‍Introduction

Before it was ever a c-suite role, the role of today’s CHRO was the head of personnel: the person who managed pay, policy, annual engagement, and even—infamously—planned the company picnic. HR handled people, but business strategy lay elsewhere. Even 30 years ago, that was a costly strategic mistake.

The CHRO has evolved into one of the most strategically consequential roles in any enterprise. These are the leaders who navigated the “war for talent” in the 2000s, became data-driven decision makers in the 2010s, and steered companies through a global pandemic in the early years of this decade. They were central to the switch to and from remote work during the pandemic, often holding the organization together.Boards and CEOs have realized that culture, resilience, and trust were essential survival factors, not soft concepts. Recent research from Harvard and Deloitte shows that CHROs now influence everything from enterprise-wide change to CEO succession, and roughly 94% now report directly to the CEO.

AI is accelerating this shift.Talent strategy and tech strategy are merging, and no other leader sits directly at that intersection. The CHRO is now a business strategist, workforce architect, and AI evangelist. If you are not treating the CHRO as a strategic leadership partner, you are operating with a leadership blind spot and putting your company at a competitive disadvantage.

The role expanded, but the expectations multiplied

Nothing in the legacy mandate of the CHRO has disappeared in this evolution. Compliance still matters.Employee relations still matter. Culture, capability, and leadership development matter as much as they ever have, if not more. Organizations have not cleared the CHROs plate, but they have heaped more onto it. Deloitte’s analysis of thousands of CHRO job postings shows that the role’s required skill set has expanded by over 20% in the past five years, outpacing every other C-suite position. Today, a CHRO must be fluent in finance, analytics, transformation, technology, and risk.

The expansion is real: CEOs increasingly expect the CHRO to translate business imperatives into organizational reality. They must reset structures, rewire culture, navigate geopolitical shifts, and lead multi-year change efforts. The CHRO is now often the closest consigliere to the CEO on issues that can drive, or destroy, enterprise value.

AI is reshaping the workforce, and the CHRO is the only leader equipped to manage the human + digital system

We aren’t in a workplace whereAI agents can handle transactions, optimize workflows, and augment knowledge work yet, but we aren’t far from it, either. Gartner predicts that soon 50% ofHR tasks can be automated with or executed by AI. They believe that this will climb to 100% in time. The question, then, isn’t whether AI belongs in HR. It’s whether your CHRO is ready to lead the transition.

IBM’s transformation provides a proof point. They consolidated dozens of fragmented AI-powered HR bots into a single, unified, platform. Now they resolve 94% of employee inquiries without human intervention, cutting HR operating costs by 40%. The real story isn’t savings, though. It’s the strategic lift. HR business partners gained back time to focus on other things:leadership, culture, and workforce planning. That is how well-deployed AI augments the CHRO’s value.

Globally, CHROs are redesigning roles, overseeing re-skilling, creating AI ethics policies and guidelines, and helping CEOs determine where humans create the most value and where intelligent systems are the better bet. The CHRO is becoming the architect of how talent and technology coexist.

Companies that elevate the CHRO outperform

Organizations that intentionally embed culture into behaviors and systems see a 34% performance lift. Those led by executives who can manage continuous change outperform their peers in revenue growth. Additionally, boards now regularly look to the CHRO for CEO succession, culture risk, and talent strategy. Far from accidental, this reflects the reality that talent, not tech and not capital, remains the ultimate driver of competitive advantage.

A strong CHRO doesn’t just runHR. They shape the workforce that will determine whether your strategy succeeds.

One size does not fit all

There are, of course, situations where the CHRO cannot yet be a strategic peer. Early-stage companies and startups may still rely on lean HR teams. Legacy organizations may anchorHR in compliance or administration. Some CEOs believe technology or finance should lead transformation because they control the data and the dollars. These are all exceptions to the rule. When transformation accelerates, work changes, and culture determines retention, productivity, and trust, nobody else has the same system-level view of talent. You cannot transform a business without transforming how people work, and the CHRO is the leader built for that mandate.

30 years of rapid evolution

The CHRO has evolved, and fast.They are no longer personnel managers. They are strategists who are shaping the future of work. CHROs today sit at the convergence point of human potential and digital capability: a vantage point that is becoming more essential as AI reshapes every function.

For CEOs and boards of directors, the question is simple: are you leveraging your CHRO as a strategic partner, or are you holding them in a role that no longer exists?

For CHROs, the mandate is equally clear: lead the reinvention of your workplace, not just the administration of it.

Reexamine the role. Reinvest init. Most of all, recognize that the organizations winning the next decade will be the ones where the CHRO is empowered to shape it.

‍