How CPOs can lead in enabling AI transformation for their talent, teams and organisations

By Rachel Farley and Sam Burman

Chief People Officers and HR leaders will be pivotal in the AI transformation, enabling their teams and organisations to adopt and optimise the technology. But many feel unprepared or underinformed for the task. To address the need for a guide to AI adoption for human resources, Heidrick brought together AI experts and CPOs with experience of the AI journey at an event in London aimed at distilling practical, hands-on advice for HR leaders on how and where to begin.

AI adoption is a people change programme

AI is not speculative technology – it’s already opening up a new class of business processes and economic activity. Just as the majority of organisations have gone digital, there will be a similar scale of change in the shift to AI-driven businesses – and at far greater speed. Research by Heidrick shows that most companies are already using AI in some capacity, with the majority looking to accelerate adoption.

There is, however, considerable nuance in how different leaders in the executive committee feel about AI and its potential to enable their part of the business. At Heidrick, our work with different functions has revealed varying perspectives on how AI will impact their organisations. CFOs, for example, are naturally detail-oriented, and often most eager to understand what new AI functionality they can implement to improve financial operations. GCs and chief legal officers are more interested in what they need to know in order to advise their boards on AI adoption and keep them accountable. And board directors are most concerned about bigger-picture AI-related risks and what AI can deliver down the road.

The HR community, meanwhile, has to have a broader, cross-organisation talent and culture lens, meshing AI with people’s purpose, expectations, experience, expertise and leadership capabilities. AI adoption is an enterprise-wide tech-enabled people change programme, with the people function at the heart of the process. The CPO will play a critical role in managing that change, driving AI enablement through their organisation to create performance advantages.

The hardest part of this process is enabling the leadership of the organisation to see it as a business transformation, and skill them up to be change leaders. The organisation will need to evolve at pace, because the way in which people lead and work is changing. It is a transformation driven by a ‘people push’ rather than a ‘technology push’.

The CPO’s starter guide to enabling AI

Step 1: Educate yourself and your HR function in AI

The people function need to become AI experts. You can do this by getting hands on and playing around with the technology and taking self-study modules from sources such as the Open University or LinkedIn Learning. Surround yourself with people who have been through the process and attend AI events. Understanding is exponential: build on these foundations to design a deliberate approach to AI enablement that the HR function can roll out.

As part of this, look at how AI can enable better ways of working, and identify activity toil or inefficient processes that can be alleviated by technology: what are the opportunities and problems and where can you plug tech into the workflow, custom building to develop solutions.

Next, set up the HR function to enable AI across the business, creating ‘SWAT’ teams in the HR function that can orient talent as the technology is introduced, and working cross-functionally to help verticals such as IT and security develop their people to optimise adoption.

The HR function can also employ AI internally to become more effective and deliver more productively. This could include creating user cases for using AI tools to, for example, summarise talent performance reviews, map out job architecture or build job profiles.

Step 2: Align the executive committee to drive change

The hardest part of an enterprise-wide transformation is encouraging everyone to embrace the change. Governance is a common sticking point because AI-infused tech comes with novel challenges, and people can be (rightly) reticent to green light something they don’t understand. CIOs, CSOs and boards are concerned about letting risk through when they introduce new technology – but at the same time they risk blocking potential value creation.

Misalignment of perceptions around AI usage and readiness is holding adoption back. By working with other functions, including IT, finance, legal and security, CPOs can help align leadership across teams and departments. This includes developing a set of organisation-wide AI principles for understanding how it will be used, how to use it safely, and to communicate its use to clients. These principles will include governance, ethical usage, identifying and eliminating bias, employing innovation, and maintaining security. They will evolve as the organisation moves along its AI journey.

Step 3: Shape acceptance of AI within the organisation

AI will alter work for everyone, creating, displacing and augmenting jobs. People are naturally worried about the impact it will have on their roles, and it’s undeniable that, as with any technological revolution, there will be winners and losers. Some jobs will disappear entirely, and HR leaders will have to thoughtfully and empathetically manage the transition of those workers in terms of their skills and roles. How you help people understand what the AI transformation will mean for them will depend on your sector and type of organisation, and the degree of automation involved.

Enabling AI in the organisation requires people to view it as a liberating and positive addition to their roles, and HR leaders should work towards AI being acknowledged and utilised as an enabler, not a replacement, for talent. A good starting point is a cross-company learning module that gives everyone a grounding in the basics, history and common use cases for AI. This will help reduce fear of the technology and give people an understanding of how AI can make their jobs better. HR can also help by showing them how AI plugs into their day-to-day jobs in a way that works for them, demonstrating that while AI does the heavy lifting, humans will continue to conceive, monitor and review the work.

Step 4: Upskill the workforce

There is potential for huge performance advantages if people are given the tools to embrace AI. The right training, and the freedom to use it, will make everyone an enabler in the business’s AI journey. Get them to develop their own AI toolkit, leveraging the company’s AI programmes to improve performance management, working through problems to see where tech can plug in. Offer incentives for innovative teams who can automate away toil, or host a company-wide hackathon event to give teams – including HR – the opportunity to come up with ideas that can be translated into use cases, tested and eventually rolled out.

Create space for experimentation, encouraging people to test and learn within the guardrails of company policy to see how they can personally make their own role more effective with AI. This could involve buying everyone a licence for the company’s AI programme, which they retain as long as they complete the training. Then they can use it to design solutions that fit their problems, fine-tuning basic AI tools, and learning how to spot AI bias and hallucinations.

Make everyone clear on how the business uses AI in its products, services and ways of working, including where the organisation is now and where it wants to get to. When leadership, teams and talent all understand what the business is doing in terms of AI, they can employ the same vocabulary to be fluent with each other and with customers about how and why it’s being used. This inspires confidence in the technology and removes barriers to adoption.

To enable AI, organisations need leadership with transition ability, who understand how the business creates value and can map technology against it, adapting and working together to understand AI-led opportunities. Leadership teams must align on their AI expectations and readiness, so that they know where they are, and where they need to get to. The CPO will be instrumental in aligning existing leadership, hiring transition talent, and preparing the workforce for an AI-enabled future.

For support from Heidrick in assessing your leadership team’s perception of its organisation’s AI capabilities and readiness – from a talent, organisation and culture perspective – please get in touch with Sam Burman at [email protected] and Rachel Farley at [email protected], as we recently launched a new online tool (AIQ) which evaluates alignment across these critical dimensions and provides insight into any gaps, in order to help you address these.

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