A while ago, I posted a fairly strong opinion: that HR, as a function, should not exist — or at the very least, that AI should eliminate most of it. At the time, I was reacting to what many employees experience as the worst version of HR: bureaucratic, performative, policy-heavy, and often more aligned to process than to people. But the more I’ve thought about where work is heading, the more I think I was aiming at the wrong target. What AI is likely to make obsolete is not HR itself, but the parts of HR that were already overdue for reinvention. The administrative core of the function — screening, scheduling, documentation, policy retrieval, repetitive employee support, workflow coordination — is increasingly automatable. But that doesn’t reduce the importance of the human problem. If anything, it intensifies it. Because the more work becomes mediated by systems, automation, and AI agents, the more organizations will struggle with questions that are not operational, but deeply human: • How do you build trust in an environment where work is increasingly abstracted? • How do you preserve meaning, fairness, and belonging when efficiency becomes the dominant design principle? • How do you evaluate people when output is increasingly co-produced with AI? • How do you manage conflict, identity, morale, and ambition in a workplace that may be structurally changing faster than people can psychologically adapt to it? That feels less like the end of HR and more like a demand for a far more evolved version of it. In that sense, perhaps AI does not eliminate HR. Perhaps it removes the excuses for HR to remain transactional. It forces the function to become more strategic, more psychologically literate, more organizationally rigorous, and more relevant to the actual human consequences of technological change. So I’m genuinely curious: For those of you working in HR / People Ops / Talent, how are you thinking about this shift? Do you see AI as: • a threat to the function, • a forcing mechanism for reinvention, • or an opportunity for HR to become more important than it has been in years? I’d be especially interested in hearing from people who are already rethinking hiring, performance, employee experience, or org design through this lens. submitted by /u/Pretty-Lauki-369
Originally posted by u/Pretty-Lauki-369 on r/ArtificialInteligence