The vision for new HR
AI is breaking the management layer. HR is what comes next.
The news is full of stories about AI taking over the world.
People are achieving incredible productivity gains. Companies are laying off substantial numbers of employees because of AI. Developers are becoming 10x more productive. Marketers are building AI agents that run campaigns end-to-end. One-person companies are suddenly becoming a real conversation.
But almost nobody is talking about the underlying shift required to unlock the real potential of AI inside companies.
And almost nobody is talking about what HR has to do with it.
I have been thinking about HR and people-related topics in companies for the last 10 years. It started when my manager at the time assigned me to a job that was completely unsuited for my skills, strengths, and personality. The result was simple: I hated my job.
Since then, I have been trying to figure out how companies can work with people better, and what the role of HR is if not exactly this.
That journey led me to founding two HR-tech companies.
First, in 2020, Supertalent, a job board matching people with employers based on shared cultural and personal characteristics.
Then, in 2023, Talentpilot, an AI-native startup leveraging AI to help organizations achieve more by having the right people in the right seats.
Being at the center of the AI revolution while partnering with enterprise clients gives me a unique perspective. I can clearly see the gap between the AI maximalists and the day-to-day reality of an organization with 10,000 employees.
And that gap is massive.
I don’t think I’m overstating it when I say we are living through the biggest revolution in human history. We are literally bringing a new form of intelligence to life. The repercussions are far from understood, and the way we live and work will probably change more and faster than ever before.
AI has become the fastest-adopted technology in history. Faster than the internet, faster than mobile.
My mother recently told me a fascinating story.
My 62-year-old father decided to fix the plumbing around a boiler. I knew my parents had the free version of ChatGPT and used it for basic search, but when my mom told me how my dad used ChatGPT as a “hotline” serviceman that helped him step by step with fixing the plumbing, I was genuinely and positively impressed.
He used ChatGPT to save money on a service company and avoid the headache of trying to figure everything out by himself.
You read such stories every day.
A developer who is 10x more productive than before.
A marketer who built AI agents running end-to-end campaigns.
A one-person company worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Companies claiming that 80% of their code is now written by AI.
But there are still very few companies with a credible story of how AI has actually impacted their bottom line.
One of the closest stories is IKEA.
IKEA has implemented an AI chatbot to handle basic customer queries. Now this chatbot handles almost 60% of them.
Because of this automation, IKEA had two choices. Either lay off almost 8,500 people from the customer service or find them new jobs. IKEA chose the second option, and here comes the interesting part.
Due to the chatbot, IKEA not only saved $16M in the first year in support efficiency, but the relocation of the employees generated more than $1.5B in net new revenue.
People will finally become the real asset of companies, and not just a resource.
It is a great story of how a company using AI can do more with the same headcount.
But what if I told you that companies will be able to achieve much more with far fewer people. And people will finally become the real asset of companies, and not just a resource.
For this to happen, a new set of AI-native HR tools must appear, and a new shift in organizational design must happen.
Let’s talk about organizational design.
The end of managers
The coordination tax that justified the management layer for a hundred years is suddenly open for discussion.
There is a big shift in organizational design happening.
For the last 100 years, with the introduction of the management layer, organizational design has not changed that much. The manager was usually the only way for people to grow in a company. Not only financially, but also politically.
But this model is starting to crack.
People in prestigious roles at the top of great companies are leaving their jobs in exchange for individual contributor roles at other companies.
Something almost unheard of.
The shift in the general perception of the manager’s role is starting to take real shape with recent announcements from Block and Coinbase.
Jack Dorsey, CEO and founder of Block (6,000 employees), introduced a new organizational design consisting of just three key roles:
Individual contributors — People who directly build, operate, sell, design, support, or execute. They use AI for context and leverage.
DRIs, “Directly Responsible Individuals” — Temporary owners of a specific problem, product outcome, or customer result. They pull resources from across the company instead of managing a fixed team.
Player-coaches — People who still do real work, but also mentor and develop others. They replace traditional people managers.
Brian Armstrong, the founder and CEO of Coinbase (4,000 employees), is also working towards redesigning the organization for the AI era with no pure managers:
Flatter hierarchy — Coinbase wants to cap the structure at five layers below the CEO/COO, reducing bureaucracy and decision latency.
No “pure managers” — Managers are expected to be player-coaches, meaning they still contribute directly, not only coordinate people.
One-person teams — They are experimenting with individuals using AI to cover work that used to require an engineer, designer, PM, analyst, or ops partner together.
And there are others who are publicly playing with similar ideas. For example, Brian Chesky, the founder and CEO of Airbnb (8,000 employees), said in a recent podcast that he is thinking hard about reorganizing Airbnb around fewer layers and no pure people managers.
We all know the old model: people create work, managers coordinate it, teams hand it off.
The new model is: a small number of strong operators use AI to produce more directly, with fewer handoffs.
People want agency over their work, not a seventh meeting to discuss the same thing.
Personally, as a non-technical CEO, I recently started contributing to our product using Claude Code. If you tried our upgraded sourcing module, I built most of it.
So, when the CEO, theoretically the highest manager in the company, can start shipping product features, why do you need so many managers?
I do not believe managers disappear completely.
But I do believe the era of the management layer is ending, and an era of superpowered employees is starting.
Nonetheless, this is not the first time companies have tried to redesign themselves around fewer layers.
Re-engineering in the 90s. Holacracy at Zappos. The agile transformation wave.
Most of these experiments quietly reverted.
The difference is that none of them changed the actual reason hierarchies exist: coordinating people is expensive.
Meetings, handoffs, status updates, the cost of keeping fifty people aligned scales worse than linearly. Managers exist to absorb the cost of this inefficiency.
AI changes that.
An agent can hold context across an entire organization without a meeting.
A single operator with the right tooling can pull resources without a manager-of-managers chain to broker it.
The coordination tax that justified the management layer for a hundred years is suddenly open for discussion.
And that creates a big new challenge.
If companies want fewer people with high agency to create more value, they need to become much better at understanding who their people are, what they are capable of, where they fit, what blocks them, and how to create a frictionless work environment so the people can deliver on that promise.
And I think that should be HR’s job.
The current situation with HR
There are two important facts about HR.
HR is one of the most admin-heavy departments.
And at the same time, the least trusted department.
HR initiatives are often considered burdensome. Employees spend hours filling out mandatory forms without understanding how these forms are supposed to help the business.
I remember working at PwC and feeling frustrated every time I had to do anything in Workday. Every interaction with that software was painful. Everybody hated it.
And Workday was an “HR thing.”
That is the problem.
But because of the amount of admin work HR people need to do, they often do not have time to think strategically about their role in the company.
Unfortunately, I have heard too many lines like this:
“Yes, I know it is important, but I don’t have time to handle it because I’m overwhelmed by too many resumes to screen.”
This is the paradox of HR today.
The department that should understand the organization’s people better than anyone else is trapped in operational work that prevents it from doing exactly that.
Instead of helping the company answer strategic questions like “Do we have the right people to execute our strategy?”, “Where is the hidden potential in the organization?”, or “Which teams are blocked by the wrong structure?”, HR is forced to spend most of its time chasing forms, screening resumes, coordinating interviews, updating systems, and reminding managers to complete performance reviews.
And because HR is seen through this administrative lens, companies underestimate what it could become.
Employees see HR as a process owner, managers see HR as a compliance partner, and leadership sees HR as a support function.
But this is not because HR is unimportant. It is because the current systems, tools, and operating model reduce HR to administration.
The tragedy is that HR sits on the most strategic data in the company, but most of this data is fragmented, outdated, incomplete, or locked inside tools nobody wants to use.
The vision for new HR
I’ll start from first principles.
If, in the AI era, people become much more important at work because they drive much greater value by orchestrating AI, which department should become much more important?
Companies always have and always will drive value through employees.
This is why I don’t understand why Sir Richard Branson’s business philosophy to take care of employees first is still an underrated narrative.
When you take care of your employees, they take care of your customers. And when customers love your company, they’ll buy more from you, be more loyal, and you’ll generate more value for your shareholders.
Simple heuristics.
For the last few decades, taking care of employees has mostly meant extrinsic motivation: nice offices, great benefits, titles, career paths, and so on.
But when you feel like a cog in a big wheel, extrinsic motivation might keep you at a company, but it will not make you engaged. It will not make you truly care about your work.
This is why startups have become so popular.
There are usually no nice offices, no great benefits, no fancy titles, and no clear career paths.
Yet people are often more fulfilled there.
Why?
Because intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic motivation.
They are there for the mission.
They feel ownership.
They feel agency over their work.
They feel the impact they have.
This is what Jack Dorsey, Brian Armstrong, and Brian Chesky seem to have realized. Their companies grew into corporations full of disengaged cogs just following the flow. They know that if they get back to their roots and give the best employees greater agency, they can generate more value than they do today.
Don’t get me wrong. The success of this new type of organizational design is yet to be proven, but the signal is there.
From my perspective, it is not about whether there will be a new organizational design.
It is about when it will happen and what exactly it will look like.
No matter the final shape, the underlying principles will be fewer people, higher agency, and less bureaucracy.
Individual productivity does not survive a high coordination cost.
To make this new organizational design work, and to help fewer people deliver greater value, I dare to say that the Chief People Officer will become the second most important role in the entire organization.
And here is why.
The biggest puzzle in AI right now is the gap between individual productivity and company performance.
Developers are 10x more productive. Marketers are running campaigns end-to-end. Analysts are doing in an hour what used to take a week. And yet very few companies have a credible story of how any of this has moved the bottom line.
The reason is that individual productivity does not survive a high coordination cost. You can give every employee the best AI tools in the world, but if the work then has to pass through five layers of approval, three handoffs, and a status meeting, the productivity gain dissipates before it ever shows up in revenue.
Closing that gap is not a tooling problem. It is an org design and an execution problem. Both are fundamentally people problems.
Org design is about which roles exist, who has decision rights, and how work flows between them. Execution is about whether the right people are doing the right work at the right time, with no friction in between.
The CTO owns the AI stack. The COO owns processes. Neither of them owns the people side of the operating model.
That has always been the CPO’s territory, and in the AI era it becomes the most leveraged territory in the company.
The CEO sets the strategic vision: where the company is going, what it wants to become.
The CPO becomes the person responsible for turning that vision into reality, because the AI-native HR layer is what orchestrates the daily work of every employee toward that destination.
There is no other C-level person with a deeper understanding of the organization’s capabilities and potential than the CPO.
It almost sounds heretical.
But hear me out.
In HR tools, the CPO has access to this type of data:
Departmental, team, individual goals and their tracking
Job description of every employee
Skills and competencies of every employee
Performance reviews of every employee
Compensation of every employee
Strengths and challenges of every employee
Aspirations of every employee
Development of every employee
360-degree feedback across all employees
Hiring needs and trends
Satisfaction reports
I’ll say it again.
No other C-level executive has this level of depth about the organization. And this information is highly correlated with company success.
The problem until now is what I described above.
Every current HR tool, from HRIS to ATS, to Performance Management, to payroll, is terribly user-unfriendly, and people hate using it.
What struck me the most about current HR software vendors is, and I’m not sure if it’s a blind spot or willful ignorance, their focus on the wrong user.
Applicant Tracking Systems should NOT be built primarily for recruiters. Recruiters manage the pipeline, but hiring managers make the actual hiring decisions. And hiring managers have totally different needs than recruiters do.
Performance management tools should NOT be built primarily for HR business partners. The key user is the employee, because the employee must understand where their performance stands and what to do about it.
I’m not saying recruiters and business partners are not important users. I’m saying HR tech is difficult because you have two types of key users with different product experience needs, and most of today’s tools are focused on the wrong one.
This user mismatch causes two things.
Either companies use only the bare minimum with these tools to avoid annoying the key users.
Or these key users fill in the data just for the sake of filling in the data as quickly and thoughtlessly as possible.
One funny story.
A colleague at Talentpilot told me how his mother’s employer, a big bank, requires annual performance reviews from all employees. It is exactly the type of terrible software I am talking about, but it is mandatory.
So what did his mother do?
She asked him if he could fill it in for her because it would take her many hours, and she would not know what to write.
So he, as a good son, did it.
It took him three hours (and part of his soul).
When he told me this story, he was swearing about the employer.
So not only does this bank annoy its employees, but it also annoys their employees’ relatives.
This is the current situation with HR software.
But things are changing.
A new breed of AI-native HR tools is coming. And I strongly believe this will be the revolution of the HR department that has been long overdue.
These tools not only reduce the admin workload of HR but also provide an amazing user experience for all key users.
While the old software was built around processes, the new tools are being built around outcomes.
And if outcomes are driven by people, then employee experience has to become central, not an afterthought.
I’ve been thinking for a long time about the ultimate outcome of HR tools.
Today, it is usually about attrition, time to hire, employee engagement, or similar outcomes.
All of that matters.
But ultimately, I think that in the AI-native era, the main outcome of HR tools should be revenue per employee.
Because revenue per employee, not EBITDA per employee, is perfectly aligned with what these new HR tools must help with.
Reduce as much work friction as possible so employees can feel agency and ownership over their work, which ultimately drives organizational outcomes.
As employees orchestrate AI to deliver results, I believe the best companies will use AI to orchestrate a frictionless work experience for employees.
Imagine a situation where you are being helped to deliver your goals by a system that makes sure there is 100% alignment between your goals and the rest of the organization, given everyone’s skills and pace of work.
If the AI-native performance management tool has access to the company strategy, all goals, and all individuals, it can spot roadblocks in your way before you hit them and proactively solve them.
You might never even know there was a roadblock.
Or imagine a situation where AI analyzes what the company wants to achieve, runs an employee gap analysis, finds missing critical roles, and automatically starts a relevant candidate search so the company can actually deliver on its promises.
These are just two examples of how I believe AI-native tools for HR will change how companies drive value.
But this will require a fundamental change in HR departments.
One CPO I deeply respect says that the future of HR is no HR.
She means it rhetorically, not literally.
HR of tomorrow will look like nothing today.
CPOs will become among the most important people in the company. They will have strong board roles and a mandate to steer the organization.
I can clearly see a future board meeting in my head.
The board has a business review. The CEO asks whether the company is delivering on this year’s strategy.
The CPO opens an AI tool and shows which goals are on track, where the roadblocks are, where delays are likely to happen, what actions the AI took to reduce friction, and what the prediction is for actual delivery.
Not only that.
The tool also shows insights into what individual board members, in their player-coach roles, can do to increase the probability of achieving the strategy.
This is not some wishy-washy future.
This HR revolution has already begun.
Atlassian, the company behind Jira and many other productivity tools, has recently announced that its Chief People Officer, Avani Prabhakar, is also taking up a new role and becoming AI Enablement Officer, responsible for driving AI across every employee.
This takes us back to the beginning, where I said that almost nobody is talking about the underlying shift required to unlock the real potential of AI, and what HR has to do with it.
If people are the enablers of AI productivity, and HR is the enabler of people, then HR must drive the transformation of organizational design from pre-AI to AI-first.
But until now, HR did not have the tools or the competencies to take over this responsibility.
The tools are now almost here.
The competencies are still far away.
HR departments will be built around three competencies:
Ability to select, support, and orchestrate the right AI tools
Deliver HR-related outcomes like building methodologies for training, recruitment, performance reviews, etc.
Understand the needs of employees and create an environment of high agency and ownership
The best CPOs are already rebuilding their teams, but the diffusion across the market will take many years.
So what should CPOs do now?
I think CPOs should start with five things.
First, reduce the administrative burden of HR.
As long as HR is buried in manual screening, interview coordination, form chasing, and performance review administration, it cannot become strategic.
This does not mean removing human judgment from HR.
It means removing work that should not require human judgment in the first place.
Second, build a real people intelligence layer.
Most companies do not actually know what skills they have, what potential they have, where people want to grow, which teams are blocked, or whether they have the capabilities required to execute their strategy.
AI-native tools can collect this data in weeks, not years, as in the case with Workday or SAP.
Fixing this should become one of the main priorities of the CPO.
Third, redesign HR around outcomes, not processes.
The goal of recruitment is not to process candidates. The goal is to hire the right people.
The goal of performance management is not to complete reviews. The goal is to improve performance.
The goal of learning and development is not to deliver training. The goal is to increase capability.
And the ultimate goal: increase revenue per employee across the whole organization.
This sounds obvious, but most HR systems are still built around process completion, not business outcomes.
Fourth, make employee agency a strategic metric.
The best AI-era employees will not want to be managed through bureaucracy.
They will want context, trust, ownership, and tools that help them move faster.
CPOs should understand where employees feel blocked, where the organization creates friction, and where the company kills ownership.
Because in the AI era, loss of agency means loss of productivity.
Fifth, help the CEO redesign the organization for AI.
This cannot be delegated to IT.
AI transformation is not only about tools.
It is about work, roles, skills, structure, incentives, and culture.
That is the CPO’s territory.
The CPO should be the person helping the CEO answer:
Where do we need fewer layers?
Where do we need more agency?
Which roles will change?
Which people can be redeployed?
Which capabilities are missing?
Where can AI increase revenue per employee?
Where is bureaucracy slowing down our best people?
This is the new mandate.
Not HR as administration.
Not HR as the department people avoid.
But HR as the function that helps the company become more capable.
I strongly believe this is the future of new HR.
A future where HR people are among the most loved people in the organization because they remove friction from everyone’s work.
A future where HR people can focus on what matters instead of filling out terrible forms or screening the next 100 resumes, out of which 80 are fake or irrelevant.
A future where the CPO helps the CEO turn strategy into reality.
This is the future I’m building for.
If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear how you see the future of HR in the AI era.