Mm-hmm.

So how do you think about what is that more you want it to do? So, so I think that head count to capacity shift is one.

A second, you know, we, we touched on it a little bit, right, is, is moving from thinking about, like, the allocation of resources into the orchestration of resources.

Uh, you know, I, I, I won't spend too much time on that since we, we touched on it already.

And the third, uh, which I, you know, maybe am hopefully most excited about is, uh, the conversation shifting to is efficiency the only outcome we can drive into a reinvestment, right, into a growth conversation, right?

Mm-hmm.

Uh, having an active role in co-designing, co-creating, you know, being part of the conversation, whether that benefits you personally because you're at the table and individually learning, or whether that helps your function show up differently, I, I see no downside to raising your hand and getting involved.

And I would say do that even if your CHRO is not actively, you know, at the table.

And, and I think that kind of leads me into the next question, which is what are, what are some of the trends that you're seeing how AI is going to affect HR's role?

Yeah.

So, um, I'll, I'll start with like a year ago, we published at Deloitte a point of view that we called HR Reimagined, and that was based on where we were seeing the market going in '23 and '24, early '25, conversations with CHROs, HR leaders, also with CIOs, with, uh, third-party technology firms, with, with researchers and analysts, right? And we started with this simple premise of we know AI is gonna impact work.

And we kind of bucketed it into three categories of saying how the, how is the work of today gonna change to tomorrow? And if the work of today is done 100% by a human, and tomorrow they're still gonna have a ton of human-to-human interaction, right? Sales executive talking to customers, HR business partner talking to leaders and managers, right? Then we would call the role probably AI assisted, right? It will use-- the person in the role will use AI to do a- facets of the work different, better, faster, but there's still gonna be a lot of human-to-human interaction.

Uh, then we had an AI augmented and an AI powered, and AI powered was basically the other end of the spectrum, where if the work of today is done mostly by human, tomorrow it might mostly be done by AI and automation capabilities, and so the work of the human will change, right? And, um, y- a lot of organizations are investing in the operations space, right? Whether it's HR operations, customer service operations, you name it, there, right? To say, do we get to a point where, uh, through agents or enhanced, you know, HR assistance, this new digital front door concept, can humans stop, you know, answering inquiries or doing transactions, right? Uh, you know, a worker or a manager can like engage in Teams and Slack, you know, you know, uh, in a collaboration tool, engage with the agent and like find answers, get, get things done, right, on behalf.

So then the role of an HR operations person would change from like doing the transaction work of inquiries work to managing the team of agents, right? Or managing the knowledge and content and data used to train the agents, right? Or taking on new AI capabilities as they roll out over time and like continuing to redesign workflows and, and things along, al- along that front, right? So, so we use that as our premise to say, okay, if we, if we think-- if we use this framework and then we apply it to the HR function, like what does that mean, right? And, um, there's really kinda, uh, three things that we saw maybe as like a go-forward perspective, right? Uh, one is, uh, w- is there convergence in some of the business partner and COE type of roles relative to how a human shows up with their end customers, with their business stakeholders, right? So today, a, a business partner might meet with a leader, and the leader says, "Okay, I've got this business problem.

We wanna do a new product launch or M&A or other." And the business partner might, you know, do a little bit in the room, but then they might have to go back and find four or five friends, like, "I need, I need my talent data," or, "I n- need my analytics and run this," or boom, boom, boom.

So if, if I'm a practitioner and I'm listening and going, "Wow, that's, that's a lot of data," what is a mic drop moment for them of what they can start doing today to get ready for the future that you're painting?

I'm curious to hear if you have a story from a company you've worked with where this is being applied in a very smart way and where that adaptability is really exemplar.

Yeah, well, I'll acknowledge.

maybe like any good professional services firm does, that two years in a row, we've created some words.

In 2025, in our human capital trends report, we created a word, stagility, which was the combination of stability and agility.

Because we saw in 2025 in our data, which was several thousand respondents, it's like 70, 80 plus countries.

And we split the data between leaders and workers.

That in 2025, 75% of workers wanted more stability because of all the change happening in organizations, big change.

listening to this, recognizing maybe some of these percentages in their own employee survey reports, and maybe curious for your advice, where do they start to deal with this this week, next week? So yeah, curious to hear about that.