From COVID-19 to The Age of AI: HR’s Wild Ride

The human resources profession was catapulted to center stage during COVID-19, a human crisis with massive workplace impact. Since then, without time to fully normalize, we now find ourselves in the age of artificial intelligence, driving profound human and workplace changes. Once again, HR is called on to take a pivotal position at the center. While the COVID period and the AI boom share the necessity for HR at the helm, we find the macro circumstances, business operating environment, and HR imperatives and deliverables are very different this time around.

What Has Changed?

Global Human Resources was forced to become a reactive function, challenged to address the basics during COVID-19. HR leaders had to tackle a broad, unexpected, and high-volume range of mission critical, basic agenda items such as figuring out remote working, employee physical and mental health, and crisis communications.

Fast-forward to mid-2026: HR now finds itself becoming a strategic function which needs to understand the levers of driving a productive and profitable business in today’s automated and AI-driven competitive ecosystem. It has been required to assess and understand how an individual organization operates and performs in a more complex, faster-moving environment. The modern HR leader is expected to focus less on programs and more on building skills and capability at scale. CHROs are tasked with redesigning work to maximize productivity, while addressing the cultural shifts that AI and a multigenerational workforce are creating.

With evolving technology, a disruptive business landscape and a difficult geopolitical environment to contend with, change leadership has become a top priority for global HR leaders. They are now called on more than ever to help organizations adapt continuously at the speed required to stay competitive.

What Are We Learning?

Culture is Critical

Culture and the ability to build or enhance it is the number one requirement for many of the senior HR searches we are tasked with. Culture is no longer framed as an aspiration, but as a driver (or inhibitor) of execution, risk management, and bottom-line results. Leaders are asking much more directly: what behaviors are helping us win, and what is getting in the way?

The CHRO is expected to be the steward of organizational culture, actively shaping an inclusive, values-driven workplace where employees thrive. Doing this consistently across a company now involves:

• Defining or redefining organizational behaviors and cultural expectations.
• Embedding culture change into performance management and leadership processes.
• Shifting leadership mindsets from “owning” talent within departments to supporting talent movement across the organization.
• Aligning talent and rewards systems with new strategic priorities.

The modern CEO has an expectation that his or her new head of HR will bring the ability to fix or change a culture with a sense of urgency.

AI Does Not Fix a Broken System

We are quickly learning that successful AI implementation depends on fixing broken processes and improving data quality first. The start point is standardized processes and clean data. Most companies have not started with this. Most are scrambling to clean up data and processes in tandem with experimenting with AI.

A related topic is people analytics—the ability to work with people data is a skill in high demand. Companies are leveraging data-driven decision-making to optimize organizational structures, evaluate pay equity and transparency, and predict talent issues. AI is amplifying the gap between the “haves” and “have nots.”Businesses are racing to centralize HR services and administrative work to improve the quality and consistency of people data. To facilitate this, the global standardization of HR processes are key to ensuring quality and timely reporting.

Workforce Planning Is No Longer an Annual Process

The traditional cycle is breaking down. Organizations are de-layering, and moving towards continuous reallocation of talent, with a much stronger focus on skills and capability rather than hierarchy and role structure. Workforce planning is becoming far more tightly linked to business strategy and capital deployment.

Today’s workforce has become more decentralized and multigenerational, now incorporating full-time employees, freelancers, gig workers, and AI agents. Leading HR, OD, and workforce planning practitioners are now designing strategies to overlay the permanent flexible/hybrid work model with organizational culture and cohesion, ensuring employees can remain engaged and thriving even given workforce fragmentation.

Markets move exceptionally fast, causing traditional annual planning cycles to become obsolete. Companies must dynamically align talent deployment with sudden shifts in market demand. Today, progressive strategic workforce planning encompasses both the long and the short-term and is a continuous, living breathing ecosystem—vastly different from its former annual “process” status.

Executive Coaching Is Elevating to a Data-Driven, Performance-Linked Process

We believe that the executive coaching profession is going to continue its rapid transformation over the coming months and years. There is noticeably less appetite for reflective, open-ended, “personal” coaching. Executive coaching is maturing from a boutique, individual-focused perk, delivered by coaches who range in terms of quality and capability, into a data-driven, organization-wide strategic and performance-linked investment. Companies are now insisting on more of a focus on measurement of results, delivery flexibility through technology and AI integration, and niche specialization and expertise.

Importantly, the content of coaching is also evolving. CEOs and Boards are expecting more challenges, quicker shifts in behavior, and a clearer connection to business outcomes. What is coming through in Board and CEO discussions is a sharper focus on how leaders think, prioritize, and make decisions in an AI-enabled environment. The real gap is often leadership judgement; executive coaches now need to be able to assess for this, determine what can be coached or trained, and look to deliver an outcome which maximizes results.

Organization Design and Effectiveness are Breaking Down Corporate Hierarchies

Forward thinking leadership is placing less focus on hierarchy and reporting lines, and more emphasis on how work gets done. Speed of decision making, clarity of accountability, and the ability to execute across corporate structures are now the real measures of effectiveness. Progressive OD and OE strategies are being translated into daily behaviors designed to facilitate fast and precise real-life, AI-enabled delivery.

From an HR perspective, AI is already driving major organization design changes. There is a growing focus on talent retention and development, internal mobility, and modernizing HR systems and operations. Furthermore, organizations are aggressively integrating AI into recruitment, team development, onboarding, and people analytics, with an increasing focus on human-AI collaboration.

Development Is Happening in the Work, Not Alongside It

Formal programs are being deprioritized. Senior leaders are expected to learn through stretch, exposure, and real business challenges, with shorter cycles between role entry and their ability to make an impact. To achieve and enhance this, companies are doing the following:

1. Encouraging cross-functional mobility rather than limiting hiring to within traditional functions.
2. Pairing high potentials with senior leaders to provide guidance, increase enterprise-wide visibility, and transfer institutional knowledge.
3. Launching stronger succession planning processes which often include formal C-level talent reviews.
4. Developing AI enabled early-career hiring programs and first-line manager development initiatives.
5. More broadly deploying executive coaching.
6. More directly forging a link between performance and rewards.

Enhancing Employee Experience Through Personalization

Companies are enhancing the employee experience through personalization by moving away from "one-size-fits-all" policies, leveraging AI to tailor career growth, and offering flexible benefits, schedules, and tools to meet individual needs.

1. Beyond traditional benefits, companies are doubling down on holistic well-being, particularly proactive mental health support, to foster trust and combat burnout in an unpredictable social and economic environment.
2. They are working hard on offering better employee and manager self-service experiences, which are accompanied by HR systems modernization and workflow automation.
3. Companies are leveraging AI to help develop internal talent matching and mobility as well as personalized development journeys. Personalized development journeys recommend upskilling methodologies and pair staff with mentors based on individual aspirations and learning styles.

• Organizationsoffer "à la carte" or stipend-based benefits, allowing workers to allocate funds toward what they value most, such as student loan repayments, wellness programs, or extended vacation.
• Modern performance management tracks and celebrates individual milestones using custom reward programs rather than generic, company-wide perks and awards.

What is Next for Global Human Resources?

The commonality between COVID-19 and today’s age of AI is that the HR function has been thrust in the limelight like never before. While the circumstances and how HR has had to “show up” are vastly different, one thing has remained the same: Since the crisis of 2019, the human resources profession has had to prove its agility and adaptability and show that it can adjust to whatever is thrown its way.

Through these recent years, the HR function continues to expand its scope and adapt to massive changes in the external environment. Whether it be forging a closer connection between Total Rewards and Talent Management, or working with the CEO to flatten an organizational structure and make it more efficient, or taking the lead in figuring out the people impact of AI… HR has been visible and steadfast on the front lines.

It has been a wild ride, forced on the profession through circumstances outside of its control. So far, human resources has more than risen to the occasion. We expect the next seven years will be action-packed, just like the last seven years. We wonder: Has there ever been a better time to be in global human resources?