Former BBC People Director Says AI necessitates redefining HR’s value

My leadership journey began in traditional corporate HR roles, such as People Director at the BBC, where I quickly saw how often well-meaning policies and processes felt overly complex and disconnected from what managers and employees needed. That experience shaped my passion for simplifying HR, focusing on what truly drives performance, innovation, and engagement.

Over time, I’ve channeled that thinking into both my work and my writing. I’m the author of several books, including "HR Disrupted", "The HR Change Toolkit", and the soon-to-be-released Influential HR, where I explore how HR can build credibility, influence leaders, and create real impact in organizations.

Founding Disruptive HR was a natural step in my leadership journey. Today, I lead with a focus on challenging convention, encouraging fresh thinking, and equipping HR teams and leaders with practical approaches that make work better for people and businesses alike.

How AI Inspires HR To Reevaluate Its Real Value

AI fundamentally changes what organizations need from HR and what HR needs to be. For many years, HR focused too much on process, policy, and control. But AI now handles huge amounts of transactional and repeatable work far more efficiently. So the real question for HR is: If AI can do the admin, what’s our value?

I’m seeing three big shifts:

1. HR moves up the value chain. The function has to spend less time acting as a compliance machine and more time shaping culture, capability, and organizational performance.
2. Leadership expectations change fast. AI gives managers instant access to information, but it doesn’t give them judgment, trust, or emotional intelligence. The leadership challenge now is less about having answers and more about sense-making, ethics, and navigating uncertainty.
3. Organizations themselves are being redesigned. Traditional hierarchies and rigid job structures already feel outdated. AI accelerates the move toward skills-based, project-driven models where work is organized around problems, not titles.

Adaptability and responsiveness matter far more now. Leadership is no longer about expertise at the top. Increasingly, it’s about creating the conditions for learning, experimentation, and trust throughout the system.

AI won’t make HR less important, but it will make old HR obsolete. HR has the opportunity to become more strategic, more human, and much more relevant to the future of work.

Why AI Asks Us To Redesign The Work Itself

Organizations talk about AI as a transformation but treat it like a tool rollout. The promise is smarter decisions, major productivity gains, better employee experiences. But the reality often involves many pilots, scattered experimentation, and little underlying change.

Clients often layer AI on top of existing processes instead of redesigning the work itself. So they automate a bad process…and end up with a faster bad process.

To change that:

• Stop chasing fifty use cases. Pick a few core workflows — onboarding, performance management, handling employee queries — and redesign them around AI to achieve real, measurable value.
• Create clear guardrails. People need to know what’s safe, what’s approved, and where the red lines are. Otherwise, AI adoption becomes either risky or paralyzed.
• And invest in capability, not just technology. Leaders need to learn how to work with AI, not just talk about it — asking better questions, using judgment, and creating trust as automation increases.

The big shift is that AI isn’t just a digital upgrade. It forces organizations to rethink how they make decisions, how work flows, and where humans add the most value.

How AI Tools Enhance HR Productivity And Impact

The AI HR tool stack evolves quickly, but the most important point is this: The best tools aren’t the flashy ones. They remove friction, personalize support, and help organizations make better decisions.

Here are a few categories where I see real impact:

HR productivity and employee support

AI's most immediate use is simply taking pressure off of HR teams.

Tools like IBM Watsonx Assistant or Leena.ai act as virtual HR assistants, answering FAQs, supporting onboarding queries, and helping with benefits and routine requests. The impact is clear: employees get faster answers, and HR spends less time on repetitive admin and more time on strategic work.

Hiring

In recruitment, AI widens access and improves quality.

Textio, for example, is a great practical tool. It helps remove biased language from job descriptions — a small change, but genuinely affects who applies.

At the more strategic end, platforms like Eightfold.ai help organizations think in a more skills-based way — matching people to roles internally and externally, and linking hiring to workforce planning rather than just filling vacancies.

Onboarding

AI in onboarding makes things feel more modern.

Tools like WorkBright quietly automate paperwork and compliance — not exciting, but hugely valuable.

Tools like Rezolve.ai, which sits inside Teams, can provide real-time personalized support for new joiners — so onboarding happens in the flow of work, not through static portals and PDFs.

In fact, we now use Circle's AI agents to respond to member questions in our learning hub, which was one of our most time-consuming tasks. And while our hub is for our customers and members, any organization could easily adopt this approach internally for its employees.

We trained the AI agent on our content, thinking, and tone. Since launching it in November 2025, members have asked over 500 questions. Previously, the community chat typically saw around four or five questions a month, representing a huge increase in engagement. And they get answers much more quickly.

And while we still update the AI agent’s knowledge base as new questions emerge, the team has reduced the time spent drafting responses by more than 70%.

Talent management and internal mobility

This is where some of the most transformative change is happening.

Platforms like Gloat act as internal talent marketplaces. They match employees to projects, mentors, and opportunities based on skills and aspirations.

That’s a big shift because employees can actively drive their own career development, rather than depending on who their manager knows.

And learning platforms like Degreed or Docebo are becoming more personalized — recommending development based on future skill needs and individual preferences, rather than generic training catalogs.

Insights and performance

On the employee experience side, tools like Culture Amp and Workleap help organizations listen more effectively and spot engagement issues early.

And in performance, platforms like Peoplebox.ai link OKRs, progress, and sentiment — moving away from the old annual review cycle towards something more continuous.

How AI Supports Leadership Development

AI is suddenly enabling HR to tackle problems we’ve struggled with for years. Consider leadership development. For decades, we’ve relied on programs or workshops. Well-designed, often expensive, they were removed from the moments when leadership actually happens.

We’ve known for years that behavior change requires reinforcement, practice, and personalization, but we haven’t delivered that at scale. AI changes that.

It enables small, timely nudges in the flow of work. Not another course. Not another framework. It provides support in the moment in the form of a prompt, a suggestion, a reflective question just before a conversation that matters. Effectively, it becomes a pocket coach.

For example, Vodafone blended traditional coaching with an AI companion called “Amy,” allowing leaders to check in between sessions and explore ideas in real time. Chevron rolled out “Marty,” an AI coach that nudged leaders to build micro-habits — 96% said it helped them become more resilient.

And it doesn’t require a huge platform. Even tools like ChatGPT or Copilot can act as a personalized leadership assistant, and HR can give managers useful prompts:

• “Help me to have a career conversation with my team member who wants a promotion when I don't think they're ready.”
• “Give me some conversation starters to address this performance issue.”
• “How do I approach this team member who’s resistant to change?”

It becomes more tailored. The more context you provide, the more specific and useful the support becomes.

A senior leader used AI to map her executive team's different personalities — describing their motivations, quirks, and pressure points — and then used it to prepare for difficult conversations and build buy-in more effectively. That level of personalized preparation simply wasn’t scalable before.

Suddenly, those old models of two-day workshops and generic competency frameworks feel outdated. Because leadership doesn’t happen in training rooms. It happens in moments. And AI can now support those moments directly.

How AI Transforms Career Development Strategies

Career development has been broken for years. We’ve relied far too heavily on managers to spot potential, have great development conversations, and open doors. In reality, those conversations are inconsistent, influenced by bias, and often squeezed out by operational pressure.

AI changes that dynamic completely. Take Schneider Electric’s Open Talent Market platform. It uses AI to match employees to internal projects, mentors, stretch assignments, and future roles based on their skills, interests, and career aspirations, not just who their manager happens to know.

It also personalizes learning. Instead of generic programs, AI can recommend development based on someone’s future skill requirements and learning preferences — whether that’s video, audio, written content, or more interactive formats.

The result is powerful:

• Employees can actively drive their own careers.
• AI opens up opportunities more equitably.
• And the organization can fill skills gaps internally by matching the right talent to the right projects — reducing external hiring and unnecessary bureaucracy.

Career development stops being controlled by hierarchy and becomes powered by skills, aspiration, and data—and owned by employees.

How To Build AI Literacy In HR Teams Effectively

When organizations build AI literacy, the best approach is to keep it simple and practical. People adopt AI when four things are true: It helps them, it's easy to use, they see others doing it, and they feel safe experimenting.

Start there.

First, focus on immediate value. Don't begin with strategy decks — begin with something that solves a real problem for people.

Second, make it easy. AI shouldn't feel like another training program. It works best when embedded into tools people already use — Teams, Slack, Copilot, ChatGPT — supported by a simple one-page guide and clear guardrails, like not sharing confidential data.

Third, normalize experimentation. Encourage leaders and teams to share their favorite prompts or “aha” moments. Some organizations run informal “promptathons” — safe spaces to practice together and learn from peers.

So what does “AI-ready” look like? It doesn't mean everyone is an expert. It means:

• People are comfortable trying things out.
• Leaders use AI as a thinking partner, not a crutch.
• There are clear boundaries and governance.
• And AI is embedded into everyday workflows, not treated as a side project.

The biggest challenges tend to be predictable. Many organizations overcomplicate it and try to design the perfect AI strategy before anyone has tried a single prompt. Others underestimate fear — people worry about getting it wrong, or what it means for their role.

So, the most effective advice is start small. Pick one pain point. Pilot with a few open-minded people. Learn, adapt, and share what works.

Why AI Presents HR Leaders With The Biggest Opportunity In Decades

I think AI presents HR leaders with one of the biggest opportunities in decades, because it forces us to confront our distinctive contribution. For too long, HR has tried to earn credibility through process expertise, policy knowledge, administrative efficiency, and frameworks.

In some cases, we have even tried to emulate other functions, particularly Finance, adopting their language and metrics to gain influence.

AI can now do much of that work faster and more consistently than any HR team ever could. It can answer employee queries, administer processes, generate documentation, and surface patterns in data with extraordinary speed.

So HR's opportunity is to stop defining our value by what automation can increasingly handle, and to reclaim our role as the true people experts in organizations.

HR's distinctive contribution is not process control, but the ability to help leaders navigate the human complexity beneath every strategic ambition. Every business strategy, no matter how well designed, succeeds or fails through the people who deliver it, through the decisions they make, the risks they take, the effort they apply, and the relationships they build.

HR's influence truly lies in helping leaders understand why their plans meet resistance, why a team is not innovating, why key talent is leaving, why performance issues persist, or why a reorganization triggers anxiety rather than energy.

AI can provide information and automate activity, but it cannot interpret a team's emotional undercurrents, sense when a policy request is truly a request for reassurance, or recognize when frustration masks uncertainty or fear.

As transactional and analytical work becomes increasingly automated, HR’s credibility as a true business partner will rest almost entirely on our ability to operate in this human space of insight, interpretation, and judgment.

Those who continue to define their value by process ownership will find themselves sidelined. However, those who lean into understanding behavior, recognizing patterns, anticipating emotional reactions, and designing interventions that reflect how work is experienced will become indispensable.

True business partnering demands that HR deliberately and visibly occupies the human space, and that our superpower is genuinely 'getting' people. We are known not for our frameworks, but for our insight. Not for our control, but for our judgment.

So my advice to HR leaders navigating this transformation is to see AI not as a threat, but as an invitation. Use it to remove administrative noise, and then stand proud in the role HR is uniquely positioned to play: helping organizations thrive through the complexity of human behavior.

In a world where technology is accelerating, the most valuable expertise HR can bring is, and will remain, deeply human.

Follow Along

You can follow Lucy Adams' work on LinkedIn. And check out Disruptive HR.

More expert interviews to come on People Managing People!