Kelly Monahan: When I started Beyond the Desk, my background is in HR, home base for me is HR. I am barely working with HR leaders right now. I am mostly actually working with technology leaders. And it is because AI transformation has found itself mostly on the CIO's agenda or CTO's agenda. And they are realizing now, a couple years into this whole transformation, that there are no longer technology problems to solve for. They have figured out the tooling, they have figured out the data concerns. It is now change management, reskilling. It is all the issues that should live in HR that technology leaders are grappling with. And that is part of a lot of the work I'm dealing with: do we really want technology leaders leading the change management and people side of this? Where is the CHRO? In some areas there have been conversations about whether these roles eventually merge. Does this become one C-suite function overseeing a human plus AI workforce? These are still very emergent and frontier conversations. But I am so worried if we do not get HR in the conversation, we are missing out tremendously on the value that could be here. Because it is not really technology's job to figure out the reskilling, work redesign, and change management side of this. I've been doing this research project with Heidrick & Struggles. Being a recruiting company, they are hearing from CEOs that they are demanding a different set of skill sets from their CHRO. How they've defined it is there is a supply problem. There is not enough qualified HR people who have the systems thinking, who have a product background, who can work with engineering teams and think about this from a first principles set of problems. The CHRO has to rethink the skills that they have. Right now it is very functional expertise: performance management, learning and development, employee relations. We need the kind of thinking that is going to stretch across all of that into the actual business. You might need Google's formula, which is a third product design, a third engineering, a third traditional HR expertise.
