The non-role of HR in AI transformation
Why HR can’t and shouldn’t lead your company’s AI revolution.
Remember when HR was supposed to “own digital transformation”? That didn’t end well.
Then came BYOD and HR’s contribution was a policy memo nobody read.
Now, the same consultants insist HR should lead AI adoption.
Spoiler: they shouldn’t. They can’t. And pretending they can is how enterprises turn every breakthrough into bureaucracy.
The promise that never learns
On paper, HR is the natural home for AI transformation. They manage people. They own training. They care about ethics, fairness, and the “future of work.” It makes sense — in theory.
The reality, nobody in the organization sees HR as a credible driver of change. To most employees, HR isn’t a partner. It’s overhead — the department that protects the company, not empowers the workforce.
Ask around. Engineers don’t believe HR understands their jobs. Data analysts don’t believe HR understands their tools. Even HR’s own software stacks are relics — brittle, siloed, and years behind.
According to PwC’s 2024 Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey, only 23% of employees believe HR “understands the realities of their day-to-day work.” You can’t lead transformation when nobody believes you understand how work actually happens.
So when HR sends another “AI readiness” newsletter, the workforce will do what they always do: smile, nod, and quietly route around it.
The BYOD déjà vu
We’ve seen this before. Remember BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)? It was marketed as empowerment. Let employees use the tech they already love. Give them flexibility. Save money.
IT braced for chaos. HR wrote a policy. And everyone pretended that was transformation.
A 2013 Gartner report called BYOD “the most radical shift in enterprise computing since the PC.” HR’s response? A six-page acceptable-use form.
By 2015, Forrester Research found that over half of employees admitted violating those policies regularly. Translation: they didn’t take HR seriously.
AI is following the same script. Employees are already experimenting with ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini — cutting, pasting, automating — miles ahead of official policy. HR’s soon-to-arrive “AI guidelines” will land like those BYOD memos: ignored by the people doing the work.
Compliance isn’t transformation
HR isn’t built for innovation. It’s built for control. Its functions — risk mitigation, documentation, compliance — are defensive by design. You don’t get transformation from departments optimized to say “no” faster than they say “how.”
When leadership assigns AI strategy to HR, they’re not empowering them. They’re offloading responsibility. It’s the same illusion that powered the FinOps and digital-transformation hype cycles: create a new committee, slap on metrics, declare success.
The result? Another round of ethics theatre. Expect workshops on “AI literacy.” Expect dashboards on “responsible adoption.” Expect nothing to change.
According to IBM’s 2025 Global AI Adoption Index, 74% of executives say AI is “critical,” but only 28% have real governance frameworks. HR’s involvement doesn’t close that gap — it institutionalizes it. They can draft a policy, not redesign a workflow.
The credibility crisis
Here’s what leadership won’t admit: employees don’t take HR seriously when it comes to technology.
They’ll nod in town halls, but in Slack channels, HR is shorthand for “people who don’t get it.” Years of clumsy rollouts and “mandatory fun” have shredded their credibility.
Transformation doesn’t fail because people resist change — it fails because they resist who’s selling it. When HR steps up as the face of AI transformation, they carry a trust deficit no ethics deck can fix.
Employees will do what they’ve always done: ignore policy, build their own solutions, and hope nobody notices. Shadow AI will replace shadow IT. The real innovation will happen far from HR’s dashboards — until the inevitable “lessons learned” review.
The scapegoat effect
The real problem? HR isn’t leading AI transformation — they’re being set up to take the fall for it.
Executives love handing unsolvable problems to departments that can’t say no. Legal is too cautious. IT is too costly. Product is too busy. So HR gets voluntold to “own” the initiative — without budget, technical fluency, or authority.
When things stall, leadership shrugs: “We invested in responsible AI, but change management didn’t take hold.” Translation: HR failed again.
It’s scapegoating disguised as empowerment — the same dynamic behind the consultant-industrial complex of AI ethics. As McKinsey’s 2024 Generative Enterprise Playbook put it, HR is “the natural owner of workforce AI integration.” Natural? Only if “natural” means “no one else wanted the job.”
BYOD, but make it AI
The BYOD fiasco gave us the blueprint for failure: when employees don’t trust rule-makers, they work around them.
BYOD started as a cost-saver and ended as an IT containment exercise. HR owned the policy; IT owned the pain. AI will be the same: employees adopt tools faster than HR can approve them, IT scrambles to contain exposure, and HR hosts webinars called “Staying Human in the Age of AI.”
That isn’t transformation — it’s theatre. And enterprises love theatre.
The role HR should play
To be fair, HR shouldn’t vanish from the AI conversation — just right-size its role.
There is value under adult or SME supervision:
Skills strategy: Identify which roles are most exposed to automation and where reskilling matters.
Ethics enablement: Codify behavioral and compliance norms under guidance from data, legal, and security experts.
Cultural translation: Help non-technical staff understand how AI changes workflows.
But AI strategy itself belongs to operations, data, and engineering — the adults in the room who understand how systems behave, not just how they sound in a deck.
A better model: unfiltered feedback
If enterprises want AI transformation to work, they need direct channels — not filtered ones.
Employees should talk directly to AI implementation teams about what’s breaking, what’s working, and what’s confusing — unfettered by HR mediation.
When HR filters feedback, the truth gets sanitized into “sentiment scores.” Real pain points — workflow friction, data anxiety, ethics gaps — get buried under corporate tone.
Direct feedback loops between users and implementers build trust, accelerate iteration, and make transformation real. Fewer memos. More Slack channels.
The uncomfortable truth
Here’s what nobody’s admitting: HR-led AI transformation will end like HR-led BYOD — with a policy nobody follows, a dashboard nobody updates, and a workforce quietly doing whatever works.
Because employees don’t fear HR. They ignore it. And ignoring is more powerful than resistance — it’s silent sabotage.
Until we stop confusing “people-first” with “HR-first,” AI transformation will stay stuck in the same loop: over-promised, under-delivered, and politically safe to fail.
AI doesn’t need another committee. It needs cross-functional ownership, unfiltered feedback, and adult supervision.
That’s not HR’s lane. It never was.
Bottom line:
If HR leads your AI strategy, brace for déjà vu. Because the last time we handed them a tech revolution, we got locked-down devices, shadow IT, and employees who learned to innovate in spite of policy — not because of it.
AI deserves better. So does HR — preferably with adult supervision and no mute button on the people doing the actual work.
Tags: AI transformation · HR dysfunction · BYOD · shadow IT · AI governance · enterprise culture
HR isn't capable of most tasks. Great article!
This article comes at the perfect tim! You've expertly articulated why HR often gets stuck in bureaucracy regarding AI. We've seen this pattern. Who do you see as the true drivers for effective, ethical AI adoption moving forward? Your insights are spot on.