Quickfire question: Who, in a business, should be responsible for AI?
Most of us would assume the tech side of an organization should hold the bag: the CTO, CIO, CDO, CMO or perhaps even a new chief AI officer. And while this direction certainly made sense in the early wave of AI adoption—when it was still a mere tool—the rise of agentic AI (read: autonomous, intelligent agents that behave less like gadgets and more like colleagues) forces us to rethink our assumptions.
Which means we should be asking whether AI should be treated as a technology or as a member of the team. And if it’s the latter, is HR actually the role best positioned to oversee it?
WHY HR IS RE-EMERGING AS A STRATEGIC AI PLAYER
While some might think that AI will diminish the influence of chief people officers, human-centered agentic design is bringing HR back to the center of business transformation. After all, autonomous AI could transform the very definition of an HR role: managing workflows, employee experiences, and workplace culture.
One challenge blocking effective AI management is often rooted in organizations’ outdated design models. Traditional enterprise structures, especially in the Fortune 500, lag years behind the market and best practice. For instance, until recently CFOs were often leading AI decisions, largely optimizing for cost savings only. But just because a machine can do something doesn’t mean it should.
Research by Gather found that 95% of AI pilots fail to deliver meaningful business impact because they’re overly based on algorithms. Meanwhile, employees spend $13 billion annually on their own subscriptions as enterprise tools don’t meet their needs. Human-centered design is the missing ingredient for AI success at scale; companies that design for human needs achieve faster ROI, lower risk, and sustainable competitive advantage.
Fortunately, I can see a more progressive mindset emerging. It’s no longer “How do we do the same with fewer people?” but “How do we help the same people do more with AI?” And instead of “What roles can AI replace?” it’s “What roles can only humans perform?”
These reframed attitudes make the people function central to AI transformation. If AI is treated as an employee-like resource that affects experience, workflow, and culture, HR becomes its logical home.
REINVENT HR: INTRODUCING THE CHIEF RESOURCE OFFICER
But if AI really is joining the workforce, HR must evolve beyond managing just “human” resources. In the agentic era, the function becomes responsible for orchestrating all faculties: human and digital.
Enter the chief resource officer (CRO). This is a new role that would reflect AI’s real place in a company, responsible for integrating AI into workforce planning, ensuring ethical and effective use, and promoting a culture that encourages augmentation over replacement.
Mic drop, I know.
Now hear me out. We’ve seen similar transformations before. The chief revenue officer didn’t exist until CFO priorities shifted, and suddenly organizations needed a new leader to capitalize on growth opportunities. AI represents a similar inflection point, one that expands HR’s mandate rather than diminishes it.
THE REAL CHALLENGE? UPSKILLING THE C-SUITE
The biggest barrier to this shift will be leadership readiness. Many existing HR managers are not yet AI experts, and they’re often stereotyped as preferring traditional processes and workflows. But as companies adopt agentic systems, CROs will become core stakeholders. They’ll need fluency in data governance, workflow management, and experience design. Any AI work integrations must be human-centered and, from an agentic perspective, negate the chances of garbage in/out. As a result, CRO training and upskilling, whether performed in-house or with the help of an external partner, become more important than ever.
The risks of unwittingly fostering an AI knowledge gap are real. At Gather, we partnered with a major global financial services company whose lifecycle management systems weren’t communicating properly with its AI capabilities—resulting in churn, operational escalations, increased risk, and inconsistent messaging to card members. But the problems were organizational, rather than technological.
Gather interviewed five core user groups to map the complete automation lifecycle (intake to execution), identifying opportunities to improve efficiency and consistency. Then, we created assets to showcase automation use cases and build stakeholder awareness, introducing structured data models for better reporting, governance, and reuse. So far, the changes have proved a huge success—powering significant progress for the business’s automation adoption goals.
DESIGN A HUMAN-CENTERED AI FUTURE
Thriving in the agentic era starts with asking another quickfire question: What work must remain human?
Creativity, empathy, judgment, and relationship-building remain irreplaceable, and these are the areas that determine long-term business success. So, a new CRO must:
- Bring HR into AI strategy early
- Upskill executives together, not in silos
- Treat AI as a collaborator rather than a cost-reduction tool
- Design systems where both humans and agents can thrive
Far from diminishing HR’s role, AI will expand it. As agentic systems take on more responsibility, HR and the chief resource officer will become some of the most important stewards of the modern workforce. Ultimately, AI won’t replace people—but it will replace organizations that fail to redesign around them.
Justin Tobin is founder and CEO of Gather.