There is a growing disconnect between executives’ AI ambitions and HR’s reality. Bridging this gap means leaving transactional operations behind and prioritizing strategic workforce enablement. 

By Gillian Manning 

The gap is widening. According to Protiviti’s latest AI Pulse Survey, while nearly 80% of C-suite executives are banking on AI to deliver rapid revenue growth and margin improvements within three years, their HR departments are sounding the alarm on a different problem: Only 5% of CHROs expect at least half of their function’s daily tasks to be AI-enabled within three years, even though more than 80% of HR activities are well-suited for automation. 

“As the AI revolution continues to unfold, we’re learning that it’s not as much about the technology as it is about all of the other things around the technology—the people enablement, the skills, the operating model design,” explains Fran Maxwell, global leader of people and change at Protiviti. 

And all of those factors make for a complex issue with no one-size-fits-all answer.  

Defining Maturity Levels    

Part of the alignment failure stems from how organizations classify their AI readiness. High-level financial projections often treat point-solution automation—a resume screening tool here, a schedule coordinator there—as equivalent to enterprise-wide AI transformation. They’re not.

“Some HR functions are really mature, and some are immature,” Maxwell says. “[A]ll HR functions aren’t created equal.”
Highly mature HR functions operate proactively, Maxwell explains, leveraging business partners and data-driven insights to strategically anticipate and address future workforce skill gaps. He points to HR functions built around dedicated business partners, centers of excellence, and shared services—teams tied closely enough to business leaders to say, in effect, “here are the skills you don’t have right now that we think you need to build in the next six months.”

Conversely, immature HR departments act as reactive “compliance police,” remaining bogged down by administrative processing and rigid policy enforcement rather than enhancing the employee experience. Maxwell also points to a root cause behind that immaturity: HR has historically been under-resourced, noting that “not a lot of organizations put a ton of investment into the HR function.”  

Ultimately, the defining shift in HR maturity is the transition from transactional, paper-based operations to strategic business enablement. 

The distinction matters because it shapes how organizations approach the magnitude of change ahead. Only 13% of CHROs strongly agree their organizations are ready for role redesign, compared with 36% of IT leaders. For workforce learning, the gap is 14% versus 46%. Without stronger preparation in these areas, organizations risk pouring money into AI systems that fail to deliver returns. 

Learn from the Past 

There’s a historical parallel that belongs in the C-suite conversation. “If you look 20 years ago, when ERP implementations happened, [they were] like 80% technology, 20% people,” Maxwell says. “But if you look at the data, ERP implementations failed because they didn’t focus on the people side.” 

The math is nearly reversed for AI. “This is now 70% people, 30% tech,” he says. Yet executives continue to default to the same technology-first playbook. 

Maxwell traces some of that defaulting to a simple, largely unexamined assumption at the top. “I also think there’s probably a perspective of like, how hard can it be? We’re just going to tell our people to do things differently.” He connects this to HR’s own history of being undervalued—a perception he says began shifting during the pandemic, when ideas around talent and skills started getting more traction. 

The reason CHROs sound cautious isn’t because they don’t understand business value. It’s because they understand the actual work required. AI creates value not just by automating tasks, but by changing how work is structured, how skills are developed, and how performance is measured. That requires wholesale job redesign—something HR has rarely done at scale, and something organizations have rarely asked them to lead. 

From Reactive to Proactive 

The divide between executive ambition and ground-level execution typically manifests in how organizations handle workforce shifts. Reactive organizations deploy technology first and handle the fallout later, calling HR in when productivity bottlenecks emerge. Proactive organizations treat workforce transformation as a strategic prerequisite. 

To move from reactive to proactive requires CHROs to bring something executives can’t ignore: data. 

“There’s this saying. ‘In God we trust, everyone else bring data,’” Maxwell says. “So data tells a story.” 

Maxwell points to a specific example of that shift. Rather than leaning on the time to fill a role, which is useful for gauging HR’s efficiency but not the bottom line, leaders should track time to full proficiency, worker productivity, and revenue per employee—metrics that connect directly to business outcomes that CEOs and CFOs care about. 

Focus on activity analysis that shows which tasks are administrative or operational, paired with skills mapping that reveals gaps, combined with quantitative productivity metrics. This gives executives a shared metric that goes beyond cost-cutting conversations. 

Starting with activity analysis also reveals another opportunity. HR functions themselves can often automate the low-value tasks that are currently occupying their people, freeing capacity for higher-impact work. However, the skills required for that higher-impact work often don’t exist yet. Organizations can create all the capacity they want, but if no one on the team has done strategic workforce redesign before, they’re starting from zero. 

Maxwell notes too that this isn’t about over-automating. “You don’t want to automate everything,” he says. “You want to automate what’s appropriate and then have people interaction where necessary.” 

Looking in the Mirror 

To credibly guide an organization through AI transformation, HR leaders must first assess their own department. According to Maxwell, this internal review involves two main priorities. First, HR teams must conduct an honest self-assessment to identify and bridge current skill gaps, recognizing that the competencies required for future business success will differ significantly from those utilized today. 

The second, often more challenging, priority is undertaking an internal transformation. Maxwell notes that HR departments must automate low-value administrative tasks to free up capacity, allowing professionals to focus on strategic initiatives that elevate the function’s standing within the organization. 

Even with the right framework, however, Maxwell notes that no one has done this before at scale and there’s no clear definitions for how jobs will shift.  But there’s opportunity in the chaos. As Maxwell says, “I think it’s a great time to be in HR. Talk about really being able to make an impact on organizations. If the profile of the function remains high, the HR function has the ability to be a competitive advantage for organizations—especially if you can crank out skills and reskilling and create a learning and development function that’s a well-oiled machine. That’s a competitive advantage.”