HR leaders reveal what the expanding people mandate now demands – and how AI is reshaping the role
The Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) has spent decades arguing for a seat at the executive table. That argument, according to four international senior people leaders, is over – replaced by a more consequential challenge: leading the most complex workforce transformation in living memory.
People leaders at KPMG, PwC, Cadillac Fairview, and Info-Tech Research Group offer a candid account of what the CHRO mandate looks like in 2026 – as a lived operational reality, not a theory.
Norm Sabapathy, Executive Vice President of Corporate Services at Cadillac Fairview in Canada, has held the top people role at the commercial real estate company for more than a decade. Over that time his portfolio has expanded to include communications, public relations, brand management, philanthropy, and AI rollout oversight alongside traditional human resources.
He draws on a concept he calls the golden triangle – the idea that the CEO's two most essential partners are the chief financial officer (CFO) and the CHRO – and argues the people function is on the same long ascent that finance completed over the past 50 years. "I'm seeing an increasing level of expectation from boards and CEOs of the HR function," he says. "And that's driving an increased quality of capability of people in those jobs."
The logic comes down to three forces HR leaders are uniquely placed to connect, according to Sabapathy. "People, process, and technology, they all interrelate together. And if you have somebody that's a decent business leader, they can connect those dots," he says. For HR directors navigating the growing strategic weight of the people function, the argument is both a validation and a challenge.
What AI has added to the mandate
At PwC in the US, Yolanda Seals-Coffield, the firm's US Chief People Officer, has been rolling out one of the most ambitious AI adoption programs in professional services – giving all 80,000 of the firm's people access to tools including Chat PwC, Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT Enterprise, and Claude. The firm's Amplify Impact Awards, which invited employees to nominate peers for measurable AI outcomes, received more than 900 submissions.
"We needed to democratise access to the tools," Seals-Coffield says. "No one's going to be left behind on this journey." But the defining challenge hasn’t been resistance. It has been pace. "Human beings have an incredible capacity for change. That capacity is being challenged by the pace of it right now," says Seals-Coffield.
The hardest part of the role, she says, is keeping employees engaged through genuine uncertainty. "Probably the most challenging part around driving this agenda is the care and feeding of our people." For HR leaders tracking how organisations are managing AI-era workforce change, the tension she describes is a live and pressing reality.
Judgment is the new technical skill
At KPMG in the US, Jason LaRue stepped into the Vice Chair of Talent and Culture role – the firm's effective CHRO – in 2026. He frames the moment bluntly: "This is probably the fastest and most change that we've ever gone through, and it'll probably be the slowest and least amount of change we'll ever go through going forward."
KPMG's response has been to redirect investment away from technical training – now being absorbed by AI – and toward capabilities AI cannot replicate: judgment, critical thinking, and the client trust that defines a professional services brand, according to LaRue. The firm uses simulations to compress years of client experience into weeks or months. For LaRue, the definition of an effective HR leader hasn’t changed. "If you want to be a successful HR professional, it really begins with being a great businessperson."
The business case has to be watertight
Shawn Gibson, CHRO at Info-Tech Research Group in Canada, tested that principle during a Human Resources Information System (HRIS) transformation across 1,600 employees in six countries – selling the project to a CEO and CFO at a data and research company that advises other organisations on precisely this kind of decision.
His post-mortem is rarely offered publicly. He acknowledged the firm under-invested in a dedicated HRIS resource for the first two years, assumed executive buy-in rather than building it, and didn’t give some modules the same hands-on evaluation that core systems received. "You really have to slow down to speed up later," Gibson says.
The lesson extends beyond technology. The growing role of people data in board-level decision-making is raising the bar for what CHROs are expected to deliver – and demanding the same rigour from HR that any other C-suite function would be held to.
That expectation is no longer exceptional. It’s the baseline.
