People leaders worldwide are redefining HR's role, from AI adoption to strategic workforce planning, as transformation becomes the new baseline
HR leaders are rewriting the rules of people strategy. From rethinking the boundaries of their function to deploying artificial intelligence (AI) across entire workforces, the executives driving transformation in 2026 share a common conviction: the old definition of human resources no longer fits the work ahead.
The shift is visible across industries — from financial services and mining to public-sector creative organizations — and it’s accelerating faster than many anticipated.
“Whereas HR was a little more traditional, primarily transactional and compliance-focused [in the past], the focus has shifted to being proactive with data-driven decisions and strong emphasis on accountability for outcomes, and delivering practical solutions rather than just policies and processes,” says Christine Barwell, Chief Human Resources Officer at Wesdome Gold Mines in Toronto.
Barwell's perspective is widely shared. A 2025 study of Canadian CHROs by International Workplace Group found that 86 per cent of Canadian CHROs report their influence is at an all-time high — a striking figure that nonetheless sits alongside a troubling gap: a 2026 study by Principal Connections found only 25 per cent of organizations view HR as central to enterprise strategy, even when 70 per cent see it as a strategic partner.
Translating visibility into decision-making power, Barwell argues, requires HR leaders to understand financials, speak the language of the business, and stay engaged with executive peers well beyond the boardroom. “Conversations with executive peers outside of strategic sessions is where CHROs can help solve a lot for the organization and learn from peers,” she says.
When the function itself gets a new name
For Cynthia Miller, Director General of People and Cultures at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in Montréal, the transformation has been literal. When she assumed the Director General role in April 2026, the NFB's division was renamed from Human Resources and Institutional Services to People and Cultures — a deliberate signal about what the function now encompasses.
"Culture isn’t just shaped by leadership and values, it’s really influenced by everything,” says Miller. “So the lived environment, hot it’s furnished, how many offices we’re able to sustain, how inclusive we are, and do people feel comfortable saying anything and feel supported by their managers?” The new framework in her organization now spans accommodation, security, official languages, equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI), and organizational development alongside traditional people functions, according to Miller.
Miller's philosophy on transformation is grounded rather than aspirational. She advocates focusing on fundamentals — clean processes, strong workforce planning, deliberate skills-based thinking — as the precondition for anything more strategic. “Teams often lack time to clean up and fine tune their processes and maximize efficiency,” she says. “Establishing strong fundamentals allow us to thing more strategically about workforce planning, organizational design, and transformation.”
Her approach to AI reflects the same pragmatism. The NFB has established a governance committee for artificial intelligence with HR representation to ensure comprehensive consideration of its impact across all departments. The goal, Miller says, is exploring how AI can maximize staff capabilities — not replace them — while thinking “in terms of skills rather than jobs” to ensure staff can pivot quickly as conditions change.
The AI adoption gap: productivity gains without organizational returns
Tara Lockyer, Chief People Culture, Brand and Communications Officer at ATB Financial in Calgary, Canada, has seen the AI adoption challenge play out at scale. ATB deployed Google's Gemini AI tools across its 5,500-person workforce in 2025 — and quickly encountered an uncomfortable reality.
“We didn’t necessarily set an expectation in terms of usage – we made the tools available, we talked about them a lot, and we gave a lot of time on building awareness and capability, but we didn’t really set an accountability in terms of our expectations of usage,” says Lockyer. “We’ve definitely seen a huge individual productivity uptake, but we’re having a really hard time harnessing that for the organization – how do you harness that productivity at the team level or at the line-of-business level so that it can be redeployed?”
The gap between individual efficiency gains and organizational-level benefit of AI transformation is a challenge that remains for Lockyer’s organization, but it’s also squarely an HR problem, she says.
“Communications and change management is a big piece of HR, and that’s going to be a forever job for us now,” says Lockyer. Growing anxiety around job security — as employees automate tasks and wonder what remains — requires HR to understand what’s being automated, recalibrate roles, and develop higher-order cognitive and creative skills for the work that follows, she says.
Lockyer points to a structural shift redefining leadership itself. In her sector of financial services, leaders can no longer teach jobs they have done themselves. “Leaders now must create environments for work they don't know how to do,” she says. “They’re leading from behind now, and their job is to create a vision and environment for people to be successful.”
Change management as a key piece
Andrew Gilchrist, CHRO for Wealth Management at BMO, frames the transformation challenge in similar terms. In an environment where acquisitions, regulatory shifts, and technology changes are compressing timelines, HR professionals without strong change management capabilities will struggle to keep pace.
“Each of our HR professionals have to have a strong change mindset and change capabilities,” says Gilchrist. “The pace of change is so incredible, and if you don't manage each of those transitions, transactions, and transformations in the right way – with empathy and care, and making sure that the right communication is happening to the employees, that change can quickly deteriorate.”
For Gilchrist, who joined BMO after specializing in wealth management recruitment, the evolution of the CHRO role is inseparable from business fluency. HR leaders need to be “digitally capable and data savvy,” he says, and they must bring key insights to the business in real-time while utilizing AI capabilities to work at a quicker pace.
Trust and people are transformation's variables
Globally, the same tensions are surfacing. Benjamin Granger, a workplace experience researcher and author of the Future of Experience Management 2030 study – a quantitative study of 1,000 business leaders across multiple countries – found that only 29 per cent of global consumers trust companies to use AI responsibly as of 2026. For HR leaders rolling out AI-enabled tools and processes, that deficit begins internally.
“A lot of companies are treating AI like a new tool that's being introduced into the workplace, whereas they really should be thinking about it as a strategic transformation and all the things that go along with a strategic transformation,” Granger told HRD Australia. “A lot of communication, a lot of conflicts, conversation, asking people questions about, what are you using these tools for?”
Successful implementations treat AI adoption the way they treat organizational change — with high-frequency communication, specific use cases, and clear guardrails, according to Granger’s research. His concept of “grounded optimism” offers HR leaders a communications framework: acknowledge difficulties, validate concerns, then show how the organization will support people through the change together.
At Nokia, a global technology company with 70,000 to 80,000 employees across 130 countries, Global Talent Acquisition Leader Linda Krebs describes a similarly methodical approach. “Adaptability to change is the key trait Nokia seeks in HR professionals since change is the new norm at an exponential pace,” Krebs says. “There’s less focus on technical expertise and more on willingness to learn.”
Alicia Lenart, Head of People at Atlassian in Sydney, believes that AI has made workers faster, but it hasn’t changed how people work together, which leaves HR at the heart of transformation. “CEOs and boards are looking around and saying, ‘Who's going to drive this AI transformation? So that’s the moment for HR leaders to put their hand in the air and say, ‘Well, there's tech and there's people, and the people thing is the more complex thing,’” Lenart told HRD Australia. “I really think that AI is closing the gap between technical and non-technical people, so that allows traditionally non-technical folks like HR to come closer to the technical problem.”
For HR leaders facing rapid and constant change in their organizations’ transformation strategies, the consistent message is that transformation isn’t just aa technology project. It’s a people project – and that makes it undeniably HR's responsibility.
