What is the future of HR teams as agentic AI adoption accelerates?
HR and IT teams will likely become blended by the end of this decade, according to a new forecast from Gartner, as AI adoption in workplaces accelerates and blurs the boundaries between both departments.
Gartner's latest prediction points to a shared leadership challenge for HR and IT as organisations accelerate AI adoption.
As a result, 30% of organisations will form blended HR-IT teams by 2029 to accelerate AI enablement.
"This does not mean most organisations need to restructure or merge HR and IT," said Mark Whittle, VP Analyst, in Gartner's HR practice.
"Most organisations will continue operating with separate HR and IT functions, but those functions must become more connected around the areas where work, talent, and technology overlap."
How AI leads to blended HR-IT teams
Whittle made the remarks as agentic AI adoption becomes more common in workplaces. Findings from McKinsey last year found that 62% of organisations are already experimenting with AI agents, while a separate report from PwC revealed that 79% of firms are already adopting AI agents.
Whittle said as agentic AI moves more work into the space between HR and IT, capabilities such as skills-based talent management, human-AI performance management, as well as human-AI capacity planning no longer fit neatly within either function.
"This can lead to decisions being made in silos, without adequate human safeguards, regulatory oversight, data protection, ethical accountability, or business alignment," he said.
According to the expert, CHROs and CIOs must intentionally share ownership of different priority capabilities in the agentic AI-driven future, such as managing the risks, bias, safety concerns, and human impacts when AI agents interact with people and processes.
HR and IT should also share responsibility in crafting a skills-based approach, determining the total cost of work analysis, redesigning work, and coming up with new human-AI performance management amid agentic AI adoption.
Without blended HR-IT teams, Whittle warned that the growing agentic AI adoption may lead to role confusion, where CHROs are left to manage workforce consequences from AI deployments that they did not help shape, while CIOs become accidental owners of workforce challenges created by AI.
Another consequence of not having blended HR-IT teams is the one-sided workplace transformation, where HR prioritises people without enough focus on technology, or IT may prioritise innovation without fully considering the workforce implications.
"These challenges can leave organisations stuck between AI experimentation and enterprise-scale impact," Whittle said.
What's the next step for HR leaders?
There are four immediate actions that CHROs can take ahead of their shared responsibilities with CIOs, according to Whittle. This includes agreeing on shared ownership of responsibility and design principles.
They should also establish clear boundaries between shared CHRO-CIO responsibilities and business-owned execution, introduce measures that assess whether the organisation has the conditions required to scale AI effectively, and bring HR and IT expertise closer to the point where AI-driven work redesign happens.
"CHROs should move from agreement in principle to clear mechanisms for how HR and IT will make decisions, support business leaders, and scale AI-enabled work redesign together," Whittle said.
