I was speaking to a Chief People Officer recently who shared their company had formed an AI steering committee, with a mandate to lead AI enablement across the business. I asked whether they were part of that group. Their answer? No.
As part of their AI approach, organisations are forming AI steering committees, appointing governance leads, and convening AI strategy meetings to ensure they have the right leaders working together on what is, arguably the most disruptive technological event of the 21st Century. They’re doing almost everything right, except including the one person who can help make their AI strategy operational and measurable – the chief people officer.
This isn’t a one-off anomaly or a small oversight. It’s a structural flaw at the heart of why so many AI transformations are falling short on ROI. Organisations are also asking their CPO to lead enablement, build capability and bring the workforce along. However, asking them to do this without being part of the strategy and governance decisions being enabled, is basically change management in the dark.
The data makes this more troubling. Korn Ferry’s 2025 CPO Survey found that while 42% of CPOs are prioritising AI investment, only 5% of HR teams felt prepared to implement it. In addition to this, the data showed 56% of HR leaders believe their company is not sufficiently adaptable to change. To succeed, change management requires a human-centered approach that engages employees. With change as consequential as AI, CPOs need to be hard wired into strategy creation and implementation.
The absence of the CPO in strategy discussions is quietly killing AI ROI. Looking across the C-Suite, the CTO brings the technology. The CFO controls the investment. However, without the CPO in lockstep, organisations end up with sophisticated tools nobody uses well and business cases that don’t convert. These three roles need to function and collaborate as a symbiotic leadership loop, the CTO and CFO defining what’s possible and what it costs, with the CPO determining whether the organisation can absorb, adopt, and accelerate it. Separate them and you just get transformation ‘parallel play’. Connect them and you can get results.
Part of the problem is structural, but part of it is also how HR has historically been positioned. In many organisations, HR is brought in after key business decisions are made, rather than being embedded early enough to shape them. That’s why CEOs can sometimes experience HR as slower to respond. To move into a more proactive zone, a shift is also required within HR itself, across mindset, capability, and ways of working.
It requires HR to reposition itself with a more proactive, product-oriented mindset: treating workforce capability not as a service to be delivered, but as something to be continuously designed and iterated against real business outcomes. It also means parts of HR - particularly workforce planning and talent acquisition - moving closer to business operations, where strategy decisions & capacity conversations occur real-time.
Look at what’s happening at Harvey, the legal AI company recently valued at $11 billion and named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies for 2026. When former HubSpot CPO Katie Burke joined in late 2024, she wasn’t handed a traditional HR remit. Katie took on people, communications, marketing, business technology, and customer engagement, and has since been promoted to COO. While an expanded scope isn’t the qualifier for a CPO being part of an AI steering committee, it does demonstrate that the connection between people decisions and business decisions needs to be more structural in the era of AI, not just relational. One where HR leadership is more integrated with how the business operates, grows, and delivers outcomes.
The organisations that succeed at AI driven business transformation, won’t be the ones with the most sophisticated tech stack. They’ll be the ones where the CTO, CFO, and CPO are genuinely joined at the hip and where HR isn’t waiting to be told what’s changing but is actively engaged with the business to shape the change.
So if your CPO isn’t in the room when your AI decisions are being made, your strategy already has a fault line. And it’s not an ‘HR problem’. It’s a strategy problem.
Amy Schulz is the vice president, market development and ops RPO at Korn Ferry ANZ
