‘AI-translator’ is now a non-negotiable HR skill

Most HR leaders didn’t get into the profession to run an AI strategy. Yet as the technology reshapes how work gets done, the job of preparing people for it is increasingly falling to them, even as companies are still debating whether AI belongs under HR, IT or somewhere in between.

AI-enabling today’s workforce “just happens to be the greatest reskilling challenge in the history of the world," said Brandon Roberts, senior vice president of talent strategy and workforce transformation at ServiceNow in Encinitas, California.

"We're completely changing how work gets done for every single employee."

ServiceNow's 2025 Workforce Skills Forecast, produced with Pearson, found agentic AI will transform more than 8 million U.S. workers' roles by 2030.

Increasingly, HR leaders are responsible for getting ahead of it, often without a technical background to match.

HR is becoming AI's translator, not its help desk

Roberts has watched organizations experiment with different structures for where AI ownership sits: some decentralizing IT into business functions, others merging HR and IT outright.

"It's feeling more and more like the line between IT and HR is blurring … but also is more critically important than it's been at any point," he said.

That is partly because AI, unlike past workplace technology, doesn't simply get bolted onto an existing process – AI is rewriting processes entirely, and implementing it without also changing skills and workflows means the investment never pays off, he said.

The push to bring the two functions closer isn’t limited to ServiceNow, either. A Nexthink survey covered by HRD Canada earlier this year found that more than nine in 10 IT leaders think merging HR and IT would boost productivity.

HR’s function is to build skills its organization needs to execute strategy, which puts HR leaders squarely in AI's path (whether they signed up for it or not), said Roberts. He isn't looking for HR staff who can build the technology themselves, but for “translators,” people who understand the work deeply enough to say what a process needs and understand AI well enough to know what it can realistically deliver.

To get started, Roberts said HR leaders should be able to answer three questions: how they prioritize which AI use cases to build, how they monitor where those use cases get used across the organization, and how they measure the value each one creates.

Where ServiceNow sees the clearest returns

Asked where ServiceNow itself has captured the most value from AI, Roberts pointed to four areas.

The first is HR operations, where agents deflect routine employee questions and handle workflow requests; Roberts said that work has seen a doubling of productivity since ServiceNow introduced agents there. The second is talent acquisition, particularly on the sourcing side, where AI helps process and understand candidate data. The third is analytics: ServiceNow found that HR business partners were spending 15% to 20% of their time on basic reporting tasks, things like tracking who still owed a performance review or pulling an attrition benchmark, so the company built a data agent to answer those questions directly. The fourth is learning and development, where AI functions less as an autonomous agent and more as a guide, steering employees toward the right training at the right moment.

The data agent behind ServiceNow's analytics gains was “citizen developed," Roberts said. It started as something an HR employee built with AI to solve a problem for their own team. Likewise with an internal tool built to help managers understand spans and layers across the organization. Both were simple artifacts being used "over and over and over again," he said. That repeated adoption became the signal that it was worth investing in as a formal, scaled product rather than leaving it as one team's workaround.

Security and visibility just became HR skills, too

Roberts said security used to be a topic HR could hand off entirely to IT. That’s no longer the case, because employees across the business, not just IT teams, are now building their own AI-powered tools and workflows.

"Security has gone from something that used to be a very specialized skill to something that everybody needs to have a basic and foundational understanding of," he said. HR doesn't need deep technical expertise, he said, but does need to answer: What’s allowed, where does data go once it enters a given tool, and when does it get deleted.

The stakes are already showing up in the data. A Clutch report covered by HRD America found that almost half of agents built by employees can access HR information.

Roberts pointed to visibility as the companion problem. Most organizations, he said, don't have a clear picture of what AI already exists inside their own walls or who is using it.

"Having that central source that says ‘this is all the AI that exists in our company, this is how many people are using it,’ is really, really critical to getting (AI-related) security right," he said.

What this means for CHROs building the case

Taken together, the skills, security and visibility questions Roberts raised point to a broader shift in how much say HR has over where AI goes inside a company.

“HR has a bigger role to play in this transformation than they typically believe," said Roberts, describing an opportunity to shape enterprise strategy rather than simply administer whatever technology IT hands down.

DeVry’s Dave Barnett has made a similar case to HRD America, saying AI ownership is shifting from the CIO’s office to the CHRO’s because it’s ultimately a people matter.

For CHROs at organizations still sorting out where that ownership sits, his framework offers a practical starting point: build a clear process for prioritizing and measuring AI use cases, develop translators who can bridge HR and IT, and treat security and visibility as core HR competencies rather than someone else's department.