How Might HR Be ‘Reimagined’ to Deliver Greater Organizational Value?

Recent breakthroughs in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and agentic AI are poised to remake the core function of HR. Deloitte’s “HR Reimagined” and “HR Reimagined 2.0” research, which spans 2025 and 2026, delves deep into this impending shift.

Workspan Daily interviewed Kyle Forrest, Deloitte’s Future of HR Leader and one of the study authors, to learn more about how HR teams should evolve in the emerging world of work.

Kyle Forrest, Future of HR Leader, Deloitte

Workspan Daily (WD): What stood out most to you from the core findings of the “HR Reimagined” research series?

Forrest: The surprise wasn’t that AI is changing HR — everyone already believes that. It’s the size of the gap between believing it and doing something about it. Eighty-eight percent of [surveyed HR] leaders say orchestrating people, skills and resources dynamically is extremely or very important —  but only 7% say they’re making real progress. That 81-point spread is the largest gap the survey has ever recorded, on any topic.

WD: What has the past year taught the research team about the HR function? How are the structures and roles shifting?

Forrest: The last operating model — with “business HR,” centers of excellence and HR operations as three separate lanes — didn’t fail because the design was wrong. It failed because practical barriers never got fixed. HR still absorbed transactional work the model assumed would disappear, business leaders weren’t brought along and success kept getting measured on HR metrics instead of business outcomes. Titles changed, but behavior didn’t. This past year, we’ve watched agentic AI force the issue where good intentions couldn’t. HR operations is shifting from process owner to portfolio owner, governing a stack of AI tools rather than running transactions by hand. HR business partners [HRBPs] are shifting from generalist support to what we call “workforce architects” [rather than managing administrative tasks, these leaders design operational models, integrate AI-human collaboration and align talent supply with long-term business goals]. Centers of excellence are becoming AI governance drivers instead of content producers. The roles aren’t being renamed — they’re being rescoped.

WD: From your perspective, what progress has occurred?

Forrest: Progress is happening at the task and process level. We worked with a large consumer products company that reviewed everything its HR business partners actually did and found up to 25% of that capacity could shift to a new discipline, workforce architecting — work HRBPs were, frankly, excited to do. Separately, a $50 billion enterprise deployed a cognitive agent as the first point of contact for manager inquiries and cut average response time by half while adding 24/7 coverage. And at the workforce-planning level, 61% of organizations now say they align and deploy people based on tasks, skills and outcomes rather than fixed job descriptions, which is up from a distinct minority a few years ago.

WD: Where is progress still needed?

Forrest: It’s at the operating-model level — the orchestration layer. Most organizations have gotten good at automating individual HR tasks: onboarding, payroll, case management, policy questions and answers. Very few have built the muscle to continuously reallocate people, skills and AI capacity across the function as priorities shift from week to week. That’s the unglamorous part of transformation — not buying another AI tool but building the governance and decision rights to keep reassigning capacity as the tools change what’s possible. Task automation is a solved problem — orchestration is not — and it’s where the next three years of competitive advantage will actually be won or lost.

WD: How has technology changed — or how will it change — the way HR operates?

Forrest: Agentic AI is collapsing what used to be a thick transactional layer. These aren’t chatbots answering frequently asked questions — they’re systems that plan, execute and adjust multistep HR workflows end to end. An employee inquiry that used to route through three tiers of HR operations can now be resolved by an agent that also updates the record, triggers the next step and flags the exception that actually needs a human. That’s already collapsing Tier 1 support work in HR operations and pushing that team toward governing AI performance instead of handling cases one at a time. In centers of excellence, the shift looks different: AI drafts the first version of a compensation policy or a rewards communication, and the human’s job becomes judgment — “Does this fit our culture, our legal exposure, our talent market?” — not authorship. Technology isn’t replacing HR’s seat at the table — it’s removing the work that used to keep HR too busy to sit at it.

WD: What might the future look like for those HR functions and pros that evolve?

Forrest: They become the function every other part of the business calls first. HR business partners spend the majority of their time — we’ve seen estimates approaching 80% — on strategic workforce consulting and change leadership instead of administrative triage. Centers of excellence stop producing static policy documents and start running live, data-driven workforce strategy, refreshed as fast as the labor market moves. HR operations becomes a governance hub that owns AI outcomes across HR, IT, finance and legal — not a ticket queue. And, the CHRO’s seat strengthens, because the function finally has the capacity and credibility to lead the enterprise’s human-machine workforce transition, rather than just administering headcount.

WD: What might it look like for HR functions and pros that don’t?

Forrest: They stay busy and become less relevant at the same time, which is the more dangerous combination than simply falling behind. Task automation happens to them rather than through a strategy they own. The routine work disappears. But without a plan for where that freed capacity goes, it doesn’t convert into new value — it just shows up as headcount pressure. And, the practice gap we saw in the last generation of business HR repeats itself: new titles, same transactional habits, and a CHRO increasingly boxed out of enterprise strategy conversations because the function never made the leap from administering the workforce to architecting it.

WD: How can HR teams transform? What steps should teams include in an action plan?

Forrest: From our vantage point, it’s four moves, in order:

1. Define the outcomes before the organization chart — name the business results HR needs to enable, then work backward to the capabilities and capacity required, instead of starting from today’s roles and automating around them.
2. Treat freed-up capacity as a capital allocation decision, not a byproduct. Every hour AI reclaims should be deliberately routed to higher-value work, redeployed elsewhere or eliminated. And, that routing decision belongs at the leadership table, not left to inertia.
3. Build the orchestration layer explicitly — the governance, data and decision rights that let the function keep reallocating people and AI capacity as conditions change.
4. Put governance ahead of scale. Decide how agentic AI decisions get reviewed and by whom before deploying it broadly, not after. Organizations that sequence it this way — outcomes, capacity discipline, orchestration, governance — are the ones showing up in our research as roughly twice as likely to report stronger financial performance. The sequencing is the strategy.

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