At the end of my last piece, I asked a question I’ve been thinking about for a while. If HR keeps shrinking inside companies, who thinks critically about the future of work? Who is worried about both the organization’s future viability and the people who did the work? Who cares about money and humanity? Where do those skills go?
My answer is simple. They follow the people.
I’ve said for years that HR sits at the intersection of work, power, politics, and money. For most of my career, those four things were decided inside companies. That’s changing. As agents take over more of the work, the big decisions about jobs, pay, and who gets help are moving into public life, into statehouses, city councils, and workforce boards. HR people should move with them, and I think public service is the natural next step.
Meet The Claims Processor
Remember the forty claims processors from my last piece? The ones who got fired because AI agents got good? Picture one of them walking into a state workforce office after her job goes to an agent.
The people behind the desk know the unemployment rules, and they can help her file. But nobody in that room knows how agents changed her old job or which employers in town are still hiring people.
An HR person would. Reading jobs and matching people to work is what we’ve done for decades.
As those claims processors are escorted out of the building, some HR Business Partners will be asked to leave, too. Yes, a small team of HR people will stay inside companies. Someone has to own the hard calls about agents, like whether an agent replaced a person or helped one do more, and who signs off. (HR and IT are already arguing over who manages agents.)
But the remaining team is small, and most of the profession won’t fit in it.
So how do we continue to fix work and make sure the world still cares about people and money?
Where The Rest Of Us Should Go
Governments are about to make some of the biggest decisions about work in a generation, and many of the people making these decisions are old as dirt, don’t understand technology, and haven’t held a real job in decades. AI is just a foggy concept. North Carolina’s own forecasters have already flagged AI as a risk to state revenue. At least one governor has ordered state agencies to study AI job losses.
The questions about the future of work are coming fast. Who gets retrained, and for what? Which jobs are worth protecting? How do you tell the difference between an agent that replaced a worker and one that helped her?
HR people have been answering versions of those questions inside companies for years. Government needs that knowledge, and the need goes well beyond HR jobs. Workforce boards, state labor departments, economic development offices, school boards, city councils, and appointed commissions all need people who understand how work works.
So I think HR needs to go into government. I’m talking about rank-and-file jobs, but I’m also talking about elected office. You don’t need to run for president to make a difference. Maybe you just need to run for city council.
Public Service Isn’t Easy
Public service costs something. State and local workers already earn about 5% less than comparable private sector workers, and for college-educated workers, the gap is about 15%. If you’ve built a corporate HR career, that’s a big pay cut. I won’t pretend it isn’t.
Federal jobs are harder to get right now, too. The federal workforce has been cut back hard. For most people, the opportunity is state and local government, which is where the money problems from my first piece show up first anyway.
Some of you will push back. If agents can do strategy inside companies, why can’t they do it in government? Well, because government needs someone to be accountable for the call. An agent can draft a workforce plan, but it can’t stand in front of a city council or its citizens and answer for it.
Government HR is also its own world, with civil service rules, unions, and public budgets. Some of you should run a county HR department. But most of you can and should look wider, at any public role where decisions about work get made.
So Where Does That Leave HR?
People are leaving corporate. But the skills underneath HR, such as caring about people and telling the truth about work and money, don’t have to stay behind. A small team will stay inside to own the agent decisions. The rest of us belong where the decisions about work are moving, in public service.
Which leaves one more question. If the paycheck no longer funds everything, and if government work changes too, what replaces the paycheck and taxes? That’s the next piece.