Every HR leader wants to be strategically involved in creating an AI playbook for their organization. But where do you start when you wonder, “What is AI? LLMs? GenAI? What are AI agents? How do I write a policy for all this? Training? What about governance?”
You’re not the only one asking those questions. Gaining AI fluency ranks low on the list for many busy leaders, including those in HR. There’s also the awareness that anything we learn today might look different tomorrow. And for those of us who remember executives promising employees would be walking around with chips in their brains by now, skepticism comes easy.
And then there’s the overwhelming feeling that understanding today’s enterprise AI landscape is just the first step. Then the bigger questions emerge, like: How does it all tie to operations and profitability? And how much does this really cost?
Well, that’s unclear for 98% of organizations where AI transformation initiatives fail.
In a dream world, what you really need to understand is your business and then apply it to your own playbook in Human Resources. (But that seems vague, right?)
When it comes to AI, here are my ideas on where HR does, could, and should get involved. It’s an honest overview of strengths, weaknesses, and where a forward-thinking department can make a difference both today and tomorrow.
What HR Actually Does Right Now: Change Management
Most HR departments have no AI strategy. They wish they had a policy memo sitting in a shared drive somewhere.
Right now, managers field questions about AI one use case at a time, with no shared talking points, and they come to HR looking for answers and for permission. What they get back depends entirely on who they ask.
When leadership decides an AI roadmap, HR usually finds out at the same time as everyone else.
So if you find yourself in a situation where IT owns the tools, legal owns the risk, finance owns the budget, and HR owns the fallout, it’s time to get on LinkedIn Learning or Coursera. Take some courses on “change management.”
Because what HR does, irrespective of technology, is help the organization and its leaders prepare for and manage through change.
What HR Could Do, If It Pushed For More Room: Ask Better Questions
There’s a version of HR that shapes the policy IT and legal are writing, instead of just reading it once it’s final. Another version maps which skills are becoming obsolete and builds a reskilling plan, even when the training budget sits elsewhere. A third flags people-risk in a vendor contract before procurement signs it.
None of this requires new expertise. It just requires HR asking to join the conversation earlier, and then showing up with something useful once it does. Relationships loop HR in earlier, because nobody comes to you early when they don’t like, know, or trust you.
You could be more involved in the business by being interested in your peers as humans, with faults and all, instead of as risks to be managed. And you could be more involved in an AI strategy if you take a risk, and possibly take technical courses on AI technologies and platforms, so that you can proactively and spontaneously join conversations about AI without sounding like a schoolkid.
“Could” is just the work that’s available right now, without a mandate, to whoever decides to start doing it before someone hands them permission.
What HR Should Own, Because Nobody Else Can Do It As Well: Enable Performance
It’s 2026, and manager enablement is HR’s job. Not a training video, but actual talking points for actual conversations, including the hard ones about whether someone’s role still exists in six months.
- Role and job architecture redesign belongs to HR too. Rewriting what a job requires, as the work itself changes, is exactly the skill HR has spent decades building.
- Naming the anxiety people feel about AI, instead of letting silence answer for the company, falls squarely on HR.
- And deciding how AI factors into a performance review, before an employee has to guess, is HR’s call to make.
All of it is hard, complicated, slow, and unglamorous, which is why it’s easy to skip when a company is moving fast and short-staffed.
The Honest Version
Most HR teams know the “should” list. Very few are executing it. Hiring and comp cycles stretch teams thin, and nobody handed them the AI conversation as a mandate.
If you’re building your organization’s AI playbook and HR isn’t in the room where leaders make decisions, start smaller. Pick one thing from the “could” list. Do it well. Use it to earn the next opportunity, the one that comes from more knowledge, better relationships, and stronger competencies.