The death of people and culture: Reclaiming HR in the age of AI

An opportunity exists to strip out low-impact, transactional activity, including within HR itself, and return focus to clarity, capability, and contribution, writes Grant Wyatt.

When most people think of HR, they picture hiring, firing, policy enforcement, and a department tasked with making work feel better, while the rest of the organisation is under pressure to make it work better.

Over the past decade, human resources underwent a widespread rebrand. It became people and culture (P&C). The banner expanded to engagement platforms, wellbeing programs, diversity initiatives, and endless “pulse” surveys. The intent was noble: improve how people experience work. The result, however, has been underwhelming.

As dissatisfaction surfaced through these channels, the responses were rarely structural. Instead, more initiatives were layered onto systems that were already bloated and increasingly disconnected from economic reality. Discomfort was treated as something to soothe, rather than a signal that something fundamental needed repair.

The outcome? Engagement and trust are down. Workload pressure and burnout are up. A growing proportion of the workforce feels disillusioned rather than energised. Despite unprecedented investment in culture, the experience of work has not meaningfully improved.

The age of AI

Artificial Intelligence has exposed this weakness. AI can already perform much of what P&C have long considered “core” work: process coordination, workforce analytics, and policy interpretation. It also challenges the role of P&C as a cultural gatekeeper. Where fairness and consistency were once mediated through human judgement, AI provides data-driven insight, offered dispassionately and at scale.

Gartner forecasts that by 2030, roughly 60 per cent of HR tasks will be executed through AI-driven agents. This is not a future problem. It is a present capability gap, and many HR teams are simply not ready.

As technology strips out friction, functional boundaries matter less. Leaders will absorb many responsibilities once tethered to HR, supported by AI systems that act as a digital sounding board. These AI coaches integrate compliance, legal frameworks and behavioural insight, delivering data-driven guidance directly into the hands of leaders. A large portion of what once required one-to-one meetings or workshops can now be accessed instantly.

The HR function remains essential, but its role is no longer to cushion people from reality. It is to help them adapt to it faster. And for that to happen, HR must adapt first.

The return to ‘resources’

For years, the title human resources felt unfashionable – too blunt, too economic, and too impersonal. Yet that framing is precisely what we now need. As technology makes value, capability, and contribution increasingly visible, the language of resources regains its accuracy and honesty.

In a high-performance environment, the “resource” is the capability of the human, and the “management” is the optimisation of that capability. When expectations are clear and systems are effective, engagement does not need to be manufactured. It emerges naturally through responsibility and meaningful contribution.

HR’s value can no longer be in acting as a service desk for transactions or short-term morale initiatives. Its survival depends on becoming sharper, more strategic, and commercially useful.

The A.I.M.S. framework: Rebuilding HR for the future

HR must re-engineer itself around four imperatives: automate, integrate, mobilise, and simplify.

1. AUTOMATE all repeatable HR work

Automation now needs to move from aspiration to execution. The greatest return comes when workflows are interrogated and simplified before automation. HR needs practical AI literacy and the courage to test every workflow for necessity and efficiency. If a task is repeatable and codable, it should not rely on human effort by default.

Onboarding, recruitment admin, contract amendments, process coordination, and policy queries; all should sit within a process and automation review pipeline.

2. INTEGRATE capability

Once the repetitive work is automated, HR’s next move is to integrate the capability into leadership. By equipping leaders with AI-driven toolkits, policy agents and behavioural coaching systems, organisations can reduce their dependence on HR as the intermediary in all things “people”.

Technology provides the first pass of guidance; leaders provide judgement, empathy, and trust.

3. MOBILISE an AI guild

Every organisation needs a transition roadmap that defines ethical principles, role implications, and guardrails for AI adoption. HR can play a critical role in shaping this foundation, drawing on its strengths in governance, communication, and change management.

Once the vision is set, HR should advocate for the building and upskilling of a cross-functional AI guild – a small group tasked with testing automation tools, redesigning workflows, and seeking out inefficiencies that slow the business down, measuring outcomes as they go.

4. SIMPLIFY the operating model

The longstanding call for HR to develop business acumen is no longer optional. Its relative distance from day-to-day operations now offers a valuable vantage point to support the simplification of work practices.

HR leaders should offer to partner with functions to map tasks, challenge redundant approvals, collapse duplicated effort, and eliminate low-value activities. This isn’t about redrawing org charts; it is about helping leaders see how work moves through the business and where technology can reliably automate or augment it. True simplification is structural, not cosmetic.

The new reality for HR

HR has spent years responding to disengagement by adding programs, rather than removing the conditions that cause it. The future of the function lies in subtraction: doing less, with greater intent.

An opportunity exists to strip out low-impact, transactional activity, including within HR itself, and return focus to clarity, capability, and contribution. Every hour spent sustaining bloated systems is an hour taken from preparing people for the realities of an AI-infused workplace.

This is not the end of HR, but a rediscovery of its purpose: shifting from steward of culture initiatives to a strategic accelerator of workforce design and adaptive capability, creating a more sustainable way to improve how people experience work.

The function that once made work feel better must now make work work better. That’s the new mandate. It’s time for human resources to live up to its name.

Grant Wyatt is the head of human resources at Ensign Laboratories, an author, and keynote speaker focused on responsibility-centred leadership, workplace culture, and the future of work.