4-minute read

This week’s Digest is essentially about work design. Whether we are talking about AI centres of excellence, the future of middle management or Dave Ulrich’s argument that the Age of AI needs the Age of HR, the common thread is clear: technology may be moving fast but the real test for organisations is how work, roles, skills and human capability are being redesigned around it. HR has a stronger voice in this conversation than it sometimes claims, but is it using this voice early and boldly enough?

A quick heads up – I’ll be at the CIPD Festival of Work in London, UK on 10 June. If you’re going too and would like to grab a coffee do drop me a note – it would be lovely to say hello in person if I'm available.

1. Is HR in the AI room?

How are you adopting AI structurally? This may sound like a dry governance question but as AI moves through organisations it is already changing workflows, roles, skills, decision-making, communication and trust. So the structure you create around it will shape whether AI becomes a series of disconnected experiments or a serious redesign of how work gets done.

This is why AI centres of excellence, steering groups and similar cross-functional forums are becoming more important. AWS describes an AI centre of excellence as a dedicated unit that coordinates and oversees AI initiatives, bridging business strategy to value delivery. It sounds sensible, but the bigger question for HR is whether the function is in the room early enough to influence what that value actually means.

David Liddle, CEO of TCM Group and author of People and Culture: A Practical Guide for HR Professionals and Leaders, describes AI adoption inside organisations as growing “like little mushrooms”, popping up in pockets across the business. It’s a great image because many organisations will recognise this picture: An AI tool appears in marketing. Customer service then gets a pilot. Operations starts experimenting. IT writes some guardrails. Legal asks about risk. HR is then brought in when the people issues become visible. This is too late.

Liddle is blunt: “AI is a people agenda, not a technical agenda.” He warns that HR has a real problem if it still sees AI as someone else’s domain, particularly when so much of its own work remains administrative and transactional. His point is not that HR must own every technical decision but that AI changes work and HR should have a serious voice in how that work is redesigned.

Emily Rose McRae, director analyst in Gartner’s HR practice, is less concerned with whether organisations call this mechanism a centre of excellence, steering committee or taskforce. What matters is whether there is a cross-functional group setting direction, coordinating activity and holding people to a shared goal. “Without it, these strategies fail,” she says.

Her challenge to HR leaders is: what is your organisation’s goal with AI? Too many groups start with tools, pilots and permissions. Fewer are clear whether they are trying to improve service, reduce cost, redesign a workflow, build capability or increase speed in a defined part of the business. Without that outcome success becomes impossible to judge.

This is where HR can add real value. It can ask how roles and workflows need to change, who needs what level of AI literacy, where the handoffs are, what happens downstream and how employees will build confidence in using AI responsibly. Research by McKinsey last year found that workflow redesign had the biggest effect on whether organisations saw EBIT impact from gen AI, yet only 21% of organisations using gen AI had fundamentally redesigned at least some workflows.

Access to AI tools may create small bursts of efficiency but without redesign those minutes often disappear into email, meetings and the general noise of work. As McRae puts it, the time saved can simply become “checking my email and a cup of coffee.”

So the immediate question for HR is does your organisation already have an AI centre of excellence or steering group? Who sits on it? What business outcome is it there to support? How close is it to real work? And, if HR is missing, what are you doing about it?

👉 Read my full story for more on this subject AI centres of excellence are taking shape. Is HR in the room? 6-minute read

2. Stop blaming middle managers

The If AI is forcing organisations to rethink how work is governed and redesigned, the same question now applies to one of the most criticised roles in the business: the middle manager.

Middle managers have become an easy target. When organisations want to look leaner, faster or less bureaucratic, attention often turns to the people sitting between senior leaders and frontline teams. They are accused of slowing decisions, blocking autonomy and translating strategy into yet more meetings, updates and approvals.

There is a problem with that argument – it treats middle management as a headcount issue when the deeper issue is work design.

​A new Future Work Forum report, The future of middle management, argues that the future lies in “better middle management, redesigned as leadership in the middle” rather than the disappearance of the layer altogether. This feels interesting to me because many of the frustrations we attach to middle managers are really symptoms of a role that has failed to keep pace with the world around it.

For much of the 20th century the role was clear. Middle managers passed information down, monitored activity, allocated work, enforced standards and reported progress back up. This made sense when information was scarce, work was more predictable and authority moved through defined lines.

That world has largely gone, however. Today information now moves instantly, teams work across functions, borders and time zones and AI can increasingly support reporting, scheduling, summarisation and workflow tracking. Employees now expect autonomy, clarity, context and trust. Yet too many organisations still promote, train and reward managers as though supervision and control remain the core job.

This is where HR needs to step in. Middle managers are not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but instead are often not doing the role organisations now need them to do – and that’s because of poor role design.

The report points to a much more demanding future role: sense-making, coaching, collaboration design, career guidance, AI interpretation, system stewardship and human judgement. Dominic O’Kelly, CEO of TR2050, puts it well: “AI removes much of the administrative burden that once defined line management: reporting, tracking, scheduling, knowledge capture, summarisation. But it also increases the need for human judgement.”

This should make leaders pause before cutting layers in the hope that work will magically flow. Remove middle management without redesigning work and the result may be burnout, fragmentation and cultural deterioration. The work does not disappear but moves somewhere else, often onto people who are already stretched.

Some takeaways from me:

• Stop treating management as the automatic reward for technical excellence. Not every expert should become a people leader.
• Build dual career paths so technical specialists can progress without being pushed into management.
• Develop managers for the work they do now: coaching, conflict, change, systems thinking, AI adoption and commercial judgement.
• Reward the work that creates value in modern organisations, including trust, clarity, learning, connection and reduced friction.
• Ask what work would still need to happen if a management layer was reduced. Translation, coordination, workload management and emotional containment rarely vanish from the system.

The middle management crisis is a challenge to design management around the work organisations now need. Blaming the layer may feel decisive but redesigning it is harder and far more useful.

👉Read our full story on Why the middle management crisis is really a work design failure. 4-minute read

3. Dave Ulrich’s free HR book

One more AI-related point worth making this week comes from Dave Ulrich and asks us to widen the lens.

Dave’s new book, The Age of HR, written with Anthony Nyberg, Rebecca Kehoe and Patrick Wright, is now available as a free download. Given Dave’s standing in the profession this alone makes it worth noting. More importantly, the argument behind it talks directly to the moment HR leaders are in.

As Dave puts it: “The Age of AI will not fulfil its promise without the Age of HR.” It’s a strong claim and one HR should take seriously. Yes, AI can bring speed, efficiency and analytical power, but as readers of this Digest know only too well it cannot replace the human capabilities that sit at the heart of organisational value: ingenuity, judgement, relationships, innovation and the ability to imagine a better future.

The book brings together 61 essays from 83 global HR thinkers, including current and former heads of HR, academics and advisers to many of the world’s largest companies. The question they were asked was simple: how can human capability – talent, organisation, leadership and HR – deliver more stakeholder value?

This moves the HR conversation away from functional activity and towards contribution – what human capability enables for employees, customers, investors, communities and society.

For me this is where the profession needs to keep pushing. AI may be the catalyst but the bigger agenda is how HR helps organisations build the capabilities, cultures and leadership needed to create value in a very different world of work.

You can download ​The Age of HR​ free here.

Find your management space!

Siân

Editorial director, The People Space​

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