AI investment is accelerating. Job cuts are following. At the same time the expectations on HR are shifting quickly, from how work gets done to who gets to lead it. This week’s Digest brings those threads together. A practical AI case study grounded in employee confidence, a challenge to rethink collaboration in hybrid work and new global data on who is stepping into the top HR role. Three different angles on the same question: how ready are we for what’s coming next?

1. How one CEO introduced AI without damaging trusts

Meta is cutting jobs again. Around one in 10 roles are expected to go as the company doubles down on AI investment. At the same time it’s tracking employees’ clicks and keystrokes to train its models, a move some staff have already described as unsettling. Meta is not alone in pushing hard here. New data from Adzuna shows AI mentions in UK job ads have nearly doubled in 15 months, with some of the fastest growth outside tech. AI in marketing roles is up 4.8x. HR and recruitment 7.8x. Admin and clerical roles, long seen as vulnerable, now sit at 15x their 2022 levels.

This is the context HR leaders are operating in. Pressure is rising from both sides: organisations accelerating adoption and employees questioning what it means for their work.

And this is why a conversation I had with Abby Connect chief executive Nathan Strum is worth paying attention to. At a time so much AI discussion is around cost or the tech itself, Nathan’s starting point was employee confidence. As he says:

It sounds simple but it isn’t. Many organisations are still introducing AI through efficiency narratives, so employees hear risk first. Nathan took a different route. He began by asking people how they were already using tools like ChatGPT in their personal lives – low-stakes, familiar and practical. From there the Las Vegas-based virtual receptionist service company built capability, ran sessions and opened conversations about how work might change.

The second shift is just as important. Abby Connect focused on workflow friction. Where does work slowdown Where does information get stuck? Where does effort go to waste? AI was introduced into those gaps.

One example is product feedback. Sales teams were hearing valuable insights every day yet little of it reached product teams in a usable form. AI now listens across calls, identifies patterns and feeds that into decision-making earlier. Another is frontline work. Their AI tools reduce cognitive load for receptionists by capturing information in real time so employees can focus on the human interaction.

This is where the case study becomes useful for HR, moving the conversation into the design of work itself.

There is also a clear warning. Poorly handled rollouts damage trust quickly. Nathan talks openly about experiments that failed and the importance of testing in controlled environments before scaling. Employees notice when leaders push immature tools into live workflows. He also mentions a mistake he made early on – relying on AI to screen CVs.

“I think it's very dangerous. There's a lot of bias and you're going to be overlooking a lot of good candidates… You can use AI to help you categorise certain things in the resume and put them into different buckets and pull out certain information. But do not ask it to give you an opinion and rank these candidates. You're doing a disservice to yourself, you're doing a disservice to the candidate, and you're doing a disservice to society," Nathan states.

His final point is one I am sure all The People Space’s readers will love to hear: start with people systems. Only then ask where AI fits.

At a time when headlines focus on cuts, surveillance and rapid capability shifts, this feels like a more grounded question for HR leaders to consider. Where is work breaking today and how confident are your people to engage with what comes next?

Here are three lines that really stick with me from the interview:

🗣“You've really got to believe what you're saying.”

🗣“Start with the people systems.”

🗣“It's a rebalance of expenses.”

👉 So, if you want a closer look at how this plays out in practice, in the full interview How one CEO introduced AI without damaging trust 5-minute read​
⏯ And watch a short video edit AI adoption starts with trust: Nathan Strum on human-first AI in practice (Video) 8-minute watch

2. Why HR must redesign collaboration for the hybrid workplace

While the first story looks at AI adoption through the lens of confidence, trust and the redesign of work our second piece picks up that same question from a different angle: what happens when the way work is organised no longer matches the way people actually work?

Hybrid work is now normal for many organisations. Collaboration, however, has become much harder to leave to chance.

That is the central argument from Guy Lubitsh, faculty at Ashridge Executive Education, Hult International Business School. His view is that hybrid work has exposed a deeper organisational problem. Many businesses were never especially well designed for collaboration in the first place and digital working has made that weakness more visible.

His research with more than 500 senior leaders found that 97% see collaboration as essential to organisational performance, yet siloed working still dominates. More strikingly, 40% of managers admit to tackling complex problems alone rather than drawing on the collective intelligence around them.

We spend a lot of time talking about whether managers listen well, build trust and role-model inclusion. Guy’s challenge is that collaboration breakdowns are often structural. They sit in unclear decision rights, overloaded meeting cultures, uneven visibility, blurred boundaries and weak mechanisms for connection.

As he puts it: “Many organisations are trying to solve 21st-century problems with 20th-century work designs.”

This line captures the practical issue. Hybrid collaboration does not improve because people are told to be more collaborative, but when the system makes good collaboration easier and unnecessary collaboration harder.

A few lessons for HR leaders stand out:

• Decide where collaboration actually adds value. Some work needs cross-functional input. Some work needs clarity, ownership and fewer people involved
• Design boundaries into the system. Flexibility without clear expectations around availability, meetings and recovery quickly becomes exhaustion
• Treat visibility as a design issue. Remote and hybrid working can widen participation while making some people less seen and less heard.
• Use the office deliberately. It has an important role in learning, onboarding, relationship-building and strategic conversation.
• Redesign progression for hybrid work. Junior employees and new joiners need access to observation, informal learning and sponsorship.
• Experiment and learn from evidence. Hybrid work is still evolving. HR should treat work design as something to test, measure and adapt.

The bigger point is that collaboration now needs intent. HR has a real opportunity here to move from encouraging better behaviours to shaping the conditions in which better work can happen.

👉Read Guy’s full piece on Why HR must redesign collaboration for the hybrid workplace. 5-minute read

3. Who gets the top HR job is changing. Here’s what the data shows

So AI is reshaping work. Hybrid is reshaping how we collaborate. And now we are seeing a shift in who gets to lead all of this.

I recently read a LinkedIn post from Nicolas Behbahani, director of global people analytics at TechnipFMC, that picked up on new data around chief people officer appointments. The headline profile is neat: female, early 50s, often hired externally. Useful, but it only tells part of the story.

The deeper data from Eton Bridge Partners shows a much more uneven and revealing picture across geographies and markets.

Start with where hiring is happening. The US accounts for 50% of global CPO appointments, with the UK at 11%. This concentration suggests US organisations are investing earlier and more heavily in people leadership as a lever for transformation. The UK continues to punch above its weight, particularly in listed and private equity-backed businesses, where the CPO role is firmly embedded at board level.

Elsewhere, the picture is more volatile. Hiring volumes have dropped sharply in markets like Australia, Germany and France over the past year, while Canada has seen a notable increase. India is also becoming more prominent in the mix. For HR leaders operating globally it’s a shifting story shaped by economic conditions, deal activity and how organisations prioritise workforce strategy.

Gender data also deserves a closer look. Women continue to dominate CPO appointments globally, representing around 72% of hires. In the UK that rises to around 80% and in Australia it is closer to 87%.

Meanwhile some markets are seeing a slight increase in male appointments while others show widening age gaps between men and women, with female CPOs being appointed slightly younger on average. In Japan and India male candidates still dominate, although India is gradually shifting.

Then there is the question of experience. The average age of appointment has risen to 53 globally, reflecting demand for judgement and context. Yet first-time CPO appointments are increasing at the same time. In Germany, for example, nearly 60% of appointments are first-time roles. That combination tells you something about the market: organisations want experience, but they are also widening the pool.

The most significant shift sits in how these roles are filled. External hiring now accounts for 71% of appointments globally – a significant rise against the previous two years. This is consistent across the US and UK, where the move towards external talent has accelerated.

For HR leaders this is the point that deserves the most scrutiny. If most senior people roles are being filled from outside what does that say about internal pipelines? About succession planning? About whether organisations are building the breadth of capability now expected at CPO level?

A few practical reflections:

• Look at your pipeline through a global lens. Different markets are moving at different speeds. What looks strong locally may not hold up globally.
• Build broader experience earlier. The data shows boards are open to first-time CPOs, particularly those with transformation and cross-functional exposure.
• Be deliberate about external hiring. It can bring fresh thinking but over-reliance risks weakening long-term capability.
• Watch the interaction between gender and route to appointment. The data suggests women may be more likely to reach CPO roles through internal promotion than through external hiring in many markets. As external appointments rise organisations need to check whether search processes are widening opportunity or quietly reintroducing bias.
• Pay attention to where the role is evolving fastest. The US and UK remain leading indicators for how expectations of people leadership are shifting.
• Treat gender and route to appointment as something to watch. Because CPO appointments already skew heavily to women it’s hard to draw a simple conclusion from the internal versus external data. Even so, the pattern is worth tracking: in several major markets the gender mix shifts depending on whether organisations promote internally or hire externally. As external hiring rises, boards and HR teams should test whether their search processes are genuinely broadening the field or simply changing which candidates become visible.

The report makes one point clearly. There is no single pathway to becoming a chief people officer. What is becoming clearer is that the role itself is tightening. Expectations are rising, shaped by business context and not just HR expertise.

For anyone building the next generation of HR leaders this is a moment to get much more intentional about what readiness really means.

Find your readiness space!

Siân

Editorial director, The People Space​

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