SpaceX’s IPO earlier this month was the largest in US history and the AI investment wave it represents shows no sign of slowing. Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to follow later this year, with potential valuations north of $1 trillion each. Wall Street’s confidence in the AI build-out is, by almost any measure, extraordinary.
And yet a Reuters/Ipsos poll published this week, surveying more than 4,000 adults, found that more than half are concerned that AI will put them or someone in their household out of work. Around three quarters expressed broader concern about where AI adoption is heading. There is also a growing concern around the loss of junior level roles and where school or university leavers might find their way into the workplace. Two things are true at once: capital has never moved faster toward artificial intelligence, and the people living alongside that acceleration have rarely felt less certain about what it means for them.
“Around three quarters expressed broader concern about where AI adoption is heading. There is also a growing concern around the loss of junior level roles and where school or university leavers might find their way into the workplace.”
The conversation that is now filling the gap between those two realities is the one happening inside organisations. Who is responsible for managing what AI does to the people already there? Who governs it, slows it down when necessary, and makes sure the organisation does not become brittle in the process of becoming efficient?
It was that question, amongst others, that led us to spend several months in conversation with senior people leaders across consumer-facing businesses for our new report, ‘Performance Under Pressure: The Changing Role of the Chief People Officer’. What we found was a role that has been unintentionally redesigned by circumstance.
Since 2020, businesses have been accumulating disruption like never before. Inflation, hybrid working, geopolitical instability, regulatory churn, and now AI acceleration each became a factor before the last had been fully addressed. The market never returned to its pre-Covid state and the consequences of that accumulation have landed most directly on the systems that govern people, capability and culture.
That is where the CPO now sits, and it is why the role looks so different compared to even five years ago.
One leader put it like this: “The art of the CPO is sending extremely commercial interventions wrapped in packaging that looks like learning and development.” It is a formulation that captures how the best people leaders are not running HR programmes. They are driving commercial outcomes through people mechanisms, and knowing how to frame that work so it lands across an organisation rather than just within a function.
This requires being able to translate in every direction. Downward into the workforce, where the reasoning behind change matters as much as the change itself, and across to executive colleagues, who increasingly need help thinking through the human consequences of decisions made at speed. There also needs to be an understanding of how to translate upward to the board, where the CPO is often the only person in the room explicitly accountable for how decisions land with people.
“The art of the CPO is sending extremely commercial interventions wrapped in packaging that looks like learning and development.”
On AI specifically, the role has become one of governance as much as implementation. One people leader in our research described a board discussion where AI-driven productivity modelling pointed towards significant role consolidation. But the analysis had not accounted for the informal relationships and connective roles that keep an organisation functioning as they don’t show up in a model. The CPO challenged the recommendation because of how crucial these are in practice, reframed the decision around organisational health, and the approach, consequently, was refined. Without that intervention, a decision that looked sound on paper would have caused real damage on the ground.
There is also a less visible risk that our research kept returning to. When entry-level tasks are automated, the environments in which people build capability – through repetition, observation, gradual progression – begin to thin out. One people leader put it directly: when the first frontline roles are replaced, where does the next generation get its foundation learning? That is not a technology question, it’s a people question. And it is one that lands squarely with the CPO.
It is a question that deserves to be asked at every level of an organisation, and yet the data suggests it is not always being asked at the top. In our report, we note that only 25% of FTSE 350 companies have any board member with a background in HR or people leadership, and in 75% of large public companies there is no formal people expertise at board level at all. While remuneration and risk committees do exist, human and cultural risk is typically delegated to a single executive, without equivalent governance. As AI accelerates decision-making across organisations, that gap becomes more consequential, not less.
“When the first frontline roles are replaced, where does the next generation get its foundation learning?”
In that context, the CPO’s relationship with the CEO becomes the most important lever they have. When it is strong, ethical considerations surface early and trade-offs are debated openly. When it is not, human impact tends to be addressed retrospectively, once trust has already been damaged. “The relationship with the CEO is make or break,” one executive told us. “It’s disproportionately important.” That has always been true to some degree, but in an environment where decisions with real human consequence are being made faster than ever, a CPO who isn’t close enough to the CEO to shape those decisions before they land is already too late.
So what does all of this mean for who does the job next? The report is clear that a traditional HR career path isn’t necessarily the key driver here. Enterprise authority is built through breadth of experience across functions, geographies and operating contexts, and through exposure to real performance risk. Several of the leaders we spoke to pointed to backgrounds in marketing and communications particularly for the ability to shape narratives, manage reputation and align internal change with external perception. Separate to this, the leaders who often have the skills required are two or three layers down from where the organisation thinks to look, where they are demonstrating consistency, sound judgement and integrity under pressure. In an environment where employees, investors and regulators are increasingly responding to the same signals at the same time, these are central skills.
“The relationship with the CEO is make or break. It’s disproportionately important.”
What this ultimately comes down to is a question every board should be sitting with right now. The capital flowing into AI is a bet on what organisations can do with it, but the ability to execute on that bet – to move fast without losing people, to automate without hollowing out capability, to make difficult decisions without eroding the trust that holds everything together – depends on having the right person accountable for the human side of the equation. If SpaceX’s IPO tells us anything, it is that the machines are not waiting – and the role of the people who lead alongside them is evolving just as fast.
Have you seen any changes to the Chief People Officer role? How is AI impacting your business? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
