Share with your CHRO
Five CHROs from Larsen and Toubro, Maruti Suzuki, Ashok Leyland, and Bajaj General Insurance argued at the ETHRWorld Annual Conclave 2026 that enterprise AI adoption is stalling not on technology but on organizational design. The consensus position, notable for its bluntness from HR leaders at major Indian manufacturers and insurers, is that layering AI onto existing processes produces digitized bureaucracy rather than business value. Real transformation requires leaders to ask whether each task should exist at all before deciding how to handle it.
What this means for your business
The failure pattern the panel described has a name inside most large enterprises, even if nobody uses it: process preservation theater. A new system gets deployed, the old parallel process quietly survives “for record’s sake,” and productivity gains never appear on the income statement. If your AI rollouts are measured by licenses deployed or models integrated rather than by tasks eliminated or decision cycles shortened, you’re likely running the theater. The question isn’t whether your organization has adopted AI; it’s whether anything has actually stopped because of it.
Vikramjeet Singh’s framing on leadership authority is worth taking seriously in a regulated context. He argued that AI erodes the traditional sources of a leader’s authority, specifically privileged information access, accumulated domain knowledge, and positional seniority, while leaving judgment and contextual interpretation as the genuinely scarce resource. That’s a structural shift in what HR actually evaluates when it assesses leadership capability, and most competency frameworks in insurance or financial services haven’t caught up. Enterprises writing new role definitions for 2026 and beyond that still weight expertise accumulation over judgment quality are already mis-hiring.
The harder organizational call embedded in this discussion is about decision rights, not job titles. When an AI system handles screening, task allocation, and quality control in an insurance claims workflow, the human manager’s job isn’t to oversee those steps anymore; it’s to own the judgment call where the algorithm’s confidence runs out. CHROs who treat that as a training problem will undershoot. It’s actually a role redesign and accountability mapping problem, and the enterprises that figure out where human accountability attaches in a partially automated decision chain before a regulator forces the question will have a durable structural advantage.
Based on reporting from Redesigning Work: Why AI Transformation Requires More Than Just Automation, ETHRWorld, originally published 2026-09-14 03:49:00.
