Share with your CHRO
Azhagiri Selvarajan, SVP and Head of HR at Cognizant, argues that HR must reposition itself from an administrative function to what he calls an enterprise orchestrator, coordinating skills strategy, AI governance, and workforce design as a single integrated capability. The case rests on two data points: the World Economic Forum projects 39% of core skills will shift by 2030, and Mercer finds 98% of executives are already planning organisational redesign with skills-powered talent models at the center. The prescription: dismantle fixed job descriptions, build dynamic skills inventories, and place HR at the table for AI deployment decisions.
What this means for your business
The argument lands differently depending on where your HR function sits today. If your CHRO is still primarily measured on headcount, compliance, and benefits administration, the 39% skills-change figure from the WEF isn’t an abstract forecast, it’s a burn rate on your existing workforce’s utility. Companies that haven’t started mapping capabilities at the task level rather than the job-title level are already behind the redesign cycle that 98% of their peers say is underway. The question isn’t whether to move; it’s whether HR or someone else owns the move.
The piece’s strongest claim is that AI governance belongs inside HR’s remit, not just IT’s. That’s a genuine argument worth stress-testing. The logic runs like this: as AI systems take on workflow tasks alongside full-time employees and contingent workers, someone has to define accountability for outcomes that no single human fully controlled. IT can deploy the model; it can’t resolve the employment, ethics, or performance-management questions that arise when the model gets something wrong. HR is the only function with standing in all three domains. The risk of rejecting this framing isn’t that HR gets sidelined; it’s that AI governance defaults to whoever fills the vacuum, usually legal or a vendor’s terms of service.
Writing from inside Cognizant, one of the world’s largest IT services firms that sells workforce transformation and AI advisory to large enterprises, Selvarajan has a structural interest in framing HR ambition broadly, because broader HR mandates create larger consulting engagements. That doesn’t invalidate the argument, but it does explain why the piece skips the hard part: what HR must give up. Real orchestrator authority means HR gains budget control over technology selection decisions that currently sit with IT, which is a political fight most CHROs haven’t won and the article doesn’t acknowledge. Skills-led operating models also require data infrastructure that most HR teams don’t own, and building it means either a serious CDO partnership or a turf war.
The leading indicator to watch is where skills taxonomy ownership lands in your next org design conversation. If the CDO or CIO claims it as a data governance problem, HR’s orchestrator role becomes advisory at best. CHROs who want the seat Selvarajan describes need to move on data literacy and workforce analytics capability now, before the next AI deployment cycle starts, because that’s when the governance question becomes concrete and whoever shows up with a framework wins the mandate.
Based on reporting from HR as the enterprise orchestrator: Driving growth in a skills first, AI-enabled economy, originally published 2026-10-16 06:22:00.
