Share with your CHRO
Great Giant Foods HRGA Director Rina Faqih argues that the modern CHRO must operate with an ambidextrous mindset, running day-to-day people operations while simultaneously planning for a workforce that doesn’t yet exist. Speaking in ETHRWorld Southeast Asia’s new CHRO Unfiltered leadership series, Faqih positions AI as a capability amplifier rather than a headcount reducer, and measures leadership success by how many future leaders a CHRO produces, not how many followers they accumulate.
What this means for your business
The framing Faqih offers is familiar enough to feel reassuring, and that’s precisely the problem worth sitting with. “AI elevates human capability” is the consensus view in HR circles right now, and CHROs who have already internalized it should ask whether their talent strategies actually reflect it or whether it remains a conference-room posture. The real dividing line is between HR leaders who have restructured workforce planning around AI-augmented roles and those still treating AI adoption as an IT project that HR will respond to later.
The ambidextrous mindset framing, balancing operational excellence with future workforce planning, names a genuine tension that most HR functions resolve badly by defaulting to whichever fire is loudest. Faqih’s argument, delivered through a publication that sells sponsorships into exactly the HR leadership community it’s addressing, skews optimistic on how readily CHROs can hold both modes simultaneously. That optimism is worth discounting slightly. Most organizations don’t give their CHRO the structural authority or budget autonomy to run long-range workforce planning as a parallel track. Without that, ambidexterity is just a personality trait, not a strategic capability.
The leadership-multiplier metric Faqih proposes, judging CHROs by the leaders they develop rather than the followers they retain, is the sharpest practical idea in the piece. It reframes succession planning from a compliance exercise into a core performance indicator for the HR function itself. CHROs who can’t name three people in their organization currently being prepared for roles two levels up should treat that gap as the budget conversation to have in the next planning cycle, not a cultural aspiration for later.
Based on reporting from Rina Faqih on the Future of CHROs: AI, Leadership, and Business Transformation, ETHRWorldSEA, originally published 2026-07-24 02:50:00.
