Share with your CHRO
Shefali Rai, CHRO at InMobi and Glance, makes the case that HR belongs in the core architecture of business strategy, not parked in a support function. Writing for HR Katha, she frames AI as the mechanism that finally makes this repositioning possible: by absorbing operational and compliance-heavy work, AI creates space for HR leaders to operate as business architects rather than people administrators. Her argument draws on InMobi’s deep-tech environment and a COVID-era crisis response that stretched the HR function well beyond its conventional remit.
What this means for your business
The CHRO who reads this primarily as a career profile misses the operational bet buried inside it. Rai’s argument is that AI-driven automation changes the job description of HR itself, and the CHROs who move first to redefine their function’s scope will occupy strategy seats that slower-moving peers will have to fight for later. If your HR org is still organized around process compliance and headcount reporting, this is a story about your team, not someone else’s.
The specific claim worth pressure-testing is that AI “liberates” HR talent rather than simply reducing it. That’s the optimistic read, and HR Katha publishes squarely for an audience that prefers it, which gives Rai’s framing a friendlier landing than it might get from a CFO doing workforce planning. The harder version of the same argument: AI compresses the number of HR generalists a company needs, concentrating value in a smaller group of strategically fluent operators. “Liberation” and “reduction” can describe the same outcome depending on which side of the talent cut you land on.
The leading indicator to watch is whether your company’s AI adoption roadmap includes HR as a decision-maker or merely a downstream recipient. At InMobi and Glance, Rai is actively building AI literacy as a personal capability, which signals that the CHRO role is being redefined from within, not handed a finished tool by the CTO. CHROs who wait for the technology to arrive fully configured are implicitly ceding the architectural decisions to someone else, and those decisions will shape culture, performance systems, and talent strategy for years.
Based on reporting from herSTORY: Shefali Rai, CHRO, InMobi and Glance, originally published 2026-08-05 22:57:00.
