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Dr. Harpreet Anand is making a direct claim about succession: AI has commoditised the technical skills that traditionally produced CEOs, and CHROs who understand the balance sheet are now the most credible candidates to run companies. Speaking to People Matters on HR’s next frontier, Anand argues that culture, learning, and workforce productivity are the last genuinely scarce inputs, and that CHROs who can read a P&L will occupy one of the biggest seats in the C-suite within three to five years.
What this means for your business
The argument lands differently depending on which kind of CHRO you are. If your mental model of the role is still centered on engagement scores, policy compliance, and headcount planning as ends in themselves, Anand’s framing is a direct challenge to your positioning. If you already sit in business reviews, read the revenue outlook, and adjust hiring posture before leadership asks you to, you’re already operating in the mode he describes. The dividing line isn’t seniority or tenure, it’s whether you treat financial fluency as someone else’s job.
Anand’s core premise, that AI commoditises technical skills and therefore elevates the non-automatable ones, is directionally right but runs faster than the evidence supports. Agentic AI (software that acts autonomously on behalf of a user or process, the way a junior analyst might run a financial model without being asked twice) is accelerating fast enough that sales execution and financial auditing are genuinely compressible. But “culture and learning” are only valuable inputs to CEO performance if the person carrying them also understands capital allocation, competitive dynamics, and operational risk. The CHRO who wins this argument won’t win it by claiming soft-skill primacy. They’ll win it by being indistinguishable from a COO who happens to have deep people judgment.
The falsification condition here is straightforward. If we reach 2028 and boards are still systematically promoting CFOs and Presidents to CEO over CHROs, the thesis isn’t wrong about AI, it’s wrong about whether boards actually believe what they say about culture mattering. That outcome is more likely than Anand’s three-to-five-year window suggests, not because the logic is broken, but because institutional inertia in succession planning moves slower than any individual executive’s ambition. The CHRO who bets their career development on this shift arriving on schedule is taking a real risk.
Based on reporting from The CHRO who aspires to be CEO: Dr Harpreet Anand’s radical blueprint for HR’s next frontier, originally published 2026-07-22 08:11:00.
