Share with your CHRO
SHRM CEO Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. used the organization’s 2026 annual conference keynote to argue that HR must redefine itself around work design, not just people management, or risk permanent marginalization. The prompt is real: in Taylor’s informal survey of 92 executives, 60% said they merely tolerate HR and 30% found it near-worthless. A concurrent SHRM survey of 5,875 U.S. workers found only 41% use AI professionally, yet a third already use AI tools their employers have explicitly prohibited.
What this means for your business
The 60/30 split Taylor cited isn’t a morale problem, it’s a positioning failure that AI is about to make permanent. If HR can’t articulate the ROI of a human worker against the cost of automating that worker’s tasks, the function becomes a compliance cost center rather than a strategic one. CHROs whose identity is built around engagement scores and performance review cycles are on the wrong side of this shift, and the window to reposition is narrowing as budget owners increasingly frame workforce decisions as build-vs-buy questions between people and software.
The shadow AI finding deserves more attention than Taylor’s conference gave it. One in three workers is already uploading data to unapproved tools, daily, at scale. That’s not a policy gap, it’s a signal that official AI tooling is too slow, too restricted, or too absent to meet actual work demand. The CHRO who treats this as a compliance violation to punish is burning information. The smarter read is that rogue adoption is a real-time skill and workflow census, a map of where sanctioned tools are failing and where the productivity pressure is highest.
Taylor’s call to make HR the expert on “how work gets done” is correct, but it only holds if HR builds that capability before the CIO or a consulting firm fills the vacuum. The falsification condition is straightforward: if AI workforce strategy at most Fortune 500s is owned by a transformation office or an outside integrator by 2027, then the repositioning Taylor is calling for will have arrived too late for the function to claim the seat he’s promising.
Based on reporting from SHRM CEO gives HR needed pep talk amid bad rap, AI challenges, originally published 2026-06-18 03:00:00.
