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The Most Controversial Man in HR Just Said Something You Can’t Ignore
Last week the head of the world's largest HR body stood on a stage and told a room full of HR leaders that their profession is going extinct and they have lost the plot. Johnny Taylor is arguably the wrong person to deliver that message. His organization just lost an $11.5 Mn discrimination verdict, and he has been recorded calling his own staff entitled and sloppy.
Easy to write him off and move on. Here is why I didn't, and what I think you should take from it: buried in a speech you have every right to reject is one distinction that tells you exactly which parts of your job are dying and which part is about to become everything.
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At SHRM26, Johnny Taylor stood in front of giant screens of humanoid robots typing at keyboards and told 1.6 million American HR professionals their livelihoods are in danger. He pointed at Bolt firing its entire HR team and Uber cutting almost a quarter of its people team. And he said the quiet part out loud: stop focusing so much on the perfect performance review or whether your employees are happy, and start explaining the ROI of every person you employ.
My team's Slack lit up within the hour. Half of them were furious. But the other half of my team was quiet. Because underneath the messenger, something landed.
So I will say the thing plainly. He has forfeited the standing to lecture any of us on the soul of this profession. You can dismiss the man completely and lose nothing.
But a broken clock is still right twice a day, and he happened to be right about the time.
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Here is the part worth keeping. He called the future HR role the "Chief Work Officer." Strip his name off it and the idea is real: the person who designs how work actually gets done, across humans and AI, instead of just managing the humans after the decisions are made. That is either the biggest opening this profession has had in twenty years, or it is the reason we get written out of the org entirely.
And then I realized that I have been doing that job all year. I just never called it that.
When we redesigned the org, that was work design. When we rebuilt the junior role into a judgment seat so we would still have managers in three years, that was work design. When we wrote the AI rules after a manager got us a cease and desist, that was work design. None of it was the HR job I trained for. All of it was the job he is describing.
That is when the extinction line stopped sounding like an insult and started sounding like a map. He is not wrong that part of our job is dying. He is just wrong about which part, and why it matters.
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So I sorted it out for myself, and it made the panic go away. The HR job splits into three piles right now.
Dying, and you should let it. The administrative middle. The perfect appraisal cycle. The role where HR is the happiness police and the form-processing department. This is the part the robots on his screen actually take, and honestly, good. None of us got into this to chase signatures.
Surviving, but only if you do it with AI. Performance, hiring, onboarding, comp, feedback, compliance. This work does not disappear. It gets faster and sharper with AI doing the production and you owning the judgment. The people who win this layer are the ones who stopped doing the work by hand and started directing it.
Becoming the whole game. Designing how work gets done. Driving the actual performance. Who does what, what the AI does, where the humans add judgment, how you build the next generation of leaders when the old ladder is gone. This is the part Taylor calls the Chief Work Officer. This is where your hours should be moving, starting now.
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Now here is the part Taylor got wrong - he talks about the dying pile like it is the same pile for everyone. It is not.
What dies depends entirely on the company you run HR for. At Meridian, a tech company, attendance and leave tracking is a rounding error. I could automate the whole thing tonight and nobody would notice. So for me, that work is firmly in the dying column. But say that to a CHRO at a 5,000-person manufacturing plant and they will laugh you out of the room. Shift coverage, leave management, and absence tracking are not admin there. They are the difference between a line running and a line stopping, and they carry real legal exposure at that scale. That same work is firmly planted in their surviving column.
Compliance is light in one industry and the entire job in another. Recruiting is a quiet function in a stable business and a war room in a hyper-growth one. The three piles are real. What goes in each one is yours to decide, based on your industry, your workforce, and what actually breaks if it stops happening.
So that is the work, and it is the one piece of homework I would actually do this week. Take your own function and sort it. Not Taylor's version. Yours.
That is the only useful thing to take from a speech you had every right to reject.
Talk soon, Kelly
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