#SHRMIAC25 session on how Agentic #AI will work with people in Organizations

hashtag

At the SHRM India Annual Conference on 13th November Sandeep Alur , the CTO of Microsoft Innovation Hub in India talked about how hashtagAgentic AI will work with humans, in hashtagorganizations.

This was my takeaway:

 Agentic AI—AI systems that can perceive, reason, take actions, and autonomously pursue goals—will change how humans and organizations work together. But it won’t replace humans; instead, it will reshape roles, workflows, and decision-making. Here’s a clear, practical view of how it will work inside organizations:

1. Humans define goals; AI executes

Leaders and teams will set objectives, constraints, ethical boundaries, and success metrics.
Agentic AI will then break those goals into tasks and execute them autonomously.

Example:
A sales leader sets a quarterly target → AI identifies ideal prospects → drafts outreach → schedules meetings → updates CRM → alerts the team when human intervention is needed.

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2. AI becomes an autonomous “digital coworker”

Instead of being a tool, Agentic AI will act like a team member with:

• A job description

• Clear processes

• Access to systems

• Responsibility for outcomes

Roles AI agents will take on:

• Recruiting assistant (source candidates, screen resumes, schedule interviews)

• Finance analyst (monitor spend, flag variances, prepare reports)

• HR service agent (resolve employee queries end-to-end)

• Operations optimizer (monitor workflows, fix bottlenecks autonomously)

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3. Humans move from doing tasks to supervising systems

Humans will:

• Monitor dashboards of multiple agents

• Approve exceptions

• Handle relationship-driven and ethical decisions

• Improve prompts, workflows, policies

• Provide the contextual judgment AI lacks

This shifts many jobs from task execution → judgment & oversight.

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4. AI collaborates across departments automatically

Agents will talk to each other, not just humans.
For example:

• A Hiring Agent identifies new headcount needs →

• alerts the Budget Agent →

• which checks cost →

• then coordinates with the IT Agent to plan equipment provisioning.

Cross-functional friction reduces dramatically.

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5. Work becomes more proactive and predictive

Agentic AI will continuously scan systems and take preventive actions.

Examples:

• Predicting attrition and suggesting interventions

• Spotting compliance risks before they become violations

• Notifying managers of performance dips before reviews

• Automatically reallocating work to remove bottlenecks

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6. Humans focus on relationships, creativity, and strategic judgment

The human differentiators become:

• Leadership & trust-building

• Empathy & conflict management

• Creativity & storytelling

• Strategic analysis in ambiguous situations

Work becomes more human, not less.

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7. New hybrid workflows emerge

Organizations will see the rise of:

• AI-first processes (AI initiates, humans validate)

• Human-first processes (humans lead, AI supports)

• Fully autonomous processes (AI runs end-to-end, humans audit)

The mix depends on risk, regulation, and company culture.

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8. Governance, ethics, and transparency become crucial

Organizations will need:

• AI governance frameworks

• Auditable logs of AI decisions

• Clear accountability: who owns what?

• Guardrails to prevent autonomous drift

• Employee upskilling and change management

• New roles (AI supervisors, prompt engineers, agent workflow designers)

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9. Employee experience improves through augmented HR

Agentic AI will:

• Personalize learning paths

• Offer real-time coaching

• Automate administrative tasks

• Provide tailored wellbeing nudges

• Draft career plans

• Mediate between employees and systems

HR becomes more strategic and human-centric.

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10. Productivity shows step-change improvements

Early studies suggest agentic AI could increase knowledge-worker productivity by 40–80%, mainly due to:

• Reduced administrative load

• Faster decision-making

• Fewer handoffs

• Always-on intelligent support

• Automated implementations (not just insights)

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Bottom line

Agentic AI will not replace humans—it will reshape how they contribute.
Humans will become:

• Strategists

• Supervisors

• Creative problem solvers

• Relationship builders

AI will become:

• The executor

• The analyst

• The coordinator

• The optimizer

Together, they form a hybrid workforce that is faster, smarter, and more adaptable.

Future skills for today’s HR professionals - written in 2012

Wrote this in 2012



Foretelling the future is always risky business, and in connection with HR doubly so. That is because HR’s field of expertise could be impacted by various things. Let’s take a look at what they are:




Competition and Globalization : While these are two different words, the impact they have on an organization is similar. Productivity needs to be increased and costs need to be optimized. HR is both an initiator of these changes and also stands to be impacted by these changes, which we shall see in detail later.


The “No Brands” movement: No Brand was the book written by Naomi Klein that focusses on how the big corporations’ “mass brands” concepts are being slowly rejected by the developed world. One way communication and branding is on the way out. Even in the developed world consumers are not seeing themselves as consumers but as co-producers of goods and services.


The Long Tail of production and distribution: taking off from point 2, the Long Tail was coined by Chris Anderson to describe the phenomenon of relatively tiny firms producing niche goods and services that get aggregated and sold using technology like Google, Amazon and eBay. This is giving rise to the workforce of Free Agents (coined by Dan Pink) and Fleas (as described by Charles Handy)


The Creative Age: As the knowledge age gives way to the age of right brain creativity, artistic, empathetic, a new class of professions will rise to prominence.

The skills that HR needs to have to meet the challenges:

The skills to translate HR deliverables into business metrics.

Too often HR people focus their deliverables in a way that does not make sense to line business. Let’s face it. The language of business is money, so if HR is only seen as a black hole for money, it will earn the sobriquet of a ‘cost centre’ and get delegated to the back benches. Hence the ability to talk in the language of finance is a critical skill for HR. Relevant people skills are the differentiating factor in most service companies. HR people must understand how to quantify those skills, how to keep track of them, how to measure them and how to upgrade them. Does a HR manager of a Consumer goods company understand what’s the difference between a great Brand Manager and an average Brand Manager? And how to measure them? Does he understand what the driving needs of the great Brand Manager are and how they are different from the average ones? And, does he understand if the policies of the organization support the needs of the average BM or the star BM?


The HR professional must not just be concerned with her internal customers but also with the external customers. The focus must be on the way they can together add value to the customer who keeps the organization in business. Only when HR professionals understand and demonstrate how they can add value to end customers will they be considered strategic partners of the business.

The Skills to facilitate change

All said and done, HR professionals mostly lack the skills to be effective ‘facilitators’ of change. Their own inability to not get involved in the content and exercise control on the process ensures that they are not accepted by the various parties as facilitators.


The focus is very rarely on the human effects of change. As we all know, any change causes heartburn and pain. Most often, either these are unacknowledged or brushed under the carpet by business leads and HR folks either collude with them. One of the foremost way to deal with change is to bring it out in the open – “the elephant in the room” way. Any attempt to wish it away or to deal with it in a secret/underhand way only makes us appear that way.

The Skills to understand communication and the changes in the processes underway.

HR needs to understand the processes of communication between organizations and how the era of one way communication is over. This has more implications than HR can realize. Newspapers in the west are seeing declining circulations and advertising. People are fed up being passive ‘consumers’ of news but are instead using free software and ubiquitous broadband connections to become ‘commentators’ on news. The culture of rip-burn-remix has spread from music to mainstream news, and organizations are struggling to grasp the reality. HR people have to understand how these generational shifts in how information is consumed impacts their business, both from the outside and from the inside.


The new way of learning: In line with the earlier point, the way how people learn is also changing. Gone are the days of the “chalk and talk” method and even the “guide by the side” method. Learners these days and in the future are the people who learn by “immersive” technologies. That will also have an impact on how they learn and perform in the organizations. It also has an impact on how the organizations’ solutions and products are used and experienced by the customers.

The age of the free agent and virtual teams

With the rise of the creative age, people are looking more at vocations rather than careers, and it is passion that drives them. These creative people will become more and more entrepreneurial and give up the comfort and the anonymity of large organizations to chart out recognition as independent consultants. HR needs to understand how to manage these people to enhance creative input and also needs to guide line managers. It needs to remember that for these folks, independence and eminence is the motivating force, and money is just a by-product. HR also needs to identify who are potential free agents in the organization and what to do to optimize their contribution.


As more and more work gets done in a globalized economy by groups of part-time, temp or independent consultants working along with full time employees in different cultures and time zones, creating a culture of inclusion and tolerance of diversity becomes an imperative for HR professionals. This would be a strategic differentiator for the business, because diversity if managed well, could give rise to ideas and innovation that the competition cannot come up with. HR needs to educate the business about the edge that diversity brings and that it’s not just a ‘nice to do’ kind of thing!




There are a lot of challenges facing us HR professionals, but nothing is unsurmountable if one maintains an open mind, surveys the business and technology landscape regularly and seeks a variety of mentors in various subject matter to build up expertise.

Interviewed by Aniisu Verghese on Personal Branding

 Some months ago I was interviewed by Communications specialist Aniisu Verghese on my approach to personal branding 

You can find the transcript of the interview here.

As I share in the interview I have mixed feelings about the term. Since I studied organizational behavior and HR, I am aware of the term of branding and not very comfortable with it. According to marketing literature, a person is hugely complex and there are also group dynamics involved when it comes to branding.  

You all can also find the video of the interview

The Dark Side of the #HRTech driven #DigitalTransformation and #FutureOfWork we prefer to not talk about

I try to attend a couple of HR Technology conferences every year:n SHRM's Tech Conference, and People Matters' TechHR Conference.

These conferences are unlike the more traditional HR Conferences. There's a different energy, with international speakers, a dedicated venue for HR Tech startups, Angel Investors hearing pitches, in addition to the traditional sponsors.

Every speaker and participant is gung-ho about the amazing difference technology can make to employees and the workplace. How it will free us of boring repetitive tasks to focus on truly creative and strategic tasks.

Some of the things that HR leaders often say in such conferences are (and I paraphrase):

"We need to reskill our employees to get them ready for the coming future of work"

"We need to embrace an agile mindset and prioritise digital transformation for putting employee experience at the centre of everything we do"

"We need to deploy tools like AI and ML and chatbots to better hire, engage and service  our employees and leaders"

"Technology will free us from the shackles of a physical workspace, enabling all of us to be masters of our time and destiny creating a rising gig economy" 

I agree, all these are correct, but once in a while I wish, people would focus on the inevitable disappointments inflated expectations will bring. There is a "law" attributed to American researcher Roy Amara, commonly known as Amara's Law which says: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."

Technology does not move in linearly. Every technology adopted by humans (from cooking food in fire to agriculture down to industrial and now to the interconnected digital world) has also profoundly changed our society for the better and for the worse. You can't really have one without the other.

Before I go any further, it would be a good point to remember that while we collectively have changed beyond recognition over the last couple of millennia, our brains haven't evolved at a neurological level much beyond our hunter gatherer days.
When faced with perceived danger of any kind, our amygdala, takes over with a "fight or flight" response. We still can't form more than 150 meaningful relationships (irrespective of the number of friends you have on Facebook or WhatsApp or LinkedIn). That number is called Dunbar's number, you can read about why that is the case here.

In my opinion we should have more conversations about the following in the context of the future of work:

• Digital Transformation is hard to get right. According to consulting firm McKinsey the average success rate across industries is about 30%. That is because digital transformation requires a concerted effort  from every part of the organization, which might be at varying degrees of digital fluency. HR people are aware how a process or structural change initiative can falter, now imagine changing processes, technology and culture all at the same time.
• Let's address the elephant in the room: Job losses, changes in work due to automation and reskilling. Depending on which report you read, the numbers are widely different. But here's an example. At a panel on HR for Industry 4.0, a person who was in HR at a paints company shared this example: The company selected a location in a North Indian state to set up a new plant. The state government was overjoyed when they heard the proposed output of the plant. However when the plant came up, it was so automated that it required just 200 people to manage it than what the policy makers expected  would be 1000-1200 people. The skills to run such a plant were not available locally too, and the only direct local employment were in areas like building security, cooks and gardening.  So yes, automation and AI will create new jobs, but most often than not the workers they displace will not be able to reskill fast enough. And it will not be a one time reskilling either. As the rate of pace keeps accelerating people will need to keep adding skills and reinventing themselves again and again. The impact that will have on the mental health of such people and the larger impact and stress it will put on the communities and social fabric is a topic that is brushed under the carpet. It has happened before too: Clay Shirky called it "Cognitive Surplus". Read a detailed summary here.
• It's also worth remembering that global companies with very deep pockets and a relatively higher skilled workforce would be able to carry out the reskilling with much less pain, if their stocks are not hammered in the stock markets, that is. It is also a fact that most employed people are in the Micro, Small and Medium sectors, which may or may not be able to afford it, even if they want to. 
• I have covered some of the issues of the rise of the gig economy in my earlier blog post here. See specially point number 10, in that post.
• Let's face it, in my personal opinion, most HR people are not very comfortable with technology or digitally savvy. Most are risk averse and simply implement the HR module of the ERP solution they are already deploying. That's because the speakers at the HR Tech conferences are outliers, the innovators, and believing that some HR leaders are representative of the larger community, would be a mistake. HR Tech vendors should therefore stop thinking of these innovators as the normal and get their hands on Geoffrey Moore's classic book "Crossing the Chasm"
• After which we come to the vendors, and some blame should be shared by the HR buyers also for falling to the "new shiny object" syndrome. The big issue with vendors, specially those working on point solutions, is that they don't have anyone in the founders who have worked in HR. Therefore they think they have a solution which meets their needs (primarily arising  out of the pain points they have themselves felt as candidates or employees) without really understanding the dependencies and processes that need to be addressed before either Candidate Experience/Employee Experience can be improved solely on the basis of technology. Finding a client who is willing to experiment with a new, unproven solution is being very lucky. Vendors need to be open to customising their product and not say "take it or leave it". Another reason many CHROs hesitate to try a new HR Tech startup is they do not want to be investing time, people, data and significant resources to a startup only to find 18 months later that it has shut down because it burned cash and couldn't raise additional funding or has been acquired by a larger player who might turn the tech for other uses, or just been acqui-hired. Vendors need to be open about their product roadmap and funding situation. Those who don't do that impact the others in the ecosystem. In the case of Artificial Intelligence in HR enough has been said about relying on past data leading to reinforcing existing biases.

This is not a rant. At least I didn't mean it to be :)

These are some aspects I think that we as a HR and HR Tech community need to be having conversations about so that we don't rush in where angels fear to tread :)

What do you think? Where would you disagree with me?