What is HR's role in preparing their teams for AI?

What if AI isn’t leaving you behind? What if you’re just assuming it’s harder than it is?

I get it. All this talk about replacing humans with machines is anxiety-inducing. Especially to those of us who work in a fields built on people, like HR and People Ops.

And who exactly are they expecting to coordinate these layoffs anyway? It's enough to make you want to stick your head in the sand.

AI feels like a black box to anyone who isn’t completely at home with technology. You put data into it and who knows what’s going to come out. 

But the concepts behind what we’re now calling “AI” aren’t new. You’ve already been using them for years. 

🤖 Autocomplete

🤖 Spelling & grammar check

🤖 Siri and Alexa

🤖 When your phone recognizes your friends in a picture

🤖 When your car tells you there’s someone in your blindspot

🤖 Even those annoying “find the crosswalks” puzzles to prove you’re human were training an AI.

So what's the big deal? The breakthrough that tech insiders are so excited about is that Natural Language Programming (NLP) is finally possible. 

NLP. Sounds fancy, right? Like some Tony Robbins Jedi mind trick. ✨⚡️👀

Nope. It just means that you can program it using the same language you use to talk to your team or your kids. Natural Language + Programming. Get it?

Of course, you still need to learn how to communicate with it for the best results. Just like you talk differently to your team as your teenager. But communicating nuance clearly is exactly what HR and People Ops do best.

And the things that make HR so difficult—like anticipating unknown unknowns, flagging edge cases, and communicating clearly—are some of the things AI does best.*

The best part is that you don’t have to go to a coding boot camp anymore to learn how to make something useful. You already learned everything you need in 10th grade English class. 

You’ve been “vibe coding” for years. You were just calling it “giving instructions.” 

HR has a lot to gain from AI, but we also have a responsibility to lead the conversation. AI may not be coming for everyone’s jobs, but people who are better at working with AI are. And if we as People leaders don’t drive the conversation about reskilling in our orgs, we’ll be leading the layoffs of those who don’t keep up.

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*Human-generated em-dashes.