Into 2026 - New Year's resolutions for Chief HR Officers - and they won't be easy!

Chief Human Resources Officers (CHRO) need to simplify, rationalize and re-build strategies in 2026 if they are to successfully deal with an increasingly complex world, driven by the expansion and evolution of the HR function and the relentless development of AI. 

According to The Josh Bersin Company’s latest research,  HR has become more complex and much larger over the last couple of years, growing about 60% faster than the overall company workforce, and being driven by everything from remote working, to DEI and new technologies. According to CEO Josh Bersin:

HR structures need to be ready for a world that looks nothing like it did ten years ago. There's been a unanimous awakening in the business and HR community that AI is now the fuel for HR and HR products.

The good news is that HR will be able to position itself as a central architect of the organization in 2026, and can have a more strategic, consultative role, which will help businesses adopt and scale AI agents in the HR arena.

But Bersin thinks the next few yearly quarters will be even more chaotic than 2025 as vendors continue to experiment. CHROs should be pushing tech vendors to deliver full outcomes, rather than isolated tools, and look out for clear, Super Agent use cases:

The major HR platforms like Workday, SAP, Oracle, ServiceNow, and HiBob are well-positioned for AI change and adoption, but that won’t guarantee success. To stay relevant, they need deep AI talent, robust architectural integration, and data systems capable of supporting Super Agent functionality.

Get simpler

While most of 2025 focused on individual productivity, or the 'Superworker model', with tools like Copilot helping employees to work faster,  demonstrable ROI from this approach has become more difficult to justify. At the same time infrastructure costs have increased, and vendors are shifting toward consumption-based pricing, so companies will start to feel even more financial pressure to justify every AI-generated document or analysis.

As a result, managing the AI tech stack will need simplifying during the next 12 months, according to Bersin:

We’re entering a period where the sheer number of AI agents is creating fragmentation. None of these systems speak the same language, leaving organizations to stitch everything together themselves. With no interoperability standards and only early-stage orchestration tools, the burden rests entirely on the enterprise. This lack of cohesion is one of the big reasons the industry is now moving toward more unified, workflow-level automation.

He predicts the next major shift will be moving from AI productivity tools to Super Agents that run entire workflows end-to-end: 

Think of it like the difference between a car with lane assist and a fully autonomous vehicle. One helps you steer, the other takes you direct to your destination while you work on the back seat. In HR, processes from hiring and on-boarding to learning will move from task-level automation to full process automation, transforming the whole HR operating model.

That said,  Bersin doesn’t see this as a reason for shrinking headcount but rather he believes that HR departments should concentrate on up-skilling"

People are anxious, but AI isn’t about shrinking headcount, it’s about scaling capability. Even in highly-automated environments, the workforce hasn’t disappeared, it’s becoming far more effective. In 2026 and beyond, HR’s real responsibility is to up-skill people, build confidence, and guide organizations away from fear-based AI workforce decisions. In the past the management approach has been to get more people to increase growth. Now the equation is, if you want to grow, get more AI. Which is where the upskilling comes in.

Transformative

The coming 12 months will see HR really becoming more transformational,  with an agenda that includes strategic organizational change, Bersin predicts.

A lot of the traditional organization structures will change. There are many projects where HR is involved in places outside of traditional HR. And there are a lot of jobs created that didn't exist before. So the whole job market is kind of going to redefine itself around these new AI jobs.

Talent management will continue to evolve in 2026, as traditional systems can’t capture the differences in talent created by AI, according to Bersin:

A more effective approach is a ‘talent density’ model that recognizes, supports, and leverages instead of forcing everyone into outdated frameworks. And nothing is frozen, so there's also the issue of keeping employees engaged and excited about these transformations.

AI-based training will also be a big theme next year, according to Bersin, who believes using AI for corporate training will really pick u[:

It's a $400 billion market, and all these companies are basically realizing, ‘wow, you know, we're spending a lot of money on that stuff, and we have a lot of instructional designers. If we use AI for this, we can dynamically build content in days instead of months. Maybe we don't need a lot of these big collaborators’. That's a big market, and that's going to be a big theme in 2026.

In the recruitment arena, Bersin believes AI powered recruitment  will consolidate next year, moving from point solutions to more standard platforms`;

Most of the AI tools and initiatives in recruiting have been point solutions, and are really good tools for finding and assessing the skills of candidates. Like AI based candidate chat bots to talk to candidates, and answer questions about shifts and hours and pay and benefits and so on. There have been all sorts of interesting implementations of AI along all these things, but now talent acquisition is saying it wants something that stitches this all together. It could go back to the corporate ERP because as wonderful as all the individual tools were, no one can manage all these different ones. I think that part of the market will be more consolidated around solutions.

He concludes:

I would also add that I see absolutely no evidence that jobs are going away. There are probably more new jobs being created than ever. So the real upside here is, even though there may be some dislocation in the HR profession, there's a lot of new jobs being created, as long as companies focus on growth and not cost reduction. I think HR departments will look smaller relative to the rest of the company, but they'll be able to leverage themselves across larger populations of growth. So this isn't a wipe out of jobs. This is more of a scaling technology if you get re-organized around the AI tools.

My take

Hope and optimism is part of the human condition. And the wonderful thing about predictions is that we easily forget them, so when the next New Year comes around, we can start all over again. Bersin's predictions that the HR function will have to rationalize and rebuild, and will evolve into a more strategic function make sense. Hopefully better clarity and real ROI amidst the chaos of rapid AI advances and its accompanying rhetoric is a pretty safe prediction for 2026.