From HR Leader to Transformation Architect: The New Role of the Chief People Officer

Last month, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced he was laying off 14% of his workforce and turning the company’s org chart upside down. Out went what Armstrong calls “pure managers.” In came “player-coaches,” flat hierarchies capped at five layers, and “AI-native pods” that could include one-person teams directing agents that do the work of engineers, designers, and product managers.

“We are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs,” Armstrong wrote. “We’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it.”

At Block, Jack Dorsey is making a similar bet. In a recent interview, Dorsey described going from five layers between the CEO and any IC down to two or three, and collapsing everything into three job categories: individual contributors augmented by agents, directly responsible individuals who own customer outcomes, and player-coaches who build others’ capability by doing the work alongside them. 

Armstrong and Dorsey aren’t alone. There’s a massive structural shift happening to corporate America’s org charts. According to Gallup, the number of direct reports per manager jumped 11% in a single year. Organizations are getting flatter, and the adaptability needed for that change is top of mind for the vast majority (81%) of Fortune 500 leaders. But, only 30% say their organization’s structures, roles, and processes can reconfigure quickly as business needs change.

Every company is talking about transformation, but very few have figured out who owns it.

The instinct is to hand it to a senior technology leader or to create a new Chief AI Officer role. For some organizations, that may be the right answer. But for most, the hardest problem isn’t deploying the technology. Instead, it’s getting people to trust it, use it, and embed it into how they actually work. That is not a technology problem, it’s a people problem. And a growing number of companies are recognizing this and putting the Chief People Officer (CPO) in charge.

When the Org Chart Becomes the Bottleneck

Just last month, Atlassian announced that its CPO’s role was expanding to Chief People and AI Enablement Officer. Before that, Zapier announced the appointment of its CPO as the company’s first Chief People & AI Transformation Officer. 

The move was a deliberate statement about where AI transformation actually lives. As Zapier’s CEO Wade Foster put it, “AI adoption alone isn’t transformation. Real transformation happens when AI reshapes how teams think, collaborate, and create value.” 

A growing number of leaders across industries have realized that AI is fundamentally inverting the equation of business. For the last century, execution was the hard part of building a business. Analyzing data, designing products, and managing operational workflows all required deep technical expertise, significant capital, and/or years of accumulated knowledge. Ideas could be abundant, but execution was the bottleneck. The bulk of human effort was devoted to turning ideas into reality, and companies’ org charts followed suit.

Now that execution can theoretically grow by orders of magnitude, what distinguishes one company from the next will be both their ability to quickly adapt and the quality of human decisionmaking. The judgment to decide what to build, why it matters, and then how to deploy people and technology together to do it. In the decade to come, the companies that win will be those that can rethink how work gets done and continuously unlock human potential. This is, or should be, the remit of the Chief People Officer. 

The Chief People Officer’s Remit in the Workforce of the Future

To deliver on that remit, the role of the CPO has to evolve from a supporting executive— one who manages programs, administers compliance, and maintains stability—to the designer of systems that allow people to thrive in an environment defined by constant change. That means owning three things most companies still assign to no one in particular:

• Architect of Organizational Capability

The Chief People Officer translates where the business is going into what people actually need to be able to do. Rather than organizing work around static roles, the Chief People Officer defines the skills, judgment, and behaviors the organization must develop to compete when priorities are shifting faster than job descriptions can be updated.

Klarna, the Swedish fintech company, became a cautionary tale of what happens when organizations try to automate without rethinking how humans and technology should work together. In 2024, Klarna’s CEO announced that AI could already do the jobs humans do. The company paused hiring, cut its workforce from 5,500 to 3,400, and promoted an AI chatbot it said was doing the work of 700 customer service agents. Within months, customer satisfaction had fallen sharply and service quality was inconsistent. The company ended up pulling engineers, designers, and marketing staff to handle customer inquiries. 

Klarna has since reversed course, shifting to a hybrid model and positioning human support as a premium offering.

While headlines may convey a different story, work is not disappearing: instead, it is being restructured around distinctly human contributions. As these shifts continue, the Chief People Officer should serve as a critical stakeholder in defining how work is divided between humans and technology. 

Chief People Officers must also ensure that employees are equipped to succeed in work that requires a human touch—a gap our data show is significant. Right now, organizations are investing heavily in building AI capability, but are still early in translating that investment into meaningful changes in how work gets done. According to our latest data, 82% of companies are already upskilling or planning to upskill employees on AI, but that training is often basic introductory content. Only 21% are using AI for individualized coaching and few have institutionalized training on how to apply AI within specific roles. 

BMW’s 2024 launch of AIconic—a multi-agent AI system in its purchasing function—demonstrates this principle. Rather than simply automating procurement, BMW invested heavily in digital training and AI innovation spaces for employees at all levels, ensuring employees had the skills needed to collaborate with the new system. The result was not just efficiency, but human-AI co-creation of value.

When Chief People Officers design talent systems that strengthen distinctly human capabilities, they can ensure technology amplifies human contribution rather than eroding it. To be successful there, it will require more than AI upskilling; it requires fundamental changes in how employees learn and adapt. 

• Builder of Adaptive Organizations in High Change Environments 

As AI accelerates the pace of change, adaptability and growth mindsets become core organizational capabilities, not just a trait of high performers. In a world where the half-life of skills continues to shrink, the ability to learn may matter more than what employees already know.

Research consistently shows that employees with a growth mindset are more likely to engage with change, persist through ambiguity, and build new skills over time. The Chief People Officer’s role is to make that mindset a default: embedding learning into daily work, rewarding skill development—not just outcomes—and ensuring employees see change as opportunity rather than threat.

This requires rethinking how learning happens. Rather than relying on static training programs, the Chief People Officer will focus on integrating learning directly into workflows, measuring skill acquisition instead of course completion, and enabling employees to move fluidly into new roles as business needs evolve.

At the same time, adaptability depends on trust. Automation introduces efficiency, but it also creates anxiety from employees around relevance, fairness, and opportunity. Without trust, even the best transformation strategies fail. The Chief People Officer builds the conditions for trust by fostering transparency, ensuring access to reskilling opportunities, and creating environments where employees feel safe engaging with change. For example, a Fortune 500 financial services company we’re partnering with is embracing AI across a range of functions. They quickly realized that the biggest barrier to adopting AI isn’t a lack of skill, but employees’ fear about what change means for them. They implemented a manager effectiveness program focused on adaptability and psychological safety, and found that when employees could talk openly about the move to AI, they were more willing to try new things, admit mistakes, and flag when a course correction is needed.

This trust infrastructure enables people to participate in transformation rather than resist it, which is a prerequisite for sustained performance. But adaptability alone is not enough. Adaptability enables change, but access determines who benefits from it. Organizations must also ensure that the opportunity to learn, grow, and contribute is distributed in ways that strengthen performance.

• Steward of Performance and Access

If adaptability determines how organizations change, access determines who is able to contribute and ultimately how well the organization performs. The Chief People Officer is responsible for ensuring that access to opportunity, development, and advancement is structured in ways that strengthen, rather than constrain, organizational outcomes.

The workforce is increasingly global and diverse. But as AI reshapes work, the risk of a two-tier workforce grows. A Randstad report analyzing 12,000 workers found that only 22% of Baby Boomers have been offered AI skilling opportunities, compared to 45% of Gen Z workers. In addition, 71% of AI-skilled workers are men and just 29% are women—a 42-percentage-point gender gap. And the World Economic Forum published research finding AI only stands to hasten the decline of women in STEM roles. The Chief People Officer must ensure that access to AI training and tools scales equitably across the workforce, preventing entire groups from being locked out of the future of work.

This gap is not just a risk—it is a strategic opportunity. Organizations that cast wider nets and expand access to AI skills and reskilling can unlock entirely new pools of talent, reducing reliance on skills that are scarce in the current labor market. In doing so, Chief People Officers can reshape their organization’s talent supply, mitigating the skill shortages that many companies now face.

But to be effective, they need to be accountable for creating cultures that attract people from a wide range of backgrounds. They also need to ensure that those diverse teams can perform at their highest level. When teams span time zones, cultures, and working styles, the quality of collaboration directly impacts speed of execution. And when talent decisions—such as hiring, promotion, and performance evaluation—are influenced by bias rather than objective criteria, organizations systematically underutilize their best people and erode trust. Over time, these patterns compound, limiting who advances, who is heard, and ultimately, how effectively the organization performs.

These dynamics are often reinforced by the way careers are structured. Linear career ladders, informal sponsorship, and opaque advancement criteria can all amplify bias, making it harder for organizations to fully leverage their talent. As roles evolve, these systems become even more limiting. The Chief People Officer must redesign career architectures to support lateral movement, reinvention, and skill-based progression, allowing organizations to retain talent even as work changes. Rather than watching roles become obsolete, employees can see pathways to contribution that leverage their evolving capabilities.

Ultimately, as execution becomes abundant, performance will depend on who is able to contribute and how effectively. Organizations that expand access to opportunity and fully leverage the capabilities of their workforce will outperform those that do not.

The Hardest Problem Is Human

As AI lowers the cost of execution, the differentiator between companies will no longer be how quickly they can build, but how effectively they can decide, adapt their organization, and deploy human judgment in a constantly shifting environment.

The Chief People Officer may be the only C-suite leader whose job gets harder as technology gets better.