By Thulani Dube
For the longest, Human Resources (HR) has been asked to manage the consequences of business strategy. They have been tasked with recruiting the right people, developing their capabilities, managing performance and maintaining organisational culture. That model is rapidly becoming obsolete.
Artificial intelligence (AI), automation as well as the rise of digital workplaces are changing not only how people work, but what work is, how organisations are structured and what it means to lead. HR can no longer remain primarily a support function responding to technological change. It must become one of the architects of that change.
The 2026 HR Monitor describes HR as having a dual role in the AI transformation journey. First as an “architect” shaping how work, roles and capabilities evolve, and secondly as a “lighthouse” demonstrating what AI enabled HR can look like in practice. This represents perhaps the most important shift in the profession highlighting that the future of HR will be less about administering the workforce and more about designing the organisation of work itself.
A big mistake that many organisations make is to confuse technology adoption with transformation. Employees can use generative AI to draft emails, summarise meetings, analyse information and prepare presentations without the organisation fundamentally changing. It may be argued that AI transformation progresses through three business stages, namely, enablement, automation and reinvention. Enablement gives employees the necessary AI tools, automation improves existing workflows, while reinvention fundamentally redesigns roles, workflows and operating models around human/AI collaboration. For many leaders, the state of reinvention remains as mythical as a pegasus. With this in mind, the HR agenda must fundamentally change.
The question should no longer be simply how many employees are using AI tools such as Copilot or ChatGPT. Instead, HR leaders should be asking how work itself should be redesigned, which tasks are best performed by people, which can be augmented or automated by AI, where human and AI capabilities should work together, and what new opportunities become possible when routine work is transformed.
Organisations creating greater value from AI are going beyond task automation and redesigning entire workflows. They are reconfiguring how people, technology and processes work together to deliver better outcomes. For HR, this means moving from headcount planning to capability planning. As such the workforce plan of the future cannot simply ask how many employees an organisation needs. It must ask what combination of human expertise, digital capability and AI agent capacity will be required to execute the strategy.
One of the defining leadership challenges will be developing AI fluency across the organisation. AI fluency is broader than technical competence. It involves knowing when and how to use AI, critically evaluating its outputs, integrating it into workflows and knowing when human judgement must override machine generated recommendations. Importantly, it also strengthens capabilities that become more valuable as AI becomes more capable.
This has particular significance for Africa. In 2025, PwC conducted a “Hopes and Fears Research” which engaged over 1700 workers across five African countries and close to 50 000 worldwide. The report found that 64 percent of employees surveyed across the five African countries reported using AI at work during the previous year, compared with 54 percent globally. This highlights that African employees are not necessarily waiting for organisations to become ready. In many cases, employees are already experimenting with the technology.
Furthermore, South Africa provides compelling examples. Standard Bank, for instance, has developed a five level AI and generative AI capability framework spanning foundational understanding through to advanced model development. In 2025, more than 9000 employees completed its Foundational AI Pathway, more than 12300 used its integrated prompt guide and more than 1000 leaders participated in its Decision Maker Pathway. By June 2026, the bank reported that more than 20,000 staff were active AI users, Additionally AI development had become a CEO-owned agenda supported by a Chief AI Officer and cross functional specialists.
This is an important lesson for HR leaders as it highlights that AI capability cannot be delegated exclusively to the technology department. It must become an organisational capability.
AI will fundamentally transform the role of the manager. The traditional manager coordinates people, allocates work, monitors performance and generally solves problems. In an AI enabled organisation, some of those activities can increasingly be performed by intelligent systems.
The evolution of the workspace has seen the emergence of what will be referred to as the “agent manager”, a leader who must manage not only people, but also AI agents operating as part of the organisation’s capacity. As AI takes over more routine tasks, teams may become smaller and organisations may require fewer layers of management. Managers will increasingly focus on coordinating the strengths of people and AI, while also deciding what technology should handle and where human judgement, creativity, coaching and leadership remain essential.
This does not make leadership less important. It makes it more human.
When AI performs more administrative and analytical work, managers will have to become better coaches, communicators, sense makers and developers of talent. For managers this means that judgement, empathy, persuasion, creativity and relationship building will become increasingly important. The challenge is that AI may automate some of the very experiences through which future leaders develop expertise, judgement and confidence. Organisations will therefore need to deliberately redesign career pathways so that efficiency does not come at the expense of leadership development. If AI agents undertake much of the entry level analytical work, the emerging HR challenge is therefore not merely reskilling people for AI, it is redesigning career development pathways so that employees continue to learn and grow as well as support leadership in developing the relevant capabilities. The AI revolution dictates that HR cannot credibly lead enterprise transformation while operating according to a model that belongs to the previous era.
Read the full story in the September edition of Public Sector Leaders
