Good morning!
Ruth Umoh here, Fortune’s Next To Lead editor. For decades, HR professionals were denied their “seat at the table” in company leadership. But during the COVID pandemic, it became abundantly clear that the C-suite could no longer ignore chief people officers, who guided companies through existential business challenges, including lockdowns, remote work, and the Great Resignation. Now, a quieter and more structural shift is underway. The seat remains, but the authority attached to it is moving elsewhere.
Across the Fortune 500, HR is reaching an inflection point that looks strikingly similar to the one marketing faced in the late 2000s. When digital tools made it possible to measure return-on-investment at a granular level, brand intuition lost ground to performance metrics, and CMOs who could not quantify impact saw budgets migrate toward finance and analytics. HR is now facing its own version of that moment. As AI-driven job redesigns, labor scarcity, and higher capital costs collide, companies are less interested in culture as a value and more interested in labor as an investment.
The result is a shift in who holds strategic authority. With workforce strategy becoming a question of cost, output, and automation rather than engagement and belonging, finance, operations, and technology leaders are increasingly setting the agenda. This could leave HR to execute decisions it no longer fully shapes.
