Good morning. For companies leaning into AI, what’s the value of the human resources function? For Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow, the answer is nada. As he told attendees at Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit this week, “We got rid of our HR team.”
To be fair, Breslow eviscerated HR last year along with thousands of other employees when he returned to the CEO role. The fintech firm he’d cofounded in 2014 had dropped from an $11 billion valuation in 2022 when he first stepped down to a reported value of about $300 million two years later. It went from a “peacetime” headcount of 2,500 to what he now calls a “wartime” footing of around 100 people.
While Breslow reports his company is better off without HR, I’d argue the art and science of managing humans is more important than ever—and it’s also evolving fast. I recently spoke to Himanshu Palsule, the CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand, a learning and talent software company. With 140 million users and 7,000 enterprise customers who are taking a hard look at their own HR spend, Palsule has a vested interest in the conversation. But I’m impressed by the agentic platform it launched yesterday that leverages AI to help assess, train, and mobilize employees. “People will enable agents to take over the enterprise,” he told me at a customer event in New York. “If you lose your people, those agents aren’t doing anything in your company—they’re just creating chaos.” Other thoughts:
