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ORLANDO, Fla. — HR is in need of a revolution that will reshape it into a function that organizes how work is done, whether by humans, artificial intelligence or other technologies, SHRM President and CEO Johnny Taylor said during his SHRM26 keynote address Wednesday.
Taylor spoke flanked by massive video boards depicting legions of humanoid robots typing on keyboards, moving packages in warehouses and scanning blueprints with human project managers. Against that backdrop, he said HR departments had “lost the plot” and hadn’t caught up with executives’ desires that work be done efficiently, effectively and predictably.
“We didn’t quite keep up,” Taylor said. “We were so focused solely on people, and we sort of forgot where this is all going.”
That reality is underscored by the idea that CEOs and other C-suite leaders increasingly see HR as expendable. Taylor recounted a 2025 meeting with 92 Fortune 500 CEOs in which he asked them whether they valued HR, tolerated it or whether they felt it delivered so little value that their organizations could live without it.
