AI is a must-do, but leaders must redesign work, not automate old processes: CHROs

TEXT START: At the 5th ETHRWorld Annual Conclave 2026, HR leaders from Larsen & Toubro, Maruti Suzuki India, Ashok Leyland and Bajaj General Insurance argued that technology readiness alone cannot deliver AI transformation.

The Dissection

The article is a management translation layer for labor displacement. It correctly identifies that inserting AI into obsolete workflows merely creates faster bureaucracy. Its proposed answer—redesign work, hierarchies, skills and accountability—describes the first administrative response to AI, not a solution to the underlying economic break.

The panel is also quietly conceding the central fact: AI is moving from automating physical operations to automating analysis, recommendations and decisions. The language of “partnership,” “upskilling” and “human judgment” makes that concession safe for corporate audiences. The real process is narrower human staffing, concentrated decision authority and a growing population whose economic relevance is no longer guaranteed.

The Core Fallacy

The article mistakes residual human accountability for durable human indispensability.

A human manager may remain legally responsible for an AI-assisted insurance, hiring or operational decision without performing most of the cognition behind it. Accountability can be retained as a liability sink while the underlying work is automated. “Context,” “intuition” and “judgment” are not automatically permanent moats; they become valuable only where they cannot be standardized, simulated, verified or assigned across a much smaller number of humans.

The article also confuses organizational redesign with employment preservation. Redesigning work may produce better firms. It does not preserve the mass employment-to-wage-to-consumption circuit. Under P1, P2 and P3, the destination is not a smarter version of the old workforce. It is a smaller human layer surrounding AI capital.

Hidden Assumptions

• Reskilling will create enough economically necessary roles for displaced workers. The article offers no mechanism for this.
• Human judgment will remain scarce rather than becoming increasingly model-assisted, standardized and concentrated.
• Regulation will preserve large numbers of human jobs rather than merely require nominal human sign-off.
• “Inclusive deployment” will distribute productive opportunity rather than distribute access to tools while ownership of the gains remains concentrated.
• Flattened hierarchies will democratize power. In practice, they can remove middle layers while strengthening the owners of models, data, energy and infrastructure.
• Different adoption speeds will materially change the endpoint. They change the timing and competitive ranking, not the direction.
• Human-machine partnership means complementarity. Often it means one human supervising the output of systems that replace many humans.
• Leaders can manage the transition through culture and training without confronting ownership, income distribution and the collapse of labor demand.

Social Function

Primarily transition management, with substantial ideological anesthetic and elite self-exoneration. It is also a partial truth.

The valid portion is operational: organizations must redesign workflows instead of digitizing obsolete rituals. Waiting for perfect evidence is strategically dangerous. But the article turns a structural labor shock into a leadership-development problem. That framing allows executives and CHROs to sound responsible while avoiding the lethal question: what happens when the redesigned organization requires far fewer people?

“Human judgment” functions here as a ceremonial bridge between present employment structures and future automation. It reassures employees that relevance will survive, while giving leaders a vocabulary for retaining human responsibility after removing human labor. The panel is not describing a plan to preserve broad productive participation. It is describing how institutions will metabolize its disappearance.

The Verdict

This is a competent obituary written as a transformation memo.

The article understands that AI will destroy old workflows, hierarchies and authority structures. It does not follow its own logic to the endpoint. Redesign will not save the post-WWII employment system; it will accelerate selection. Sovereigns who own or control AI capital gain leverage. Servitors who remain indispensable to those Sovereigns survive conditionally. Everyone else faces shrinking access to economically necessary work.

The technology is not waiting for leadership to become wiser. Leadership is deciding how cleanly the organization will shed labor once the old circuit can no longer be defended.