Our Senior HR Salons continue to create a safe space for HR leaders to speak candidly about what’s keeping them up at night. Last month, we were joined by Tom Gratian, Kamyn Search’s Organizational Effectiveness Practice Lead, who also runs an AI-native consultancy around organizational effectiveness. He opened with a line that caught everyone’s attention:

“This isn’t your grandfather’s change management.”

He wasn’t being dramatic. Every technology shift we’ve navigated before came with resistance, but AI comes with real fear for a lot of people. That’s because AI isn’t just changing workflows. It’s making people question their relevance, their careers, and their futures. 

This requires a fundamentally different approach from HR and business leaders than anything we’ve managed before.

Investing in technology isn’t enough

Tom estimates organizations taking a strategic approach to AI transformation will need to spend five to ten times more on the people and process side than on the technology itself. 

At organizations most effectively embedding AI, he has seen 70% of the gains in profitability come from people and process changes, not the tools.

That means HR shouldn’t be waiting to be brought in after the tech decisions are made. CHROs who want a seat at the AI strategy table need to claim it early and lend their expertise and leadership.  

Get the right people in the room from day one

One of the most common failures Tom sees is treating AI like an IT project. If employees feel like they’re hearing a top-down directive to “Go get me AI,” the process feels like something that is happening to them, rather than an initiative they have the opportunity to shape by providing feedback on the work they know best.    

To ensure alignment across the board, three voices need to be present from the start: 

• Business strategy, to connect AI to a competitive purpose
• Technology, to understand what’s feasible
• Organizational transformation—which is HR’s superpower. The people who understand culture, trust, and behavior change need to be driving the AI agenda, not reacting to it.

It’s not upskilling. It’s unlearning.

We shouldn’t be teaching employees how to layer AI onto their existing jobs. Most of those jobs are going to be fundamentally rewritten anyway. 

Instead of thinking about AI as automating a task, we need to take a step back and look at the process as a whole. This might mean collapsing multiple steps into one, or discovering certain handoffs don’t need to exist at all.

Tom calls this participative redesign, and it’s where HR has a natural advantage. We know how to bring people along through change. But again, CHROs have to flex this muscle from the start, not wait until the reorg is already drafted. 

Be honest about the hard parts

Tom doesn’t sugarcoat it: not everyone will transition into the more strategic, judgment-heavy work that becomes more valuable as AI handles execution. Trying to sell a “world of abundance where everyone pivots to strategy” narrative while quietly reducing headcount is one of the fastest ways to destroy trust.

His advice: name it. Be transparent about what phase you’re in, measure what actually matters at each stage, and give people as much dignity and clarity as possible throughout. The organizations he most respects are the ones dealing with hard truths head-on rather than hoping employees won’t notice the gap between the message and the reality.

Start before you feel ready

Tom’s advice is simple: just start doing. Pick a use case in your own function, run it through real tools, and iterate. 

Get executives’ hands-on experience with tools rather than getting bogged down in intellectual arguments. Once a leader sees that something that used to take days can be done in an hour, their entire view of the potential for the organization shifts.

HR has a genuine opportunity to own this moment, not as a support function, but as the architects of how organizations actually work in an AI-native world. That’s a meaningful role, and one CHROs have to claim proactively.

As Tom said before we wrapped: “You’ve gotta go do it.” The organizations winning at AI right now aren’t the ones who figured it all out. They’re the ones who got into the work and kept moving.