86% of CHROs Say AI Is Reshaping Their Role — One CHRO Is Building the Blueprint

Eighty-six percent of surveyed chief human resources officers agree that AI is changing their role "significantly" or "dramatically," according to data from The Josh Bersin Company. Megan, CHRO at Xactly — a vendor of AI-powered intelligent revenue and sales performance management software — has lived that number: her role has been redefined multiple times within a single year.

The practical consequence for employers is that the CHRO mandate now stretches beyond people programs into technology ownership, AI adoption strategy and the governance of digital labor. At Xactly, the IT and Business Systems teams merged with HR to form a "People & Technology" function sitting under the CHRO's office. She also chairs a cross-functional global learning council covering learning and development areas that once spanned several executive remits.

Why does AI adoption now count as a people strategy?

Megan argues that no AI course or certificate matches hands-on use, because employees build confidence only by working in the tools. The core question for HR leaders, she writes, is: "how do you create the conditions that make employees want to use AI?"

Her playbook has three elements:

• Make AI accessible and lower the intimidation factor.
• Encourage experimentation without making employees feel adoption is fear-driven.
• Create a Slack forum where staff share AI learnings and missteps openly.

In her experience, outcomes driven by fear never match outcomes driven by curiosity and passion. Reframing the language around "failing," she argues, accelerates the AI fluency curve. Once employees move past the initial overwhelm and apply AI practically, adoption begins to reinforce itself — which is the real point: building an engaged workforce rather than chasing tool proficiency.

What does building AI tools look like inside HR?

The CHRO role at Xactly has shifted from supporting leaders through people challenges to building tools that let managers navigate those moments independently. Her team built Penny, a text-based AI coach trained on company policies, regional norms and compensation philosophies. Penny helps managers prepare for difficult conversations, draft scripts, role-play scenarios and receive real-time feedback on their communication.

The tool saved Xactly's HR team and leadership 1-2 hours per manager during each compensation cycle. The broader effect, Megan writes, is a changed mandate: instead of HR being the first stop for every management question, guidance is embedded directly into the flow of work. That reduces manager stress and preparation time, preserves HR capacity for higher-value issues, cuts unnecessary escalations and opens a path from reactive support to predictive coaching on manager capabilities, development and performance.

Who manages the digital workers?

Workforce strategy now spans humans plus digital labor and agentic systems — software agents that act with some autonomy. Megan predicts the CHRO title itself could morph into CHDRO (Chief Human & Digital Resources Officer) or even CHARO (Chief Human & Agentic Resources Officer).

She frames four governance questions every HR leader should answer:

• What is the agent designed to do?
• How do you know it is working correctly?
• What happens when it is not?
• Who owns the corrective action?

Answering these intentionally, she writes, builds the foundation for the "hybrid" manager who oversees both human and digital resources.

Xactly has leaned into personification, naming its digital resources Penny and Scout. Scout is already on its second iteration and is taken offline for "training" when its agentic abilities are upgraded. Megan acknowledges that perspectives vary on humanizing agents, but she contends that treating AI merely as a tool risks layering technology onto existing processes rather than reimagining how work gets done.

What should HR leaders take from her year?

The CHRO role can no longer be defined by a fixed set of responsibilities, Megan concludes. Her verdict on the new reality is direct: long-term AI strategies must be paired with the agility to continuously reassess and change course as new capabilities emerge.

For people-operations teams, the Xactly example turns vendor-era AI talk into concrete adoption questions: which executive remit owns the agents, who measures their output, and how many hours of HR capacity your own comp cycle could recover.