Harris recently spoke with HR Executive about HR's changing role in the age of AI.

HRE: Is AI reshaping what it takes to be an effective HR leader?

Harris: The same fundamentals are true. You have to have a strong business acumen, being an enabler to the businesses. The way an exceptional leader uses AI is understanding the biggest pain points and solving for them with AI. It's automating rote tasks, freeing teams up to lean into creativity—not just encouraging teams to adopt AI, but reimagining how work is done, rearchitecting systems that aren't working. Exceptional HR leaders are helping leaders across the business identify that the way they work needs to evolve and that they can't just use AI for the sake of it. Strong judgment is the superpower of any exceptional leader, and it's become more amplified in the AI era.

HR Executive: Has there been any pushback or resistance as you go through your AI journey?

Harris: Not necessarily pushback, but more so folks grappling with what it means to be AI fluent, creating space in their day to invest in skill-building. On that front, we invested in an AI fluency framework that sets a baseline across the company to say what it looks like when you're proficient, that at the next level you become a power user and the next level a builder. My people business partners are working to define these further across teams.
Once folks had that level of clarity and understood what's expected, we saw leaders lean in; they did hackathons with teams in off-sites, they're creating moments where they're setting expectations, giving clarity and making space to invest. Those approaches broke down any nervousness that, if I'm honest, we all have about how AI will change work.

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