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Welcome to this issue of Talent Edge Weekly!

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AI has evolved from being a promising experiment to a company-wide imperative. But most are still treating AI like a toolset, rather than a transformation that will redefine their organization.

Our new 2026 Global Learning & Skills Trends Report reveals four key workplace trends and distills proprietary global learning data to help leaders move from incremental adoption to true organizational AI fluency, tied directly to measurable business outcomes.

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THIS WEEK'S CONTENT

Below are links and descriptions of the topics covered in this issue. If you're interested in my deep dive, you can read the full newsletter.

• Are Your Most Critical Roles Occupied by Your Top Talent? | Brian Heger | Five of my slides to help leaders evaluate whether their organization’s top talent is occupying its most critical roles.

• AI Is Moving Faster Than Your Workforce Strategy. Are You Ready? | BCG | Explores how AI adoption is reshaping work tasks, talent needs, and team structures, offering HR leaders insights and tools to plan effectively.

• AI, Demographic Shifts, and Agility: Preparing for the Next Workforce Evolution | Deloitte Insights | Outlines four opportunities—and practical recommendations—for HR leaders to navigate demographic shifts and AI adoption.

• Should Your Company Merge Its CHRO and CTO Roles? | Harvard Business Review | Examines whether companies should combine the CHRO and CTO roles to better align talent and technology strategies in the AI era.

• How CHROs Can Prevent Common Change Missteps | Gartner | Highlights three areas where misconceptions about change often arise and offers tactics HR leaders can use to build a change-ready culture.

Also, check out my job cuts tracker & Chief HR Officer move of the week.

🔈️ SPECIAL SHOUT-OUT

A special shout-out to Ross Sparkman, Head of Workforce Planning at Nutrien and author of the recently published Strategic Workforce Planning: Developing Optimized Talent Strategies for Future Growth, 2nd Edition. Ross recently joined my private community for internal HR practitioners—Talent Edge Circle—as a guest speaker. We covered everything from AI’s impact on workforce planning to scenario planning. If you haven’t picked up Ross’s book, I highly recommend it—it’s full of practical ideas, tools, and resources written for internal practitioners. And if you’re an internal HR practitioner interested in my private community, you can learn more 👉️ HERE.

Brian

THIS WEEK'S EDGE 

TALENT MANAGEMENT

Are Your Most Critical Roles Occupied by Your Top Talent? | Brian Heger

Five of my slides to help leaders evaluate whether their organization’s top talent is occupying its most critical roles.

One key aspect of talent management is identifying an organization’s most critical roles. But identification alone isn’t enough. The real value lies in understanding why these roles are important and ensuring that top talent is assigned to them. The rationale is straightforward: since these roles disproportionately influence business outcomes, deploying top talent in them can provide a performance advantage. To help determine if your critical roles are filled by top talent, I’ve shared five excerpt slides from my private community, Talent Edge Circle. Each slide highlights one area with a primary question, why it matters, probing questions to dive deeper, and indicators to consider. For example, the internal benchmarking component asks: Could someone inside the organization realistically perform this role significantly better within the next 12 months? Why it matters: helps determine if higher potential talent already exists internally and whether the incumbent is the best fit moving forward. Probing questions: Have we benchmarked the incumbent against peers in similar roles? Are we keeping the incumbent in this role due to familiarity rather than capability? Indicators to look out for: internal employees in similar roles are outperforming the incumbent, and high-potential talent in the organization is being underutilized. Use this resource as a starting point to identify opportunities to upgrade talent in your most critical roles.

Access my slides

AI AND WORKFORCE STRATEGY

AI Is Moving Faster Than Your Workforce Strategy. Are You Ready? | BCG

Explores how AI adoption is reshaping work tasks, talent needs, and team structures, offering HR leaders insights and tools to plan effectively.

As organizations continue to implement AI tools within the workforce—from general-purpose platforms to specialized solutions—HR leaders play a critical role in helping their organizations understand the impact on work tasks, talent needs, and team coordination. For HR teams working to make sense of these implications and plan effectively, this new article provides useful ideas to consider. One tool highlighted is the AI Talent Horizon Framework, which helps organizations navigate transformation across two dimensions. The first is AI Maturity, which progresses from tool-based adoption by individuals, to workflow transformation, and ultimately to full agent-led orchestration—where autonomous AI agents handle complex tasks with human oversight. The second is Workforce Impact, which considers how each maturity phase affects tasks (how work is done and processes evolve), talent (the skills, roles, and capabilities required), and teams (the structures, culture, and models that shape how work is delivered). Together, these dimensions highlight how shifts in tasks, talent, and teams can be significant. To illustrate how the framework can help leaders segment workforce implications, the article includes an example of how a software engineering role evolves across maturity stages. Additional insights are shared, including seven trends that are reshaping how work gets done, who does it, and how teams are structured.

Read article

AI AND THE WORKFORCE

AI, Demographic Shifts, and Agility: Preparing for the Next Workforce Evolution | Deloitte Insights

Outlines four opportunities—and practical recommendations—for HR leaders to navigate demographic shifts and AI adoption.

Organizations continue to explore how AI—and especially AI agents—can redefine teams, with AI serving as a “teammate” rather than simply a tool. At the same time, aging workforces and declining labor participation are shrinking talent pools, creating urgency for HR leaders to rethink how people and machines collaborate. Deloitte projects that by 2027, 50% of firms currently using generative AI will have at least piloted agentic AI, which could boost productivity but also raises questions about how to optimize human and machine teams. Based on a survey of 11,000 workers across 17 countries, Deloitte highlights four opportunities for integrating AI and human capital. One in particular—human oversight still matters, but AI wins on speed—examines how organizations can determine which tasks are best delegated to AI and which require deliberate oversight. Deloitte suggests shifting from keeping humans “in the loop” to “on the loop,” treating AI like a junior team member that can be monitored, guided, and corrected. This approach enables organizations to capture efficiency gains without compromising accountability, quality, or trust. To help organizations explore AI’s impact on specific tasks and processes, I am re-sharing my one-page template as a starting point. While not a scalable solution, it can spark conversations on which tasks are best performed by AI, which by humans, and which through collaboration between both.

Read article

CHIEF HR OFFICER

Should Your Company Merge Its CHRO and CTO Roles? | Harvard Business Review

Examines whether companies should combine the CHRO and CTO roles to better align talent and technology strategies in the AI era.

This new article explores whether companies should merge the CHRO and CTO roles to better align talent and technology in the AI era, capturing the perspectives of three experts on this issue. Keith Ferrazzi argues against merging, emphasizing “teamship”—cross-functional co-leadership grounded in shared purpose and accountability—citing Gap and Cisco as examples where collaboration drove transformation. Peter Cappelli suggests that combining roles could be beneficial, but only if a leader understands both HR and AI deeply; otherwise, small HR–tech teams may be more effective, as AI adoption is less about plug-and-play and more about organizational change. Kalifa Oliver stresses that leaders shouldn’t start with org charts but with clarity of priorities, which in turn informs decisions. To help Chief HR Officers and their organizations with these decisions, the article includes eight guiding questions for leaders, starting with: What problem are we trying to solve? Is the goal efficiency, employee experience, or innovation? Would merging leadership accelerate those outcomes, or create new bottlenecks? Do we have the governance, data infrastructure, and expertise to combine functions effectively? Would a joint leader have the bandwidth and vision to steward both well? Questions like these can help leaders make thoughtful choices that weigh the risks and benefits of different models and determine which are more likely to achieve the desired outcomes.

Read article

HR ENABLING ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

How CHROs Can Prevent Common Change Missteps | Gartner

Highlights three areas where misconceptions about change often arise and offers tactics HR leaders can use to build a change-ready culture.

According to a recent survey by The Conference Board, driving organizational change and building culture remains a top priority for Chief People Officers for the remainder of 2025. This raises the question: what tactics can best help HR leaders and their teams create a change culture that enables leaders and employees to meet the continuous demands of today’s business environment? A new Gartner article highlights three areas where misconceptions often arise: 1) Change messaging (defined as the communications and signals leaders and the organization give about change), 2) Change feelings (defined as employees’ emotional reaction and how they feel when asked to implement change), and 3) Change implementation (defined as the things employees need to do to implement a change). Taking change messaging as one example, 78% of HR leaders assume employees need to fully understand why a change is happening or that transparency alone will build trust. Similarly, 56% of business leaders believe they must share as much information as possible for employees to adopt change. Yet the change failure rate remains steady at around 21%, regardless of whether leaders report providing details around the changes. As noted in the article, rather than focusing heavily on the details of the change, the focus can be more on the need to make progress and giving employees the information they need to act on the change. Other tactics are shared for each of the three areas. As a bonus, I’m re-sharing my one-page cheat sheet to help leaders map and pace organizational changes according to capacity.

Read article

AI AND THE WORKFORCE

Empowering Organizations with AI: A Playbook for Skilling, Strategy, and Success | AI Workforce Consortium

A 135-page playbook outlines practical strategies, frameworks, and tools to help organizations build, assess, and strengthen AI-related workforce capabilities.

This 135-page playbook provides organizations with strategies and tactics for acquiring AI skills, including the “Build, Buy, Borrow, Bot” framework, as well as methodologies for assessing workforce capabilities and identifying AI-related skill gaps. Developed by the AI Workforce Consortium—led by Cisco and includes companies such as IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Google—the playbook offers tools to support AI workforce readiness.

Access playbook

JOB CUTS AND LAYOFF TRACKER

Check out my tracker of announcements from a segment of organizations that have conducted job cuts and layoffs since the start of 2023.

A few job cuts announced this past week:

• Fiverr (NYSE: FVRR). The freelance marketplace said it will cut about 250 jobs, or 25% of its workforce, as part of a transformation into an “AI-first” business. 

• Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F). The automaker disclosed that it was cutting 1,000 jobs in Cologne, Germany, as part of its restructuring plan amid weaker-than-expected EV demand. 

• xAI. Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup said it will cut 500 employees, mainly from its data annotation team, as part of a plan to hire more specialists and improve its Grok chatbot.

Click here to access my tracker with all announcements.

CHIEF HR OFFICER MOVE OF THE WEEK

This past week, 11 new Chief HR Officer announcements were posted on CHROs on the Go, my subscription-based platform tracking movement in and out of the CHRO role. Subscriptions are for monthly or yearly plans.

This week’s CHRO move of the week is:

• Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Inc. (ENGLEWOOD, COLORADO) [NASDAQ: RRGB]—a full-service restaurant chain—announced the appointment of Humera Kassem as Chief People Officer, effective September 15. She joins from Dave & Buster's—a restaurant and entertainment business headquartered in Dallas—where she served as Chief People Officer since December 2023. Before that role, Humera was the Chief Human Resources Officer for Jamba Juice.

🔓️ Never miss another Chief HR Officer announcement!

CHROs on the Go has over 4,500 archived announcements in its online platform, with new announcements added daily!

If you are already a subscriber to CHROs on the Go, log in here.

👉️ To join a monthly or yearly subscription, click here.

FROM ME ON LINKEDIN

THE BEST OF AUGUST 2025

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