In a striking shift across corporate America, HR and IT teams are no longer operating in silos, and they’re forming partnerships to navigate the upheaval caused by artificial intelligence. Rather than view AI as a threat, leaders are framing it as a collaborator, but doing so requires deliberate retraining and a cultural reset.
As reported by Wall Street Journal on November 10th, 2025 by Belle Lin.
AI Is Upending Jobs. Corporate Tech and HR Are Teaming Up to Figure It Out.
Corporate tech departments are seeking the expertise of their human-resources counterparts—and the other way around—as businesses across the country sort through the workforce impacts of artificial intelligence.
AI is already wreaking havoc on the white-collar workforce, with chief executives increasingly admitting that the technology will wipe out jobs.
Looking ahead, remaining employees face a workplace transformed by new processes, new “digital” workers and new organizational structures designed to better harness AI’s potential.
It isn’t only a technological shift, but also a cultural one. And the chief information officers responsible for rolling it out say they are joining with their HR peers to teach employees how to use the technology, and not to fear it. They also need HR to help manage the impact of so-called digital co-workers, or AI agents, which are the bots that can perform tasks on behalf of humans.
Networking-equipment maker Cisco is bringing together its IT and HR departments to figure out what its workforce will look like with a “virtual staff of AI entities” working alongside roughly 86,200 employees, according to CIO Fletcher Previn. “That will be an interesting frontier where we’ll work closely with HR and figure out, ‘Does [the previous] chain of command still make sense in an AI agent world?’”
Job-search company Indeed has a “transformation office,” led by Vice President of AI Hannah Calhoon, which works with HR but sits under the technology team. Once Calhoon’s team has identified specific ways in which AI can help Indeed’s over 10,000 employees, they reach out to their HR counterparts, who have “expertise around learning and development, and scaling up solutions,” she said.
Even Microsoft, the tech giant behind many of the AI tools that workers use, is undergoing its own internal AI evolution. Katy George, the company’s corporate vice president of workforce transformation, moved to the position from an HR strategy role earlier this year to help Microsoft shape AI’s impact on its roughly 228,000 employees.
George said Microsoft’s workforce transformation group, which is made up of eight people, is an extension of CEO Satya Nadella’s office, but also works closely with the company’s information-technology department and HR group.
“Business transformation is about changing how we all as humans are doing our work, and therefore HR is an incredibly important enabler to create the flexibility to learn and evolve, but also to chart the course,” George said.
Yet as AI transforms the way businesses think about hiring and retaining employees, there have already been job losses.
Microsoft in July said it would cut 9,000 workers, adding to the 6,000 roles that the company eliminated in May across its product and software development teams.
PricewaterhouseCoopers is laying off about 150 employees in marketing, human resources, operations and other support functions, with more cuts coming as the Big Four accounting firm redesigns processes around new tech and data.
In October, U.S. companies said they would cut 153,074 jobs, nearly triple September’s 54,064, according to a report from consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The report said many firms pointed to cost controls and the impact of AI as they reassess staffing.
CIOs and HR experts say they are trying to manage expectations.
At cloud-security company Netskope, Chief Digital and Information Officer Mike Anderson is in regular discussions with Patsy Gilmore, its chief people officer, on ways to change employees’ perception of AI from a threat to a help.
“What we’re trying to help people understand is that [an AI agent] is a co-worker that’s going to help you be more productive, not someone who’s going to replace you,” Anderson said.
Tech data provider IDC predicts that by next year 40% of all job roles in Global 2000 companies will require working with AI agents. At the same time, by 2027, “AI-driven burnout” could reduce workforce productivity by 15%, it said.
Moody’s, the 116-year-old credit-ratings and research company, is also bringing together its technology, HR and corporate affairs departments to help ensure its 16,000 employees are making the best use of Moody’s Copilot, an AI-powered assistant designed for the company.
Those efforts led to the creation of an AI workforce enablement team, set up by Maral Kazanjian, the company’s chief people officer. The team is responsible for “making sure the whole workforce understands what AI agents are, making sure they have time to play with and learn how to use them,” Kazanjian said.
The team’s motto, as seen on a sticker on Kazanjian’s laptop, reads, “AI is the tool. The people are the power.”
