The future of work demands organisations to redefine their operating core, because while technology accelerates, the ‘people systems’: skills, decision-making, culture, and manager capability are not keeping pace. 

Leaders must redesign how humans, agents, and systems work together if their organisations are to stay competitive. In fact, studies show that there’s $4.4 trillion in productivity potential from AI use cases, but only about 1% of organisations are ready for this AI deployment.

At the same time, organisations are prioritising skills, flexibility, and managerial capability, which are the foundation of this transformation, one study shows. However, employee engagement continues to decline, with Gallup estimating $438 billion in lost productivity in 2024. Here, we see HR’s role being elevated as the core driver of this transformation. Because without HR shaping capability, culture and workforce design, transformation cannot scale or sustain. 

In an interview with People Matters, Shashwat Kumar, SVP, Customer Success and Delivery, Darwinbox, noted that for long, HR had fought to earn this seat at the table; now they are being called to “own it” The time has come to start treating HR leaders as business leaders,” He shared pointed insights in this conversation. 

Shaswat Kumar is the Senior Vice President – Global Customer Success & Delivery at Darwinbox, where he leads enterprise HR transformation and value-realisation strategies for large and multinational customers. He brings over two decades of multi-geographical experience in HR transformation, technology adoption and organisational change, having previously held leadership roles at Alight Solutions (as APAC Head) and Aon, where he specialised in outcome-driven HR transformation across the Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa regions. 

HR to enterprise transformation

Shashwat describes this shift across two eras:

  1. Pre-2010: Here, the HR transformation was inward, with shared services, HRBPs, and efficiency.

  2. Post-2010: HR transformation became enterprise-aligned, as it redesigned work, capability, culture and agility.

This shift was accelerated by COVID, with organisations forced to manage contradictory demands such as: high compliance alongside high empowerment, strong cultural coherence within distributed teams, efficiency combined with extreme agility, privacy balanced against personalisation, and global standards adapted to local nuance. 

Managing these tensions exposed the limits of traditional structures and role-based models. Contradictions are known to impact workforce redesign, as research shows. As a result, HR’s role moved decisively toward redesigning work itself, focusing on skills, workflows and decision rights rather than traditional job descriptions, as the SHRPA report finds. Thus, in digitising HR, the whole organisation is digitally re-architected.

Human systems in transformation 

A crucial aspect of this transformation gap, as Shashwat outlines, is that digital programmes fail in execution, because they never convert into changes in jobs, workflows, behaviours, capabilities and leadership.

“Human failures were leading to failures of digital programs. All of these need to translate into org change, job change, behaviour change, capability change,” Shashwat highlighted in the Humanscope podcast. 

Technology on its own does not create value unless organisations redesign decision-making, workflows and skills around AI, finds one study. Without new operating models, AI adoption remains fragmented. HR leaders cite culture inertia, skill gaps and adoption challenges, not technology, as the top barriers, according to research by SHRPA. This makes the role of HR central to business transformation.

How HR elevates to being a business function

The organisational performance indicators like productivity, innovation, capability, culture, and agility are people levers that are driven by HR initiatives. This blurs the line between HR leadership and business leadership. 

According to Mercer 2024–25 research, CEOs are now elevating skills, manager effectiveness and workforce redesign as core business priorities. While SHRPA finds that HR leaders increasingly co-own business outcomes such as productivity, cost optimisation and market responsiveness. Shashwat notes, Futurist leaders blend empathy with execution, building organisations that are strengthened, not threatened, by change.

In this context, the CHRO emerges as the only enterprise leader with an end-to-end view of the human operating system. Today’s CHRO understands the talent supply chain in its entirety, shapes operating models and organisational design, anchors culture and behavioural norms, and oversees workforce capability, agility, and experience. This makes HR the architect of human infrastructure beyond just a support function. This positions the CHRO at the centre of enterprise reinvention, where decisions about work, skills, and structure directly determine business performance.

HR-led transformation drives real business outcomes

Shashwat demonstrates this clearly with two examples -

Example 1

He shares the case study of a telecom-tech giant turning a $1.5B shortfall into a $0.5B overachievement in two quarters through capability rebuilding, empowered hiring, leadership enablement and gamified talent drives.

Example 2

In the second example, Shashwat spoke about a Chinese high-tech firm doubling revenue without increasing headcount. It was simply by redesigning global capability, culture and decision-making.

They go beyond being “HR initiatives" to enterprise performance outcomes enabled by people systems. SHRPA too finds that HR teams with the highest business impact invest in decision intelligence, workforce design and skills strategy.

However, none of this is possible without leadership sponsorship.“If that buy-in is not there, don’t waste your time,” Sashwat shares another case study of an oil & gas major that paused nearly every project except HR transformation during the COVID pandemic at the insistence of the CEO. This is because the organisation needed empowerment and agility for survival. 

The Gensler workplace research and the Microsoft Work Trend Index both show that organisations with leadership-backed people transformation see significantly higher gains in agility and customer outcomes.

What is the Darwinbox’s perspective?

As a platform, Darwinbox gives organisations the tool to unify the elements that shape modern work - from large-scale digitisation, workforce agility, capability evolution, employee experience, to multinational operating models and AI-enabled workflows. Instead of functioning as a transactional HRMS, it acts as the connective tissue that turns people systems into strategic, enterprise-wide intelligence.

SHRPA finds that 59% of organisations have overly fragmented HR tech landscapes. This obstructs transformation. Thus, Darwinbox’s strategy aligns directly with this orchestration gap, operating at the intersection of people, technology and decision-making.

The new mandate: HR must own the table

HR is the only function that touches every lever of organisational change. Thus, HR leaders aligned with business outcomes will move into core business roles. This is the essence of the Futurist leadership.

In the current context, the question is no longer about if HR deserves a seat at the table. It is about who understands the organisation deeply enough to design its future. 

As organisations navigate AI, agility and distributed work, this is where HR is called to step up.
Evating beyond its traditional role as the custodian of culture and trust, to the architect of capability, HR must orchestrate the futurist organisational operating system at the collaboration of human and agentic AI, whilst being a catalyst of workforce innovation, upholding shared responsibility for business performance. As Shashwat Kumar’s words echo, “The line between HR and business leadership is fading irreversibly.”

Microsoft predicts that by 2030, “superagency”, which is humans empowered by AI, will define business value. And HR will shape how that value is designed, deployed and sustained. This makes HR the true architect of the future of work, which is done by owning the table.