AI’s Impact on Human-First HR with Dr. Dieter Veldsman

[00:00:00] Vishnu Shankar: Hello and welcome to Talent Draup, the podcast where we bring together HR leaders, thinkers, and innovators from around the world to unpack how talent, technology, and transformation are shaping the future of work. I'm Vishnu Shankar from Draup, and I'm your host. Today in today's conversation, we'll be talking about one of HR's biggest challenges as AI reshapes the way we lead, organize, and engage talent.

How can HR evolve from a policy driven function to a truly people first system. To explore this topic, I'm honored to be joined by Dr. Dieter Veldsman, chief scientist at AIHR, the Academy to Innovate HR. He's a global thought leader in organizational design and the future of work. A keynote speaker, researcher and author, and the host of the HR Dialogues podcast.

Dieter it's a pleasure and a privilege having you on Talent Draup. Before we dive in, I'd love for you to tell our listeners a bit more about your background and the work you're doing at AIHR.

[00:01:04] Dr. Dieter Veldsman: Perfect. Thank you so much and a good day to all the listeners and thank you Vishnu. It's lovely to be here with you for, our conversation.

As mentioned, my name is Dr. Dieter Feldman. So I play the role of Chief HR Scientist at AIHR and it basically means three different things and we're responsible for a lot of our original research and thought leadership is the future of HR and how do we prepare people for that. Secondly, we do a lot of content and career development, so that is in the form of e-learning, podcasts, articles, etc.

and then lastly, we also work with clients around strategic advisory work, and pertaining to making sure that they have the right HR strategies and operating models for the future. In terms of my background, I'm an ex-chief HR officer, so I grew up in the HR world. I have done various things there from performance to talent, to organizational design, which really is my first love.

And whilst also on the other side, I've also had, an academic career. And I'm a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg. and in my role as Chief HR Scientist, I have the privilege of being able to combine both the practical world as well as this, the science and the theory, and to be able to find new solutions for current world problems.

[00:02:14] Vishnu Shankar: Fantastic. Very very interesting career trajectory Dieter. I was, like I was saying earlier, I had the chance to attend your session in

Amsterdam earlier this year, and there was this thing, you said a lot of interesting insights you said, but there was this one particular thing where you said, employer- employee trust is starting to decline and, how organizations, need to own their narrative, especially when it comes to the AI place now.

That was very important insight and I think it really frames, today's conversation on what a truly human first HR design looks like. You often talk about, bridging organizational psychology with operating model design. What does a truly human first HR operating model look like today, especially with AI in the mix?

[00:03:08] Dr. Dieter Veldsman: So I think Vishnu we're at a very interesting point in time. If you think about where HR as a profession, as a function finds itself. I think something that we've been really good at over the years is to respond and reshape and reframe what HR is, depending on what was happening in the external world and what organizations needed at the time.

So if you think about our roots in things like. Labor as well as then from personnel psychology, strategic HRM, and I think the last 20 to 25 years has been this idea around HR being a strategic business partner. And we have big conversations there around our seat at the table. And what does that look like?

I think where we are today is we are entering a new chapter of work, which is going to call on us as HR professionals to rethink what our mandate and what our value is in the organization. And as an outflow of that, there will definitely be a conversation around what does that mean for operating models.

So in my view, I think the next chapter of work is going to be one that's driven by digital and AI and human augmentation. So I think it's going to be a big thing around how does we, how do we work with AI going forward and augment that into our organizations. But on the other side, from an HR point of view, how do we make sure that there's still a high touch human experience in terms of what we provide and what we offer.

I think at the moment there's this big question around just because we can does not mean we should. So I think we're going to have to make really intentional decisions around how and where we utilize AI as part of our HR operating models. And for me, it is really going to shift and I think there'll be a couple of big things that start to happen.

I think we'll definitely start managing HR much more like a product house, if I can call it that, and start thinking about our employees as consumers of the HR

product. I often ask clients this question to say, if employees had to buy HR solutions with their own money, would they do that? And if not, why not?

So we're gonna have to think very differently and apply a lot of behavioral principles in what we bring forward, the solutions that we offer, and how we then incorporate AI into that and also build our own expertise around what our AI capability and HR is going to look like to really drive, I believe, what can be a high touch human experience that's augmented by AI in future.

[00:05:20] Vishnu Shankar: Right, again, very interesting insights here, Dieter. so how do organizations actually go about making this structural, get this into their design and governance? because what might end up happening is this thought, and this structure, might, people might end up treating it as an add-on afterwards, but how do we make this integral and structural in the organization's core. Yeah.

[00:05:49] Dr. Dieter Veldsman: That's a very good question and I think I'm going to start with what I think you should not do, and then I'll get to what I think might work right. As long as we start seeing AI as an add-on and as something that is just the same way that we viewed past technologies, just enabling work, I think that's a mistake because I think then it'll always be seen as something separate to our actual core way that we work.

I think you have to incorporate AI and think through it as part of your work and your operating model design. So realistically, we are in the last generation of people, leaders that will be leading teams that are only human beings. We know that agents are coming into the workforce and it's a good thing.

They're not taking our jobs. I think they're complimenting and not mitigating it. And it means that our contribution is gonna look very different. So I think it's more of an org design question that we need to ask. And an org design question usually has a couple of, key things that you need to unearth. The first one is, what do you want HR to be in this new world?

And again, it gets to my point around what really is our mandate and what is it that the business is going to need and require. If so, what type of game are you going to play? So what are your strategic initiatives where you're going to invest your resources or not? Thirdly, then how are you going to deliver work?

Which is where I think being the conversation around, AI and processes and human beings and skillset start to emerge. And then the last one, what does success look like for you? So to make it practical, we need to not have a

conversation only about structure. I think we need to have a conversation around mandate and success criteria and use that to guide the decisions of starting to change and kind of shift our structures a little bit.

We know we need to work in a much more cross-functional manner, right? So step one, we need to kill the silos that we currently have between things like centers of excellence, business partners in the different functional domains. We know on the other side that we have to incorporate a lot more product-based thinking to continuously improve things.

We know that we want to be more data driven and evidence driven and, have more intelligence in terms of the decisions that we make. So I would almost take those types of value statements that we want to incorporate for the future and then bring them back and say, what type of HR organization is gonna get us there?

What capabilities do we need and how do we then actually infuse and get access to those capabilities?

[00:08:07] Vishnu Shankar: Perfect.

And, going back to one of your other points, which was about just , just because. We can, we shouldn't, right? I think, is there a real life scenario or a case where I think restraint actually helped?

Not, going for, not doing that.

[00:08:28] Dr. Dieter Veldsman: Yeah, of course. My favorite example was a story that was shared with me when, when I was in Singapore a while ago. And, the, this individual shared with me that they, they said, what is the most subjective HR process? Performance management, right? Okay.

Let's replace the manager and rather use AI to give people objective, data-driven evidence-based feedback. What they then found from employees is that you've actually killed this human conversation that needs to happen between a manager and an employee. So it turns out that we still want feedback from a human being that can understand context and nuance, even though we know that it might be, a little bit more subjective as opposed to AI doing it.

So it completely blew up just because they could do it. They then rolled it back. They then said, hang on. So if we want to really celebrate the human moment.

Let's rather use AI to actually help managers prepare for the conversation, pull data together, look at trends, make sure that there's not a recency effect.

Let's utilize it to help prepare the employee to say, this is how you give feedback. This is how you set goals. And that was actually, they received a really positive business outcomes from utilizing it within the process to augment as opposed to replace, even though the capability was there to do both.

[00:09:42] Vishnu Shankar: Great. That's a great example. You also described three layers of governance that connect policy, readiness and accountability for AI in HR. Could you walk us through those, layers?

[00:09:57] Dr. Dieter Veldsman: Yeah. I think there's the three layers to think about is, I think the first layer is you do need to understand strategy and value.

I think a lot of organizations have now realized just blindly experimenting with AI in their operating models is not conducive to value, right? It leads towards a lot of actually lost productivity. So your first governance layer is where are we going to experiment and what do we actually want to get out of incorporating AI?

To put it in simple terms, who guides the strategic roadmap on how we are going to adopt AI in HR? I think your second layer then is a lot more about the enablement layer. And when I talk about the enablement layer is there's some real practicalities that you need to utilize in order to get AI into your structure.

What does your data look like? What technology do we have, etc. And then your third layer is really for me, the transition layer around people, skills, culture, mindset. Because as much as AI is not about technology, in my view, it's a lot more about actually transforming work and transforming mindsets.

And to pull all these different things together, there has to be a conversation around ethics. What type of organization do we wanna be? Where are we gonna use AI? What does the legislation tell us as that starts to evolve and develop a little bit more. So I think it kind of holds these three layers in place.

There's the strategy layer, the enablement layer, there's the transition layer that's all about people and change and culture. And then circling that is the ethics and risk layer that we manage by making sure that we do the right things in the right way.

[00:11:24] Vishnu Shankar: Got it. So let's say these layers are in place.

How do they actually change the way HR operating models function in practice? For example, could be areas like decision making or transparency. so how do they actually change the way they work? I know you gave some examples, but if you can dive deeper into a very specific case,

[00:11:49] Dr. Dieter Veldsman: Of course. So, let's start with decision making because I think that's going to be a key one, for the future.

And I think by putting some of these different elements in place, it immediately leads you towards the fact that what our own data also tells us is that you do need a cross-functional, cross disciplinary team that guides AI adoption in the organization. So HR needs to form part of that broader business team, but even within HR, you need a cross-functional team.

It can't just be one center of excellence that's now your AI, COE, that's going to drive everything going forward. You need this two speed kind of model that says, on the one side we have somebody that looks at the standards and does that align with what we need to do? They are able to make certain decisions around.

What tool sets are available for us? Where are we going to apply it? How do we make sure that the legislation is worked into our everyday workday, application of AI. And then you need other implementation people that is actually spread across the different business that understands the context.

So things like bps, people in the shared services center. And they need to be enabled to make certain calls around how am I experimenting with AI in the guardrails that have been set through the governance to make sure that it's applicable to my work context. So I think that's slightly different. I think a lot of HR models are still very tightly controlled centrally.

I think for AI to be effective through governance, you need to push out a lot of the decision making to the front lines where the actual work happens. But to do that in a responsible way, you need centralized governance that gives broad guardrails for people to know what they can decide and what they can't decide.

that's one of the examples I wanna utilize a little bit more, because I think ownership has to transfer out, but we have to do that in a responsible way, which then means that accountability is also shared. It's not just one center of excellence that's accountable for AI adoption, it's actually the whole function.

But there's various different parts of it in the future. So yeah, I think that's going to be very different from a way of work point of view. And I mentioned earlier, in HR we grow up in the process type of thinking. I think about a process and a function, and that's how work gets done.

I think for this really to take fold, you're going to have to start thinking a lot more horizontally about outcomes. Because if I'm an employee and HR needs to do something for me, I don't really care out of which area in HR it comes from. I want to understand what the experience is on my side, and that's the type of changes that we are going to have to make to start thinking a lot more outside in.

And that's something we've been talking about for a number of years. But I think that changes by putting these types of governance structures in place because HR teams run on rhythms and rituals and where decision making actually happens, and I think this is a great opportunity to relook that.

[00:14:27] Vishnu Shankar: Perfect.

I think this also kind of was leading to my other question I had. You also said, talent intelligence should be insights and action, otherwise nothing changes with just insights. You did call out one of the biggest bottlenecks today, but then where else do you think HR organizations struggle with taking action today and what can be done to intervene?

[00:14:59] Dr. Dieter Veldsman: So I, I think there's a couple of things that, that we see, right? I think we have the privilege of working with HR teams across 200 countries. But what's really interesting for me is that there's some commonalities that always start to come out.

I think the one is that very often HR remains very tight to what the business perception of HR is. So what I mean by that is if the business perception of HR is. You are a compliance function that operates in this type of domain, HR in a strange way, kind of identifies with that and starts becoming that for the business.

So that conversation has to change. It's a real bottleneck around securing mandate and runway for the type of HR organization that you want to be. I ask everyone this question. They say, we want to be more strategic. I say, what on earth does more strategic mean for you in your context? That becomes a bottleneck.

If we don't create clarity. So I think one of the key things that we can do to remove bottlenecks is create clarity. The second one is you can't be everything for everyone. So make your strategic bets to say, we are going to be really great in these three things. The rest, we just need to be on par with the rest of the world.

The other things, we're not actually going to pay attention to, because for us, they don't matter. We don't want to be the best in them. So I asked this question around, where are you going to win as an HR team? What game are you going to play there? And I think there's just three or four things there in our context of our conversation.

If AI is one of those, then you need to invest there. You need to make sure you have the capability and the knowledge there to actually infuse that you know a lot more into the way that you work. And then I think the last one, it still remains a skill challenge that we find, right? So 92% of HR professionals don't start their careers in HR.

They actually start in education, social work, administration, customer service. So people enter the HR domain and then you learn by just looking around you and seeing what other people are doing in the HR world. And I think we still have a massive skills and professionalization gap that we need to close in future.

If you can't fix skills, structure will never help you. If you don't have the right structure with the skills tied to it, you can never deliver on strategy. So I really think that those are the key things that turns into bottlenecks because we look at them in isolation and not as one holistic thing that actually interplays with one another.

[00:17:11] Vishnu Shankar: Perfect. Perfect.

Because you brought up skills. there was another interesting point from your, session, which is, how talent today is making decisions, they're not making career decisions truly they're making career, life, choices, right? So they, they're open to, not taking that promotion or not taking, big project if it means making major life changes like relocating or anything like that.

How do you think that's also another big change happening in the world today? How do you think. HROs should navigate this kind of, change in workplace, employee mindset.

[00:17:58] Dr. Dieter Veldsman: Yeah. So I think the important thing there for any HR team is to understand who your workforce is as human beings, right?

Which is something that, that we've also mentioned before. And the reason I say that is if you don't understand them as human beings with wants, needs and desires, in a particular context, looking at things like data points that just tell you things about demographics, it's not going to really tell you what the workforce need and what they want.

Now I say that because I think very often we make aggregated decisions. We look at beautiful dashboards in boardrooms and say, oh, because we see this trend over time, this is what we need to do. We do need to go slightly deeper and combine that type of insight because it's extremely valuable with a bit more of a human lens to it 'cause I think it influences. You use the example of talent decisions. We sometimes operate from this assumption that everybody wants to be promoted, everybody wants to be, pushed into extreme projects and stretched, et and that's not the reality for a lot of people. It is for some people, but you need to understand what that mix in your workforce also looks like.

'cause I think it influences things like employee value proposition. Employee experience, and how we leverage some of the skill sets that we have available. So for me, and I've asked my teams over the years, always, but who's the human being at the other side of this process or policy or system or, practice that we are rolling out as HR and what is it that they expect from this, and how is that tying up with what we want to achieve from a business point of view?

And I think that changes the conversation slightly, as opposed to just working on aggregated averages and making key decisions based on those, that doesn't really account for, what people wanna do. And, maybe to make it practical, one of the key things I sometimes smile about is we do succession planning in organizations.

And then we come back, and we say, we are fine. Our coverage looks fantastic, in the next year or two. And then I ask the question, have you spoken to the people that you've identified? Do they wanna do this? Do they know that they're being developed into this? Most of the time people will tell me, no.

That, they can't know. What if we can't deliver on the promise of moving into that particular role? And then time and time again if you wanna promote people there, they say, but that's not what I want to do from a career point of view. Or they leave because they weren't aware of the fact that you were trying to develop them into something for the future that they wanted to do.

And it's those type of nuance that I think we just need to realize that there's real human beings that also sit in some of these processes, that are data driven.

[00:20:25] Vishnu Shankar: Super.

Totally agree. Totally agree. I, we also saw that, your 2026 HR Trends report is out. Are there a couple of trends, that you want to call out that would reshape how HR teams would operate from the report?

Maybe?

[00:20:44] Dr. Dieter Veldsman: Yeah, of course. I think, and this is one of the publications that I look forward to most every year. and if anybody that's interested, let me know. You're happy to have a free copy of it. There's a couple of things that stands out for me in this year's report. The one we've touched on already, right?

It's HRs role in terms of co-leading the AI transformation to make that practical, that is a bit of our conversation around how does HR find its identity and what it needs to do for the business to be able to adopt AI. So what does that look like in terms of reskilling, having the conversation around what AI is, what we will do, what we won't do that we've already mentioned.

I think there's a second one a bit around how do we make AI fluency a core capability within HR, which talks a bit about, everybody's on the bandwagon of, ooh, you need AI skills. Yes, fantastic, but what skill, what, does the skill look like? We try to dive there into a little bit of an argument that some of it is technical, but some of it is much more durable and behavioral base that we need to bring together.

And in the last one that I think just to move away from the AI topic, because it's not, the only thing that's happening at the moment is there is really this idea around that we are going to have to redefine what we want and expect from managers and leaders in the future. Something we've seen in the data is that has been a shrinking population and organizations are saying, oh, we can take away a lot of these tasks in future, but we are gonna have to rethink a little bit what management is and what that looks like and how we equip. People with the right competencies to be able to really manage and lead, as I've said before, these blended technology and human teams in the future. So those are three of the top ones, that I'll call out for the purpose of our conversation for everybody, anybody li

We try to cover a bit of a broader view.

[00:22:31] Vishnu Shankar: Of course, I'll go check it out. Thank you for sharing those insights. Is there a, again, a hypothetical question. Is there a role inside HR that you believe or you expect to look completely different by 2026?

[00:22:46] Dr. Dieter Veldsman: Oh, that's a great question. So I think we already starting to see, quite big changes in the role on the in roles on around talent acquisition and learning and development. And what I mean by that is, I think it's two of the domains in HR that has immediately been influenced very much by AI adoption, for different reasons, right?

The one very much I think in the L&D space, the value moving away from content. A lot from content creation, a lot more towards content curation, and how we use AI in the learning experience. So I think what a learning and development consultant does in future, and I think in 2026 already is going to be very different.

And then similarly with I think the talent acquisition specialists, I think that's already shifting and starting to change. I think there is a massive opportunity for a much more human candidate experience if we use AI to the benefit there of, in a kind of moving through the volumes that we typically have, being a little bit more proactive and outbound.

So my money would be on those two, I think for 2026. With the caveat that other roles will also change. And it's not going to be just limited to those two. And these changes are good. I think they're positive things if we embrace them in the right way.

[00:23:58] Vishnu Shankar: Of course, of course. Perfect.

We'll, keep track of this when we meet next year in Amsterdam I guess. We nearing the end of a podcast Dieter. I'd like to finish this with a rapid fire round, a ritual that we always have in our podcast. Let me know when you're ready to go.

[00:24:22] Dr. Dieter Veldsman: Yeah, let's go for it.

[00:24:25] Vishnu Shankar: So, one skill every HR leader must build to stay relevant in the age of AI.

[00:24:31] Dr. Dieter Veldsman: I'm gonna give you two curiosity and critical thinking.

[00:24:35] Vishnu Shankar: Perfect. What's been the most surprising insight you've uncovered while hosting your podcast, the HR dialogues?

[00:24:45] Dr. Dieter Veldsman: I think, on the one side, I think, it's lovely to hear people's stories across the, world in HR and the things that they're dealing with. I think one of the, most insightful things I've gathered is, one, we don't celebrate the good work that HR does enough.

And two, we underestimate the complexity that HR professionals deal with from a day-to-day point of view. And yet we find a way to be impactful and value adding to the business. And that's been like a massive, I think something that's underestimated in the world.

[00:25:17] Vishnu Shankar: Perfect. Which of your, two books was the bigger challenge to write between Work for Humans and Organizational Identity and why?

[00:25:30] Dr. Dieter Veldsman: I think, yeah, they were very different, right? So I think work for humans, we wrote very much for it to have a science-based way of driving employee experience. So that was a very much a labor of love. I think org identity was slightly more difficult. It's a more abstract topic. And it is also something that, myself and my, co-author there, worked together for a couple of years to try to get to something tangible around organizational identity and what it really is, and how that guides organizations into the future.

So I must say that one, I think conceptually was a slightly more difficult, child to bring into the world.

[00:26:06] Vishnu Shankar: Got it. The last question. If, you have to sum up the future of

HR in 2026 in one line, what would it be?

[00:26:16] Dr. Dieter Veldsman: I think, we are in the time period now where 15 years from now we're going to look back and say the decisions that we made in 2026 , 2027 , 2028 , I think is going to set the tone for what HR will become.

And I think there's various different options for what the future of HR looks like. To whittle that down to one sentence is quite difficult. But I think to and I

know it does sound cliche, but I think there's never been a more exciting time to be in HR given the amount of change that's starting to happen.

But it will require some significant also transitions that we would need to make, to get to a different chapter. And I think 2026 is going to be really exciting when we see some of the things start landing in a good value adding to that.

[00:26:58] Vishnu Shankar: Because it's nearing very fast. Dieter, thank you so much.

This session was, packed with so much, insight. my three takeaways, I think ownership needs to move out and decentralized. The insight to action gap I think must be bridged and, trust I think trust is becoming increasingly important. I think it should be designed. And I think, these are my three takeaways, and there's a lot in this session.

It was an honor to host you in our podcast, Dieter. Thank you so much for taking your time. Thank you for making time. Yeah

[00:27:39] Dr. Dieter Veldsman: Thank you very much, Vishnu and the team for inviting me. It was lovely to, be able to spend the time with you and the listeners.

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