The idea of a “chief work officer” has come up in several settings this year, as the “chief people officer” title perhaps doesn’t fully reflect the changes to leadership needed amid broader use of artificial intelligence.
One of the people who believes it’s time for chief work officers is Athena Karp, the founder and CEO of HiredScore, which was acquired last year by Workday, where she’s now senior vice president of product and solution marketing. We spoke with her recently about this—here are excerpts from that discussion, edited for space and clarity:
How would you summarize what the role of the chief work officer is, what their principal responsibilities are, and how they sit in an organization?
It’s supporting the business in shepherding the change of how work is done from humans to human-machine collaboration across all the different facets of work and readying the human workforce for the changes that we can project ahead for them to have the highest likelihood of success in that human-machine collaboration workforce. And for them to have the furthest clarity they can of what the work demands will be so that they can take the steps to get themselves ready and continue to be a part to the extent that they want to of that workforce.
Why should companies have one?
An organization has always gone to HR to answer the key question, ‘What type of talent can get this work done? Where will we find that talent? How much will it cost? How scarce is it? How will we measure performance outcomes? How will we pay in terms of salaries and performance and bonus and rank it versus others that do that work today or new ways of doing that work?’
What I’m excited about from a chief work officer standpoint is all the questions the business has always come to HR to ask are the exact same strain of questions that you’re going to ask. How do we decomposition this work down into humans and agents? As you bring human-machine collaboration in, how do you measure performance? How do you measure outcome? How do you monitor different versions performing well or not? How do you help employees have the right know-how, training, exposure, experience to be able to be successful and productive in the work?
There’s actually more work to be done as we think about the future being human-machine collaboration than in a more simple org structure where the humans do the work on top of software that enables them to provide the services for the work. So I get excited about the criticality of that strategic lens and the speed that it will constantly change. Think about it: Each time there’s a new version of the AI out, asking, ‘Do we deploy that for the same tasks for different tasks? For some tasks, not all? How do we monitor its performance? How do we make decisions to remove it or swap it out? How do we experiment with different ways of doing it?’
The work is extensive and how you usher that change of human-machine collaboration in the most responsible way to the workforce you have today is something most leaders have top of mind, but they don’t have answers to and they don’t have answers to what are the tools that they’ll need when the work is done by human-machine collaboration versus humans.
Is the chief work officer the evolution of the chief people officer or the chief human resources officer or something else?
For the CHROs that are excited about this, it probably will be an evolution if they’ve always advised the business. The same core skill of deeply understanding the business challenges and the business goals is exactly what you need for the chief work officer as a CHRO today. Understand governance, understand law, understand how to be a great partner and bring strategic advice. For the leaders where that’s exciting, it is an evolution. I imagine it will also be in some places a partnership hat where the CHRO, maybe the CIO or the chief AI officer are wearing that hat together, depending on how much a company is building internally versus buying versus partnering in new ways to explore agentic AI.
Most CHROs don’t manage technology per se and don’t necessarily manage workflows and those are two parts of what you’re describing as the remit of the chief work officer. What are the gaps between current CHROs and the chief work officer and how do you see those being filled?
Actually, I don’t think managing workflows and managing technology needs to be under the chief work officer. I think the chief work officer needs to help the business forecast as far ahead as it can. What is the work demand and how is it changing from today? What is the talent supply—the talent being human-machine collaboration—that we have and what can it become in what time horizons? Then where do we have shortages and gaps and what do we do about that? So the technology will continue to be maintained under CTOs and CIOs and chief AI officers.
What will be the role is the same way HR today supports the business in monitoring performance, monitoring pay, monitoring outcomes, adjusting if outcomes aren’t achieved—today, the people, tomorrow, the human-machine collaboration in certain roles. Helping employees get up to speed in what they need to be successful in adopting technology has traditionally been a collaboration between the tech departments, IT departments and the learning, training, reskilling, upskilling teams within HR. So all of those teams just have an expanded mandate here versus new work they’ve never done before.
An important element of this is I’ve not met anyone who has the answer in how to educate, upskill, reskill, continue to help your employees be ready for the technology that is coming. This is a really important element of the chief work officer, which is not just partnering with the business to figure out what the work will look like, what the talent we have is, what’s the composition between human-machine collaboration and always monitoring, do we have the right mix? Is it performing well and what that looks like? How are we compensating? And everything else. But it’s also how are we continually adjusting the ways that we train, upskill, and enable the employees for success?
In a similar vein, ServiceNow’s Jacqui Canney’s title was changed earlier this year to “chief people and AI enablement officer.” We spoke with her recently about that change and will share more in an upcoming briefing. Sign up for Charter’s free newsletter here.