From CHRO to Chief Workflow Officer: The Transformation

The CHRO has traditionally led the management of Human Resources. It's a “people” function. Which is still highly valued. But, it is not enough anymore.

As a former CHRO, a role I loved, I can tell you straight: It was built for a workforce that no longer exists.

We designed HR for full-time employees. Benefits-eligible. On the org chart. That was the whole universe.

Now, that universe is rapidly expanding.

The Workforce Has Changed. The C-suite Hasn’t Caught Up.

Gartner predicts 40% of enterprise applications will have task-specific AI agents embedded by the end of this year. A year ago, that number was under 5%.

Forrester says the top-five HR platforms will all offer digital employee management this year. HR tech is becoming the system of record for a human-and-digital workforce.

The infrastructure is being built. The executive layer to govern it is not.

Today's workforce is a portfolio — employees, contractors, contingent talent, and AI agents, all doing real work, side by side. And right now, no single executive owns that entire picture. That gap is costing companies. In efficiency. In compliance. In the ability to move at the speed the market demands.

Here's how big the gap actually is.

Only 1 in 5 companies has a mature model for governing autonomous AI agents, according to Deloitte's 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise. McKinsey puts the number of companies that consider themselves mature in AI deployment at 1%. One percent. While investment keeps climbing.

And here's the one that says it best: IBM's 2026 CEO study found 86% of leaders believe their employees have the skills to work with AI. Only 25% of employees are actually using it regularly.

That's not a skills gap. That's an ownership gap. Nobody is responsible for closing the distance between what leaders believe and what's actually happening on the ground.

The Chief Work Officer Will Own How Work Gets Done

Enter the Chief Work Officer. The CWO fills these gaps.

This is more than a rebrand of HR or a lateral move from CHRO. It's a net-new role for a net-new reality.

Here's the definition I'd put on the page:

The Chief Work Officer owns how work gets done across the entire workforce: employees, contractors, contingent talent, and AI agents. The role designs and governs the mix, the work itself, and the boundary between human and machine. And the CWO owns another thing: each part of this new workforce and what it needs to work well.

I’m not the only one who sees the need for a new kind of executive ownership.

In their new book, Infinite: How Visionary Leaders Transform Today’s Businesses into AI-Forward Companies, Dave Wright, ServiceNow’s Chief Innovation Officer and a Novaworks Advisory Board member, and Brian Solis, ServiceNow’s Head of Global Innovation, make the case for a Chief Workflow Officer.

They define the Chief Workflow Officer as the executive who is “accountable for the design, orchestration, and performance of all of the enterprise’s critical workflows in a human-agent operating model.” That includes “how work is sequenced, instrumented, governed, and continually improved across silos, with AI.” It’s one of the sharpest ideas I’ve seen for how to update management structures for a post-AI world.

I see the Chief Work Officer and Chief Workflow Officer as solutions to the same problem. It’s not hard to envision a world where they coexist within the same organization. (Maybe the combination is a Chief Workforce Officer?)

The Chief Work Officer starts with what work needs to be done and who (or what) should do it. The role owns the full workforce architecture: employees, contractors, contingent talent, and AI agents.

The Chief Workflow Officer starts with how that work gets done: the steps, handoffs, governance, and orchestration that turn activity into outcomes.

Companies may ultimately define the roles differently. But the underlying conclusion is the same: AI is changing both the composition of the workforce and the architecture of work. Enterprises can’t manage that transformation through management structures designed for another era.

People Will Drive AI Success More Than Technology

The average enterprise now runs 12 AI agents. That number hits 20 by 2027. Half of those agents operate in complete isolation — not connected to any other agent or any other workflow.

And 88% of AI agents never make it to production at all. Not because the models don't work. Because nobody built the governance, the infrastructure, or a way to measure whether it's paying off.

That’s a leadership problem, not a routing problem.

The Chief Work Officer does more than manage the routing — who goes where, what gets assigned to humans versus agents. That's useful. But it doesn't move the needle.

The Chief Work Officer owns what each part of the workforce needs to not only perform but thrive.

This new HR + Work role drives business outcomes, breaks down silos, and invites people to work differently. Right now, employees are being asked to absorb more change than at any point I have witnessed in my career. The CWO's job is to reduce the friction and ambiguity that change creates.

What the role owns:

→ The total workforce mix — employees, contractors, contingent talent, AI agents — and how it's designed and adjusted over time

→ How work is sequenced and assigned across humans and machines

→ The boundary between human and agent work — which goes where, how accountability flows, how outputs get checked

→ The skills and workforce intelligence that shows where capability sits, and where it's heading

→ The risk and compliance posture for AI-assisted employment decisions (and this exposure is real and growing)

→ And underneath all of it: what each part of the workforce needs to perform. That's the condition everything else runs on.

CPOs know this too. The WEF's Chief People Officers' Outlook found that redesigning org structure and job design is now the #1 workforce priority — 74% of CPOs say so. Deploying AI and automation is right behind it, at 70%.

They see the problem clearly. What they don't have is the mandate — or the operating model — to own it end to end.

83% of CEOs will tell you AI success depends more on people than on technology. And yet nobody sits at the table accountable for the whole picture.

Nobody Has Built the Architecture to Hold the Modern Workforce Together

This isn't a future-state idea. The companies getting this right are already operating this way. They've built the function. They just haven't named it yet.

AMD ran an agentic AI system across its 30,000-person HR function. Resolution time dropped 80%. Half of all queries now get resolved through self-service. Employee satisfaction went up 70%.

P&G found something else: Teams working with AI produced significantly more top-tier ideas than teams without it. And AI broke down the old functional walls — R&D and commercial teams, working with AI, started producing balanced solutions regardless of what department they came from.

Microsoft's latest Work Trend Index looked at trillions of productivity signals across 20,000 workers. The companies pulling ahead — what they call “Frontier” organizations — aren't winning by accident. They've documented the handoffs. They've set the quality standards. They've built the governance for where human work ends and agent work begins.

Every one of these is proof at the function level. Not one of them is proof at the enterprise level. Nobody has built the architecture that holds all of it together.

That's the gap. The Chief Work Officer is how you close it.

I believe we'll see this title formalized across the Fortune 500 within five years. Every major enterprise will have one, and they'll be accountable for both how work gets done and what each part of the workforce needs to do it.

At Novaworks, we're building the operating system that executive will run on. Total workforce management — all worker types, all work relationships, all powered by AI — deserves a system built for it from the ground up. That's what we're doing.

The question I'd ask every board and CEO is simple:

Who in your organization owns the architecture of work, and the processes and Centers of Excellence that enable you to deliver business outcomes that have measurable impact?

If the answer isn't clear, that's a problem. And that problem is getting more expensive every quarter.