Bolt’s cofounder scrapped its HR department. This CEO says people management is key to thriving in the AI age

In today’s CEO Daily: The debate is raging over how to manage humans in the AI era.

The big leadership story: Deep cuts at Meta

The markets: In the black as investors remain upbeat about AI.

Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. For companies leaning into AI, what’s the value of the human resources function? For Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow, the answer is nada. As he told attendees at Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit this week, “We got rid of our HR team.”

To be fair, Breslow eviscerated HR  last year along with thousands of other employees when he returned to the CEO role. The fintech firm he’d cofounded in 2014 had dropped from an $11 billion valuation in 2022 when he first stepped down to a reported value of about $300 million two years later. It went from a “peacetime” headcount of 2,500 to what he now calls a “wartime” footing of around 100 people. 

While Breslow reports his company is better off without HR, I’d argue the art and science of managing humans is more important than ever—and it’s also evolving fast. I recently spoke to Himanshu Palsule, the CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand, a learning and talent software company. With 140 million users and 7,000 enterprise customers who are taking a hard look at their own HR spend, Palsule has a vested interest in the conversation. But I’m impressed by the agentic platform it launched yesterday that leverages AI to help assess, train, and mobilize........

© Fortune