HR leaders are drowning in decisions: here’s how the best ones are getting ahead

Two competing forces are currently shaping the work of people leaders at many major businesses. On the one hand, geopolitical uncertainty and economic volatility are leading to a tightening of purse strings, making it harder to retain and attract top talent. At the same time, the requirements of the modern workplace mean that there has never been such a need for workers with the right skills and attitudes to innovate and embrace the potential of AI and other cutting-edge technologies.  

To address this, we convened a panel of experts to glean their insights on the challenges facing CHROs in 2026 and the practical solutions that can help.  

The Problem: Siloed, Opaque Workforce Decisions  

One of the biggest challenges for people professionals, and one area where the savvy use of technology can really help, is decision-making. Workforce decisions are rarely broken because of poor policy, says Maria Colacurcio, CEO of Syndio, a pay equity software platform. Instead, they often break down in the execution. 

“What happens is, once those policies are set, they go out into the wild,” she says. This could mean that a recruiter needs to close a deal by Friday to get a candidate in or a retention bump gets approved because a specific manager makes a really good case for it. “These decisions happen in massive silos, so, in spite of really good intentions, there are unintended consequences when you can’t see all of these decisions together.” 

This means that it is no longer enough to simply formulate excellent policies once a year and let them go, says Sara Morales, senior vice president for People and Communities at Cisco. “Now, with the pace of change, we need to be proactive and reactive. Culturally, what we’re seeing is an evolution of highly structured teams’ organizational decision-making to much more dynamic and fluid ways of making decisions at speed.” 

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Dr. Laura Weis, global Human-AI strategy lead at WPP, agrees. “Ways of working are fundamentally changing and you only get value from technologies like AI if we’re moving away from this siloed, waterfall,........

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