The Skills That Make You Great At HR Will Help You Lead In The AI Era

InnovationThe Skills That Make You Great At HR Will Help You Lead In The AI EraByJim Barnett,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 09, 2026, 09:15am EDTJim Barnett is the CEO and Co-Founder of Wisq, an Agentic AI platform for HR. gettyThere's an undercurrent of anxiety running through the HR profession right now. On social media and in private HR forums, the question keeps surfacing: Am I going to be left behind?It's an understandable anxiety. On LinkedIn, some posts make it sound like survival in the AI era means becoming something you're not, maybe a software engineer. That's not quite right, but HR does need to get more technical than it has been. The good news is that technical looks very different than what most people fear.It doesn't necessarily mean learning to code. It means getting comfortable managing AI systems, designing workflows and maintaining the knowledge bases that power them. These learnable skills build directly on what HR professionals already know how to do.The tools are changing. The work isn't.Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said something on the Lex Fridman Podcast that stuck with me: "The purpose of your job, and the tasks and tools that you use to do your job, are related, not the same." That's exactly right for HR, and it's a distinction the profession needs to hold on to right now.Ask any HR leader what their job fundamentally is, and the best answers aren't about running payroll or processing paperwork. To borrow from my friend Joan Burke, former CPO of Docusign, it's about helping people do the best work of their lives. That's been true for decades and will still be true when AI is handling every routine inquiry, policy question and first-pass workflow.The skills you already have are the ones that matter most.Think about...