CHROs have to take a bigger role in driving and supporting business decisions: it's almost a truism by now. That sudden pivoting of responsibility started with the pandemic, and even though lockdowns and digital proliferation are several years behind us, the expectation remains for HR to step up and occupy a place at the table.

But how do HR practitioners - traditionally reporters of data and processers of employee requests - make that shift, especially when analytics is still very much an emerging area in many industries?

With great persistence, says Ryan Wong, the CEO and founder of people analytics and workforce planning platform Visier.

"I always tell every CHRO that I do not want your job, because I think it's really difficult to be a CHRO these days," he said, speaking at the closing of Visier's Outsmart Local in Singapore at the start of July. It was a sincere comment, he explained: "You have to take care of the people. You need to show a lot of empathy. And at the same time, the business is demanding a lot. Everybody who works in the HR function probably has experienced full transformation and change in the last 15 years."

Wong, a software engineer and data scientist by trade even before founding Visier, has seen the challenge first-hand over decades of working closely with developers, end users, and now business users. When he first started Visier over 15 years ago, the market's focus was on delivering technology that would help HR consolidate data silos and identify and track key metrics - a primarily reporting and dashboarding function, after which HR's job could be considered done.

But external events did not let HR stay in that comfortable rut. Even before Covid-19 reared its head, sociopolitical change in North America, where Visier is headquartered, was forcing HR to look more deeply into softer elements of the workplace: culture, inclusion, dealing with the systemic racism that still plagues the country today. Before that was even anywhere near resolution, the pandemic brought in mental health issues, productivity tracking issues, remote work, and mass resignations; and then there was war in Europe, global recession, and "all the uncertainty that started driving HR to step out and say: delivering reports and dashboards is not good enough. You deliver reports and nobody reads them. So what if you have that report? What does it mean?"

"The work of HR has gone beyond just being good in compliance and delivery," Wong said. "HR has been forced to understand the business and how they can actually help to impact the business. Which we have been saying from day one: people impact the business and HR needs to understand their people, so that they know how to better impact business outcomes."

How does HR make that first step?

Wong and his team actually developed a highly prescriptive methodology that they call the Visier Path, released about a year ago. Step one is to understand your people; step two is to understand how your people work; step three is to take that knowledge and make adjustments and plans accordingly; step four is to use the plans to elevate your people productivity and how they drive business outcomes. And step five is to go back and start over from step one.

"It's almost a lifestyle of continuous improvement," Wong described it. "This is how you should be looking at driving business outcomes from a very basic analytics perspective, using a technology become relevant to the business. That's a big part of making the change."

It's easier said than done, though, he warned.

"In the last 15 years, one of the hardest parts of the journey of implementing people analytics is to educate HR professionals to be data savvy, to understand charts and graph and numbers. As it turned out, that is not an easy task. Most HR professionals will say 'I'm all about people, I failed my math, don't make me understand analytics'. And we were saying, 'No, you need to be more data savvy!' "

Eventually Wong and his team came to the realisation that it simply is not possible to force change in such a way - there has to be a compromise of some kind where both perspectives meet in the middle. That was where technical expertise and AI came in.

"Here's the beauty of it. AI creates an opportunity where you don't have to be very data savvy, and you can still get the insights that you need. We've spent all these years trying to transform data into some form and shape that a human can understand. But it turns out that preparing the data for a machine to understand, and building the machine to have a conversation with a human, is a lot easier."

That technological shift will make HR's work easier, but it is also going to be a whole new huge disruption in itself, Wong warned. Agentic AI is developing at a terrific pace, and will only grow more sophisticated in the coming months.

"One day that agent, or digital worker, will take the role of analyst and all the consultants of the business. It's not about just delivering dashboard and reporting, it's not even about making HR better, it really is to make business better. We see HR as the kingmaker: a good CHRO should be somebody who can unleash the power and the potential of the employees, the managers, the leaders."

It's a great vision, but it's also one that will leave people behind if they don't change. Wong considers change - or not changing - to be a choice at this point, given that all the tools and technology that one might need to pivot are now easily available.

"Every one of you who works in the HR function has the right to change, but you have to start with your willingness to change," he said. "Before you can help the organisation, you have to help yourself step out and change, because if you don't, I can guarantee that the world of AI and the future of work will change you."