Yesterday's PwC Global AI Jobs Barometer landed with a clear framework for understanding what AI does to any given role: it either professionalizes the work, elevating the expertise required and rewarding it with faster growth and higher pay, or it democratizes the work, absorbing the skilled tasks and leaving the less demanding remainder behind. The report's published coverage has focused, reasonably enough, on how that framework applies to the workforce at large. What it has not done — and what the HR profession should now do for itself — is apply the same lens to HR.

The answer is not flattering, and it is not simple. HR is not one thing. It is a function that contains, within its own boundaries, both a highly professionalized future and a significantly democratized present. The question of which parts of HR end up on which track, and how fast, is the most consequential workforce planning question that most HR teams are currently not asking about themselves.

Where HR sits in PwC's own data

PwC's barometer explicitly names employment recruiters as an example of a professionalized role: AI screens CVs, leaving recruiters the more demanding work of negotiating offers, reading candidates, and building relationships with hiring managers. That is a genuinely professionalized dynamic — the routine work is automated, the expert work remains and becomes more central.

But PwC also explicitly names medical secretaries, finance managers and systems administrators among the most strongly democratized roles in its dataset — roles where AI is absorbing a large share of the expert tasks formerly performed by people, leaving the less demanding work behind. The operational core of most HR functions maps directly onto that category. Payroll administration, benefits processing, policy documentation, compliance tracking, standard onboarding, interview scheduling, initial candidate screening, routine employee queries — SHRM's 2026 State of AI in HR report found that real-world AI deployment in HR is overwhelmingly concentrated in exactly these transactional, process-driven areas. The function that is managing the democratisation of work across the organization is, in its operational engine, being democratized itself.

"A finance professional who can read a business case, or a lawyer who instinctively understands risk and employment regulation, may be better positioned to lead in this new environment than a career HR generalist,” Simon Fenwick, global head of talent acquisition at Fisher & Paykel, told HRD in May.

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