- 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.
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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 employees. “People will enable agents to take over the enterprise,” he told me at a customer event in New York. “If you lose your people, those agents aren’t doing anything in your company—they’re just creating chaos.” Other thoughts:
On Gen Z: “The greatest irony of our time is we are leaving out a generation that’s most skilled to do AI. We have to make room for that generation if we want AI to thrive within a company. We dismiss them, like they’ve done something wrong. These are people we asked to grow up digitally different. We shoved an iPad in their hands at 3 and 4 years old.”
On ‘knowledge’ workers: “The corpus of knowledge that you have is going to be far outpaced, but you can use that to create value and differentiate. My tax agent now gives me wealth advice because his tax work is automated. Everyone’s going to be the world’s greatest coder. However, your ability to build products, use judgment, use inference, use delight in how you bring it to market—that is never going to go away.”
On leadership in the AI era: “Be very clear and set board expectations on what success looks like—and sometimes educate them on what the challenges are going to be. Explain to your people that their jobs are changing. There will be reductions in force. Don’t hide from them—but at the same time, enable them to be successful. Get the humility to understand that your 10, 30, 40 years of experience is important but may not be relevant at the pace of change. Be a constant learner.”
CEO Daily is taking Memorial Day off and will be back in your inbox on Tuesday. Enjoy the weekend!
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com