Are HR Chiefs The Most Important Resilience Leaders?

For HR chiefs, the remit has expanded far beyond support. In an era of persistent uncertainty, workforce transformation and rapid advances in AI, HR is now a primary engine of business growth and resilience.

Gartner’s latest survey of 426 Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs) across 23 industries and four global regions underscores this shift, setting a clear mandate for the function: design an HR model built for AI, agility and adaptability.

Gartner’s Top HR Trends and CHRO Priorities for 2026, released annually, distils what’s top of mind for HR leaders and provides directional guidance on why these shifts are happening and how to act on them for long-term business impact.

Four priorities lead the agenda for the year ahead:

• Establish a purpose-built AI strategy for HR
• Redesign the workforce for the human-machine era
• Equip leaders to drive and normalise continuous change
• Embed culture into the flow of daily work to lift performance

What CHROs say matters most in 2026

AI transformation tops the list. The call to action is not simply to automate tasks, but to reimagine how HR creates value across talent acquisition, learning, performance, mobility and employee services.

Gartner’s research indicates that evolving the HR operating model itself in a way that ensures people and AI systems complement one another can unlock up to 29% in productivity gains.

The most effective CHROs are moving from scattered experiments to cohesive, HR-specific AI strategies that set governance, identify high-impact use cases and accelerate capability building across the function.

The second priority is workforce redesign. HR leaders are stress-testing talent strategies against multiple future-of-work scenarios and blending human capability with AI systems to elevate quality, speed and innovation.

As AI becomes more capable, it is reshaping roles, skill architectures and service delivery models, pushing HR to reframe work around outcomes rather than activities.

Kris van Riper, Practice Vice President at Gartner, says: “2025 was about AI pilots, discovery and experimentation.

“2026 will be about delivering agentic AI ROI.” This shift from exploration to ROI demands clarity on where AI augments, where it automates, and where uniquely human strengths must be amplified.

The third focus is leadership readiness. In volatile conditions, leaders must be fluent in change and be able to make adaptability a daily habit, not a one-off reaction.

Gartner’s findings show that organisations embedding change into day-to-day routines see materially better transformation outcomes.

For CHROs, that means hardwiring techniques like shorter planning cycles, transparent decision rationales and team-level experimentation, while upgrading manager capabilities in coaching, communication and sensemaking. The goal is to make change a team sport, not a top-down announcement.

Finally, culture remains a critical lever for performance. With many organisations facing culture drift and pockets of disengagement, CHROs are operationalizing values into moments that matter - projects, rituals, goals and recognition - so that culture is experienced, not just described.

Gartner links this approach to performance gains of up to 34% in employee engagement. The emphasis is on real-time nudges, leader role-modelling and measurement that ties culture behaviours to business outcomes.

How HR must evolve right now

Across these priorities, the throughline is an HR function in transformation, rapidly becoming more dynamic, tech-enabled and impact-oriented.

Traditional, siloed models are giving way to integrated operating systems that connect strategy, skills, data and experience.

Many CHROs are adopting “now–next” strategies that deliver near-term improvements while building longer-term capability, a pragmatic approach as organizations seek to do more with less.

At the same time, employers are rethinking the deal with employees, shifting from transactional benefits to experiences that build trust, growth and belonging.

That means designing learning and career pathways aligned to future skills, simplifying processes to reduce friction, and using AI responsibly to personalise support without eroding privacy or equity.

The message for HR chiefs is clear: define a crisp AI strategy for HR; re-architect work for human–machine collaboration; prepare leaders to normalise change; and make culture visible in the flow of work.

Done together and done well, these priorities reposition HR as a central creator of value and set the foundation for sustained growth in 2026 and beyond.