Sometimes organizational decisions, beyond mere cosmetic changes, embody fundamental trends in the organization of work. The recent merger of the HR and IT departments at Moderna is a perfect example of this, and it is difficult to see it as anything more than a simple governance choice: it may be a turning point in the way businesses view the relationship between talent and technology.
I generally try to illustrate my articles with examples from external sources, but it has been a long time since I have found a case that warranted a specific article. However, what Moderna is doing is a textbook case that deserves closer attention.
Moderna is therefore experimenting with a radically new model by merging its HR and technology teams. More than a digital transformation project, it is a complete overhaul of the way a business conceives its roles, tools, workflows, and operating model.
The biotech company is not content with simply integrating AI into its processes; it is rebuilding its organization around human-machine collaboration, managing the whole thing through a hybrid model that is unprecedented to date.
In short:
- Moderna merged its HR and IT departments to rethink the organization around human-machine collaboration, integrating AI at the heart of processes rather than as a simple support tool.
- This transformation responds to rapid post-COVID growth, scalability challenges, and the emergence of artificial intelligence as a lever for reinventing work models.
- The biotech company has deployed more than 3,000 GPT agents in a variety of roles, adopting a task- and flow-oriented approach that breaks with traditional business logic and organizational silos.
- The creation of a Chief People and Digital Technology Officer position reflects a commitment to fully integrating human and technological dimensions into a unified governance structure.
- Moderna is experimenting with a unique transformation model in which technology enriches the human experience without simply aiming to reduce headcount, raising questions about learning, social ties, and the transferability of this model to other businesses.
A response to the post-COVID era in the context of AI
This transformation did not come out of nowhere and, above all, is not a fad born out of blind enthusiasm for technology (The limits of technology-driven transformation). Moderna is one of the big winners of the COVID-19 pandemic, having experienced rapid growth but at the cost of a proportional increase in its workforce, which has doubled, and its internal complexity. As is often the case, this fast expansion has led to redundancies, slowdowns, and organizational debt (How to Tackle the Biggest Threat to Your Team’s Growth). This HR/Tech merger is therefore taking place in a context of seeking sustainable and controlled scalability (Why Moderna Merged Its Tech and HR Departments).
But above all, it is also part of a desire to adapt to the era of artificial intelligence, which has arrived on the scene with almost perfect timing. This is not about defensive digitalization, but rather a desire to be a leader by leveraging AI to rethink the organization around the question of “who or what (human or machine) should perform each task to achieve the best result?” and by deciding to no longer have separate human and technological strategies ([FR]Moderna uses AI to restructure HR and eliminate jobs).
This is, of course, a desire for post-pandemic rationalization, around which the business has experienced sudden and unexpected growth that was therefore unplanned and difficult to control, but it also responds to a very current paradigm shift, namely the need to adapt the architecture of work to the era of cognitive agents. We are therefore far from the blind cost cutting that is often the rule in such circumstances, as temporary staff reductions (Moderna says this is a temporary phase before hiring in other areas) ultimately seem less like a goal than a consequence.
It is therefore seeking to fundamentally change the way it operates, assigning each activity the most efficient human-machine configuration (Moderna Is Rewriting The Enterprise Playbook). Gone are the silos, replaced by flows and orchestration.
GPT agents on an industrial scale
The driving force behind this reorganization is a partnership with OpenAI. Moderna has reportedly deployed more than 3,000 specialized GPT agents across the business for tasks as varied as managing HR requests and adjusting doses in clinical trials (Moderna leverages OpenAI to transform HR and tech operations), legal, sales, and production.
This is not a marginal experiment, but rather a rearchitecture where technology is not a support function but part of the execution. This may explain why, as early as 2023, internal adoption of ChatGPT was 83%, even though we know that most pilots never make it into production (88% of AI pilots fail to reach production — but that’s not all on IT) and that barely 25% achieve the expected ROI (Will genAI businesses crash and burn?).
In doing so, Moderna is building a distributed cognitive layer that is directly operational and transforming the nature of work, operations, and human-machine collaboration.
This is not an experiment on the sidelines: it is a in-depth rearchitecture where technology no longer comes in as “support” but becomes part of the execution. Moderna is thus building a distributed, always-on operational cognitive layer that is transforming the very nature of work.
People + Digital: one position, one role, one vision
To embody this model, Moderna has merged its HR and IT departments, creating a new position of Chief People and Digital Technology Officer, which has been filled by Tracey Franklin, the former HR Director. This is not a “simple” HR/IT alignment (and anyone who has attempted this knows that it is anything but simple), but rather an attempt at integrated governance.
A quick personal aside.
Sometimes merging functions is the best way to break down silos, create synergies, and even put an end to turf wars between people who refuse to talk to each other. But such initiatives are not that common and often raise eyebrows in a world where everyone likes to protect their vertical power base.
There was a time when I held the positions of employee experience and client experience director . This initiative was based on the observation that the latter could not exist without the former and that marketing and HR were often unable to communicate with each other (Employee experience is not a support function but a business function… and Who really benefits from the employee experience?). In the mid-2010s, this made sense, but I don’t remember meeting anyone who held both positions, except for a VP at Adobe whom I met at the Unleash conference at the time.
It was for much the same reasons that I later combined the roles of People and Operations director (HR and Operations: the only viable duo for driving employee experience). Because the two didn’t talk to each other, because the essence of the employee experience lies in the design of work and operations, because you can’t reorganize anything without getting people on board (People Centric Operations: adapting work and operations to knowledge workers ), because a smooth work experience is a component of operational excellence, especially for knowledge workers, and perhaps because I had the perfect background for it (Is it heresy to put “people” and “operations” in the same sentence? and 2023 Employee Experience Barometer: the employee experience confronted with its contradictions).
Add to that the fact that work design is a key factor in engagement, even if very few people in HR give it any importance (Right fit, wrong fit).
In short, as my president at the time told me: “HR is finally talking to Ops, and since it’s the same person, it saves me from turf wars within the Executive Committee, since you’re presumably in agreement with yourself.“
All this tells you that the experience was extremely conclusive, but that the combination of roles did surprise a lot of people, as the two roles seemed so orthogonal, and it was seen as a courageous but risky move on the part of the business.
But what about Moderna? That’s really a step above. Merging HR and IT is, at first glance, highly unlikely, perhaps risky, and in any case very bold. What’s more, by entrusting the management of this new department to the former HR director rather than a tech profile, perhaps the message is that technology is at the service of people, not the other way around.
But in doing so, Moderna is radically changing the game. Instead of asking the traditional question of which technologies can support HR, it asks us how to design a hybrid, intelligent, and scalable organization.
Fewer jobs but a different working model
This transformation comes at a price: around 10% of the technology workforce has been cut, representing around 50 people, but new roles have also been created to support this hybrid model, and the business will continue to hire. It should be noted that, for once, it is technical profiles that are affected and not others, confirming that the role of technology is not primarily to reduce headcount, otherwise job cuts would have been made elsewhere. Moreover, there do not appear to have been any job cuts in HR, even though agents are supposed to answer junior-level questions.
GPT agents have replaced some of the roles held by junior staff, particularly in HR. This saves time, but raises the question: what will happen to the learning curve of young employees if AI takes over entry-level tasks? (Will AI replace juniors? The false debate that’s only the tip of the iceberg).
Other experiences have been more or less conclusive
What is happening at Moderna comes at a time when other recent experiences have raised many questions.
For example, IBM replaced several hundred people in HR with AI (IBM CEO: AI Replaced Hundreds of Human Resources Staff), promising that this would allow them to recruit more people in more strategic areas, without providing much further detail. Here, however, it is clear that HR was the first to suffer, highlighting the differences in philosophy between the two approaches.
Even more radical is the experience of Swedish unicorn Klarna, which first announced a massive replacement of customer service agents with AI before admitting that it had made a radical mistake in neglecting what they were losing in the process ([FR]Klarna shows us the limits of AI agents)…and then rehired them.
What seems to set Moderna apart is its ambition to redefine the business based on a mix of humans and AI, rather than simply digitizing what already exists in order to separate itself from humans. Doing better by keeping humans and adding technology rather than doing the same by removing humans.
A task-oriented model instead of a role-/function-oriented one
If we look at the consequences, or rather the underlying ideas, without dwelling on the simple merging of functions, Moderna is abandoning function-based thinking (Moderna Is Rewriting The Enterprise Playbook) in favor of viewing its organization as a series of tasks to be orchestrated in real time through human + AI configurations.
We are therefore no longer talking about automation, but rather the transition to a model driven by uses and objectives, capable of dynamically reconfiguring itself according to needs, data, and available resources.
It seems that Moderna has anticipated two topics already discussed on this blog: namely the limits of augmenting humans with AI alone (AI in the workplace: going beyond augmentation to actually transform) and the need to reinvent operations in knowledge work in order to adapt and reconfigure continuously by giving autonomy to actors rather than through a heavy and slow top-down logic (People Centric Operations: adapting work and operations to knowledge workers).
Questions that remain unanswered
The Moderna case is unique for now, and even though it seems to be working well for over a year, there are things that will be interesting to observe in the long term.
First, what about the standardization of human relationships if the majority of interactions are through AI?
Next, is there a risk of losing social ties and contextual intelligence in sensitive HR situations, for example?
Finally, are we moving toward an erosion of the collective if the individualization of tasks and tools takes precedence over team dynamics?
And above all, where do we learn the job when it is fragmented or entrusted to generative models? Transformation is not just organizational: it affects the skill lifecycle, a subject I have explored in the past (AI and talent management: a dynamic approach that promotes internal mobility).
Is the Moderna model transferable?
I often say that duplicating what works elsewhere is rarely a good idea. You can copy everything except what makes the difference, namely the context of a business at a given moment.
Moderna ticks many of the boxes for such a transformation: its technological DNA, its post-COVID agility, and its culture of experimentation make it fertile ground for this kind of movement.
But transposing the model elsewhere requires several things, including a solid AI infrastructure, a management culture open to questioning roles, and the ability to manage change accurately, without reducing people to “system users.”
The question is not so much whether others will do it, but rather how and at what cost to humans.
Bottom line
What Moderna is implementing is not simply technological optimization, but a reprogramming of the business around generative AI, which is seen as a native operational resource that works alongside humans, not in place of them.
The HR function is no longer a support function but, merged with IT, becomes the heart of a hybrid architecture, at the crossroads of talent, systems, and processes. It is a kind of laboratory for the future of work, where the challenge is no longer to align humans and technology or pit them against each other, but to make them cooperate intelligently.
Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
