The recently announced merger of Moderna’s HR and IT departments has been widely reported and has sparked numerous comments and questions, often with good reason. Logically, many people have focused solely on this merger, whereas in my opinion, the real issue is the reinvention of work orchestration with the help of AI.
But above all, there is what Moderna did not say or what journalists did not deem worth asking. Sometimes, decisions affecting organizational design have a deeper meaning than structural issues and reveal deeper trends or even tensions.
This is how I would classify the merger of HR and IT at Moderna (HR and IT merger: Moderna redesigns its organization for and with AI). At first glance, this is a very strong move: bringing together two distinct functions that often ignore each other completely to create an integrated whole dedicated to digital transformation and the integration of AI into internal processes. The biotech company wants to rethink its operating model to accelerate and automate by orchestrating the most relevant mix of humans and AI in real time and focusing no longer on tasks and roles but on workflow, taking inspiration from industry (People Centric Operations 2.0: how AI is reinventing knowledge work at scale).
However, in my opinion, this announcement contains some gray areas and unspoken assumptions. Not that Moderna is hiding anything but, in my opinion, they haven’t fully grasped the significance of what they’re doing or considered all the implications, but because it’s not only legitimate for them to keep certain trade secrets to themselves, but also because I understand why the business journalists they spoke to didn’t think it was useful to go into too much detail about the operational logic at the risk of losing their readers.
Everything that follows is therefore mere speculation, but it is the nature of gray areas to provoke a desire to shed light on them, each with their own lantern.
In short :
- The merger of the HR and IT departments at Moderna is a strong signal, aimed at integrating these traditionally separate functions to support digital transformation and the orchestration of work with AI.
- This reorganization highlights a common structural flaw in businesses: the lack of clear responsibility for the continuity, fluidity, and consistency of actual work, which is often left to operations without official recognition.
- Technology, and AI in particular, is presented as a lever for orchestration, but without clear modeling of workflows, it risks amplifying existing dysfunctions rather than resolving them.
- Operations, which in practice ensure the coordination of work, are conspicuously absent from Moderna’s discourse, raising questions about their place in the new organization.
- Moderna’s approach may be innovative, but as long as the transformations remain focused on functions rather than uses, the alignment between technology, organization, and day-to-day work will remain uncertain.
Convergence on paper
Although it may seem surprising at first glance, there is a certain logic in bringing HR and IT closer together, as these two functions are at the crossroads of all work experiences. One drives policies, skills, and career paths, while the other provides the systems, tools, and digital infrastructure. Together, they largely structure the framework within which employees operate.
But this convergence says nothing about how work is actually done. It does not guarantee that tools are designed for their intended use, nor does it say anything about the actual sequence of actions, validations, trade-offs, and ongoing adjustments required to produce, cooperate, and make decisions, or about work design in general. It therefore does not answer the question of who is responsible for the continuity of work, its fluidity, its intelligibility by those involved and, ultimately, its effectiveness.
Work as an operational chain, not as a stack of functions
In most businesses, work is designed as a juxtaposition of functions. Each department defines its objectives, tools, and processes, often without considering how they fit together with those of other departments. As a result, work becomes a chain of invisible adjustments made by employees themselves to bring coherence to work practices that are designed vertically but whose reality is most often cross-functional.
Work is known to be static in a silo, whereas the reality is that it is a cross-functional journey through silos, which is not without consequences for digital work environments (What (digital) workplace experience for your employees ?).
Instead of a fluid and therefore efficient work experience, teams experience chaotic sequences, decisions disconnected from reality, inconsistent user journeys, and validation circuits that slow everything down.
And no one in the traditional business structure is explicitly in charge of orchestrating all of this.
HR and IT are essential functions, but they are not orchestrators
Moderna places the concept of orchestration at the heart of its approach, but it must be acknowledged that, in their traditional sense, HR manages policies, compliance, and talent growth, while IT manages infrastructure, security, and tools. Both are essential, but neither is responsible for ensuring business continuity, i.e., the smooth, consistent, and understandable flow between the various components, actions, and stages of the business
Each manages a building block, but neither takes responsibility for the system as a flow, and this invisible burden falls very concretely on the teams in the field.
Operations, the informal guarantor of continuity
In reality, it is operations and local managers who take charge of this coordination, without any real mandate. They are the ones who fix what has not been thought through, who bridge the gaps between processes that do not fit together, between decisions that do not come at the right time, between tools that do not communicate with each other.
They are the ones who absorb the consequences of poorly thought-out or poorly implemented transformations.
And yet, when it comes to implementing transformations, their voices are often unheard, their constraints are not reported, and their experience is never taken into account in the decision-making process.
The HR/IT merger at Moderna, at least as it has been presented publicly and as far as we know, is no exception.
AI: symptom or solution?
AI is at the heart of Moderna’s approach, with the guiding principle of building a function capable of automating, orchestrating, and accelerating (Moderna Is Rewriting The Enterprise Playbook) in a comprehensive, consistent, and scalable way.
AI is therefore presented as the invisible lever that is supposed to take over what functions were previously able to manage.
But for AI to orchestrate, the flows must first be designed, clarified and modeled. Once again, technology, and AI is the perfect symbol of this, only brings two things: speed and scale. If we digitize and automate a dysfunctional organization, we will only make it dysfunctional faster and on a larger scale. Automating poorly designed processes and formalizing informal practices only increases operational workload and tensions instead of reducing them.
The second risk is that of automated, opaque, unchallengeable decisions that are disconnected from business priorities. AI without operational roots is like a conductor without a score.
Who are the forgotten ones in Moderna’s narrative?
Current literature on AI discusses many functions, including HR, IT, legal, and general management, and Moderna is no exception, focusing on the first two. We talk, quite rightly, about jobs, skills, and the future of work, but almost never about those who experience work in its most concrete form: operations.
They are the ones who act as a buffer or even an adjustment variable between the organization on paper and the work as it is done on the ground, and they are conspicuous by their absence in the story we are told.
Was operations management consulted? Involved? Will it be dissolved into the new HR/IT function? Or will it simply disappear?
But the fact that the name is never mentioned gives us cause for concern: the victim of AI is neither HR, nor IT, nor even employment, but operations.
What Moderna says and the gray areas that remain
Perhaps Moderna is paving the way, and perhaps this merger marks the beginning of a more fluid, systemic, and usage-oriented approach. But let’s recognize that, for now, it says nothing about the reality of the work and operations, nor about those who carry it out and experience it.
A gray area therefore remains, raising many questions: how does it work, what will happen to day-to-day work, how will it all materialize in very concrete terms, and will AI be solely responsible for operations?
Bottom line
What this decision reveals is not simply a choice of governance or rationalization, but that technology is often used to avoid thinking about work design and work management, or even to dispense with thinking about them altogether.
As long as we continue to think about transformations in terms of functions,
because despite all the talk about flows and the desire to break free from functions, it is around two of them that all the discourse is built, as long as AI is seen as a generic response that is difficult to understand how it is rooted in reality, we will continue to question alignment and have legitimate doubts.
Moderna may be opening up a new path, but for it to become a model, we will need to go far beyond structure and explain, if this has been done as part of this reorganization, the creation of a new capacity to see, understand, and orchestrate work as it is experienced.
Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
