“IT will become the HR department for your digital workforce.”
This quote comes from Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. It’s certainly an effective punchline, perfectly tailored for a conference, but it’s also revealing. Because when we talk about the digital workforce, we end up forgetting about the workforce itself, the one that is not generative, not scalable, the one that doubts, adapts and struggles.
But while we are organizing ourselves to manage AI as employees, who is still thinking about how we design human work?
In short:
- The integration of IT and HR, as at Moderna, reveals a paradigm shift where AI agents are treated as employees, with a management logic similar to that of human resources.
- While AI benefits from rigorous orchestration, human employees evolve in complex and unstructured systems, forcing them to compensate for organizational shortcomings.
- Rethinking work in terms of information flows, decision-making and collaboration is essential if AI is to truly contribute to efficiency without replicating existing flaws.
- The digital transformation of businesses will only be relevant if it is accompanied by a rethinking of the role of HR, which must become a designer of work, not just an administrative manager.
- The main challenge remains the design of human work: without reflection on its organization, AI will only accelerate the dysfunctions of an already strained system.
IT, the new HR for smart agents
At Moderna, Huang’s statement is no longer just a prediction (HR and IT merger: Moderna redesigns its organization for and with AI). HR and IT have merged under the responsibility of the Chief People and Digital Technology Officer, an HR director who has become the driver of the transformation. This is not just a change in governance, it is a paradigm shift: IT no longer delivers tools, it orchestrates work with AI (Moderna Is Rewriting The Enterprise Playbook).
More than 3,000 GPT agents are deployed throughout the organization to interact with employees, assist them, and augment them. They are selected, trained, assigned, and updated just as you would with employees.
In other words, we are deploying a near-HR logic for machines that businesses do not always apply with the same commitment and enthusiasm to their employees. This is not necessarily the fault of HR, but also of the role and resources given to them.
Orchestrated AI and disorganized humans
The contrast is striking.
While AI benefits from end-to-end management, human employees evolve in a complicated organization made up of a stack of poorly articulated tools, poorly organized decision-making processes (The organizational complication: the #1 irritant of the employee experience), low-value tasks whose sole purpose is to enable them to combat organizational debt (How to Tackle the Biggest Threat to Your Team’s Growth). Nothing is orchestrated; everything depends on their ability to muddle through and pick up the pieces without the organization giving them the necessary resources to do so (People Centric Operations: adapting work and operations to knowledge workers ).
And yet we know that rethinking work in terms of information flows, decision-making and collaboration, as Moderna envisages, can be a game-changer, provided that we are fully aware of the scale of the revolution this represents before we embark on it (Thinking of work as a flow: appealing, but is it realistic?).
AI can play a key role here: streamlining, flagging issues, and prioritizing, but only if the organization has already done the design work by involving operations (HR/IT and the reality of working at Moderna: the unspoken truths of a reorganization), which are conspicuously absent from Moderna’s narrative, for example.
Otherwise, AI only amplifies existing flaws, reproducing the system’s defects and absurdities, but faster and on a larger scale than before. It gives the impression of performance on the surface, but leaves the chaos intact.
Conversely, a well-thought-out flow-based work organization no longer leaves humans in chaos. It restores coherence and clarity, and gives meaning back to the efforts made. It is this work infrastructure that must be built so that AI can truly enhance humans, but this will not happen without a prior transformation (AI in the workplace: going beyond augmentation to actually transform).
The reality behind the punchline
What Jensen Huang is telling us without saying it is that work is becoming a matter of orchestration, and that this orchestration is now better designed for machines than for humans. Because it is easier to model, because machines obey and do not demand recognition, meaning, or management. No variability, no feelings, no questions—that’s what separates machines from individuals.
But an organization that knows how to orchestrate its AI without knowing how to orchestrate human work is definitely flawed and very short-sighted.
A challenge for the future of HR
It is not IT that must become HR, but HR that must become truly operational, and not just at the level of HR operations (Is it heresy to put “people” and “operations” in the same sentence?). Not as executors, but as those who design the work.
If they don’t do it, others will do it for them and replace them.
From skills management to workflow design, from compliance to performance, from administrative support to interaction architecture.
But when we talk about transformation, we need to look at the reality behind the announcements:
“Merging HR and tech may appear forward-thinking, but unless it is accompanied by a fundamental redesign of how power, trust, and accountability are distributed within the organization, it risks doing little more than accelerating legacy inefficiencies. This is not transformation. It is optimization of a model already showing signs of strategic irrelevance.” (Why Moderna Merged Its Tech and HR Departments—And Why That’s Not the Transformation You Think It Is).
If HR wants to regain its place, it is in the work production system.
Bottom line
The real issue is not that IT is becoming HR or vice versa, but that too few people are still seriously thinking about human work.
We orchestrate AI, but we still too often leave humans to improvise.
Rethinking work in terms of flows means breaking out of this chaos and stopping viewing employees as a buffer system that fills gaps, absorbs inconsistencies, and improvises to compensate for system failures.
Instead, it means designing a fluid, intelligible organization that is adapted to the reality on the ground and not just to the logic of the tools. In this context, AI can help, but only in an organization that has been designed for this purpose, not just by slapping technology onto an obsolete work organization (People Centric Operations 2.0: How AI is reinventing knowledge work at scale).
AI is only a lever; the real driving force is the willingness to think about work for what it is: a dynamic combination of human and technological interactions.
The future of work will be orchestrated and, above all, designed with and for those who experience it every day.
Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
Related articles:
HR/IT and the reality of working at Moderna: the unspoken truths of a reorganization
HR and IT merger: Moderna redesigns its organization for and with AI
People Centric Operations 2.0: how AI is reinventing knowledge work at scale
AI and HR: a revolution searching for direction
People are everywhere in the workplace, but HR is nowhere when it comes to work
Productive tensions or sterile tensions? A reading of the Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends 2025 report
