The rhetoric is well-rehearsed and omnipresent in every business: “people are our most valuable asset“, “human capital is at the heart of our strategy”, and now, even in the age of AI, “it’s our employees who will make the difference”. These phrases are repeated in speeches, annual reports, company seminars, and employer branding.
But behind the slogans, the reality tells a different story. When we look at how staff, budgets, and priorities are allocated, we see that businesses devote far more resources to their IT systems than to their employees. We take care of IT, we strengthen cybersecurity, we hire more service providers to ensure that everything runs smoothly, and tomorrow we will pamper AI agents. But in the meantime, HR departments continue to be understaffed, overworked, and criticized for failing to cover all the issues for which they are officially responsible.
In short:
- Businesses strongly value the importance of human capital, but the resources actually allocated to human resources remain low compared to those dedicated to IT.
- The HR function is overburdened, under-resourced, and often perceived as a cost center, which prevents it from fulfilling its strategic missions.
- Conversely, the IT function benefits from significant human and financial resources, as it is seen as a direct lever for performance and innovation.
- The emergence of artificial intelligence is accentuating this imbalance, with AI agents being welcomed and supported more carefully than new human employees.
- This contrast between rhetoric and reality raises an organizational choice: either accept the priority given to systems, or truly equip the HR function with the means to put people at the center.
An HR function that is always playing catch-up
There are regular complaints that the HR function is under-resourced. Professionals themselves acknowledge this: they are asked to deal with engagement, employee experience, and the transformation of work, while also handling recruitment, training, and administration. Historically, the function originated in personnel management and legal compliance. Development, mobility, and transformation were gradually added, but without ever aligning the resources.
The result: a function that is criticized for not doing enough on strategic issues, and which always responds with the same answer: “we don’t have enough people”. This is increasingly felt by employees who do not see HR as a partner in their career (The impact of HR questioned by French executives). And if this situation persists, it is no coincidence. In many businesses, HR is seen primarily as a cost. Not a necessary cost, not a productive cost, but a cost nonetheless.
Investing in people is not seen as an investment: it is a burden, sometimes tolerated but rarely valued.
Investing in people is not seen as an investment: it is a burden, sometimes tolerated but rarely valued.
Ultimately, this should even make us question the need to split the function to distinguish between administrative and complianceissues and investment in human capital, but that is not (yet) the subject of this post.
IT, a productive cost
Conversely, IT is also expensive, and everyone is aware of this, but it is not perceived in the same way. A dollar spent on IT is rarely seen as an unproductive cost: it is a production cost, a prerequisite for efficiency, a performance lever, and sometimes even a promise of innovation. In short, it is a cost that produces, a “useful” cost.
This is how the IT function has gained its staff, its service providers, and its legitimacy to mobilize larger budgets. We willingly tolerate its heavy weight in the organization because we associate it with immediate performance, productivity, and even the very survival of the business.
When AI becomes a full-fledged colleague
This imbalance is reflected in current discourse on artificial intelligence. We are told that we must “integrate” AI agents as colleagues, see them and treat them as employees, and think about their role and place in workflows. This discourse is not just an educational metaphor: it reflects a new reality, where we treat the arrival of an AI agent as we would a new employee.
This presents us with a paradox: by repeating that AI should be treated like a colleague, we find that we sometimes take better care of machines than we do of humans (IT is becoming the HR department for machines, but who is taking care of the humans?). And this is not just an impression, it is embedded in the very structure of organizations.
An HR function reduced to the bare minimum
The figures speak for themselves. HR accounts for an average of 1.7% of the workforce, or approximately one HR employee for every 60 employees (How Many HR Staff Members Is Best?), a ratio that can reach 2.57% on average, or one HR employee for every 37 employees, with variations depending on the size of the organization (higher in small structures, lower in large ones) (70 Pivotal HR Statistics for 2025).
In other words, the capacity for support is structurally weak. HR spends more time dealing with administrative tasks than working on the quality of work or the employee experience, and transformation ambitions come up against the wall of limited resources.
Conversely, while it is easy to guess that the IT function is anything but modest, we certainly underestimate the scale of the situation. The average ratio of internal IT staff is approximately 1 for every 27 employees, with variations depending on the size of the organization: According to Workforce.com, the average ratio of internal IT staff is approximately 1 for every 27 employees, with variations depending on the size of the organization: 1 for every 40 in very large companiesand 1 for every 18 in organizations with fewer than 500 employees (Ratio of IT Staff to Employees).
These figures, even when considered in isolation, are already significant: businesses devote up to three times more resources to their systems than to supporting their employees, and I am only talking about the “basics” of what we mean by “putting people at the center” (Putting people at the center: much more than care).
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. These benchmarks only take into account internal staff, but a large part of IT is outsourced: IT management, user support, offshore development, cybersecurity, etc. In many large organizations, there are at least as many service providers as internal IT employees. If we include them, the ratio drops to 1 in 20 to 1 in 27 employees in large groups, and 1 in 10 to 1 in 13 in SMEs that are most dependent on outsourcing.
An organizational imbalance
Whether or not this contrast is justified, it cannot fail to raise at least some questions or prompt some reflection.
On the one hand, there are a handful of overworked HR staff who struggle to do anything other than keep up with day-to-day administrative tasks. On the other, there is a visible and invisible army of technicians, service providers, and partners whose job is to ensure that the machines are running, the infrastructure is working, and the software is deployed correctly.
The imbalance is such that, mechanically, businesses devote far more resources to their tools than to their people. This is not a question of ideological choice but of resource allocation: systems are overprotected and employees are under-supported.
Once again, this is understandable and explainable, and in a way, I don’t have a problem with it. However, it’s important to be able to explain it clearly when an employee (they’re not blind) expresses surprise. When you see that it takes just a few hours to resolve an IT issue but several days to get an answer to a basic HR question, it inevitably prompts feedback from employees, and the worst thing would be to sidestep the issue when confronted with them.
I once asked this question during a dinner with friends, and the answer was unanimous. Even the members of the HR department had no objection: “If that’s the case, then the business can’t function and move forward without IT“. I’ll leave you to draw your own bottom line about the image of the HR department.
A discourse that no longer reflects reality
Indeed, we hear everywhere that “people are what matter most” and that “human capital is our most important resource,” but the figures tell a different story. In some businesses, there are up to twice as many people working on IT systems as there are dealing with employees.
There comes a time when we need to be clear. Either we accept that what matters most is not people but the business and the tools and machines that support it, in which case we should stop the double talk and own up to that choice. Or we can decide that we really want to put people at the center, and then we need to give HR the resources it needs to play its role fully because, for the moment, even if many of the criticisms are justified, it is not being given the means to do better.
Bottom line: an organization for machines, not humans
As Peter Drucker reminded us, “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” but it still has to be there to prepare the meal.
Today, businesses are investing in ways to ensure the robustness of their infrastructure, monitor their systems and, tomorrow, integrate AI agents as we already do for any critical tool. But at the same time, they are leaving their HR functions to operate with derisory ratios that condemn their ambitions to remain mere slogans.
If they continue down this path, they will build organizations where machines are integrated, monitored, and carefully supported, while humans continue to evolve in poorly designed environments, with little attention paid to design, organization, and the work experience. This is the promise of a business perfectly equipped to manage fleets of intelligent agents, but still incapable of seriously managing its own employees.
We can already see the trajectory: tomorrow, it will be easier to integrate and supervise an AI agent than to welcome a new employee. The former will be entitled to permanent support, while the latter will continue to depend on an overburdened HR department.
The question is therefore no longer whether “people matter most”, because everyone already says so, but whether we finally want to align our resources with this rhetoric. Because if people matter, then HR must have the size, legitimacy, and resources of IT. And if this is not the case, businesses must have the courage to take the opposite stance and say that systems, business, and performance come before employees.
But we have to choose. As long as we continue to proclaim “people first” while investing twice as much in machines as in human support, we will remain caught in a double discourse that undermines trust and discredits any attempts at transformation. Organizational honesty and trust, ultimately, start there.
Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
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