He Came to an AI Event
to Prove AI Can't Replace Him.

I expected AI in HR. I got a pitch from 2004.

His message, stripped down, was this: the working environment is complex now — flexible working arrangements are law, compliance is heavier — so you need him as your HR consultant. That was the whole thing. At an event about AI, a man was on stage explaining why the world is too complicated to handle without him.

I don't remember his name. I want to be fair about that — it isn't an insult, it's the review. Nothing he said stuck, because nothing he said belonged to this decade.

Then there was the deck. I'll be honest — this is the part I can't stand. It looked like lecture notes handed to students, not a talk for a room of professionals: text boxes dragged onto blank slides, and that was the design. At an AI event. There are half a dozen AI tools now that turn a rough outline into a clean, beautiful deck in minutes. He reached for none of them. If you won't use the very thing the event is about, why are you the one holding the microphone?

At the end, he offered to share his slides with us. A kind gesture. But here is what actually went through my head: my AI agent can read the entire policy — every clause of the flexible working law, every compliance line — summarise it for me in minutes, then advise me on my exact situation. Why would I need his?

The shift was never AI alone. It's AI plus robots.

Here is what actually stayed with me, and it has nothing to do with his slides.

For a while I told myself a comforting joke: if I can't compete in AI, I'll go back to farming. Everyone needs food. Let the machines have the spreadsheets — I'll take the soil.

Then I watched what China is doing in robotics.

AI alone was never the whole story. The real shift is AI plus robots. Software came for the desk jobs first because they were the cheapest to automate — no hardware, no hands. But the hands are arriving. Look at the pace of humanoid and industrial robots coming out of China and the farm stops being a hiding place. AI + robot doesn't only come for the analyst. It comes for the fundamental jobs — the physical ones we assumed were safe precisely because they were physical.

So the honest question is not "how do we manage the complexity." It is "what do I actually do now." I sit with that question. The speaker did not look like he had ever asked it.

HR is not a welfare department.

Which brings me back to HR.

There is no point building a practice around managing redundancy — around how to gently keep hold of the people the work no longer needs. Let me say the unpopular part plainly. Our job is to give people the resources to transform: the tools, the training, the runway, and an honest picture of where this is heading. That is the responsibility, and we take it seriously.

Making sure every single person succeeds with those resources is not the responsibility. It cannot be. That is not cruelty — it is the difference between opening the door and carrying everyone through it.

An HR function that spends its energy keeping redundant seats warm is optimising the wrong thing. The energy belongs on transformation: who can move, to what, how fast, and what we put in their hands to get there.

The tell

By the end I understood exactly what the talk was. It was not about AI in HR. It was a man at an AI event making the case that AI cannot replace him. Dressed up as expertise, it was really just defence.

And that is the tell. The people most eager to explain why they are irreplaceable are usually the ones who have not looked up yet. The competition is no longer the consultant down the road. It is AI for the thinking, and AI + robots for the doing. You don't answer that by selling complexity. You answer it by moving.

Published by IMA AI — July 2026. I invest in AI for HR, and we build AI-grounded systems for real operations — because the point of AI at work is not to defend anyone's job, it's to transform how the work gets done.