Meta started laying off 8,000 people on Wednesday. Another 6,000 open roles got cancelled. 7,000 employees are being moved into AI teams.
All during a quarter of record $56 billion in revenue, alongside $145 billion in AI infrastructure spend this year alone.
Every leader I'm working with, on both sides of the border, is processing some version of the same question: "What does AI mean for us?"
As a Fractional CPO in the room across multiple companies, here are my thoughts from that seat.
The story underneath the story
The Meta story is about layoffs on the surface. Underneath, it's about which function is built to lead what's next.
8,000 exiting. 7,000 redeployed into AI. Managers flattened. Severance structured. Regulatory exposure managed across dozens of jurisdictions. Every remaining employee asked to rethink their job using tools that didn't exist 18 months ago.
That's not a technology problem. It's a change management problem.
The function best equipped to lead this isn't the one that owns the tech. It's the one that owns change. That's HR.
HR's job in AI isn't to dictate what people create with it. HR's job — in partnership with IT, Legal, and the business — is to build the enablement and transformation system: the guardrails, data zones, and governance that let every employee use AI to reinvent their own work.
Three things to think about
1. AI failure looks like adoption failure, not technology failure
BCG just published the largest CHRO study ever run: 7,115 leaders, 115 countries. 90% of CEOs say AI will reshape their industry. 38% of HR leaders rate it highly relevant to theirs today.
That 52-point gap is what separates buying the technology from getting humans to actually use it. Enablement is the work.
2. The regulatory exposure is already HR's
Ontario's Working for Workers Four Act now requires AI disclosure in job postings. Quebec Law 25 governs AI processing of personal data. Plus the EU AI Act, NYC Local Law 144, Colorado SB 24-205, and Mobley v. Workday on vendor liability as employer "agents."
If a regulator or candidate asks "how did this decision get made?" the CIO isn't the one answering. If HR doesn't build the playbook — what data goes where, who uses what, what gets human review — Legal and IT will build it, and HR will execute it. No thanks.
3. The CHRO seat at the AI table isn't given. You claim it.
Research cited at the Fortune Workforce Innovation Summit: a CEO change leads to roughly 70% of CHROs eventually being replaced. The CHROs who help build the AI enablement system in the next 18 months will be the ones the next CEO inherits, not the ones they replace.
To be clear
I'm not saying HR owns all of AI strategy. CEOs do. CIOs/CTOs own the tech. CFOs own the capital.
HR should own the enablement and work-related transformation system that lets the rest of the company use AI to do their best work.
Without that, AI capex is just expensive software and tokens nobody trusts. With it, every employee becomes a builder.
Navigating an AI-driven restructure or transformation? Let's talk.