Editorial
White Paper
The Future of Leadership Development: AI-Driven Manager Enablement
A European telecommunications company recently learned a lesson many leadership teams are still missing. It introduced an AI “expert” into customer service and expected productivity to rise. The operating model remained unchanged with roles, workflows and escalation paths staying the same. The result was a modest 5% productivity gain.
Then, the company changed its approach. It invested most of its rollout budget in redesigning how humans and AI would work together. It clarified trust thresholds, escalation paths, training, role expectations and human oversight. Under this scenario, productivity rose by 30% as people learned to effectively partner with AI.
The story illustrates that AI transformation is primarily about people, capabilities and work design. Technological infrastructure is important, but the value comes from the human systems that define how work is structured, how decisions are made, how managers lead, how skills are built and how trust is maintained. In fact, organizations taking a technology-focused approach to AI are 1.6 times more likely to fail at realizing strong AI ROI than those that design for the human systems around it.
This is why the Chief People Officer (CPO) role is entering a new chapter I call the age of the Chief People & Performance Officer (CPPO). I am not predicting a title change (titles tend to lag reality anyway). The more important shift here is in the mandate. Forward-thinking CPOs will increasingly need to think and operate like CPPOs because enterprise performance now runs directly through the systems they are uniquely positioned to shape.
Table of Contents
- Why the Levers of Performance Have Changed
- What Actually Moves Performance
- Three Moves for the CPPO-Minded CPO
- A Board-Level Question
Why the Levers of Performance Have Changed
The CPO role has been described for years as moving from administrative HR to strategic people leadership. That evolution is still critical, but it no longer goes far enough. Today’s CPO is being pulled closer to enterprise performance because the levers of performance have changed. In an AI-enabled organization, performance depends less on individual effort alone and more on the design of the system around people. That system includes workflows, job architecture, skills, management routines, technology adoption, culture, incentives and governance.
Recent research points us in the same direction. The World Economic Forum’s Chief People Officers’ Outlook found that reviewing organizational structure and job design is now the top workforce strategy priority for CPOs, cited by 74% of respondents. Upskilling and reskilling, along with supporting workforce deployment of AI and automation, followed closely behind at 70%.
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index found that organizational factors such as culture, manager support and talent practices account for 67% of reported AI impact. In other words, AI value is determined largely by the environment in which people use it. And that environment is precisely what the CPO’s mandate is built to shape.
The market is already showing early signs of this shift. Moderna merged its HR and technology functions under a Chief People and Digital Technology Officer, with the company reframing workforce planning and technology planning as a broader exercise in “work planning.” ServiceNow has created a Chief People and AI Enablement Officer role, explicitly connecting people leadership with AI adoption, reskilling and workforce transformation. Zapier expanded its Chief People Officer's remit to include AI transformation, with the people team now asking every function to reimagine how work gets done with AI. Microsoft’s former Chief People Officer, Kathleen Hogan, moved into a strategy and transformation role during the company’s AI-era reinvention.
These moves suggest that the people function is being pulled closer to the design of work, technology adoption and enterprise performance.
What Actually Moves Performance
Performance is often discussed as if it is primarily an individual attribute. But anyone who has worked inside a complex organization knows that performance is rarely that simple. A talented employee loses momentum when the workflow around them is clumsy. A strong team slows down when decision rights are unclear. A well-intentioned manager cannot make AI adoption stick if the organization has not provided training, guardrails or a shared view of what good use looks like. A company that measures AI usage instead of AI outcomes will conflate activity with value.
This is where the CPPO mindset becomes useful. A traditional people leader might ask, “Are our employees engaged?” A CPPO-minded leader asks, “Are our people systems helping the organization perform?”
The shift isn't about making the job colder or more financially driven, but it does make the role more consequential. Engagement, culture, talent management and employee experience still matter deeply, but they matter because they are part of the organization’s performance architecture. Trust affects adoption, manager capability affects execution, skills affect speed and culture affects whether people learn, adapt and speak up when something is not working.
Three Moves for the CPPO-Minded CPO
The first move is to redesign work before measuring productivity. Too many organizations are deploying AI into existing workflows and expecting transformation. That is how companies get shallow efficiency, hidden rework and “AI workslop.” CPPO-minded leaders are central to work redesign. They should help business leaders answer:
- Which work should remain human-led?
- Which work should be AI-assisted?
- Which work can be AI-run within clear boundaries?
- Where does human judgment matter most?
- Where are handoffs, approvals, and role definitions slowing the work down?
In short, this is about operating model design.
The second move is to treat managers as transformation infrastructure. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report identified manager support as one of the strongest predictors of meaningful AI adoption. Employees whose manager actively supports their team’s use of AI are dramatically more likely to say AI has transformed how work gets done.
That finding should change how leadership teams think about managers. Managers are the translation layer between strategy and execution. They shape whether AI is trusted, ignored, misused or embedded into better ways of working. They clarify quality standards, coach judgment, notice anxiety and turn enterprise ambition into daily behavior. If managers are burned out, unclear or underprepared, AI transformation will stall. Consequently, CPOs must treat manager capability as a performance investment, not simply a leadership development program.
The third move is to connect capability, culture and trust to business outcomes. The CPO dashboard needs to evolve. Engagement, retention and time-to-fill still matter, but they are no longer enough. Metrics such as workflow cycle time, rework, time-to-competency, internal mobility into critical roles, manager AI enablement and whether redesigned roles are producing better outcomes should be considered too.
This is where partnership with the rest of the C-Suite, especially the CFO and CIO, is essential. The CFO brings discipline around value, and the CIO brings technology, data and platform expertise. The CPO brings an understanding of work, human behavior, leadership, trust and capability. None of these executives can solve the performance equation alone.
A Board-Level Question
The CPO title may endure, but the expectations attached to it are changing. The next generation of CPOs will need to be fluent in business value creation, organizational design, AI adoption, manager effectiveness, workforce planning and responsible governance. That is the essence of the CPPO mindset.
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The gap between the telecom company's 5% and its 30% was a question of who designed the work and how well. In an AI-enabled enterprise, performance is designed through people, work, technology and trust. Whether the person in the CPO seat is equipped to lead that design is now a question about the performance of the whole enterprise, and it belongs on the board's agenda.
Editor's Note: Chief People Officers are juggling multiple priorities. What other headwinds are they facing?
- Pro-Worker AI Is a Business Strategy, Not a Moral Imperative — When the Brookings Institute makes the business case that pro-worker AI is the smart move, will businesses pay attention?
- If We Want AI to Help HR, HR Has to Join the Conversation — Engineers are designing AI systems to address problems that are rooted in the very systems HR understands best.
- Employees as 'Lower-Value Human Capital': When Fads Impact Culture — The language C-suite executives use to announce workforce cuts reveals whether their AI strategy is built on evidence or wishful thinking.
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