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Key Takeaways
- Traditional HR tech fails because it doesn’t deliver actionable daily insights.
- AI must empower managers with context‑rich people data, not replace them.
HR needs a reset. Let me explain.
Over the past decade, HR departments have spent billions on platforms, processes and programs promising transformation. Yet at many organizations, the experience on the ground still looks the same.
Managers are overwhelmed. Teams feel disengaged. And too often, “strategic” HR initiatives fail somewhere between the C-suite and the frontline.
That disconnect is HR’s “last mile” problem.
Chief human resources officers (CHROs) and their teams excel at crafting strategy and standing up systems. But HR hasn’t moved the needle where it matters most: enabling frontline managers to drive results through better decisions.
If CHROs are serious about impact, they must extend their reach and empower those managers by closing the gap between strategy and execution. AI can help make that happen.
Here’s why HR stands at a crossroads — and how it can fix its last-mile problem.
The last mile is the frontline manager
For organizations serious about results, managers — the people on the frontlines, not in HR — are the linchpin.
They account for about 70% of the variance in team engagement. When managers thrive, teams are more productive, profitable and resilient. When they struggle, disengagement ripples through the org.
And many managers are struggling. Manager engagement fell below 30% in 2024, while overall employee engagement dropped to about 20%, costing an estimated $438 billion in lost productivity.
Why? Managers are being asked to do more than ever. They now oversee twice as many people as five years ago while dealing with hybrid teams and constant change — often with little training or support.
The healthcare sector, which my company serves, offers a clear example. A large study of frontline hospital managers found that broader spans of control are linked to worse work-life balance and higher intent to quit.
Managers represent the last mile of corporate performance — where strategy meets execution. And despite decades of HR effort, they’re in trouble.
Why dashboards and legacy HR tech can’t fix the last mile problem
If you look at how HR spends, it’s easy to see how we got here.
Big human capital management rollouts, employee self-service portals and digital workflows were designed to make HR more efficient. They mostly succeeded, but they did little to improve the quality of managers’ decisions about people and work.
Take performance management systems, which report on how employees are doing but rarely shape better outcomes. On their own, these tools have little influence on how managers hire, coach, allocate talent or respond to signs of burnout and attrition.
To be fair, people analytics teams have made progress getting better data into managers’ hands. Still, organizations that do this well remain the exception, not the rule.
The challenge is that people analytics tools are built for HR, not frontline managers. They don’t reflect what leaders need to make better daily decisions.
Those managers don’t want another dashboard. They want context and confidence. That means being able to explore what their options for the best people decisions truly are, the potential consequences of their decisions, what others have done, and what the leadership team has prescribed — all backed by hard data, not mere intuition.
Static charts and quarterly reports don’t deliver that.
For CHROs, closing this last-mile gap requires bold action — with a little help from AI.
Step 1: Reset HR’s North Star
HR departments need a new mission — one bigger than compliance, record-keeping and cost-tracking. That North Star isn’t just talent impact… it’s business results.
HR must become outward-looking. Instead of simply reporting on employee performance, how can it drive productivity? Managers — not HR’s internal needs — must be the focal point of its delivery model. That means working backward from a day in the life of a manager. What can help them make better talent decisions every day?
Step 2: Rethink HR’s relationship with AI
Today, CHROs have a golden opportunity. AI is changing not just how their department operates but also the nature of work itself — and they’re at the crux of that shift.
Fortunately, many CHROs get it. In a recent survey of HR leaders on 2026 priorities, harnessing AI to revolutionize their work topped the list.
The key is ensuring AI doesn’t become another way for HR to optimize efficiency while staying in its traditional lane. Instead, HR must view it as a true management system that extends strategic intent into everyday people decisions.
Think of AI as a new nervous system for the company, one that puts an end to the “telephone game” that dilutes talent strategy as it moves from CEO to manager. AI enables a direct flow of insights up and down throughout the organization.
That gives managers real-time information to make better decisions — for example, contextualizing Jira or Salesforce data to assess employees’ contributions and inform pay and incentive choices.
Step 3: Be the bridge builder in your org
But AI isn’t simply a switch you turn on. Making it a company’s management system requires breaking down organizational and data silos. The CHRO needs to form strategic partnerships with the CFO and the CIO.
When HR, finance and IT work together, companies can combine people data, business data and AI-powered analytics to surface real insights. For example, we worked with a luxury retailer that integrated HR data with point-of-sale systems across hundreds of locations. Leaders could see which store managers’ training correlated with higher sales and scale that program companywide.
Blending people and business data is key to improving corporate performance, but it requires overcoming challenges around privacy, security, governance and entrenched ways of working.
Ultimately, this moment demands HR rise to the occasion — moving beyond administration to connect people across the org with the data and insights needed to drive business impact.
Step 4: Give managers tools that actually serve their needs, not yours
But of course, insights mean little if frontline managers lack the tools to understand and use them.
Usability and accessibility are paramount. Dense spreadsheets — inscrutable to almost anyone but analysts — aren’t the answer. Managers need on-demand, data-backed, strategy-driven answers.
The latest AI-powered analytics let managers ask questions in plain language inside Excel, Teams, Slack and other workforce apps — and get real-time answers and recommendations.
Even better, a manager doesn’t have to be a data analytics expert to use these tools. They democratize workforce insights by providing: direct answers to questions like “Who on my team is at risk of leaving?”, early warnings and concrete guidance for tough moments.
By deploying AI to close the gap between strategy and execution, HR can achieve the business transformation that has long eluded it. Ultimately, solving the last mile problem empowers not just frontline managers but also CHROs. That gives the CHRO new clout in a world where business results and business impact mean everything.
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Paul Rubenstein