“I don't always want to say I work in HR”.

Mindy Honcoop has over 20 years of experience building HR progressive people teams and innovative programming that she’s proud of. And yet, she sometimes feels uncomfortable revealing to people what she does for a living. Raise your hand if you need no further explanation.

"There's still the stigma that HR is policing or they're fluffy, that there's no value add."

But frustrating as this reality is, Mindy believes that the conditions that created this stigma are finally changing - largely because of the technology we can now leverage. We can automate the administrative and transactional weight that keeps HR buried in process instead of people. Data that used to take forever to sift through can be synthesized in seconds, freeing HR up for real discussions about what to do next.

By harnessing the right tools, HR folks can focus on the things that only humans can truly do: discerning judgment, empathetic coaching, change management, the complex psychology of humans trying to build something together. 

"Now is the time," she says. "The manual stuff that has kept us from being able to do all of these things can go away…and do them even better." But building bespoke internal apps and using AI to make our tools talk to each other only gets us so far. When everything is automated, HR gets to blow everyone away with the incredibly valuable “softer” skills we’ve spent our entire careers honing. 

The real question isn’t whether HR leaders will step up to the plate. It’s how quickly we’ll be swinging for the fences.

Telling a Different Story

The easy narrative around HR and AI sorts people into two buckets: the ones who are excited, and the ones who are scared. Mindy finds that framing mostly useless.

"There's a continuum of feelings and emotion," she says, "and even with early adopters, you can't assume that they're only excited and happy. When you really dig down, there is a sense of different levels of uncertainty." 

The most enthusiastic HR+AI experimenter is still carrying some version of am I doing this right, am I missing something, is this going to change my role in ways I can't yet see? They’re learning about employee privacy and data hygiene even as they’re creating magical-seeming web apps from messy spreadsheets. Flattening that feeling into "excited" misses the actual human experience, and more practically, it makes those leaders harder to support.

What compounds any individual uncertainty is (as always) a structural issue: HR leaders are frequently left out of the conversations that decide a company’s AI strategy, leaving them to manage the human impact of a transformation they had no hand in designing. 

This matters beyond the HR’s team and their feelings. If the function most equipped to manage organizational change isn't in the room when change is being architected, that's not an HR gap; it's a design failure. 

The question isn't whether HR is using AI, is capable of using AI, or is opposed to using AI. It's whether HR has any agency in how AI is reshaping their organizations. And the answer to that question is what determines how successful your AI rollout will be. 

So what do you do when you’re trying to be brave, experimental, and persuasive, but you’re still sitting in a bit of fear? What story do you tell yourself (and the leaders in your organization!) to move forward as a peer and partner?

Mindy says the answer lies in our ability to be self-aware.

Self-Awareness, Shame, and Fear

Mindy coaches an HR leader she describes as “a spitfire, naturally curious, born with a ‘possibility mindset' that was built to absorb learning.” This leader loves the fact that her job is becoming something different with the introduction of AI, and she feels equipped and empowered to be a part of the conversation.

But this is a somewhat unusual profile among her clients – In Mindy’s experience, most HR leaders are carrying a hidden sense of shame. At first, they think Mindy is there because they aren’t doing their job well; that they’re “bad” at leadership and need an intervention. But this is misplaced fear - “they do know how the business makes money, because they've been part of that company from the early days. They know more than they realize." 

And Mindy says that misconception creates a “shame barrier,” present even in the most capable leaders, and blocking them from having the influence they deserve. What she’s learned through decades of experience (and a background in social work!) is that most of the time, underneath that shame is knowledge that never got permission to become authority. And so with this insight, Mindy goes beyond typical HR frameworks to integrate principles of self-worth and personal validation into her leadership coaching. 

This means that her most powerful work isn't in building new capabilities – it's excavating what's already there and helping the client believe they have the right to use it, moving them from “I'm bad to I'm good, I have value, and I am worthy of having a voice in this organization". 

Human Skills for AI Collaboration

The shame may show up differently in the AI conversation, but the insecurity is the same. When you feel like you’re the only one who doesn’t know what they’re doing, you’ll be less likely to speak up, especially cross-functionally, and especially if it seems like other people are ahead of you. But the truth is that nobody really knows what they’re doing; this is new for almost everyone. The universality of that uncertainty is liberating once someone names it out loud. 

It’s slower, harder work, the self-actualization that comes before you focus on things like strategic impact and effective rollouts. But if people don’t believe their perspective belongs in the room, they’re nowhere close to actually sharing it.

Mindy reminds us that "HR has always been about the complex sociology and psychology of us as complex humans: living organisms in an ecosystem, trying to do life with other people to get a shared common outcome." 

And AI doesn't displace that understanding, it amplifies it…for better or worse. The same qualities that make someone effective at the human side of work (curiosity, a coaching mindset, the willingness to seek understanding before offering answers) are exactly what effective AI collaboration requires. 

HR’s unique combination of human and business skills makes them the best-equipped to hold space for this conversation. 

Learning from the Past

Mindy's optimism about AI is honest, but it arrives with a warning, because she’s seen how this kind of enthusiasm without constraint plays out. She knows from experience how difficult it is to balance fast-paced change with organizational stability, not to mention the personal toll it takes on a leader to be the face of that change!

Mindy recalls that when Agile swept through organizations in the early aughts, it came with genuine promise: iterative thinking, self-organizing teams, cross-functional collaboration. What happened in too many places was that leaders leaned into the tools and the process, and quietly left the people out of their calculations.

Leaders forgot the human impact of self-managed teams, the empathy needed for high-quality retrospectives, the dialog required for gaining adoption. The methodology was popular, but the culture didn’t change, and many organizations continue struggling to adopt Agile principles at scale.

The influence of AI is moving faster than Agile’s did, and into higher-stakes territory because of the level of integration and autonomy these tools are granted. We risk repeating history, enthusiastically jumping to get our next innovative fix without pausing to consider the unintentional human impact. What makes Mindy hopeful, though, and what makes HR's position so critical in this moment, is the fact that when HR teams utilize better tools to get out of the weeds, they can spend more time focusing on the nuances of people’s experiences at work. If HR can lead the AI adoption engine, they’ll find themselves influencing important cultural integration, not just reacting to the results of poorly-designed rollouts.

Mindy argues that “we need humanity evermore…with the human-focused, change management perspective that organizations need in order to be even more profitable, to be even more successful." 

Watch the Full Video from Disrupt Austin, here:

The Next Chapter

Futurism is inspiring, but often leaves people with destabilizing questions. HR must lead the way by modeling experimentation, comfort in ambiguity, effective communication, and ideas that are grounded in real organizational context. HR is at its best when it balances the business and people sides of an organization: in this chapter, we need to remember that we are a part of the org chart as well. 

Starting by understanding our own opinions, perspectives, and fears gives us a much more credible and empathetic lens by which to communicate changes to our teams. And embracing this agility within ourselves makes us much more effective builders within the organization.

As Mindy reminds us: "We need to hear what's possible to be inspired to create and build together. But if we don't understand what ingredients we have in ourselves, how do we mold that into something?

We may have spent decades defending our existence against the perception of being overhead, or policing, or theater, but we are standing at a pivotal moment. Success with technological adoption only happens if the value of human connectedness doesn't get lost. And HR is the only function with both the mandate and the training to make sure it doesn't.

The very core of what HR has always been about – the irreducible complexity of humans in organizations – is the very thing that cannot be automated away. That was always the job. The difference now is that technology finally gives us room to do it.

As Mindy says, “we need to connect with ourselves in order to connect with others." If we can get out of our own shame spirals, realize our knowledge holds power, and find the courage to use it, HR won’t be reacting to the narrative, we’ll be writing it.