Why the ‘AI productivity paradox’ calls for HR’s intervention

The news

HR Executive published a piece featuring Stephanie Larson of Seramount arguing that widespread AI adoption is creating a productivity paradox: as AI makes nearly everyone faster, speed stops being a differentiator — and organizations that aren’t also developing human judgment and critical thinking will fall behind. Read the full piece here.

My take

I think this is the most important framing I’ve seen on AI and the workforce this year — and I say that as someone who reads a lot of takes that dress up the same anxiety in different clothes.

Here’s the thing most HR Tech vendors are missing: the productivity story has already been told. Every major platform has an AI copilot. Every vendor deck leads with time savings. But if every employee at every company can now produce a first draft, summarize a meeting, or generate a report in thirty seconds, then speed becomes table stakes — not talent.

What that means for HR is a genuine opportunity to reclaim strategic relevance. Not by owning the AI rollout (IT and ops will take that), but by answering the harder question: what does good human judgment look like in an AI-augmented workforce, and how do we build it?

I’ve had conversations with at least four clients this year who are investing heavily in AI tooling and almost nothing in the learning infrastructure to develop the judgment required to use those tools well. They’re automating tasks without asking what skills and thinking patterns need to grow in the space those tasks used to occupy. That’s not an AI strategy. That’s a procurement strategy with a press release.

The companies that win the next five years won’t be the ones who adopted AI first. They’ll be the ones who figured out what humans should get better at because AI exists — and built the organizational systems to develop it. That is fundamentally an HR problem, and HR should be driving it.

The so-what

I’d tell any CHRO reading this to stop letting the AI conversation belong entirely to IT and the C-suite AI task force. Your seat at that table isn’t to manage change communications — it’s to define what human excellence looks like post-automation and build toward it. If your L&D strategy still looks like a course catalog and your skills framework is a spreadsheet someone built in 2021, you are not ready for this moment. The organizations that treat AI as a productivity tool will hit a ceiling. The ones that treat it as a forcing function to develop sharper human capability will pull ahead — and HR has to be the function that makes that happen.

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