Dave Ulrich, Father of Modern HR on HR Trends 2026
Dave Ulrich is the Rensis Likert Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan and a partner at the RBL Group. He has published over 200 articles and book chapters and 30 books.
He edited Human Resource Management for ten years, served on the editorial board of four other journals and on the Board of Directors for Herman Miller (16 years), has spoken to large audiences in 90 countries; performed workshops for over half of the Fortune 200, received numerous lifetime achievement awards, and is a Distinguished Fellow in the National Academy of Human Resources.
He posts weekly and comments daily on LinkedIn. His work creates ideas with impact about how to deliver stakeholder value through human capability (talent + organization + leadership + HR).
Q1- What are the Top HR trends in 2026?
There are many specific HR practices and services, but I see four general HR pivots in 2026.
- First, HR is less about HR and more about delivering stakeholder value through human capability: Stakeholders are all the “humans” who engage with the organization, including employees but also boards, customers, investors, citizens, and others who get value from an organization.
- Second, human capability are the innovative insights in talent + leadership + organization to deliver value.
- Third, upgrade the HR function through 10 actions with value created and relationships as most critical and HR professionals with the competencies that deliver value.
- Fourth, genAI and analytics provide information to deliver stakeholder value by prioritizing and guiding human capability investments that have the most impact.
Q2- In 2026, how should HR redefine its role to directly drive business outcomes in an AI-enabled organization?
As business and HR leaders use AI to deliver talent, incorporating human ingenuity—the ability to creatively solve problems with imagination, adaptability, judgement, and empathy—remains and becomes even more critical. An emerging complementary formula becomes:
Talent Advantage = AI (artificial intelligence) * HI (human ingenuity)
Note the multiplier (*), not an addition (+). An addition would mean 2/10 AI + 8/10 HI equals 10/10 talent total (or 100/100), while multiplication of 2/10 * 8/10 equals 16/100. Either AI or HI without the other severely limits overall talent. Figure captures twelve ways AI and HI complement each other, which evolves legacy discussions of high tech versus high touch.
Figure: AI and HI Complementary Contributions to Talent
| Dimension | AI (Artificial Intelligence) | HI (Human Ingenuity) |
| Predominant question | What happened? | Why did this happen? |
| Competitive positioning | Parity to do what others do with talent | Advantage to differentiate from others through talent |
| Time horizon | Summary of the past talent work with optimization and patterns | Creation of future talent with imagination and breakthroughs |
| Outcome | Efficiency to save time with accuracy and speed of accessing talent information | Meaning that comes from living values, providing empathy and emotion, and building energy |
| Learning foundation | Objective talent data and analytics | Subjective experience, intuition, and wisdom about talent |
| Problem solving logic | Converge to offer the right talent solution | Diverge to solicit more talent opinions |
| Connection channels | Ideas and concepts | People and relationships |
| Highlights | Processes to improve talent | Purposes for talent achievement |
| Ethics and judgement | Follows programmed rules | Relies on moral reasoning |
| Trust building method | Task automation | Personal relationships |
| Design logic | Used by a few; delivered to many | Create with many; delivered to the one (personalized) |
| Accountability, responsibility | Talent tools without accountability | Accountable and responsible for building talent |
Q3- What distinguishes a true “human experience” at work, and how can HR design it at scale?
There has been an evolution of the employee value proposition or experience over the decades. Today, I see “hope” as the next stage of that evolution.
Hope is a universal topic that has been part of discussions across time and belief systems. It focuses on confidence in the future and meaning from daily actions, especially in times of uncertainty or difficulty so prevalent in today’s world.
Hope impacts talent in three ways. First, it evolves the employee value proposition building on motivation, satisfaction, commitment, flourish, well-being, and then hope (figure).
Figure: Hope as Next Wave of Employee Value Proposition
Second, hope determines the mindset of how to approach work. In a world of AI technology, hope infuses human ingenuity with creativity, opportunity, emotion, and empathy (see figure above on AI and HI).
Third, hopefulness replaces emotional funk with personal opportunity and fear with confidence. Hope comes from taking responsibility for choices (agency), building confidence by achieving goals (efficacy), having a positive attitude (optimism), and seeing options (imagination).
Q4- How can HR operationalize skills-based organizations to ensure agility and long-term employability?
There has been a rejuvenation of competency models around skills required to compete in the future. With the rise of AI, I believe the focus can be on worktask more than the workforce. Every job contains work tasks that rely on information to improve performance. Most information-related tasks can be enabled by AI. Doing worktask rather than workforce planning helps HR and business leaders focus on how to improve performance using AI.
The logic of worktask planning has seven steps, as shown in figure.
Figure: Worktask Planning
Summary of Steps to Worktask Planning:
- Create strategic clarity. Strategy is about gaining consensus and clarity around 1) where we are going to compete (e.g., industry, market, customers), and 2) how we will compete (e.g., price, product, customer intimacy).
- Define desired organization capabilities. What are the capabilities we require to be competitive over time (e.g., information asymmetry, customer service, innovation, agility)?
- Specify strategic positions. What are the key roles or positions in the company that will deliver value to customers in unique ways?
- Describe the key tasks of the strategic position(s). What does the role or strategic position do?
- Decompose tasks into specific activities. What are the key activities of accomplishing the tasks? Delineate these tasks in terms of specific behaviors or actions.
- Identify alternative ways of doing these tasks. Recognize and identify the work options for accomplishing the specific tasks (full-time, part-time, consultant, outsource, or technology [AI]).
- Match worktasks with work options. Fill in the matrix, identifying which tasks could be accomplished by which work options. Using this logic, decomposed tasks (A, B, C, etc. in the figure) that require strategic, proprietary, optimal, insightful, and unique solutions are more likely to be done by full-time employees who become a source of strategic differentiation. Tasks that are characterized as essential, generic, satisficing, efficient, and standardized may be done through automation with technology-enabled solutions. Part-time, consultant, and outsourced employees will preform a mix of the types of worktasks.
Decomposing tasks and adding AI as a possible provider of the work changes workforce planning (people) to worktask planning (task accomplishment).
Q5- Any final comments?
This is a great time to be in HR because HR helps deliver more value to all stakeholders. Strategic HR focused on implementing strategy can be complemented with stakeholder HR which is about adding value to all stakeholders.
Thank You, Dave Ulrich!