- 60%of CHROs see leadership demands growing faster than development capacity
- 80%of CHROs say their managers are overwhelmed
- 89%of CHROs find it hard to balance strategic goals with cost targets
- 50%of HR activities could be handled by AI agents by 2030
Managers now run three sources of work
The first finding is about the manager’s workload. 60% of CHROs say leadership demands are growing faster than their organization’s capacity to develop leaders, and 80% say their managers are overwhelmed. Performance is not moving fast enough either. Just 45% of CHROs think managers lift team performance fast enough, and under half of employees feel their manager really helps them improve.
A new layer is now being added on top. As agentic AI spreads, the work a manager is accountable for comes from three sources: an employee’s individual contribution, work an employee does together with AI, and work that agents run on their own. Gartner treats each source as its own performance dimension. Managers keep evaluating people on goals, contribution to business outcomes and job-specific skills. On top of that they now assess how employees work with agents and how the agents themselves perform.
Individual employee contribution
The employee does the work.
- Progress on annual goals
- Contribution to business results
- Level of job-specific skills
Employee-AI collaboration
The employee works with an agent.
- Understanding the agent's role
- Quality of feedback given to the agent
- Coordination with the agent
- Safety and ethics
Autonomous AI execution
The agent runs the work on its own.
- Business results delivered
- Task execution
- Consistency and reliability
- Safety and ethics
The report then turns to feedback. In the report’s reading, the feedback culture a company ends up with is the one it designs, and that design has three principles. Clarity comes from an explicit coaching agreement and written role expectations. Ease comes from standard conversation templates everyone uses. Accountability means a minimum conversation cadence that is logged, plus an upward feedback survey once a year.
The recommended actions follow the same line. First, measure the complexity load on managers and simplify approval layers. Second, set escalation thresholds for autonomous agents and a responsibility matrix for hybrid tasks. Third, move from optional feedback to a structured coaching routine. That routine depends on the manager’s coaching skill, which is why programs like Emotional Intelligence and Leadership stay at the center of manager development.
Product-oriented HR instead of an annual plan
The second challenge is how HR itself operates. 38% of CHROs say shifting conditions get in the way of designing HR solutions that are ready for the future, and 89% find it hard to balance strategic goals with cost targets. Calendar-based annual planning struggles here because its assumptions go stale before the plan is in force.
Gartner’s answer is to treat HR solutions as products. A product has users, an owner, measures of success and a continuous improvement loop. The report describes the change as four mindset shifts.
| Area | Calendar-based annual plan | Product approach |
|---|---|---|
| Strategy | Focus on compliance | Focus on value for the user |
| Solution design | One standard for everyone | Targeted segmentation |
| Collaboration | Siloed projects | Enterprise-wide product portfolio |
| Value | Process excellence | Continuous improvement based on business impact |
“Product” can sound foreign to HR at first, yet the report’s examples are familiar. On the human-enabled side it lists leadership development training, personalized onboarding programs, employer value proposition messaging templates and goal-setting frameworks. On the tech-enabled side it lists AI-powered succession platforms, AI coaching bots, candidate experience chatbots and targeted benefits recommendations. The report places these examples on two axes, strategic to operational and human-enabled to tech-enabled.
There are three recommended actions. Continuous monitoring and quarterly reviews replace the annual strategy cycle. The HR portfolio is split into value streams, each with a product owner. Recruiting metrics gain business-impact indicators, and the report highlights time to value, talent coverage and decision velocity.
The first wave delivered, governance comes next
The third challenge is AI itself. 80% of HR leaders say their initial AI implementations met or exceeded expectations. Gartner goes further and expects that agents could handle half of all HR activities by 2030. The market is shifting as well. Between 2026 and 2030, Gartner expects agents to take up to $28 billion of human capital management (HCM) software revenue.
The most concrete data in the report covers the five use cases HR has implemented most in the first wave. Each comes with two figures, the share of HR leaders implementing it or already done, and the share who say it met or exceeded expectations.
Five most implemented AI use cases in the first wave, percentage of HR leaders
| Use case | Implementing or implemented | Say it met or exceeded expectations |
|---|---|---|
| Candidate sourcing | 68% | 81% |
| Candidate matching | 64% | 84% |
| Employee and manager self-service agent | 63% | 82% |
| Personalized learning | 62% | 79% |
| Workforce planning | 52% | 90% |
The last row is the one to watch. Workforce planning is the least implemented of the five and the one most likely to meet expectations. Candidate sourcing and matching lead on adoption, while workforce planning leads on satisfaction.
On governance the report is direct. Classic software governance falls short once agents act and decide on their own. Gartner recommends a human-accountable model, where a named person answers for what the agents do, and it makes that model concrete with a framework it calls ROAD.
The Gartner ROAD framework
R: Responsibilities
High-stakes actions are reserved for humans.
O: Ownership
Every agent has a named owner.
A: Autonomy
Agent boundaries are calibrated.
D: Decision rights
Decision rights are set across four tiers.
Four-tier decision rights
The report names only the two end tiers. The middle tiers belong in your own decision-rights table.
The four steps build on each other. Under responsibilities, high-stakes actions are reserved for humans. Under ownership, every agent gets a named owner. Under autonomy, an agent’s room to act is calibrated to the risk of the work. Under decision rights, authority is set across four tiers that run from fully autonomous execution to human-only authority. In our view this structure needs a management system behind it so it does not stay on paper, and ISO/IEC 42001 for AI management systems offers a sound basis for documenting ownership, risk and decision rights.
HRQ’s view: what this means for HR teams in Türkiye
The views in this section are HRQ’s own and are not drawn from the Gartner report. They include no survey or measurement of the Turkish market.
The report’s first-wave list starts with recruitment: the two most implemented use cases are candidate sourcing and candidate matching. For an organization that does not use agents yet, we see this as an opportunity rather than a delay, because building governance before agents arrive costs far less than building it after they are live. If you write down early which decisions belong to humans alone, which agent reports to whom and where a problem gets escalated, you will not have to unwind it later. Starting an agent with a narrow scope and widening it over time is usually easier than starting wide and pulling back. We built this principle into our own product, HRQ Lens: AI never scores, ranks or rejects a candidate, and a human always makes the call.
An agent needs access to employee data to do its job. Under the Turkish Personal Data Protection Law (KVKK), we believe that access should have its own line in your personal data processing inventory. Record which agent reaches which data category, for what purpose and for how long, and update the privacy notice and retention periods to match. Article 11 of KVKK gives people the right to object to an outcome against them that results solely from automated analysis. Writing down human-only decisions in advance makes that right easier to honor. Updating the inventory this way is work that can be carried out as part of KVKK and GDPR consulting.
Our takeaway from the manager finding is this. Before asking managers to oversee agents, lighten the load they already carry. Every new expectation added before approval layers are simplified and a feedback routine is in place just adds another line to an overwhelmed manager’s list. A diagnostic such as the HR Check-Up is a practical way to see where your HR processes stand today.
The three-source workforce also raises a concrete question for performance management. A classic performance form is designed to measure only the first source, the individual contribution. Before adding a criterion on how an employee works with agents, define with the manager what that criterion means in the role. An undefined criterion does not make evaluation easier. It hands the manager one more thing to interpret.
We consider this the most important finding in the report. Workforce planning is less visible than hiring, yet its decisions shape budget, hiring and talent development at once. For an HR team that keeps regular headcount, turnover and skills data, we recommend it as the second step after recruitment. It does not need a large platform. A small trial built on a year of hires, exits and position data will also show which data is missing.
What to do on Monday morning
The five points below are HRQ’s recommendations and are not taken from the Gartner report. Each one is small enough to start with a small team.
Five things for Monday morning
Build an AI inventory
List every AI tool and agent used in HR work and assign each one a named owner.
Write down human-only decisions
Document which decisions in hiring, pay, performance and dismissal stay with humans alone.
Add agent access to your data inventory
Record the employee data each agent touches, with data category, purpose and retention period.
Measure your managers' load
Before adding a new expectation, map approval layers and repetitive tasks and pick what to simplify.
Pilot workforce planning
Design a small planning trial with the headcount and turnover data you already have and review it after three months.
Source
This article is HRQ’s summary of and commentary on the Gartner report “The CHRO Report: Gartner answers top CHRO challenges” (4Q26). The figures come from the report, and HRQ redrew the charts from the same data. The commentary sections are HRQ’s view. You can read the full report on Gartner’s website.