Summary
Enterprise risks are increasingly affecting CHRO decisions, even when they originate outside HR. Drawing on Gartner's 2026 risk research, analyst Dion Love identifies three organisational vulnerabilities that could shape the 2027 CHRO agenda: adaptive overload, resource ambiguity and resilience depletion. He explains how recognising early warning signs can help HR leaders identify emerging risks and influence business decisions before disruption escalates.
An expansion of trade barriers affecting digital services might initially look like a problem for finance or technology. Agentic AI might sit with the CIO. Yet both can create workforce planning challenges, capability gaps and changes to how organisations operate.
These are the kinds of enterprise risks increasingly finding their way onto the CHRO's agenda, according to Dion Love, VP of research and advisory at Gartner, speaking at its recent EMEA conference.
Gartner's research points to risks arising well beyond traditional HR concerns. Its Q2 2026 Emerging Risks Survey, involving 316 respondents, informs an emerging risk universe spanning technology, economic and political developments alongside more familiar workforce issues.
Among the risks Gartner has examined for CHROs during 2026 are AI-driven skills erosion, productivity pressures and the unexpected costs of workforce reductions. It has also identified continuous change as a potential threat to employee engagement and concurrent disruptions as a risk to executive team performance.
The difficulty for CHROs is deciding where to concentrate their attention when several of these risks may be developing at once.
In a small Gartner poll of 40 HR leaders attending an August webinar nearly half identified the CHRO as responsible for helping their organisation identify and respond to emerging risks. Most respondents were only somewhat confident in their ability to navigate enterprise risk. The sample is too small and self-selecting to establish a wider trend but it illustrates the challenge Love was addressing.
"At some point, adding another risk stops improving preparedness and starts fragmenting attention," he said.
His argument is that CHROs need a more durable way to assess risk than continually extending the list of potential threats.
Three vulnerabilities that expose organisations to risk
Love identifies three recurring organisational vulnerabilities that can increase exposure to enterprise risk: adaptive overload – when change outpaces an organisation’s ability to respond, resource ambiguity – when priorities and resources become difficult to align, and resilience depletion – when employees struggle to absorb continuing disruption. Love has borrowed an approach from cybersecurity, where identifying vulnerabilities is an important part of preparing for threats that cannot always be predicted. He calls these ‘threat vectors’.
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Adaptive overload – when change happens faster than an organisation can respond
One example is the adoption of agentic AI moving ahead of the governance needed to manage it. Another is employees beginning to use generative AI before they have developed the capabilities to work effectively with it.
Love also pointed to Gartner's research on executive team performance, in which boards identified executives' inability to respond to changing conditions as a leading threat to shareholder value.
For CHROs the warning signs include decisions taking longer, repeated changes of direction and previously settled decisions being reopened. Leaders or teams responding very differently to similar challenges can also indicate that the organisation is struggling to adapt.
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Resource ambiguity – when organisations struggle to direct people and investment towards their most important priorities
This becomes particularly relevant when businesses are trying to reduce costs while investing in transformation or pursuing growth.
Love used AI-related workforce reductions to illustrate the problem. Gartner has predicted that some employees displaced by AI will eventually need to be rehired, because employers discover that the work and capabilities they still need were not adequately understood when the original decisions were made.
The wider concern is that organisations may pursue individual efficiency targets without sufficient clarity about the resources needed to deliver their overall strategy. Competing priorities, an inability to make trade-offs and persistent uncertainty over accountability are among the indicators Love suggests CHROs should watch.
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Resilience depletion – when the workforce is being asked to absorb more disruption than it can comfortably sustain while continuing to perform
This includes the cumulative effect of continuous organisational change and the additional demands placed on employees as technology alters their work.
Gartner has already identified continuous change as a potential risk to engagement at a time when organisations need employees to remain adaptable.
The question is whether the pace and demands of change are beginning to exceed the workforce's ability to adjust. A business may continue delivering individual transformation programmes while underestimating their combined effect on employees.
What should CHROs do differently?
Love's approach gives HR leaders a way to look for developing weaknesses before a particular risk becomes urgent.
He recommends starting by examining which of the three vulnerabilities is creating the greatest exposure in their own organisation. That means looking at the indicators already visible and considering which risks are developing as a result.
Over the following 90 days CHROs should engage executive colleagues in identifying where those vulnerabilities are likely to intensify. Over the next year Love suggests incorporating regular reviews into workforce and wider enterprise planning.
The approach also raises a question about the CHRO's influence over business decisions.
Many of the conditions Love describes originate outside HR. Decisions about technology investment, costs and business priorities can have consequences for workforce capability and employees' ability to cope with change. Yet CHROs may have limited influence over those decisions, even when they are expected to manage the risks that follow.
Recognising these problems is useful but reducing the exposure may require changes to decisions being made elsewhere in the business.
Love argues that CHROs have valuable visibility into the early signs of emerging risks, particularly where these affect how organisations work and execute strategy.
His message is that HR leaders should use that visibility to become involved earlier, while there is still an opportunity to influence the decisions creating the exposure. "I don't want you to be called into a meeting," he told delegates. "I want you to call the meeting."
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