Will HR and IT merge? How AI is changing the relationship between people and technology

Last year pharmaceutical firm Moderna made headlines internationally not for inventing a game-changing drug but for something many people would find far more prosaic: merging its HR and IT functions. The two now sit under the leadership of chief people and digital technology officer Tracey Franklin. Franklin, formerly the company’s CHRO, oversees a dual mandate, covering both human capital strategy and digital infrastructure and AI deployment. 

At the time many commentators predicted the move to be symptomatic of a wider trend, driven by AI and its impact on the world of work and both HR and IT functions. HR leaders have been paying attention too. According to Marsh’s Global Talent Trends 2026, 56% of HR leaders expect HR and IT departments to merge. 

And yet the reality is that HR is often still outside the room when it comes to AI. A 2025 report by HR platform Beamery said that HR is “often sidelined” when it comes to workplace AI transformation. Only 30% of HR leaders said they were involved from the outset on AI strategy, and only 12% of survey respondents picked CHROs as a top influential decision-maker on AI.

There’s no doubt however that AI puts increasing pressure on the boundary between people and technology decisions. As Marsh’s Global Talent Trends asks: “Is an algorithm used in recruitment a talent or a tech tool? Where does accountability for bias sit: HR or IT?” So, more than a year after Moderna announced its bold new model, has merging HR and IT moved from rhetoric to reality outside of a handful of companies? And what actually changes when organisations try to bring the two functions closer together? 

Why AI is pushing HR and IT closer together

Stuart Branch is people, digital, environment and health and safety director at Weetabix. He has had IT reporting into him alongside HR since before it became fashionable. A decade ago, when the firm was doing a major ERP project, Branch (then HR director) identified that while the work was “being technically done well”, from a change point of view, the opposite was true. "IT was brilliant in its functional capability, but not good enough in engaging with and being of service to the business,” he recalls. He “heckled” about the need for a change management approach to technology transformation until he was given accountability for the function, bringing about a “bigger, broader organisational approach” to technology.

Does merging HR and IT actually work?

However, while Branch has executive accountability for both people and tech, he has deliberately not merged the two teams. He went so far as to commission external research on the pros and cons of doing so when he first took on his expanded role. The results showed that among those organisations that had tried to combine HR and IT service desks or business partnering, many didn’t achieve much success, and some chose to later reverse the decision. 

Things have moved on since, and Branch acknowledges the similarities and overlaps between the two areas are becoming more common. What bringing the two together under one executive has done, he believes, is help cut through the functional or silo political challenges that can exist in large, global and complex organisations, bringing a broader and more holistic viewpoint. He gives the example of Post Holdings (Weetabix’s parent company) recently appointing a group-level chief AI officer: “The conversations that person wants to have are as much around capability, agility, ways of working and change management as the tech stack.”

HR and IT collaboration may matter more than reporting lines

At vehicle leasing business Zenith, chief people and transformation officer Stuart Price spent a year with technology in his portfolio. Similar to Branch’s experience, Price took on technology to bring about a cultural shift in ways of working within the function. “Historically, tech functions are quite one-way,” he says. “It’s been ‘tell us what you want us to build, or we’ll tell you what we think you should have’.” But as the problems businesses face become more complex and interdisciplinary, solving them requires a wider approach. As Price puts it: “The cultural shift that was needed was ‘how does this function interact better with the business?’”

He reflects that any bad examples of tech deployment he’s seen have generally been because “people were not properly engaged or the comms weren’t good enough”. In his year in charge of tech he believes the value he brought was "opening the function's eyes to what the business challenges were and their role in helping to solve them, creating a culture that felt a bit more balanced between the tech function and its customers”. 

However, he is clear that the deep expertise required for leading a function is “very rarely found in the same person”, and is happy to have handed technology back to an IT leader. “I’m not in the converge camp,” he adds. “If you choose the people leader, you lose technical brilliance. If you choose the technologist, you lose people and leadership capability.”

What counts most going forward is collaboration, he adds. “No single function ever has the answer to these complex problems. You have to collaborate across the boundaries. The AI era only accelerates the need for that.” He gives the example of a recent Copilot deployment. While IT was approaching it from a tech-first, governance lens, the people lead partnering on the project was asking questions about capability, engagement and wider company narrative around AI. 

“Two people came at it differently and put their heads together,” Price explains. It meant the comms messaging began with offering clarity on the why, then moved into upskilling and capability, before covering infrastructure and security. “If we’d let the tech function go off or just let the people team do it, you wouldn’t have got anywhere near as positive an outcome,” he adds.

This need for true partnership is a belief echoed by Sonia Mooney, global HR transformation consultant and author of High-Impact HR. “Too often we expect tech to fix what we’ve avoided – legacy complexity, broken processes, siloed teams and functions,” she says. “But no tool alone can resolve these problems if we haven’t done the work to solve them. The HR and IT partnership is more important than ever. It’s the foundation of successful, sustainable, tech-enabled transformation... And when it’s missing, it shows.”

Where should people technology sit – HR or IT?

Indeed, Kerry Smith, chief people officer at charity British Heart Foundation, reflects that tech has overtaken finance as her most important stakeholder relationship. With HR shifting to become much more tech-enabled she struggles to think of a project she wouldn’t need to involve IT in. This shift has caused her to make the opposite decision to the Modernas of the world: moving her people tech sub-function out of HR and into IT. 

“It was becoming more technical and needed product leadership,” Smith explains. Moving it out of HR and into IT brings a broader awareness of how different systems, not just HR systems, interplay across the whole organisation, she adds. 

AI work design is becoming a shared HR and IT responsibility

Branch points out that the rise of AI raises both the importance of IT and the importance of change management and human capital. And the work and organisation redesign required if companies are to embed AI at scale is perhaps the clearest example of where HR and IT need to work in lockstep.

Moderna’s decision to bring the two together was to create better oversight of how work gets done. "It's [about] how work flows through the organisation, and what should be done with technology – whether that's hardware or software or AI – and where you complement human skills around that,” Franklin told BBC News in 2025. Tech firm Atlassian is another example where people and AI have been brought together under one leader, chief people and AI enablement officer Avani Prabhakar.

Price believes that technology should be getting more involved with operating model design, organisation design and role design, even if ultimate responsibility for this should remain with the CPO, given their “end-to-end” view of the organisation. Figuring out exactly what this looks like needs to be a collaborative process, however: “[The CPO] has to stretch their thinking: is that the right work to be done by humans, or can it be better fulfilled by agents or another form of technology?”

As Smith owns OD she believes there is very little that tech could do to advance AI without involving her function: “They can’t do their AI strategy without us, and we can’t do it without them.” Even when operating as separate functions, she sees a “dependency” between the two, neither able to succeed without the other. She has even seconded members of her OD team over to tech to support a major technology transformation programme.

However, she believes merging HR and IT is neither inevitable nor desirable, as the two functions have “different missions, visions and values”. Keeping the people team separate also helps ensure they are positioned independently enough to ask challenging questions when needed, she says. “The people team needs to be a critical friend to the tech team. They need to be able to challenge and critique. They need to ask: are we doing the right things for the right reasons?” 

Ultimately, whether the right thing for an organisation is deeper collaboration and partnership or full-on structural reorganisation, what matters most is ensuring people and tech transformation achieves desired organisational outcomes, not quibbling over who owns what. “How the partnership is realised structurally will differ across organisations," concludes Mooney. “What is critical is to remember that both functions work for the same organisation with the same business strategy and goals. Together, they are greater than the sum of their parts.”