The overlooked skill paying real dividends in the AI era

“In my day, you got one day for an aunt or an uncle or a cousin or a grandmother, and you got three days for a parent or a child,” she said. “And, you know, having conversations with people that, maybe their grandmother was basically their parent. And so even three days wasn’t enough for their grandmother, let alone one. I regret that.”

That kind of individualized judgment, she said, is what modern leadership demands, more than the rules leaders were trained to enforce. It echoes what other leadership experts describe as empathy becoming a core competency as AI adoption accelerates.

HR’s opening, if leaders take it

McClure ties HR’s growing influence to the same argument. The function best equipped to make the business case for empathy, in her view, is also the one best positioned to prove whether AI actually pays off.

“The role of a senior HR leader or an HR leader in general has more opportunity and is more powerful than ever, because we are kind of at the intersection of technology, culture, systems, processes,” she said. “All of that involves people and the work that they do.”

HR’s real opportunity, in her view, is being part of the earliest conversations about how AI gets implemented, then regularly reminding other leaders that the real ROI comes from redesigning the work so people and AI each add what they do best, not from simply eliminating a role AI can now handle.