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If you’ve been following FullStack HR for a while, you know I’ve been writing about how AI will impact HR since January 2023.
I’ve been both positive and negative. And while it’s probably fair to put me more on the “AI hype” end of the spectrum, this was one of my conclusions in that first article about ChatGPT:
There’s been a lot of debate about whether AI will eventually make human work obsolete. While I believe that humans will always be needed, AI will significantly increase our productivity and reduce the need for headcount in the future. ChatGPT shows a glimpse of that, a glimpse of the future.
Fewer people will be able to do more.
Since then, I’ve relentlessly tried to put the pieces together: where is this going, and what does it mean for HR and the work we do?
I’ve done so by talking to people, both at the labs and in other organizations. I listen to so many podcasts and YouTube videos a week that I sometimes wonder if it’s healthy. On my bike, running, commuting, cooking. (Always at 2x speed, just to get more information in.) I read the news every morning, every night, and usually in between.
And then, perhaps most importantly, I test the models deeply and thoroughly. Ask my wife, and she’ll tell you about the late nights.
Along the way, I’ve encouraged you to play around with the technology yourself. To use it, understand it, and form your own opinion.
Having worked with GPT-6 Astra since launch, mine has become considerably firmer.
I’m now convinced that, from a technical perspective, AI can replace a substantial share of the work we do in front of a computer. In my own work, I’m seeing it complete tasks at an equal or better quality than I would expect from HRBPs on my team.
I thought it would take us a bit longer to get here.
My bad.
The computer use capabilities are mind-blowing. I remember being blown away when this launched. Fast-forward to today, and Astra can do (almost) whatever I do on a computer, fast.
That’s my experience with the work I’ve given it so far. It’s also why I’ve become so convinced that we’ve crossed the bridge where we, on one side, hypothesize about what AI could do and, on the other, conclude what I can do. We are now on the can-do-side.
As an example, we’ve been talking about MCP and connectors here, and sure, they’ll continue to make your life easier. But if your HR system lacks one, the AI may now be able to use the same interface you do and act on your behalf.
(Yes, simplification, I know. Access, permissions, and getting the result right still matter. But technically, once again… the capability is there.)
So if we are on the can-do side, what should we expect? Just because we are on that side doesn't mean we'll be replaced from one day to the next. Other factors affect how an AI operates. Governance, data structure, laws. Things we’ve put in place to safeguard our organizations, and things we still need to take seriously.
But when an AI gets stuck, we need to understand why. It might lack the capability. It might lack the information. Or it might be perfectly capable of taking the next step but lack permission to do so.
Those are different problems.
My guess is that more of the limitations we’ll encounter will come from everything around the model. That doesn’t make them small problems, but it does change what we need to work on.
Astra isn’t perfect. Neither are humans. And as said, technical capability alone won’t mean mass layoffs overnight. Organizations still need to figure out how to use it, how to check the work, and who takes responsibility for the result.
But if I’ve been a bit on the fence about when and how this will impact us in HR, I’m more convinced than ever that it will not only impact our work; it will change how we work, or whether we work at all.
We’ve been marching towards this for a while. I’ve spent years writing about it and trying to understand it. Even so, working with Astra has made me reconsider the timing. What I wrote about in January 2023 is materializing faster than I expected.
The pace is not slowing down, and I’ll keep trying to figure out what that means for HR and how we work until there is nothing left to figure out.
We’ll see when that happens.
And to the skeptics out there: if GPT-6 on Ultra has failed you, please let me know in the comments. I would love to hear where it’s falling short, because I’ve struggled to make it fail at the work I’ve given it.
Tell me what you tried, where it got stuck, and what you had to fix.