People Managing People Podcast
The AI “Sandwich”: Why HR Teams Are Caught in the Middle
Why It Matters
Understanding AI’s practical impact helps HR leaders move beyond buzzwords to tangible improvements in hiring, performance, and employee experience. As AI adoption accelerates, HR’s role as the orchestrator of governance and empowerment becomes critical for organizations to stay competitive and avoid fragmented, unmanaged AI initiatives.
Key Takeaways
- •HR sits in AI sandwich between top‑down mandates and bottom‑up
- •60% of firms are at AI evolution, not revolution
- •Every employee now manages their own AI, becoming informal managers
- •HiBob democratizes AI, embedding tools across hiring, onboarding, performance
- •Future HR may include AI agents with permissions via MCP
Pulse Analysis
The episode frames HR as the middle layer of an "AI sandwich," caught between board‑level pressure to adopt artificial intelligence and grassroots teams demanding AI resources. Josh Rod explains that roughly 60 % of organizations sit in the middle‑tier of AI maturity—using the technology to streamline existing processes rather than fully automate them. This evolution stage means most HR leaders are focused on safety, efficiency, and incremental improvements. A deeper shift is also emerging: frontline workers now manage their own AI assistants, effectively becoming informal managers and reshaping traditional hierarchy.
HiBob positions itself as a democratizing force, embedding AI across the entire employee lifecycle—from recruiting and onboarding to performance reviews and compensation. By making advanced models accessible through a user‑friendly interface, the platform lets managers and individual contributors alike extract insights without needing data‑science expertise. Rod emphasizes that HR should act as the architect of these AI‑enabled processes, providing frameworks that empower managers to build on them. This middle‑out strategy turns AI from a siloed admin tool into a collaborative engine, helping fast‑growing companies extract more value from each employee while keeping governance in HR’s hands.
Looking ahead, Rod warns that predictions beyond six months are risky, yet several trends are already visible. Companies are experimenting with AI agents that sit on org charts, granted limited permissions through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) to act as virtual managers. Such controlled agents could automate routine tasks while preserving human oversight. More broadly, the conversation shifts from a revolutionary overhaul to an evolutionary refinement—using AI to accelerate work without discarding core human interactions. As AI tools become as commonplace as a spreadsheet, the real competitive edge will be the imagination to re‑design processes like performance reviews from the ground up.
Episode Description
AI in HR is finally moving out of the pitch deck and into the messy reality of day-to-day operations. In this conversation, Tim Fisher sits down with Josh Rod from HiBob to unpack what’s actually changing—and what’s still just noise. The headline? Most organizations aren’t chasing some agentic, fully automated future. They’re trying to make today’s workflows less painful, faster, and marginally more effective.
But underneath that pragmatic adoption sits a deeper shift: the structure of work itself is being quietly rewritten. When every employee becomes a “manager” of AI, the old hierarchies start to wobble. HR isn’t just implementing tools anymore—it’s being asked to design the operating system for how humans and machines collaborate. And that’s where things get interesting.
Related Links:
Join the People Managing People Community
Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts
Connect with Josh on LinkedIn
Visit HiBob
Support the show
Comments
Want to join the conversation?
Loading comments...