During the summer of 2026, we interviewed CHRO/CPOs from a broad cross-section of Nordic businesses, ranging from media groups and global engineering and manufacturing companies to major retailers and large multinational corporations.
We asked what keeps them awake at night. What challenges their companies will face over the next few years. And what they face themselves as seasoned HR executives.
We expected AI to dominate the answers. It did, for about ten minutes each time. Then every conversation moved to something more fundamental: leaders that are busier than ever, and hesitant to set clear expectations and performance targets, change programmes nobody has time for, Strategic directions where the long-term directions are even more difficult to set and describe.
One manufacturing company has done what most firms are told to do. It built its own platform with several language models, and roughly 40% of employees use it daily.
Its CHRO is unimpressed. Asked how AI will change people’s work, the answer was: “We have no clue, because the adoption rate is still so low.”
Forty percent daily use, and adoption is low. The remark only makes sense if adoption means something other than usage. For this CHRO, it does. People use AI to do their own tasks faster. However, nobody has redesigned the workflow those tasks sit in.
That, the CHRO said, is where the value is. It is also where the organisation chart eventually changes.
McKinsey’s 2026 State of AI survey describes the same gap at scale. Eight in ten respondents say AI has improved their personal productivity. Only 37% say it has contributed anything to company EBIT, the same share as a year earlier.
The 6% reporting significant financial impact differ above all-in-one respect: nearly three-quarters have fundamentally redesigned workflows, compared with one-quarter of everyone else.
BCG’s AI at Work survey shows where some of the value disappears. Among frontline employees, 74% now use AI regularly. Of those, 42% save a full working day a week. However, wo-thirds get little or no guidance on the purpose of the saved time.
That is the heart of the problem. When employees adopt a technology themselves, but the company sees little return, the missing piece is not technical. It is the of the managerial capability to scope the full transition to AI empowered work.
Those are decisions about roles, structure and workforce planning. They sit amongst other places also on the CHRO’s desk.
A retailer’s CHRO has turned this into a rule under consideration: “Every time we need to hire, we need to ask: should it be a robot, an AI agent or a person?” It is workflow redesign, one vacancy at a time.
The same company has deliberately chosen not to be an AI pioneer. Proven use cases remain scarce, and even the consultancies struggle to show them. With the share of companies reporting bottom-line impact unchanged in a year, waiting for evidence may be less timidity than discipline.
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A media group faces a problem that will become familiar to many companies. Its people need to experiment with AI, but they also handle rights, manuscripts and personal data.
The day before we met, ten people had spent their day containing the damage after a colleague used an AI tool outside the secure environment.
The obvious response is more control: restrict the tools, tighten the rules, put experimentation behind approvals. But that creates the opposite problem. AI is still a technology whose useful applications are being discovered by the people closest to the work. Put every experiment through a central process and you may prevent mistakes, but also much of the learning and progress
So, what do you govern? Too little, and experimentation becomes reckless. Too much, and it becomes timid. CHROs we interviewed told us that the answer is not a rule for every possible use case, but clarity about the boundaries: which tools are safe, what data can be used, which decisions require human oversight, and where people are free to experiment.
The same distinction applies to leadership more broadly. A media group’s CHRO questioned whether leaders should be ahead on AI at all. In many fields, employees are the specialists. They will know better than their managers how to use the technology. They do not need a manager who prompts better than they do. They need one who tells them the purpose of the AI transformation and the longer-term perspectives for the organisation in an era of AI transformation.
BCG’s data supports that instinct. Usage is no longer the main bottleneck. Direction is. Only a third of frontline employees say their leadership communicates clearly about AI.
And direction becomes more important when the consequences are uncomfortable. The same CHRO rejects the reassuring line that AI will not take your job, only someone using AI will (rephrasing the Nvidia’s CEO). “There will be jobs that we won’t ask for anymore, and people with skills we are not asking for anymore. That’s for sure.”
The evidence is less tidy. A year ago, 32% of respondents in McKinsey’s survey expected AI to shrink their workforce. Only 14% now report that it did. Yet 39% expect reductions in the coming year. BCG finds that 72% of employees say the skills expected of them have shifted, while only 36% feel adequately upskilled.
So far, skills are being retired faster than jobs. Leaders may not know which jobs will disappear, or when. But uncertainty about the future does not remove the obligation to be clear about what they know now: which skills are becoming more valuable, which are becoming less so, and what they expect people to do differently.
This is the thread running through the AI discussion. Leaders do not need to know every use case, master every tool or predict every job that will disappear. They need to make the playing field clear: where people can experiment, what the organisation is trying to achieve, what future scenarios they are looking into and what it now expects from the people in the organisation.
The striking thing is how little of this is really about AI. AI has simply made the cost of ambiguity and need for clarity harder to ignore. BCG reaches the same conclusion: “The biggest hindrance to a successful AI transformation is ambiguity.” Its sharpest finding is that employees with a clear strategy and limited tools outperform those with good tools but little direction. Only 28% of frontline employees see a strong link between what leaders say about AI and what the organisation does.
Asked for the one people problem to fix tomorrow, one CHRO chose clarity in expectation settings. Another CHRO agrees and chooses to put it like this; In an uncertain world, leaders need sharper roles and responsibilities. “It’s okay to disagree, but it’s not okay to go against.”
The engineering company’s CHRO adds an important complication. For years, top management meetings were about creating clarity for the organisation.
Now they are increasingly about helping leaders live with ambiguity and learn to adapt to constant changes. Every time the three-year plan is finished, a war or pandemic seems to arrive. In the words of this CHRO: No leader can promise what the world will look like. Every leader can say what is expected, what are key priorities, and who decides.
Expectations, priorities and decision rights can be clear even when the world is not. Yes, half of BCG’s respondents say their company lacks clear governance for teams of people and AI agents.
Deloitte’s 2026 Human Capital Trends asks who is accountable when humans and agents both make decisions. A leader who cannot say who decides among humans will struggle when an agent joins the team.
Asked what to fix tomorrow, one CHRO did not hesitate: “Remove change management programmes. And just make the changes.”
The reasoning starts with the pandemic, when people adapted far faster than the year a classic programme assumes. A generation of leaders was raised on questions about who is “on the bus“, and on the duty to win over sceptics. This CHRO would rather spend the energy on people who want to come along. “We don’t have the time for that, and it’s not worth it.”
Part of the remedy is language. If every shift is announced as another transformation, people brace themselves each time. If change is simply how the company works, with governance built for it, some of that stress disappears.
Deloitte’s 2026 report lends support to the argument. Only 27% of respondents believe their organisation manages change effectively. A third of workers experienced 15 major changes in a single year. The report suggests that even the term “change management” may be out of date. One CHRO it quotes could have been sitting in our interviews: “We don’t need more change frameworks or reskilling programs.”
The scepticism does not stop with change management. It extends to some of HR’s own machinery.
A media group’s CHRO is equally unsentimental about HR infrastructure. EU requirements on time registration and pay reporting make sense where jobs are standardised. In an organisation where an editor and a film producer have almost nothing in common, the CHRO argues, such requirements consume leaders’ time and create reporting systems that often confirm what the company already knew.
Skills-based HR gets even shorter shrift with this CHRO: more registration, more maintenance, and information that is out of date almost as soon as it is recorded. “When people work together and know each other, you know what skills they have. We don’t need systems for that.”
There is a common instinct behind these examples: replace apparatus with judgment. The Nordic CHROs we interviewed are betting on something simpler: a manager who knows their people, and an employee who says what they need. It is cheaper and faster. It also suits organisations where trust is high and hierarchies are short.
Once again, the argument leads back to clarity: people need to know what matters, where the boundaries are, and who gets to decide.
There is, however, a limit to how far the anti-machinery argument can go. As the manufacturing company’s CHRO explained, a people-oriented company now also has to become process-oriented, because digitalisation and AI demand it. AI does not remove the need for systems and processes. It makes their quality more consequential.
As an EVP leading the automation of the entire HR function at a large energy company put it more bluntly: “If you put AI on a pile of crap, you get an even bigger pile of crap.”
The CHROs we had the privileged of meeting, are right now in the centre of defining the future of work and organisations.
The conversation that are on the agenda is to decide and set the direction for how we will utilise the potential of the AI transformations.
What do we want the Future of Work to look like? How do we build the resilience and capabilities to thrive in ambiguity and uncertainties? How do we make sure to get everyone on board for the next important and very defining time in our organisations? And not least how will we create increased value for customers, users and partners?
We are excited to follow the people and trends and to contribute to the continued dialogue of the organisations we want in the future.
A sincere thank you to all the Nordic CHRO/CPOs who generously shared their precious time, experience and honest perspectives with us. Inspired and enriched by these conversations, we hope with this article to pass on their insights and inspiration to others.
Interviews with CHRO/CPOs of large Nordic/global companies, held in June -August 2026. Companies and individuals are not named. Quotes are lightly edited for readability.
McKinsey & Company, The state of AI in 2026: On the road to ROI, August 2026. Survey of 1,719 participants in 97 nations.
Boston Consulting Group, AI at Work: Why Strategy Matters More Than Tools, June 2026. Survey of close to 12,000 employees, managers and leaders.
Deloitte, 2026 Global Human Capital Trends: From tensions to tipping points, March 2026. Survey of more than 9,000 business and HR leaders in 89 countries.
Deloitte, Staying relevant in a world that won’t sit still, chapter of the 2026 report, March 2026.
Curious to explore what AI means for people and organisations?
Get in touch with Berit Kristine Bøggild, Client Director at Mannaz.
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