Your Senior Executives Shouldn't Be Running Claude Training. HR Should.
A senior executive told me recently that his company has been on their AI journey for over six months. When I asked how it was going, his answer stopped me:
"I'm still the one running Claude training sessions."
Six months in. A senior leader. Still personally conducting tool training.
That's not a technology problem. That's an organizational design problem. And it's one I see playing out across companies that are treating AI adoption like an IT rollout, assigning it to whoever is most enthusiastic or most technical, rather than recognizing it for what it actually is: a full-scale workforce transformation.
AI adoption isn't a technical implementation. It's a change in how every person in your organization works. That belongs to HR.
Where HR Should Be Leading
The employee lifecycle doesn't pause for a technology initiative. It shapes it. Here's where HR should be driving AI adoption, not supporting it from the sidelines:
- Recruiting & role design. If AI is changing how work gets done, job descriptions need to reflect the skills required to work alongside it. HR should be rewriting role profiles now, not after the tools are deployed.
- Onboarding & enablement. AI proficiency should be embedded in onboarding from day one. Not as a one-time training. As a foundational capability expectation, the same way we handle compliance or systems access.
- Learning & development. Adoption doesn't happen in a two-hour session. HR should be designing continuous learning pathways that build AI fluency over time, tied to role-specific application, not generic tool walkthroughs.
- Performance & expectations. If AI is supposed to make people more effective, that needs to show up in how we define and measure performance. HR owns that conversation with managers and leaders.
- Employee experience & engagement. Fear of displacement, confusion about what AI means for careers, uncertainty about expectations — these are people issues. HR should be monitoring sentiment, surfacing concerns early, and designing the communications strategy that keeps employees engaged through the change.
- Compliance & governance. How employees use AI tools, what data they input, what decisions they defer to automation, what they're accountable for, requires policy, training, and oversight. That's HR's domain.
The Misdiagnosis
The reason senior executives end up running training sessions is that organizations misdiagnose AI adoption as a technical problem. So they assign it to technical people, or to whoever raised their hand.
But the barriers to AI adoption are almost never technical. The tools work. The friction is human: unclear expectations, change fatigue, lack of manager capability, no connection between AI use and career growth.
Those are HR problems. And they require HR solutions.
What Strategic AI Ownership Looks Like
The HR leaders who get this right are treating AI adoption the same way they'd treat any major organizational transformation: with a structured change management approach, clear accountability, and metrics that measure adoption, not just access.
They're asking:
- Which employee populations have the greatest adoption gap, and why?
- Are managers equipped to coach AI use on their teams, or are they struggling alongside their employees?
- What does our governance framework say about appropriate AI use, and do employees actually know it?
- How is AI changing the skills our workforce needs in the next 18 months?
These are workforce strategy questions. They don't belong in IT. They belong in HR, at the leadership table, connected to business outcomes.
The organizations that get AI right won't be the ones with the best tools. They'll be the ones with the best people strategy around those tools.
The senior executive I spoke with is smart, capable, and deeply committed to his company's AI future. That's exactly why he shouldn't be spending his time in training sessions.
HR should be freeing him up to lead, by building the infrastructure, capability, and culture that makes AI adoption sustainable.
That's the strategic application of this function. And it's where the evolution is going.