Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffè, Professor of Strategy at SDA Bocconi, explains why artificial intelligence does not diminish HR’s role, but moves it to the centre of business strategy.
For years, HR has been described as a support function. A fundamental one, certainly, but often positioned at the edge of the places where business strategy is really decided.
Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffè’s talk at Sparking Thoughts turns this perspective on its head.
His argument is simple: if artificial intelligence changes the nature of work, it inevitably changes the nature of HR as well.
No longer only the management of people, roles and processes, but the governance of the intangible assets that generate value within the organisation.
From work to contribution
For a long time, companies thought in terms of jobs: relatively stable roles, tasks and responsibilities. A job description defined what a person was expected to do and which skills they were expected to have.
AI makes this model less precise.
Work is being broken down into activities, decisions, knowledge, relationships and judgement. Some of these can be supported or automated. Others will remain profoundly human.
The question therefore shifts from “how many people do we need?” to “what contribution do we need, and how can it be generated, orchestrated and enhanced?”
The issue is not replacing people. It is understanding where value comes from and how to help it grow.
The organisation’s semantic capital
According to Carnevale Maffè, every organisation owns an often invisible asset: its semantic capital.
It is the body of knowledge that lives in people, relationships and experience accumulated over time. It includes what is written in processes, but also what has never been formalised: intuition, market sensitivity, tacit expertise, customer knowledge, management culture and the ability to interpret context.
It is the asset that often resides in the most experienced people, long-standing teams or founders themselves.
The problem is that this knowledge can remain hidden or fragmented, or even disappear when someone leaves the organisation.
AI therefore makes a new responsibility urgent: turning individual knowledge into organisational knowledge.
Adopting tools is not enough. Organisations need a shared language that allows people, processes and technologies to work from the same knowledge base.
HR as an asset manager for intangibles
In this scenario, HR is no longer simply a function that manages a cost item.
It becomes a steward of organisational assets.
Its task is not only to attract talent, but to understand which knowledge truly makes an organisation distinctive, how to protect it, how to develop it and how to pass it on to new generations.
It means identifying which skills must remain human, which can be supported by AI and which activities can be fully automated.
Above all, it means governing the portfolio of skills and knowledge on which the organisation’s competitive advantage is built.
The human value that remains
In a scenario where many activities can be automated, what remains human becomes even more valuable.
The ability to ask the right questions, interpret context, define the constraints of a problem, manage exceptions and take responsibility for decisions remains human.
Artificial intelligence can produce answers, but it cannot bear the weight of the meaning, consequences and responsibility involved in every decision.
Human work does not disappear. It moves towards what requires judgement.
Organisations will increasingly need people who can see what a model cannot see, challenge what appears obvious and read nuances that no algorithm can grasp independently.
Why this reflection matters to Sparq
For Sparq, these reflections touch the heart of our work.
Headhunting, Talent as a Service and HR Advisory can no longer be viewed merely as services for finding or managing people. They become tools that help companies rethink their architecture of work.
The point is not simply to fill a position.
It is to help organisations understand which contributions will truly be needed, which skills will remain distinctive and which forms of collaboration will emerge between people and technologies.
In this scenario, talent is no longer simply a person placed in a role.
It is a combination of skills, experience, judgement, energy and knowledge that the organisation must be able to recognise, activate and enhance.
The future of work will be a matter of governance
Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffè’s talk is not a reflection on AI as a technology trend.
It is a reflection on how value is changing within organisations.
AI does not eliminate work. It forces work to redefine itself.
It does not eliminate HR. It pushes HR towards the centre of strategy.
And it does not replace human value. It forces companies to finally understand where that value truly resides.
HR’s work will therefore no longer be only about finding talent.
It will be about recognising the value the organisation already holds, turning it into shared knowledge and creating the conditions for it to generate the future.
Article inspired by Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffè’s talk at Sparking Thoughts, Sparq’s format for exploring how work, organisations and leadership are changing.