Moderna and several other companies are merging HR and IT under one leader — and AI is driving the change.
64% of senior IT decision makers at large companies expect HR and IT to combine within five years, according to a Nexthink survey.
Tracey Franklin, chief people and digital technology officer at Moderna, runs both HR and IT for the biotech giant’s 5,000+ employees. She shapes how work flows through the company, mixing tech like AI with human skills. 
“I am responsible for the entire HR function and the entire IT function,” Franklin said.
“Traditionally, HR departments would say, ‘we’re going to do workforce planning, so we’re going to count how many humans we need to get tasks done’. And then the IT team would take requests [for] the systems that we need.”
“It’s [about] how work flows through the organisation, and what should be done with technology – whether that’s hardware or software or AI – and where you complement human skills around that.”
Moderna has partnered with OpenAI and trained every employee on ChatGPT. They want workers to become AI masters and redesign how work gets done.
Franklin took IT training for her new role but relies on her IT managers for technical expertise.
“I don’t think the leader of this function has to be an expert in one area or the other, but what they have to do is set direction, provide vision, do capital allocation, remove obstacles, set culture, and do employee engagement,” she said.
“I haven’t turned an HR person into an IT person or vice versa.”
Covisian merged its 27,000-employee company’s IT and HR teams last year under Fabio Sattolo, chief people and technology officer. The focus: developing people and IT together, especially as AI changes call center work.
“We’re talking about developing people on one side and developing IT on the other,” Sattolo said.
“We can have a common vision for how technology can have an impact on people and how people can adapt and evolve to leverage the new technology.”
AI will handle fixing problems after human agents take and diagnose calls. Covisian built an internal job postings tool with the combined HR/IT team that doubled employee responses.
“Making people speak the same language was the hardest part, because IT and HR people are really different,” Sattolo said.
“I remember many meetings where I was asking the questions because they were not talking to each other.”
Bunq’s chief strategy officer Bianca Zwart says IT and people teams sitting together is “a natural merger.” They want their 700+ employees to build their own AI automations.
“AI will be taking away the repetitive tasks so they can focus on the more complex problems,” Zwart said.
“In any company, people need to understand that they need to work in a completely different way moving forward.”
David D’Souza from CIPD warns merging HR and IT could dilute specialist skills needed for complex people and tech issues.
The AI era is pushing companies to rethink IT and HR silos — but it’s still early days on how deep this shift will go.
