Happy International HR Day!
HR professionals are the unsung heroes of workplaces. Balancing people’s needs and business expectations often leads to making tough decisions that can be hard for others to understand.
If you’re an HR professional, chances are you’ve spent the last twelve months holding a lot together. You might have helped a manager learn how to give better feedback. Or rewritten policies before a Slack storm at 11 PM. The new joiner needed someone to make their first week feel welcoming, and you took up the charge.
You did all of that. And then, somewhere in between, you also led change.
This year’s International HR Day theme, set by the European Association for People Management, is Empower People to Lead Change. It’s a beautiful idea. And here’s the part worth saying out loud today:
Indian HR has been living this theme already.
Not waiting for the headline. Not waiting for the playbook. Just quietly doing the work.
Three Ideas, One Story
The 2026 theme rests on three simple pillars:
- Future-focused leadership: building trust and empowering employees.
- Human-centric AI and digital transformation.
- Continuous learning and upskilling for change readiness.
Each of these is a story Indian HR can tell with its chest out. Let’s take them one at a time.
The CHROs Who Pulled Up A Chair
The CHRO seat has changed shape over the last few years. While the role once focused largely on policy, process, and people operations, it now carries a transformation mandate as well. And Indian HR has stepped into that wider remit with confidence.
In 2024, 27% of BSE 100 companies appointed a new CHRO, more than three times the global average. Look at who they hired:
- Pidilite brought in Ashish Prasad to lead leadership development and cultural transformation.
- Bajaj Finserv promoted Anupam Sirbhaiya to Group CHRO to support its scale story.
- Relaxo appointed Manju Kohli to redesign operating models and put real HR tech to work.
- TCS transitioned the CHRO baton from Milind Lakkad to Sudeep Kunnumal with a succession pipeline built years in advance, no scramble, no drama.
These aren’t HR appointments. They’re transformation appointments. And the leaders stepping in know it.
Pramod Shah, CHRO at ECL Finance, said something to ThePeoplesBoard that still sits with us.
“Successful change management needs inclusion of Junior, Mid and Senior Management throughout the cycle. It is only the equality and clear division of work that makes change management move from the boardroom to the floor.”
That, right there, is what empowering people to lead change actually sounds like. A quiet, generous belief that the front line knows things the boardroom doesn’t.
AI Arrived And HR Said, “Come On In”
Remember when the AI conversation in HR was mostly fear? “Will it replace recruiters?” “Will it kill L&D?” “Will my job exist in three years?”
Indian HR could have buckled under the pressure. It didn’t.
Instead, the function rolled up its sleeves and got to work. The numbers are quietly remarkable:
- 62% of Indian employees use GenAI at work regularly, putting India at the top of EY’s global AI Advantage Index.
- 72% of Indian organisations have built AI features into their HR software already.
- Indian CHROs expect agentic AI adoption to grow 383% by 2027, with productivity gains projected at 41.7%.
But here’s the part that matters more than the percentages. Indian HR didn’t just adopt the technology. It carried its people along.
Asma Shaikh, who runs the agentic AI learning company Enthral.ai, shared that AI’s most exciting role in HR is learning, where personalisation can finally happen at the scale it has always promised. That’s a long way from “Will AI take my job?” That’s “What can I do with this thing that I couldn’t do before?”
Is the work done? Of course not. Trust still lags adoption. Bias audits are inconsistent. The DPDP Act is settling in. Smaller companies are still finding their footing. But we’ll get there. The HR community has earned that confidence by what it’s already pulled off.
Learning Is Now Part Of The Job, Not An Event
Here’s a beautiful thing about Indian HR. It figured out that learning isn’t a workshop you attend. It’s the way you work.
The country needs to train 109 million skilled workers across 24 sectors by 2026, per the Ministry of Skill Development. WEF says 63 in every 100 Indian workers will need some form of retraining by 2030. Those are intimidating numbers. But the response from corporate India has been quietly heartening.
Look at what’s actually happening:
- Mahindra Group built a first-of-its-kind Returnship programme for women returning to mainstream roles, a structural answer to one of India Inc’s most stubborn gaps.
- Tech Mahindra anchored its Limitless Together culture framework on learning and inclusion as central pillars, not afterthoughts.
- NTT Data India is committed to reskilling its entire India workforce in AI-related skills.
- Capgemini India sits HR inside business planning, so capability needs get anticipated, not patched.
- Accenture India is building skilled architecture work at an enterprise scale.
Then there’s the part you don’t often see headlined. Skill India Digital makes AI courses free for anyone with a phone. The National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme continues to build the bridge from college to career.
The country is finally building learning infrastructure that feels like infrastructure.
Korn Ferry’s research showed that more than 60% of employees would stay in a job they dislike if it offered serious upskilling. In India, with our young, mobile workforce, learning has quietly become one of the strongest retention levers HR has built. Real growth, paid for and protected by the people function.
What This All Adds Up To
If you squint at the three pillars together, a simple truth emerges. Indian HR didn’t wait.
It didn’t wait for the boardroom to grant it a seat. It didn’t wait for a global framework to be translated for the local context. It didn’t wait for the AI conversation to mature before joining it. It moved.
That’s the spirit of this year’s theme. Empower people to lead change. The Indian HR community has been doing that. For its employees. For its companies. For the function itself.
And, as with all good HR work, most of it happened without much applause.
Veena Bansal, CHRO at M3M India, recently said that 2025 reminded us how important it is to move past caution. Vinod Nair, CHRO at Aadhar Housing Finance, was even more candid: companies grew, but people decisions sometimes slowed down.
Both of them are right. The work isn’t finished. Succession depth below the C-suite still needs to be built. Learning access in tier-2 and tier-3 cities still has gaps. AI governance is still maturing.
But that’s a good problem to have. It means there’s a clear road ahead and a community ready to walk it.
In the End…
Today isn’t really about strategy, transformation, or technology. It’s about people.
The people who pick up the phone when an employee is having a hard day. The people who design induction programmes that make a stranger feel like they belong by Friday. The people who push back on a senior leader because the policy isn’t fair. The people who fight for an extension of parental leave. The people who quietly remember birthdays, anniversaries, and the names of every new joiner’s children.
You are the function that holds the rest of the building together. You’re also increasingly the function that’s shaping where the building goes next.
If the 2026 theme asks HR to empower people to lead change, the Indian HR community can take a small bow. You’ve been doing it. You’ll keep doing it. And tomorrow, when the day of recognition fades, and the inbox starts filling up again, you’ll do it some more.
So happy International HR Day, from all of us at ThePeoplesBoard. Thank you for showing up, for the people who don’t always know how to thank you back.
Today is yours. Enjoy it.
