Agentic AI and HR: Why 40% of Leaders Have No Strategy
Joey Price on why HR needs a seat at the table before the robots do
40% of HR leaders don't have an AI strategy, not even a rough draft of one.
Most of the AI conversation happening in HR right now still lives in fear. Will it replace me? Will it replace my team? Will it replace the whole department?
That's the wrong starting point.
The tools in front of us aren't just executing tasks anymore. They're reasoning, deciding, and acting on their own. Which means the real question isn't whether AI is coming for HR's seat at the table.
It's whether HR is even in the room.
Joey Price has spent years turning that answer into research, frameworks, and a business built to help HR leaders stop guessing and start leading the conversation instead of reacting to it.
(00:00) Meet the Guy Everyone's Following on LinkedIn
Joey Price is the CEO of Jumpstart HR, a TEDx speaker on AI in the workplace, and the author of The Power of HR: How to Make an Organizational Impact as a People Professional. He's a SHRM Top 30 Under 30 alum, was named one of the top 100 HR tech influencers of 2025, and hosts his own podcast, While We Were Working.
His path into HR wasn't the plan. He set out to study sports medicine in college, chasing a career working with athletes, before realizing partway through that it wasn't the right fit. A tip from his sister-in-law pointed him toward HR instead, and something about the field stuck immediately.
In 2011 he bet on himself and started his own company, telling himself that if it didn't work out, there was always a plan B. Fifteen years later, that company is still running, and Joey has built a reputation as one of the sharper voices helping HR leaders make sense of where AI is taking the profession next.
(04:00) The Seven-Year-Old Test for Explaining Agentic AI
Ask ten people to define agentic AI and you'll get ten vague answers involving the word "robot." Joey has a better method: he explains it the same way he'd explain it to his seven-year-old daughter, who actually listens to his podcast.
The old version of AI was a one-lane highway. You programmed a tool to do one specific task, with precision, over and over. Think the robots that dance on command, or a script that sorts data the exact same way every single time.
Agentic AI changes the lane count entirely. Instead of a tool that only executes, you get a tool that can own a task, make decisions inside it, reason through the steps, and come back and tell you what it did and why it did it that way.
That distinction matters because it's already sitting inside tools most HR leaders touch daily without registering the shift: Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, Siri, Claude, ChatGPT. The tools stopped being one-lane highways a while ago. Most people just haven't updated how they think about what they're actually approving when they hit "go."
(11:00) The Buying Mistake Almost Every HR Leader Is Making
Here's how most HR teams still buy technology: they've worked with a certain brand before, they know the tool, so they buy it again. Familiarity does the deciding, not strategy.
Joey's team found something that should stop that pattern cold. Through Jumpstart HR Research's recent Insights at Work report, they discovered 40% of HR leaders don't have an AI strategy at all.
That's not a niche problem. That's nearly half the profession walking into vendor conversations without a plan.
So Joey built what he calls "the bridge," a framework for how HR teams should actually buy technology now that agentic AI has changed what tools can do. It starts before you ever talk to a vendor:
Get clear on the actual business problem you're solving, not the one a sales deck describes for you
Pin down your real requirements and get internal alignment before anyone signs anything
Rank your decision criteria instead of reacting to whichever vendor pitches the hardest
Run a guided vendor review, not an ad hoc one built on whoever your CEO golfed with
And the part most companies skip entirely: a real plan for execution once the contract is signed. Because vendors don't stop at the sale. Multi-year contracts increasingly come with agents bolted on mid-term, and HR needs to already know how it'll handle that before it shows up.
(16:00) Not Every Business Is Supposed to Look the Same
Joey's second framework pushes back on a belief that's quietly taken over a lot of AI strategy conversations: that full autonomy is the finish line everyone should be racing toward.
He built out five workforce "archetypes," borrowing the structural thinking from Patrick Lencioni's work on team dynamics, to map where a business actually sits on the automation spectrum, and where it should sit.
A few examples he uses to make the contrast concrete:
A Main Street car dealership with a handful of branches has no business putting customers on a kiosk to buy a car. The interaction is still fundamentally human.
A large fast food chain, on the other hand, may lean much further into kiosks and agentic tools because that's exactly where its customers already expect autonomy.
A one-person CPA or design shop can sit at the fully autonomous end too, just from the opposite direction: the founder interacts one-to-one with clients while agents quietly handle outreach, finance, and reconciliation behind the scenes.
Joey describes the sweet spot for most employers as somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, closer to what he calls putting on the Iron Man suit: agents you delegate to individually, and eventually agents that show up alongside people right on the org chart. Five isn't the goal for everyone. Knowing where you actually are, and whether that's the right place to be, is the actual work.
(21:00) "You're On the Menu"
Joey's clearest warning of the whole conversation came down to one line.
"If you aren't at the table for digital transformation, then you're on the menu."
He points to companies like Sears and Blockbuster as the cautionary tale here, not because they lacked good products, but because they didn't move on the technology shift fast enough, and the shift moved on them instead.
His read on where this leaves HR isn't about panic. It's about positioning. Organizations need human-centered people in the room shaping how this technology gets deployed, not receiving a rollout after the decisions have already been made without them.
Where Do You Actually Start?
The tools aren't waiting for anyone to feel ready. They're already inside the platforms most HR teams use every day.
That doesn't mean sprinting toward full automation, and it doesn't mean HR's relevance is shrinking. It means the job is shifting toward the people who understand the technology well enough to guide it, not just get handed it.
Joey goes deeper into all five workforce archetypes and how to actually run a self-assessment against them, the full list of criteria inside "the bridge" framework for evaluating vendors, and what Jumpstart HR Research found when they dug into what separates the 60% of HR leaders who do have a strategy from the 40% who don't.
Connect with Joey Price: LinkedIn | jumpstart-hr.com | jumpstart-hr.com/research
Connect with Traci here: https://linktr.ee/HRTraci