‘The responsibility is on us as HR agents and as strategists to remind folks about the role that we add,' says expert
When a CEO fires his entire HR team and calls it a fix, many in the HR profession may wonder if they're also on the chopping block.
Ryan Breslow, CEO of fintech company Bolt, told Fortune's Workforce Innovation Summit recently that his HR department had been "creating problems that didn't exist" – and that those problems disappeared when he let them go.
Breslow said the company is back in startup mode, operating with roughly 100 employees after multiple rounds of layoffs, including one that cut roughly 30 percent of its remaining workforce.
Canadian HR professionals and academics say this kind of dramatic move is worth taking seriously – but with a substantial grain of salt.
Why cut HR completely?
Nita Chhinzer, associate professor of human resources at the University of Guelph, says Bolt's decision to eliminate HR needs to be understood in context. Whether it’s “human resources” or “people ops”, she says, the label matters far less than the strategy behind it.
"The company is trying to reinvent itself," Chhinzer says.
"It's trying to go from being this large behemoth of a company that it used to be in 2022 to now be more of like a dynamic startup feel, and in dynamic startups, they want to keep things really fluid."
She says the approach Breslow is describing – shifting people management responsibilities from a centralized HR function into individual business unit leaders – is not unusual in small or early-stage companies. What makes Bolt different is the circumstances driving the decision.
"This person is looking for a revolution, not an evolution," Chhinzer says.
"They're looking to immediately bring on people who have the desired skill and mentality, as opposed to switching the mentality."
The hidden risks of removing HR
Breslow's argument is that firing HR made problems disappear. Chhinzer's response is that invisible problems are not the same as solved ones.
"No one's highlighting that your practices are systemically biased or potentially illegal in one way or another – just because there's nobody highlighting that doesn't mean that the problems just went away," she says.
"It's too naive of a perspective."
Chhinzer draws on her research into organizational structure and group dynamics to explain why some smaller companies can operate without a formal HR function – and why that has limits.
"When groups get to a large enough size, they need structure," she says. "When they're smaller, they can really thrive and operate in unstructured environments, because that responsibility for identifying any of the challenges then lies with the business leader."
The problem, she says, is that not all business leaders are equipped to carry that responsibility.
"There are managers who can do some of those functions – some managers are exceptional," she says. "But not all. So there are a lot of potential risks here."
HR to people ops shift: necessary changes
Natasha Lakhani, SVP of people and talent at Super.com, has a unique perspective, having operated inside a company that has had to navigate exactly this tension.
Speaking with Canadian HR Reporter, Lakhani explains how decisions made early in a company’s life, before HR structures are in place, can cause complications years down the line. For this reason, she says, agility has become a non-negotiable quality for HR.
"To work in my space today, you absolutely, as an HR professional, have to be agile, you have to be flexible, and the baseline now is you've got to understand the needs of the business," Lakhani says.
"You will be a blocker if you don't understand the way the business operates and what the business needs."
She describes how this plays out in practice at Super.com, where she co-leads the company's AI strategy alongside the chief technology officer – a responsibility she sees as entirely consistent with core HR expertise.
"At its most basic and fundamental principle, this is a change management exercise," Lakhani says.
"How we evolve and get us all on the same boat, going in the same direction, is an exercise in evolving our culture, and that is at its core an HR expertise, not a tech expertise."
Successful companies still centre people
According to Chhinzer, the debate over HR versus people ops is, in part, a debate over strategic positioning. As she sees it, companies that are succeeding are moving toward a more employee-centric model – not away from it.
"The companies that are succeeding are in fact taking an employee-centric approach," she says, "because they know that the employees are their competitive advantage. They know that if they lose certain groups of employees to other companies they will essentially be giving away or shifting their innovation, their critical thinking, their ability to access customers."
Retention, she adds, is where the people function creates the most measurable value, regardless of title.
"It is much cheaper on a company and much more effective to keep … a successful employee that you have than to let that employee go and go back into the market and hire," she says.
"That's way more disruptive."
AI is rewriting the HR playbook, in real time
Another curveball being tossed at HR is the pace of the change itself, which Lakhani says is happening faster than traditional planning cycles can accommodate.
"The things that we were thinking about six months ago are completely different," she says.
"What we thought was going to be something we were going to be rooted in and have a very specific focal point going into 2026 for the year – I would say going into July of this year, it's going to look totally different."
Lakhani’s team has adopted a forward-oriented approach to this problem by deliberately normalizing AI use rather than siloing it. As part of its learning and development budget, employees are permitted to purchase AI tools for personal use – on the condition that no company data is involved.
"We just want you to get familiar and comfortable with that tool," Lakhani says. "Use it on your personal computer, use it in your personal life to get comfortable, and we will pay for it."
The logic is that fluency in AI requires practice outside of high-stakes work environments; Lakhani describes how she applies it in her own life and how it’s widened her scope of use at work.
"I use it to make games for my kids to track what they're supposed to do. We've created an entire game behind their daily routines and activities,” she says.
“It allowed me to be much more fluent in AI at work, because I know how to train it better, because I'm asking it smarter questions."
Value of HR in changing world
Whatever its limitations as a management model, Chhinzer credits the Bolt story with raising crucial questions around HR’s value in the changing world of work. The people function is not disappearing, she says, it is being asked to prove its value – on business terms, at the speed of business.
"It's starting a great conversation about what is the role of HR and what value do they add," Chhinzer says.
"And the responsibility is on us as HR agents and as strategists to remind folks about the role that we add."
