Last week, I apologised. My strategy was sound — a weekly on people sustainability. My execution wasn't. "Strategy is a commodity; execution is an art." (Drucker)

This week, I execute. Part 1 is here.

And that same line happens to be the point of the whole trilogy.

Every people leader has the strategy: the trend list. Ten research houses publish it in H1 2026, and last week I shared the heatmap that maps the lot — ten publishers, twenty themes, sixty-four trends. Reading the trends is the commodity. The art is what you do next.

It starts with seeing what the agenda actually says. I went looking for what 2026 added; what I found was what it dropped. Two constants hold — HR's value and operating model, and skills. Two things moved, in opposite directions: AI framing leapt from 11% of trends to 75% in a single year, and as it rose, the people agenda fell — fair wages, flexible working, wellbeing, and whether work is still sustainable for the humans doing it.

In a year of forecasts written about the workforce, the workforce quietly left the page.

That's The Signal — Part 1 of HR Trends & Priorities 2026. Measured, mapped, and traceable to the source.

— Tanguy

Links to heatmap → issue #033 (or the PDF download).

The Signal: What the 2026 HR Trends Tell Us

Part 1 of 3 — an analysis of the 2026 HR trends, read across ten publishers.

By Tanguy Dulac, Founder & Managing Director, PeopleCentriX

The HR profession has a person at its centre — someone whose pay, health, security and prospects are the whole point of the function. This year, its own forecast wrote that person out.

This analysis reads the 2026 HR trend reports side by side — ten publishers: AIHR, BCG, David Green, Deloitte, Gartner, i4cp, McKinsey, McLean, Mercer and SHRM. Every one leads with the same figure: the share of trends framed through AI has jumped from 11% in 2025 to 75% in 2026. There is a case for leading with it — AI is the genuine shock of the decade, HR has been slow to it, and a function that ignored it would be failing. Grant all of that, and it is still the wrong figure to lead with. What should worry a Chief People Officer is not what the agenda added but what it dropped to make room: the story is what it kept, what it cut, and whom it forgot.

The full cross-publisher reading behind this series — every trend mapped, every AI flag, every source — is set out in our 2026 HR Trends & Priorities Heatmap.

Read the ten reports against one another, and four signals remain: two constants worth building on, two shifts worth questioning.

Some things do not trend; they hold. The first constant sits at or near the top of every serious ranking, and has for as long as the genre has existed; it ranks first again this year.

But the label matters, because two things do the work, and only together. HR Value is the mandate, vision and strategy — what the function is for. The HR Operating Model is the infrastructure that delivers it: structure, processes, technology. Value without an operating model is an ambition no one can execute; an operating model without value is plumbing with nothing to carry.

Why does this pair barely move while everything around it churns? Because it is not a trend. It is the discipline that decides which trends matter, cutting the year’s flood of signals and vendor pressure to the few priorities that fit one organisation. Everything else is raw input; this is the filter. It holds the top spot not because it recurs — durability in a trend report proves persistence, not truth — but because its job is to judge the rest of the list.

The second constant is skills — the only one with proof from outside the genre. Its evidence sits in the labour market itself.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 22% of today’s jobs will churn by 2030 — 170 million roles created, 92 million displaced, a net gain near 78 million. A labour market that turns over a fifth of itself in five years is not a publishing theme. It is a structural fact — the rare trend that would survive even if every report stopped printing it.

The same evidence shows what the churn does to people. Of every 100 workers, 59 will need training by 2030 — and 11 will need reskilling they never receive, written off in advance inside the very transition the field is championing.

Hold onto that one in nine. They are not a statistic; they are the person this profession exists to serve, and the first sign of what the loud half of the agenda has stopped counting. We will meet them again.

Three — Human–AI collaboration: the rising shift

One theme climbed further than any other: Work Redesign and Human–AI Collaboration, onto the podium from near the bottom. The speed tells you more than the subject. Real adoption diffuses gradually, publisher by publisher; this sat low for two years, then leapt in one.

The same one-year swing runs through the field. As recently as 2024, AI sat in its own box — a discrete “AI in HR” theme among twenty. By 2026, that standalone box has vanished, dispersed into everything else: skills, leadership, analytics, culture and reward are now all narrated in AI terms. The headline figure traces the same shape: across the 2024 baseline, the AI-framed share ran near a fifth of trends, sat at 11% in 2025, then leapt to 75% in 2026 — close to a sevenfold rise in a single year. (Treat the 2024 figure with care: it is an earlier, provisional baseline. What is robust is the jump — and what it pushed off the page.)

None of this says AI is hollow; the churn behind the second signal says the opposite. The concern is the uniformity. A field can converge because the world shifted or because it is reading itself, and the test is not how fast it moved but what moved out as AI moved in. Part 2 makes that case.

Four — People sustainability: the falling shift

The first three signals are what the field kept and celebrated. The fourth is what it buried — the one no one is selling, and the one that matters most. “People sustainability” can sound soft, so anchor it in something hard: the WEF’s Good Work Framework defines good work as five pillars. Score the 2026 agenda against them.

Only one pillar — employability — advances. Three human pillars retreat outright. The fifth is the sharpest irony: in a year three-quarters of which is framed through AI, the pillar that calls for technology and generative AI to be deployed responsibly is itself nearly absent. Four-fifths of an established framework, dark in a single year.

Wellbeing is the starkest of these declines. A top-ten priority in both 2024 and 2025 — pushed up the agenda by the pandemic and holding there long after the crisis passed — it falls out of even the top twenty in 2026, even as alarm mounts over the psychological, physical and financial health of the workforce. A topic does not fall off the agenda because it has been solved; it falls off because the field has tired of it.

And the one advancing pillar is only half-honoured. It asks for reskilling across the entire workforce and systems to redeploy the displaced; the agenda kept the productive half — upskill the people you keep — and dropped the human half — redeploy the people you don’t.

What this leaves us with

The year resolves into a sentence. The profession has two constants worth building on — HR value and operating model, and skills — and an agenda so absorbed by one story that four of the five pillars of good work have gone quiet. People sustainability did not lose an argument; it was never invited to the table.

This is not a moral complaint but a causal one. The priorities dropped — fair wages, flexible working, wellbeing — are not peripheral: they are what Herzberg called hygiene factors, and the substance of the psychological contract. Break that side of the deal and commitment, trust and the will to stay erode with it, as my own research in the Academy of Management Journal found (Dulac et al., 2008). An entire band of human priorities falling out of the top ten in a single year, while the problems they name keep worsening, is not a solved problem retiring quietly; it is the signature of a management fad. That is what Part 2 examines, beginning with one question: Is the field reading the world, or reading each other?

Mini-lexicon

HR value and operating model — the mandate, vision and strategy (value) and the infrastructure that delivers it (operating model); the priority that decides which trends matter.

People sustainability — the human side of the agenda — fair wages; protection and flexibility; wellbeing; employability and human capital; responsible technology deployment — as set out in the WEF Good Work Framework.

The five pillars of good work — the WEF’s definition of good work: fair wages; protection and flexibility; wellbeing; employability and human capital; responsible technology deployment.

Psychological contract — the unwritten deal between employer and employee — what people are promised and expect to be honoured.

Hygiene factors — Herzberg’s term for the baseline conditions whose absence corrodes the employment relationship, even when their presence goes unremarked.

The one in nine — the roughly eleven in every hundred workers the WEF expects to need reskilling and never receive it.

On method. The reading behind this series maps every published trend in the 2026 reports into one 20-theme framework, each flagged for AI framing, with 2025 logged on the same basis for comparison and an earlier year held as a provisional baseline. All three editions are double-coded; the full traceability workbook is available on request. External figures are drawn from the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 (Survey 2024) and Good Work Framework (2022).

References: World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025 and Good Work Framework; Dulac, T., Coyle-Shapiro, J. A.-M., Henderson, D. J. & Wayne, S. J. (2008). Academy of Management Journal, 51(6): 1079–1098.