Microsoft HR CVP: The labor market will be reimagined by AI agents

Christopher Fernandez is a seasoned HR professional. He’s been working in the HR space for three decades – 20 of those at Microsoft, where he currently serves as Corporate Vice President and Chief AI Officer, HR.

In an exclusive interview with UNLEASH, Fernandez shares that “my entire career, I’ve always had this mindset of how do you enable people to bring their best insights, their perspectives, to the forefront of whatever it is they’re doing in their work”.

“Historically, our reach would be limited”, and “many ideas that may be very pertinent to others aren’t really amplified”.

This has all changed with AI, and particularly the newest innovation: AI agents.

“I now have an agentic network that I can build, curate, and extend my knowledge and insights to colleagues, and hopefully give them further insight,” shares Fernandez.

“Hyper-scaling human thought is something that has always been, for me, an aspiration, but it’s never been able to be achieved tactically or theoretically”, but now it can “with the advent of agents as the most practical extension of an AI platform for people”.

The idea is that organizations need to move away from simply seeing AI in terms of productivity gains and efficiencies.

Yes, “those are very important things that leadership want”, but, for Fernandez, “there’s another piece of the puzzle, which I think is of paramount importance”, and that is for people to see how “AI will benefit them on their career journey”.

It’s time to think about how AI can enable humans to “achieve their own aspirations, goals, hopes and desires”.

Bringing AI agents to life in Microsoft HR

As a tech company leading the way on AI generally, and specifically on agentic AI, UNLEASH was very keen to find out how Microsoft is practically leveraging agents internally.

Fernandez is clear that the HR function has a crucial role to leading the agentic AI transformation within organizations; “how we approach AI as HR professionals now will define the world of work over the next century and beyond”.

Microsoft HR are doing this through a four dimensional model.

When people think about their role, they need to think it vertically (where they sit in the organizational hierarchy), horizontally (your workflows), diagonally (their profession, for example, journalist or HR professional) and spherical (the informal networks that revolve around the role).

“When you capture those four vectors, and capture it consistently across multitudes of roles in an organization”, it is possible for organizations to really understand how people actually work, and then “you can begin to realize how you might augment that work with agents”.

Microsoft is focusing on two types of agents – enterprise agents and task-based agents.

An example of a Microsoft enterprise agent in the HR function is Employee Self-Service – this already helping with efficiency gains within Microsoft (employees are 25% more likely to get an accurate response, and 49% less likely to need to create a support ticket). Microsoft plans to make this agent available to customers later in 2025.

But to drive Fernandez’s aspiration of “hyper-scaling of human thought” and people using AI to help humans with their careers and goals, task-based agents really come into their own.

“When I came into this role three years ago, I curated a group of citizen developers within HR. They’re not technologists, I’m not a technologist”, but Fernandez and the HR team (and everyone for that matter) possesses “domain expertise in our profession”.

So the HR team has been leveraging that domain expertise to go into Microsoft Copilot studio and use their own domain expertise to build agents to support them in their own 4D workflows.

Christopher Fernandez, CVP and Chief AI Officer, Microsoft HR.

Examples of task-based agents created by the Microsoft HR team were Hiring & Onboarding Agent and a HR Professional Support Agent.

By creating agents that can retrieval information, as well as “do things on your behalf, enables people to have a reach in a ways they would have been able to do” previously, Fernandez tells UNLEASH.

Being human-centered with AI agents

The beauty of task-based agents is that it is “individuals who are controlling the creation of agents” – “it’s not being done to them, and most importantly, it becomes an extension of themselves”.

Having a responsible, ethical, human-centered approach to AI is very important to Microsoft generally, and Fernandez personally.

Human-centered AI is not just about having a human in the loop, “you also need the human to have a sense that this something they are helping to create and steward”, adds Fernandez.

“To me, it is truly a genuine human-centered approach that is core to getting people to adopt” agentic AI. The alternative would be talking about productivity and efficiency, “but, for me, that’s not the lead into the conversation”.

The lead in is how can I enable you to have a broader reach with your expertise and your domain knowledge through way you could not have done before, and to connect with colleagues across the whole organization.”

This gives employees a sense that they are contributing to something larger – “that’s an exciting place to be in spirit and intellect”.

Bringing people on the journey is a top tip Fernandez has for HR leaders further behind on this agentic AI journey.

The more you say to people, “this is not something where somebody comes in from above and says here’s a new system, go learn in and deploy it”.

Instead, it is about reminding them they are experts, and “they’re the creator” of agents that will improve their day to day working lives.

In fact, at Microsoft, creating communities of practice to do this AI work has been successful.

“Oftentimes those ideas that were created in those communities of practice have been more powerful”; when people work together to solve problems with AI based on that 4D workflow model, it leads to better results than someone from above coming in to saying apply AI to x, y, z use case.

The transformative future of agentic AI

“We often talk about the era of AI – an era infers a time frame, an expanse of time. It’s not really an era, it is permanency,” states Fernandez.

“We don’t say the era of electricity; it’s just part of our life now, it is who we are as a society.”

The question of questions is “how to prepare people … that the future of work as we enough it is going to forever transformed?”

It is not hyperbole, for Fernandez, to say that the “labor market will be reimagined” by agentic AI.

Currently when you start a role, you come with a resume – but there could soon be a world where “employers will ask, what agents are you bringing with you? How are you thinking about your agent strategy?” This is not in the sense of being a technologist, but as an expert in your field.

The key to this labor market transformation is that, if done right, “it can be a benefit to all”. “This is a way to create opportunity” for people – whether that’s economic opportunity, job opportunity or career opportunity.

We’re in a moment of “massive transformation”. Companies will, of course, benefit, but ordinary people will be too.

They themselves have agency over their lives in a way they would no have had in the past, because they’ll have this technology that will create an enablement of who they are at scale,” concludes Fernandez.

UNLEASH is thrilled that Microsoft HR executives will be joining us on stage at UNLEASH America 2025, including newly appointed CPO Amy Coleman. Still not bought a pass? There’s still time to join us in Las Vegas, 6-8 May!