Reengineering HR with AI
Week 4
I spent two weeks building a business case for a new HR role that would reduce pressure on the team and improve how we support managers. I walked into the meeting confident. I had data on volume, team needs, and employee satisfaction scores. Twenty minutes later, the CFO asked, “But what does this actually cost us, and what do we get back?”
I didn’t have an answer. The project died in that room, not because it was a bad idea, but because I’d pitched it like an HR person instead of a business leader.
HR knows our initiatives will make business impact. We can feel it. We’ve seen what happens when we don’t invest in people programs, when managers are overwhelmed, when processes break down. But when it’s time to pitch the solution, we talk about employee engagement, culture, and experience. We use HR language for an audience that thinks in revenue, cost, and efficiency.
I’ve sat in budget meetings where HR leaders presented compelling ideas, truly valuable work, and watched them get deprioritized because they couldn’t translate the value into terms that mattered to the decision-makers. Someone pitches a leadership development program and talks about “building capabilities” and “strengthening our culture.” The CFO nods politely and moves the conversation to the sales team’s request for new CRM software, which comes with a clear ROI projection.
It’s not that the leadership program isn’t valuable. It’s that we didn’t speak the language of business impact. We assumed our audience would connect the dots from “better leaders” to “better business outcomes.” They won’t. That’s our job, and most of us have never been taught how to do it.
After my pitch failed, I watched what happened over the next six months. The HR team kept drowning in operational work. Manager escalations increased. We missed two critical talent retention conversations because we were too buried to notice the warning signs (although, these were partly on the managers). Both people left for competitors.
In the next budget cycle, leadership approved an expensive HR technology platform that promised to “streamline processes.” It cost three times what my proposed role would have cost. And it didn’t solve the problem because the problem wasn’t technology, it was capacity and strategic support.
The really painful part? I could have prevented all of it if I’d just framed my original pitch differently. If I’d walked in talking about the cost of turnover for those two critical roles, the revenue impact of delayed manager support, the efficiency gains from redistributing work. The business case was there. I just didn’t know how to tell that story.
Six months later, the CFO mentioned in passing that he wished we’d solved the HR capacity problem sooner. I truly wanted to throw my hands up and walk away. We’d tried. But I’d pitched it like an HR professional asking for resources instead of a business leader proposing an investment with clear returns.
I know why we struggle with this. Most of us came up through HR, not finance. We learned to think about people and culture, not P&L statements and cost-benefit analyses. When we try to speak the CFO’s language, it feels inauthentic, like we’re reducing human work to spreadsheets.
There’s also this belief that our work should speak for itself. That leadership should just understand why investing in people matters. But that’s not how budget decisions work. Every function is competing for limited resources, and the ones that win are the ones that can clearly articulate their impact in business terms.
We also don’t want to be seen as the HR person who only cares about numbers. We got into this work because we care about people. But if we can’t get our initiatives funded, we can’t help anyone.
If you know me, you know I wasn’t done with my original idea. So I took my failed pitch and put it into an AI chat. I explained what I was trying to accomplish in creating a new role that would reduce pressure on HR and improve manager support. Then I asked it to help me think like a CFO.
The conversation took about an hour. The LLM asked questions I hadn’t considered: “What’s the current cost of the problem you’re trying to solve?” I calculated the hours the team spent on reactive work that could be redistributed. “What’s the revenue impact of delayed manager support?” I looked at the two people we’d lost and their contribution to key projects. “What’s the efficiency gain if this role handles X instead of the current team?” I worked through the time savings and what the team could focus on instead.
By the end, I had a completely different pitch. Instead of “we need help,” it was “we’re currently spending $150,000 in team hours on reactive operational work that could be handled by one dedicated role at $80,000. That redistribution frees up capacity for strategic work that directly impacts retention and manager effectiveness. Based on last year’s turnover in critical roles, preventing just two exits pays for this role twice over.”
Same initiative. Different story. The AI didn’t make up numbers, it helped me find the business impact that was already there and frame it in terms that resonated with the people holding the budget.
You can do this next week. Take your next proposal, the program or role or initiative you know will help. Open ChatGPT or Claude and say: “I need to pitch this to my CFO. Help me think through the business impact.” Let it ask you questions (This is the key!). Work through the cost of the current problem, the value of the solution, and the ROI. Spend an hour getting the story right before you ever walk into that meeting.
Every time HR gets deprioritized in a budget meeting, it’s not because leadership doesn’t value people. It’s because we didn’t make the business case clearly enough.
You can complain that you shouldn’t have to translate your work into dollars and cents, or you can accept that this is how decisions get made and learn to speak that language. It’s like money. We all wish we didn’t have to work for it, but it’s the means to get the things we want. In this case, we want programs that support employees. To get there, we need to think in business impact.
AI can teach you to think like a CFO without becoming one. It can help you find the financial story that’s buried in your HR initiative. The question is whether you’re going to use it or keep losing in budget meetings.
What pitch are you going to reframe first?
Great information and insight!!