The conversation going around every HR team in the UAE right now is the same one. Will AI take our jobs? And the honest answer, according to Dominic Keogh-Peters, Group CHRO of Galadari Brothers and a CIPD Fellow, is that AI will not replace HR. But it will remove most of what HR departments currently spend their time doing. That is a very different thing — and for HR professionals who understand the difference, it is actually good news.
The Work That Is Already Disappearing
Think about what a typical HR department in a UAE company does on any given day. Letters go out. Policies get explained. Annual leave queries get answered. Forms get processed. Records get updated. Reports get written. These tasks consume a large portion of most HR teams and they are exactly the tasks that AI handles better, faster, and cheaper than any human. Within a few years, an employee in Dubai who wants to know their maternity leave entitlement will not send an email to HR and wait two days for a response. They will ask an AI assistant, get an accurate answer in seconds, and have the relevant workflow triggered automatically. Keogh-Peters is clear that this shift is coming and that HR teams should want it to happen. The administrative layer of HR has held the profession back for decades. Removing it is not a threat to HR. It is an opportunity to finally do the work that actually matters. If you manage HR payroll or employee payments and use FAB for business transactions, a quick FAB Balance Check Online keeps your account details in order without needing a branch visit — useful when your team is smaller and everyone is wearing more hats.
What AI Cannot Do and Why That Changes Everything
Here is the part that gets missed in most discussions about AI and HR. The reason AI will not replace HR entirely is not because AI is not capable enough. It is because organisations are not machines. They are social systems made up of people who respond to fairness, trust, leadership, status, identity, and relationships. An algorithm can tell you that removing a layer of management would improve efficiency on paper. It cannot tell you whether that change would destroy the informal trust networks that are quietly holding your organisation together. AI can model an optimal workforce structure. It cannot decide whether that structure is actually right for the people who have to work inside it. It can identify that something has gone wrong in an employee relations case. It cannot replace the human judgement and empathy needed to make it right. Keogh-Peters describes this distinction as the difference between AI running processes and AI knowing when a situation has moved beyond process and now needs a human with real experience, real context, and real leadership to handle it. That moment — the moment where process ends and judgement begins — is the future of HR.
The Three Big Shifts Coming for UAE HR Teams
Keogh-Peters identifies three areas where the HR function will change significantly as AI takes over the administrative layer. The first shift is in employee relations. Today, HR teams spend a large amount of time explaining policy, gathering documentation, and managing straightforward cases. AI will increasingly do all of that automatically. The HR professionals who remain in this area will be dealing with the genuinely complex situations — the ones where policy is clear but the human context is not, where legal risk exists alongside emotional complexity, where culture and leadership are part of the problem. These cases require significantly more skill than the routine ones. There will be fewer people doing this work, but the people who do it will need to be far more capable. The second shift is in talent management. Traditional HR has spent years maintaining talent grids, succession plans, and annual review processes. AI will make much of this continuous and real-time. Organisations will be able to see at any moment what capabilities they have, what they are losing, and what they need to build. The conversation stops being about who replaces whom and starts being about what capabilities the organisation needs and how to build, buy, or automate them. The third shift is in organisation design itself. Keogh-Peters argues that the most important work HR can do is help design how an organisation actually functions — its structure, its accountabilities, how decisions get made, how performance gets rewarded, what behaviours leadership reinforces every day. AI can provide extraordinary amounts of data about how an organisation is running. But deciding what kind of organisation to build is a human decision. That work — strategic, commercial, deeply connected to how the business creates value — is where HR becomes genuinely important. If you are an Etisalat user and need your phone topped up while managing a busy HR transformation project, take a moment to check How to Check Balance in Etisalat so your line stays active for every important call and notification.
Should Payroll Even Stay in HR?
One of the more provocative questions Keogh-Peters raises is whether payroll belongs in HR at all. His argument is straightforward. Payroll is fundamentally a financial transaction. It requires the kind of controls, reconciliation, governance, and accuracy that already sit naturally inside Finance. In most organisations, HR is not really running payroll anyway — it is administering a platform that Finance could just as easily own and govern more effectively. Moving transactional work like payroll out of HR would free the function to focus entirely on the things only HR should be doing. Total reward strategy. Compensation philosophy. How incentives and recognition drive the behaviours the organisation needs. Benefits design. None of those move to Finance. But the payment processing? Keogh-Peters thinks it should. The broader point is that the future HR department should not be defined by which administrative processes it owns. It should be defined by the strategic questions it is uniquely positioned to answer.
What the Future HR Department Actually Looks Like
Put all of this together and a clear picture starts to emerge. The HR team of the future in the UAE will almost certainly be smaller. Significantly fewer administrators. The people who remain will be more senior, more commercially aware, and more deeply connected to the business than most HR teams are today. They will spend their time on organisation design, capability architecture, leadership development, total reward, culture, and the genuinely complex human situations that AI cannot resolve. AI will run the administration. Finance will likely run payroll. Technology will manage the platforms. Managers will handle more of their own day-to-day people decisions, supported by intelligent tools that guide them rather than bypass them. And HR will concentrate entirely on the work that actually creates organisational advantage. Keogh-Peters describes this as the irony of AI in HR. The technology might finally force the profession to become what HR people have been saying they want to be for years. Not the department that fills out forms and runs processes. The function that helps design how the organisation converts its strategy into human performance. Because strategy can be documented by a machine. Execution still lives in people. And connecting the two still requires someone who understands both. That is the HR professional the UAE’s most competitive organisations will be looking for over the next decade.
What This Means If You Work in HR in the UAE Right Now
If your current role is primarily administrative, the message is clear. The work is going away. Not immediately, but the direction is set and the pace of change is faster than most organisations have planned for. The question to ask yourself right now is not whether AI will affect your job. The question is what you are building to remain relevant when it does. The HR professionals who will thrive are the ones developing commercial awareness, organisation design thinking, data literacy, and the ability to have genuinely strategic conversations with business leaders. The ones who will struggle are the ones waiting to see what happens. If you are considering upskilling, changing roles, or exploring what a future in HR looks like, and you receive calls from unknown numbers offering HR courses, certifications, or job placement services, always verify first before sharing your details or making payments. Use the Who Called Me From This Number UAE tool to identify any unfamiliar number before you respond.
AI is coming for the administrative layer of HR. That is not a threat. It is an overdue redesign. The HR professionals who understand that will come out of this transformation doing more valuable work than HR has ever been asked to do before. For more UAE business insights and helpful guides, visit Ever List.
