What is Share of Life and why is it changing how we measure brands?
Human talent was to the company what oxygen is to the heart. It seems that some absolute truths are beginning to crumble. The scene is repeating itself with a new starkness. Tech companies, fintechs, digital platforms , and software giants are announcing layoffs in areas that until recently seemed protected by a kind of corporate aura. From operations to finance, and from legal to compliance. But what is truly extraordinary is happening in the engine room of the employees: Human Resources.
In other words, everything that does not directly build the product or sell it directly to the market.
For years we were told that talent was the most important asset of the company. And I still believe it.
But now, some companies are starting to act as if the department that was supposed to take care of it were dispensable.
The paradox is unsettling.
The department that nurtured talent is starting to run out of space.
Bolt made headlines again after its CEO, Ryan Breslow , announced he had eliminated the entire Human Resources team because, according to him, they were “creating problems that didn’t exist.” The decision was part of a broader staff reduction and an attempt to return the company to a leaner, faster, and more startup-like culture.
Cloudflare represents an even more relevant case because we’re not talking about a company in freefall, but one that had just posted record revenues. Its CEO, Matthew Prince , argued that artificial intelligence was reshaping how software is created and consumed, but also how the organization works internally.
Shortly afterwards, the company announced the elimination of more than 1,100 positions, nearly 20% of its workforce , as part of a reorganization towards a more AI-driven model.
Bolt isn’t the mobility company that competes with Uber; it’s an American fintech firm. It specializes in one-click checkout technology for online stores, aiming to simplify and democratize payments and digital commerce.
Cloudflare is one of the leading technology companies on the internet. It provides CDN (content delivery network) services , cybersecurity, DDoS protection, and website optimization, protecting and accelerating millions of websites worldwide.
The underlying message seems clear. AI is no longer just here to automate tasks. It’s here to redesign structures.
And that’s where a new conversation begins. It won’t be easy or comfortable. But it will be necessary and cannot be postponed.
Builders, vendors, and surveyors
Prince (not the singer, but the CEO of Cloudflare) divides the company, following a very Peter Drucker-esque logic, into three large groups: builders, sellers, and meterers.
Builders create products.
The vendors take them to the market.
The meters observe, control, audit, report, analyze, supervise, and coordinate.
For decades, companies grew by adding layers of measurement. Every new risk created a committee. Every committee created a process. Every process created a report. Every report created a meeting. Every meeting created another meeting to review the previous one. And so, bureaucracy devoured agility, culture, empowerment, and commitment from within.
The modern company was filled with mirrors.
And now comes artificial intelligence that can measure more, faster, cheaper, and with less effort. No breaks, no vacations, no internal politics, no distractions.
There’s some truth to that argument. It would be naive to deny it. AI can continuously audit risks. It can detect anomalies, review contracts, and compare budgets. It can also analyze performance, summarize meetings, cross-reference data, automate reports, accelerate accounting closings, and find patterns invisible to the human eye.
The question then arises: if everything can be measured, what do we do with that data? Who transforms it into value, strategy, or tactics? If an organization measures everything—and that’s very interesting—who transforms it into something more than just data?
Measuring is not understanding
Measurement requires interpretation, projection, and practical application in the business. Otherwise, it’s just about creating pretty dashboards full of content that are only useful for committee presentations.
Many organizations confuse control with care, auditing with security, and even automation with transformation. Semantics isn’t a language class in elementary school.
In recent years, many companies have confused people management with employee administration. They’ve confused culture with climate surveys. They’ve confused leadership with organizational charts. They’ve confused diversity with reports. They’ve confused well-being with an app. And they’ve confused purpose with a phrase on a wall.
So, when a CEO eliminates Human Resources and says that the problems disappeared, maybe the problems didn’t disappear.
Perhaps the function that named them disappeared.
Silence is not always peace. Sometimes it’s fear.
The problem is not Human Resources
The real problem with some Human Resources departments isn’t that they exist. It’s that they were late to their own transformation.
They were trapped between bureaucracy, internal politics, and process management , while the world of work was changing its skin.
They became guardians of procedure when they needed to be architects and coaches of talent. They became obsessed with controlling the organization when they should have been helping it evolve. Deskilling came faster than reskilling and upskilling.
But using AI to dismantle Human Resources doesn’t solve the talent crisis , nor the culture crisis, nor the leadership crisis, nor the engagement crisis. Rather, it exposes it.
Learning replaces obsolescence
AI, big data, digital literacy , creative thinking , resilience, flexibility, and continuous learning will become increasingly important. A little technology, a little humanity. The balance that brings together the best of both. The virtue of knowing that.
That information should be posted on the door of every management committee. Because the great business battle of the coming years will not only be about automating faster, but about learning faster, and evolving with direction, meaning, purpose, and clarity.
AI can replace tasks. That much is clear; few dispute it. AI can be seen as a threat to functions that merely describe what happened. But it’s not clear that it can take the place of people capable of imagining what might happen.
That’s why we can frame the threat as reporting without criteria, as processes without purpose. We can include in this category middle management who transmits information without adding judgment, and even departments that exist to protect themselves.
But, let’s emphasize, it empowers those who know how to ask, interpret, connect, decide, create, lead, and care.
The dividing line won’t be between humans and machines. It will be between humans who contribute enhanced humanity and humans who act like slow, sluggish machines. And then everything will fall into place. As my dear father used to say: once the truck starts moving, the melons will rearrange themselves.
Culture cannot be automated.
At TOTEM Branding, we have some very good news. The strongest brands are built from within. This involves talent, culture, purpose, and values. If these are lived, internalized, and well-integrated into daily operations, the barrier to entry for AI, in certain sectors, will be lower.
A company cannot communicate externally what it does not experience internally. A brand doesn’t begin with the logo; it begins with its purpose and culture. It lives in the daily experiences of the people who make it possible.
That’s why it’s worrying when the dominant narrative reduces the debate to an Excel spreadsheet. How many fewer employees, how much more productivity , how many costs saved.
That look may impress the market for a quarter, but it impoverishes the company for a decade.
Qualitative approaches are gaining ground. Everyone who can be replaced by AI will be. No drama.
The market is beginning to distrust the narrative of efficient layoffs.
For years, Wall Street celebrated the cuts as if slimming down an organization was automatically a sign of business intelligence.
But things are starting to change. When Cloudflare announced its cutbacks , its stock price fell sharply despite strong results. Perhaps investors are beginning to distinguish between smart efficiency and frantic downsizing.
Between a company that redesigns itself to grow and a company that uses AI as an elegant excuse to fire people.
The narrative “fewer people thanks to AI” no longer automatically appeals.
Because an overly lean company can become fragile. An organization without human muscle loses memory, judgment, mentorship, culture, creativity, and the ability to absorb shocks.
In the short term, AI can make a structure appear more efficient.
In the long run, the absence of people capable of thinking, dissenting, and sustaining meaning can make it less intelligent.
At the same time, everything is so new in this field that everything could either stand or collapse under the weight of the same arguments. Time, talent, and the market will have the final say. Or perhaps AI will.
The talent that becomes indispensable
PwC, in its AI Jobs Barometer 2025, offers a less apocalyptic and more insightful perspective. Sectors most exposed to AI show greater revenue growth per employee, salaries grow faster in AI-intensive industries, and workers with AI skills command a significant pay premium.
In other words, AI does not destroy labor value in a linear fashion.
It also creates new forms of value for those who know how to use it.
What kind of talent becomes essential when intelligence becomes abundant?
My answer is, talent that gives meaning.
AI can produce analysis, but not consciousness. It can write policies, but not build trust.
You can take the pulse of an organization, but you can’t embrace its fear. You can detect rising turnover, but you don’t always understand why people are emotionally leaving long before they actually leave the company.
It can identify patterns, but it cannot replace the courage of a leader who sits down with their team and says, “We need to change, and we’re going to do it together.”
The future of Human Resources must be more strategic (we have been demanding this for years)
Human Resources must reinvent itself, transform itself; it shouldn’t simply be a “department.” It should occupy a more strategic role. Much more.
Less payroll administration. More capabilities architecture. Less defensive bureaucracy. More cultural intelligence. Less employee-as-a-resource management. More people development as a competitive advantage. Less climate measurement. More trust building. Fewer processes designed to avoid conflict. More leadership prepared to navigate conflicts with maturity.
The very expression “human resources” is starting to age poorly. We’ve been saying this for years. Semantics…
People are not resources. They are talent, energy, judgment. They are connections, brand, experience.
They are the difference between a company that works and a company that matters.
AI does not fix broken cultures.
Microsoft is already talking about the emergence of hybrid teams made up of humans and AI agents.
New roles are already emerging. They sound futuristic, but that future is here. AI workforce managers, agent specialists, automation architects, human-machine interaction designers, model trainers, algorithmic ethics officers.
But even that vision requires something essential: training, supervision, and a new way of working.
Buying technology isn’t expensive, or at least it won’t be. What’s costly is redesigning mindsets. That’s the point many companies are underestimating.
If a company was hierarchical, AI can make it more hierarchical. If it was distrustful, it can make it more vigilant.
If you were short-sighted, AI can give you the tools to be more precise in your approach. If you treated people as a cost, AI will give you arguments to do so with greater sophistication.
But if a company has purpose, leadership, clarity, confidence, and a hunger to learn, AI can multiply its impact.
Technology amplifies what we already are.
The new emotional contract between people, companies, and machines
Here, Human Resources —or whatever we want to call it in the future— has a huge mission.
Designing the next emotional contract between people, companies, and machines. Hybrid work is no longer about working from home or in the office; it’s about understanding that our new colleagues will be agents, machines…
To be the place where we decide what tasks we automate , what skills we develop , what values we protect , what ethical boundaries we do not cross, what new careers are born, what talent we retrain , and what kind of humanity we want to survive within the workplace.
Because this revolution is much deeper than improving efficiency and productivity. It’s about identity.
For too long we’ve asked: what can AI do for business? And now the question that holds a mirror up to us is emerging: what kind of business are we building with AI?
The difference is enormous. The nuances matter.
This isn’t the end of Human Resources. It’s its toughest test yet.
Bolt may be right about one thing. A bureaucratic, complacent, slow, and disconnected Human Resources department has no future.
Cloudflare may be right about another thing. Many measurement functions will be profoundly transformed by agents capable of auditing, reviewing, and operating with a continuity previously impossible.
But if the conclusion is that caring for people is unnecessary, we will be confusing the symptom with the diagnosis.
Talent doesn’t need more corporate paternalism. It demands direction, high standards, learning, clarity, trust, and purpose.
Human capital needs leaders who elevate it, who make it feel included in the Board of Directors, who give it the prominent place it should always have occupied.
AI isn’t here to save companies from their people. It’s here to reveal which companies never understood their people.
That’s why the department that’s supposed to nurture talent shouldn’t be dismantled. It should be reborn.
Like the eagle that molts its beak and talons to continue flying, Human Resources has to let go of the old: unnecessary processes, empty language, self-protective bureaucracy, distance from the business, metrics that do not transform.
But it must preserve and strengthen what is essential: the ability to see people where others only see headcount.
The future will be extraordinary; or not.
The future will not be kind to those who merely measure. But it will be extraordinary for those who know how to transform data into criteria, criteria into culture, culture into trust, and trust into growth.
AI can tell us who produces the most. But we still need humans to ask ourselves what we are producing, for whom, at what price, and with what consequences.
That is the task. To create companies with more humanity, better talent, and technology in service of a higher ambition.
Soon almost everything will be able to be automated and digitized. Everything except one thing. And that’s precisely what cannot be automated or digitized, and that’s what will have the most value.
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