Meet 10 of the Chief People Officers advancing the workplace in 2026

The share of employees who say they are thriving at work fell from 66% in 2024 to 44% this year, the lowest level Mercer has recorded since it began tracking. The same survey of nearly 12,000 executives found HR’s top priority is improving the employee experience to attract and keep good people.

People leaders are reading the same signals. In the CHRO Association’s 2026 survey of about 150 CHROs, leadership development sits near the top of their most immediate concerns, just behind technology. 

Gartner reported that just over half of organizations redesigned or redefined roles in the past year, and warns that CHROs who manage change the old way risk undermining it.

Particularly in today’s AI-first era, culture lives in relationships, and those are under strain. For instance, research from our Cloverleaf Labs’ report, AI as a Workplace Coach, found that there is a real crisis hiding inside the rush to adopt AI at work.

When people stop bringing hard conversations to each other, the job of rebuilding trust falls to managers and the people team. The ten leaders below are doing that work in public, at companies ranging from global giants to private and mid-sized firms outside the Fortune 1000. Several have been recognized by their peers in the past year. 

Each is building culture deliberately, through leveraging technology, leadership development and belonging.

Here are 10 of the Chief People Officers advancing the workplace in 2026.

Jacqui Canney: Chief People and AI Enablement Officer, ServiceNow

Jacqui Canney joined ServiceNow in 2021 after running people at WPP and Walmart and spending 25 years at Accenture.

Her position is that technology should raise what people do best, including  judgment, creativity and empathy, and that leaders who skip values and well-being lose their people’s trust.

She also sits on the board of Project Healthy Minds, a mental-health nonprofit. In April, Liberty Mutual elected her to its board, citing her people-first approach to workforce change.

Avani Solanki Prabhakar: Chief People and AI Enablement Officer, Atlassian

Avani Solanki Prabhakar has spent close to seven years at Atlassian, after leading HR transformation at Fuji Xerox Australia and British Airways.

She helped shape the distributed-work model behind Atlassian’s Team Anywhere approach.

One of her lessons from this year, as told to the Australian Financial Review, is that the real gains come when teams work together on new tools rather than as individuals.

Melanie Rosenwasser: Chief People Officer, Dropbox

Melanie Rosenwasser has run Dropbox as a test bed for distributed work since it went Virtual First in late 2020. The company wrote its principles into a manifesto that includes defaulting to asynchronous work and designing for joy.

The model has become a recruiting asset, with about 70% of job applicants citing it as a reason they applied, according to HR Grapevine. 

Before Dropbox she held HR roles at Apple and GE, and she is part of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women community.

Andy Doyle: Chief People and Agent Officer, Kantar

Andy Doyle has led Kantar’s people function since 2022, after running HR at National Grid, Worldpay, ITV and Morrison.

Kantar describes his focus as a high-performance culture where people want to do their best work, supported by strong engagement tools and operating processes.

In 2026 the firm added agents to his title and promoted people leaders who pair people skills with fluency in new technology.

Donna Morris: Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer, Walmart

HR Executive named Donna Morris its 2025 HR Executive of the Year.

Her bet at Walmart is skills and mobility for a 2.1-million-person workforce: she led execution of a $1 billion investment in career training and launched an internal mobility platform. 

At Walmart’s Associates Week in June, she told employees that technology will power the company’s future but associates will lead it.

 

Nickle LaMoreaux: Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, IBM

Nickle LaMoreaux, who was named HR Executive of the Year for 2024, is protecting IBM’s talent pipeline while many peers shrink theirs.

At February’s Charter AI Summit she said IBM would triple U.S. entry-level hiring in 2026, warning that companies that stop hiring juniors will run out of future leaders. 

She earlier shared in AI Magazine argues that communication, judgment and leadership remain distinctly human work.

Tracey Franklin: Chief People and Digital Technology Officer, Moderna

Tracey Franklin joined Moderna as CHRO in 2019 and grew its workforce from about 800 to nearly 6,000 through the pandemic and the company’s commercialization.

Through that seven-fold build, Moderna has been consistently named a top employer by Science..

According to Fortune, She brings the same attention to the executive team itself, using a GPT built from leaders’ personality assessments to think through how two colleagues in conflict might react before she steps in.

Jill Larsen: Chief People Officer, Synopsys

Jill Larsen won HRO Today’s 2026 Large Market CHRO of the Year award this past May.

With more than 20,000 people in 30 countries, about 80% of them outside the U.S., she designs programs around employee personas so people in different roles and regions are supported in the way they actually work. 

OpenText, which added her to its board in July, cited her work building a high-performing culture and long-term succession planning.

Helen Russell, Chief People Officer, HubSpot

Helen Russell, who previously led people at Rivian, Atlassian and Sonos, puts belonging at the center of HubSpot’s people strategy, arguing that uncertainty makes it more important for people to feel they belong. 

She favors candor over reassurance, saying the most honest conversation a company can have right now admits how much about the future is still unknown.