The past year was a challenging one, to put it mildly, for people leaders in any organization. Our list of the most-read Charter Pro articles for 2025 reveals our premium subscribers turning to ideas for managing the disruptive policy-making of a new US administration, navigating the messy reality of adopting AI, and balancing how new technology is reshaping jobs with the human needs of their workforces. They sought practical answers, particularly on AI. All but two of the articles on this year’s list were primarily focused on AI and its broader impacts, such as case studies, frameworks for entry-level roles, or candid assessments of new AI tools.
Below, we’ve shared key takeaways from the 10 most-read Charter Pro articles of 2025, with links to read more and subscribe.
1. Tracking and responding to the Trump administration’s policy changes
Our tracker was updated through the first half of 2025, chronicling the many executive orders, policy changes, and court decisions of the Trump administration’s first year. Employees at risk of immigration enforcement was a key topic. Kim Cohen, former director of employer engagement at immigrant and refugee services organization Upwardly Global, told Charter offering those employees a transfer to offices outside the US was becoming increasingly common among large companies her organization works with.
Charter senior reporter Jacob Clemente’s deep dive into how HR is reinventing its own work—and helping other corporate functions do the same—shared concrete ideas for using AI to reshape HR at Cisco, IBM, ServiceNow, and more. The areas of HR that are most ripe for AI to disrupt are hiring, learning and development, and routine employee support. “Perhaps the biggest change to the HR function over the next few years will be the role it plays in leading the organization through its AI transformation,” writes Clemente. “Employees can be the brake or the accelerator for this change, and HR has a significant role to play in ensuring it’s the latter.”
3. Reassessing which workers AI actually helps
After a widely covered study about AI was disavowed by MIT, Clemente explored what other research says about which workers AI helps most. The issue in question: Does AI give a bigger boost to less experienced, lower-performing workers or more experienced, higher-performing ones? After reviewing multiple studies, Clemente’s view is it depends on the role’s level of autonomy. “If you’re in a job where you help set your goals, determine how to reach those goals, and make many decisions throughout your day, AI likely helps you more if you’re a high performer with strong judgment.” But if your job includes less decision-making and more pre-defined tasks that AI does well, the technology likely narrows the performance gap between less experienced and more experienced workers, Clemente concludes.
4. How genAI has already reshaped the job market
New research found that since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the number of job postings per quarter per company for “highly automatable” jobs decreased by 17%, while the same figure for “augmentable” jobs increased by 22%. The former includes jobs, such as translators or telemarketers, where a large share of tasks can be done by AI. The latter, which includes jobs like clinical neuropsychologists or agricultural engineers, involve a more balanced share of tasks that AI and humans can perform. In the short term, companies can benefit from automating existing tasks. But companies should also “create space to reimagine work from the ground up,” Clemente writes, or “startups without legacy processes [could] quickly disrupt their business.”
5. A case study in using genAI to unlock growth
Charter spoke with intimate apparel company Adore Me about how it used AI to remove growth bottlenecks and expand into new markets faster. For example, marketplaces like Amazon and Macy’s each have different rules for what can be included in a product description. Rather than edit each of its descriptions by hand, Adore Me built an AI workflow to automate this process, letting it move more quickly into testing new marketplaces, former senior vice president of strategy Ranjan Roy told Charter: “When thinking [about] ROI, this has become one of the fastest growing business segments in the company.”
6. Four ways to redesign entry-level jobs in the age of AI
Charter examined four ways to rethink entry-level roles as AI automates many traditional tasks for young workers. One idea: Ramp up the difficulty of their work. Matt Beane, a University of California Santa Barbara professor and author of The Skill Code, says he’s hearing examples of managers or senior developers assigning junior workers problems that are far more complex than usual. The managers are giving them a short amount of time to tackle the tasks with the help of AI, and then having them work with senior leaders to fix their mistakes. He argues such coaching efforts can significantly boost the productivity of the group as a whole, even if it means more productive senior people are spending less time writing code.
7. What testing shows about OpenAI’s deep research agent
Clemente took OpenAI’s deep research tool for a spin in February, finding it much better at research than the normal ChatGPT, particularly when looking for examples or for people with expertise on the topic they’re researching. Users should still verify any information the tool gives, he writes, noting its ability to cite sources could give users a false sense of security. The tool could eventually replace the work of some human researchers, he warned, but also serve as a boon for some jobs, citing the example of a venture capitalist who could now research every startup. Since the release of the deep research tool, AI models have gotten better at a range of tasks and are capable of working on their own for longer periods of time.
8. How AI changes jobs, expertise, and career ladders
Charter spoke with Joseph Fuller, who co-leads the Managing the Future of Work Project at Harvard Business School, about new research he co-authored. With the potential for significant automation of entry-level work, he said the danger for organizations isn’t just thinning the overall pipeline, but not hiring the most productive people who grow into superstars. He cited a firm that has a category of “super fast movers”—only about one in 200 people—who rise to partner very quickly. “If I used to hire 200 to get that extraordinary, fast-promotion person, now I’m hiring 110. How do I know that my one-out-of-200 fast mover will get hired into the 110?”
9. The 12 charts you need to see from Davos
Editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney attended the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland in January, when many companies release big reports about the state of work and leadership. He collected a few of the most compelling: the Edelman Trust Barometer found that workers’ trust in employers declined for the first time since the communications firm started tracking it in 2018, software firm Workday found that the top use for AI in the workplace was data analysis, and workers told staffing firm Randstad that training was more important to them, up 12 percentage points between 2024 and 2025.
10. IBM’s CHRO on how AI is changing her HR function
Many experts say AI will free people up to do more creative parts of their jobs. IBM CHRO Nickle LaMoreaux suggested in an interview with Charter it can also upgrade the experience of working with the HR function. “The reason HR departments don’t always provide that higher consumer-grade experience is because they are bogged down in the transactions that have to be done,” she said. “In a world of an AI agent, you can give the organization accurate, at-their-fingertips transactions. But you can also give them this higher-order HR service around talent management and culture. That’s the big unlock here.”