Organizations today are navigating the most turbulent macroeconomic environment in decades. For talent leaders—chief people officers (CPOs), chief human resources officers (CHROs), and heads of talent—the ground beneath long-held assumptions is shifting quickly. The impacts of post-globalization are evolving, capital is becoming more constrained, labor pools are shrinking, and artificial intelligence is transforming how work gets done.

Bain & Company’s recent CPO Forum focused on the forces reshaping the global talent landscape. The message is both clear and urgent: The context in which most HR leaders built their careers is not the context in which they will lead the future. We are in an exceptionally tumultuous period, unlike anything experienced since the early 1970s.

The macroeconomic picture, combined with insights from a recent survey of talent executives, reveals a profound transformation in the way companies access, develop, and deploy talent—and in the expanding role of the CPO as architect of the workforce of the future.

The results of Bain’s survey of 81 CPOs and talent officers across global industries show a community bracing for change. Seventy percent reported concern about slowing labor market momentum in the United States and its potential spillover effects on economies in the EMEA and Asia-Pacific regions. Many are already rethinking where and how they hire globally, with a majority considering adjustments in select markets and some actively rebalancing their hiring footprint.

The CPO mandate is expanding quickly, and the changing macroeconomic environment helps explain why.

Four macro forces reshaping the global workforce

Four structural trends are fundamentally redefining how organizations access and manage talent: post-globalization, capital rationalization, demographic decline, and the decreasing cost of distance.

Taken together, these forces are creating a very different operating environment from the one in which today’s people-leadership playbooks were developed.

1. Post-globalization and the new limits on talent mobility

While Bain doesn’t believe in deglobalization, in a post-global world, we will see frictions growing for trade in goods, services, intellectual property, and capital. For talent leaders, there are new constraints on the movement of people across borders—a foundational assumption of many multinational workforce strategies.

One example: In semiconductors, the US has set restrictions not only on where certain goods can be sold, but on which passport holders may work on specific technologies destined for certain markets. Visa rules, trade policies, and rapid geopolitical shifts—such as tariff changes or the redeployment of staff following geopolitical conflict—are complicating global workforce planning.

Talent mobility can no longer be taken for granted, and CPOs must plan for a world where geopolitical boundaries increasingly shape access to skills.

2. Capital scarcity and rising pressure on productivity

The second major force is the end of the era of “capital superabundance.” Over the last three decades, the financial economy grew at a much faster rate than the real economy, making capital less of a constraint than good ideas or great talent. That is changing.

The global system now faces competing demands for capital—automation, the energy transition, and large-scale infrastructure development—that exceed annual economic savings. Meanwhile, the supply of capital will grow much more slowly than it did in the prior era.

For talent executives, there’s tension between investment in people and investment in automation, which is leading to greater scrutiny of spending and expected ROI. The survey data aligns with this shift, with CPOs prioritizing HR efficiency, AI implementation, and organizational redesign, in addition to cultural and leadership needs.

3. Demographic decline and structural labor shortages

Perhaps the most profound and least reversible force shaping the future workforce is demographic change. The era of plentiful labor is coming to an end (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

Working-age populations in China, Germany, Japan, and other major economies are shrinking. Even in the US, assuming some mitigation of current immigration policies, the total workforce is expected to grow only 4% in total between now and 2050. In China, a country of over 1 billion, only 9.5 million babies were born in 2024. India is the only large economy with a workforce growing at scale.

Companies will not be able to meet talent needs through hiring alone. Automation will become not just a cost lever but a necessity to sustain productivity and economic growth.

4. The decreasing cost of distance and the reconfiguration of work

The final force—the declining cost of distance—has reshaped how and where work happens. Technology has enabled greater spatial dispersion, changing where people choose to live, work, and play.

Remote work surged during the Covid-19 pandemic and has stabilized at roughly 20%, while office occupancy remains at about 50% of pre-Covid levels.

For CPOs, this shift presents both opportunity and complexity. Hybrid work expands access to talent but challenges apprenticeship, cohesion, and culture. Physical infrastructure, often built for a previous era, must adapt.

Automation, AI, and the new human–machine frontier

Automation and AI are emerging as a powerful throughline connecting demographics, capital, and globalization. As increasingly capable generative AI and dexterity robotics push automation deeper into service sectors once considered resistant, like healthcare and food preparation, AI’s march raises an important question: When do we need a human?

There are certainly scenarios in which AI delivers technically correct answers but fails at the human interface. Anyone who’s tried to bypass a chatbot on a service call will have experienced this. As companies rethink workforce design, the goal won’t be simply to automate tasks but to determine where human presence matters most. Humans can provide empathy, judgment, trust, nuance, and the lived experience of navigating complex decisions.

Geopolitics, immigration volatility, and the shifting map of global talent

At the same time that AI is upending talent plans, recent changes to US working visas are creating a different kind of anxiety for employees and new burdens for employers. One result may be an erosion of the country’s status as the default destination for talent. Companies must think about talent hubs and where they should be located. Tools like AI translation make it possible to draw from new labor pools—for example, hiring customer support talent in Guatemala (time-zone aligned) rather than in the Philippines—as language barriers diminish.

The CPO role: from people steward to architect of the 2040 workforce

All this adds up to a striking shift in the mandate for talent executives. CPOs are now helping CEOs and COOs answer questions such as:

• In 2040, what is the composition of our workforce?
• Where do we have people? Where do we have automation?
• How do we get closest to talent?

The role of the CPO is evolving from steward of people to strategist of the entire workforce system—including automation, location strategy, and long-term access to skills.

A future defined by new fundamentals

The demographic cliff, the shifting rules of globalization, the rising cost of capital, and the rapid acceleration of AI are not temporary disruptions. They are durable forces that will reshape work for decades.

For CPOs, the task ahead is both challenging and consequential. They are being called upon to lead organizations through a profound workforce transition—one that will define competitive advantage in the years to come.