The defensible seat is auditing people-models, not authoring them

Finance will model capacity as a cost line and miss the humans. Engineering will measure throughput and miss the tail: burnout in connectors, trust quietly draining, skills rotting. The models they ship will encode old bias, fail on messy data, and walk into legal exposure the moment they touch a real hiring or firing decision.

The only durable seat is the one that catches all of that before it becomes a headline or a lawsuit. Not the author of the people-models. The auditor of them. That seat exists because the failures are expensive and legally radioactive - disparate impact, masking, discrimination wearing the costume of objectivity. It's open only to people who actually have the tradecraft to sit in it.

Governance without tradecraft is worse than nothing. A person babysitting a black box they can't actually evaluate becomes the liability sponge: blamed for following a biased model, blamed for overriding it. Taking that seat without the method to use it isn't power - it's volunteering to take the fall.

Source claim: The durable role for people analytics is not producing workforce intelligence but auditing the models Finance and Engineering are now producing, because those failures are legally radioactive and expensive.