As skill demands shift and the talent landscape evolves, workforce intelligence gives HR leaders the insight needed to build a workforce ready to adapt and succeed.
Blaise Radley
Editorial Strategist
Workday
The talent landscape is currently undergoing significant challenges: last year, 75% of industries experienced an increase in voluntary, high-potential employee turnover. Vague promises of career development or future promotions are no longer enough to retain talent—HR leaders need to take the bull by the horns.
Workforce decisions now carry broader and faster consequences. As skill demands and business priorities shift—often with little notice—HR leaders need a current view of their workforce to act decisively. Similarly, HR teams need a reliable, scalable way to analyze their talent resources, identify existing gaps, and build proactive hiring plans to create a workforce that can succeed.
Too often the emphasis with AI is placed solely on analyzing data to generate insights. It doesn’t matter how strong your AI tool is—if your analytics aren’t connected to business outcomes, your AI solutions become useless. That’s why workforce intelligence platforms are becoming critical for HR teams.
Powered by AI-driven predictive analytics and advanced data analysis, workforce intelligence brings clarity to talent strategy, enabling HR leaders to switch from reactive planning to informed, forward-looking action.
Workforce intelligence applies AI to workforce data to provide a real-time view of the talent landscape.
Report
Workforce intelligence refers to AI and advanced analytics tools used to collect and interpret data relating to employee skills, behaviors, and performance. By applying AI to workforce data, organizations gain a continuously updated view of their talent landscape that reflects current conditions while signaling what may come next.
Strategic workforce planning has become an imperative for businesses large and small. Workforce intelligence supports business strategy by combining multiple dimensions of insight:
Organizations are turning to workforce intelligence tools more than ever as AI capabilities in HR become more sophisticated and leaders increasingly recognize potential workforce gaps emerging—for example, less than one-third of leaders say their companies currently have the skills they'll need to succeed in the future, and 51% are worried about near-term talent shortages.
With workforce intelligence platforms built into HR and talent strategies, teams gain a clear understanding of what’s happening across the workforce—as well as what’s likely to happen next—and are better equipped to make workforce decisions that drive measurable impact.
Workforce intelligence solutions deliver a clear return on investment by enabling quality, speed, and confidence in all workforce decisions. When HR leaders can see workforce capacity and risk, talent investments are better budgeted and HR’s strategic impact is easier to demonstrate.
These gains show up across the workforce lifecycle, shaping how organizations plan, hire, develop, and deploy talent. Here are four key benefits of implementing workforce intelligence in the modern workplace.
Traditional workforce planning relied on assumptions, lagging indicators, and static headcount models. Today, by combining real-time workforce data with predictive data signals, companies can model scenarios to predict trends such as:
HR teams can then stress-test those plans, evaluate tradeoffs, and adjust course early rather than waiting for gaps to appear.
Skills are now the top currency for talent success. More than half (55%) of organizations have already adopted a skills-based approach to talent management to maximize internal talent and ROI on external hiring strategies. Another 23% will do so within the next year.
Further, 81% say they believe transitioning to skills-based hiring models better positions companies for economic growth. By embracing a true skills-based approach, companies further support ongoing learning and development by tracking employee skills across the organization.
Workforce intelligence provides a clear, holistic picture of the skills inside an organization today and how they align with overall strategy. Leaders can prioritize reskilling and redeployment opportunities and focus workforce development where it will have the greatest impact.
Speed is an important workforce planning metric, but it's only valuable when aligned with quality. In other words: Filling vacant roles isn't enough; it has to be with the right people with the right skills to deliver results.
With more sophisticated insight into skills gaps and role requirements, workforce intelligence helps teams target the right talent pools and reduce misaligned hires. Internally, leaders gain better visibility into employees ready to move into critical roles, enabling faster deployment of talent where it’s needed most.
This last capability is one of the most crucial for performance: Workday research found that internal hires are 80% more likely to be high-performers in their first review in their new roles than their externally-hired peers.
The majority of AI pioneers in HR (54%) say it’s enabled their teams to deliver more strategic value.
Workforce insight is central to overall business success and the key to unlocking HR's full strategic influence. With full workforce intelligence capabilities, organizations can continually keep workforce decisions connected to high-level priorities like growth and innovation, further gaining a competitive advantage.
AI pioneer organizations in HR report the advantage delivered by adopting AI into the HR function for initiatives like workforce intelligence strategy—the majority (54%) say that it enables their teams to deliver more strategic value.
AI elevates HR from a traditionally operational function to a true strategic partner that helps to shape enterprise decisions with evidence and anticipates talent implications before execution.
When considering workforce intelligence and its importance in today's workforce management practice, the most important takeaway can feel paradoxical: As AI becomes a more important tool and force behind decisions, it's more essential to remain human-centered in everything we do.
Workforce intelligence data and analytics informs smart strategy and action, but it's ultimately what it delivers—the right people to the right roles at the right time—that enables HR teams to move their organizations successfully into the future.
Critically, workforce intelligence also provides a foundation for stronger trust and transparency with the workforce, something employees increasingly value. While HR teams gain better insight into the best decisions for the future, employees get visibility into new skills and opportunities to pursue.
As workforce strategies continue to mature, workforce intelligence serves as an essential layer of alignment—supporting informed decisions, scalable growth, and a workforce in tune with where the business wants to go next.
Feeling the strain of rapid market changes on your talent strategy? Develop a plan to define goals, evaluate possible vendors, and unlock workforce potential with the right skills technology in this Workday Buyer's Guide.
Report
In the past decade HR has undergone a major evoluton from a supportive role to a strategic one. However, as this report finds, HR teams are more conservative on AI than finance and IT. That makes the potential competitive advantage even greater—learn more below.