'I see it as an add-on to help make the strategic decision,' says Canadian CHRO
A new study is warning that workforce planning in the AI era is changing, but many leaders still lack the right metrics to understand team productivity — even as organizations with strong people analytics pull ahead on performance and innovation.
For HR leaders, that means shifting from strict headcount plans to a continuous, skills-aware view of work, according to Paul Rubenstein, chief evangelist with Visier — which compiled the report — in Vancouver.
“Most people think of workforce planning as this multi-year head count and [full-time equivalent] FTE analysis, like ‘What's our workforce going to need to be in three years, in five years, in seven years?’” says Rubenstein. “But now it's shifted into this incredibly dynamic, continuous analysis of what do we have and what do we need.”
HR now needs to take into account what Rubenstein calls “multiple dimensions,” which he says can be often at tension with each other.
“We think about the classic factors, like location, headcount, and total workforce costs, but now it's specific skills related to what kind of a company or culture you want and related to a product, initiative, or change in your business strategy,” he says, noting that CHROs now need a live, multidimensional picture that includes all the factors.
AI, skills and smarter scenarios
Generative and predictive AI are pushing planning even further by making it possible to model work at the task level, not just the job level. Rubenstein says leaders need to ask which tasks that should be taken over by AI and what new tasks will be taken on by humans during the organization’s transformation, along with how this will reshape the workforce.
“You're not just planning people, you're also planning over time,” he says.
Treating tasks as building blocks lets HR look at automation, reskilling and redeployment together, rather than defaulting to job cuts when technology arrives, according to Rubenstein.
He believes that AI’s biggest immediate contribution lies in scenario planning. In the past, planners could only adjust a few variables at a time in vast grids of numbers.
“Now AI is better at doing multidimensional math than humans, so being able to come up with the right data set that looks at all of these different variables and speak in plain language to say, ‘What if I shifted half of these and which of these jobs are most likely to be impacted by AI?’ That capability allows HR teams to test many more options around job design, location, and automation, and to bring clearer tradeoffs to the executive table,” he says. “Playing around with that very quickly in leveraging large language models helps you get to a more balanced plan and a more reasonable plan faster.”
People, skills data more accessible
Visier’s research finds that 71 per cent of senior leaders feel that they don’t have the right metrics to understand their team’s productivity. Rubenstein says AI-enabled tools are changing how quickly HR can answer basic questions about performance and capacity.
“The way we interact with analytics and data is changing because of AI,” he says. “In the old days, you would ask an analyst and it would take a week but now, using AI, I can be a non-expert in the language of the HR data and use plain language to interrogate the data to tell me who my top performers are.”
However, according to the Visier report, less than one in four executive teams include people data in strategic decisions.
According to Rubenstein, to successfully use AI and its associated analytics, HR should set the standards and definitions of what metrics are important for the organization’s planning and share them with other leaders.
“Be disciplined about the data engineering on the back end and have common definitions and good data governance — it's not like rocket science, it’s just discipline,” he says. “It's just sitting down and everyone agreeing, ‘We all want to measure something like this.’ And then instead of being the gatekeepers for it, HR has to let it free and really democratize these insights to help everyone ask better questions and make better decisions.”
CHRO outlines AI plans
For Diana Valler, CHRO at Toronto-based TravelBrands, the foundation for AI-enabled planning is governance and education. Working with colleagues in digital and IT, “we started to make sure on everything that happened that they had the proper guidelines within the organization,” says Valler.
“First and foremost, of course, we drafted an AI policy — it was truly an amazing meeting between myself with an HR perspective, the Chief Digital Officer from the digital perspective, and the IT officer from the IT security perspective.”
Valler says those rules are reinforced through training sessions that explain “what is AI meaning for our organization, and how can we best use it?” with concrete doanddon’t examples.
She is also using AI-enabled HR systems to bring real-time workforce information into planning discussions.
“We can actually get a lot of information to the Employee Voice, which is our service, and see exactly what the Employee Voice is saying regarding engagement,” she says. “To go one step further to planning, through AI, I can easily pull the report and say exactly what staffing we have, how we can basically plan the workforce, how we can actually design the workforce for the future, and present the strategic data to the CEOs and the executive team.”
AI also provides opportunities to look at an organization’s structure and simulate multiple solutions to see what will work for the organization’s goals, says Valler.
“Before it would have taken a lot of time on workforce planning, but models can now be built through AI in a much faster way,” she says. “It helps look at multiple models and present the best one to the executive team — I see it as an add-on to help make the strategic decision, because you have more information than before.”
Redesigning planning around skills and data
For individual HR leaders, Valler believes that technical fluency and continuous learning are now essential skills with the floor being a generalist with technical capability. “They should know the HR systems that are out there and, more importantly, they should know the data that’s coming out,” she says.
Looking ahead, Valler says she expects “a big leap” between organizations that simply layer AI onto old processes and those that redesign planning around skills and data: “The ones that can leverage AI for office planning would be higher placed from the ROI and the business numbers perspectives than others because of a faster redesign,” she says.
“We have to embrace AI and I love acronyms, so my acronyms about AI are ‘Adapt’ and ‘Ignite’ — you have to adapt, but you also have to work with it.”
