Cory Steinle explores how automation, AI, and shifting market needs are transforming workforce planning. By combining task and skills intelligence with ethical AI, organisations can shift from reactive hiring to proactive strategy, redeploying talent, boosting agility, and making good people decisions that keep pace with the speed of business change.
Organisations are navigating a workforce landscape being reshaped by automation, generative AI, and evolving markets. By 2030 up to 30% of current working hours could be automated (McKinsey), and nearly 83% of human resources leaders say they struggle to find enough talent with the skills they need (Gartner).
In this environment, simply tracking headcount and filling vacancies is no longer sufficient. Organisations need a strategic, forward-looking approach that anticipates change rather than reacts to it.
From static to Strategic workforce planning
“Strategic workforce planning is the compass that guides firms through the ever-changing landscape of market demands, technological advancements, and business model shifts.” – KPMG
Traditional workforce planning relies on historical data, rigid job titles, and periodic reports. It offers a snapshot of capacity but rarely provides actionable insight into future needs. Strategic workforce planning, by contrast, takes a forward-looking, agile approach, aligning workforce capability with business strategy as conditions evolve. It treats talent with the same rigor as financial capital, enabling organisations to anticipate multiple scenarios and ensure the right people with the right skills are in the right place at the right time.
To achieve this, leaders must understand not just who their employees are, but what work they actually perform and how their skills are evolving. Without connected, real-time, and dynamic data, workforce planning remains reactive, incomplete, and misaligned with organisational priorities.
Why skills and task intelligence are game-changers
As work evolves faster than ever, organisations must understand both the nature of the work itself and the people performing it. Task intelligence provides this clarity by breaking roles into discrete activities and estimating the effort and time spent on each task. AI tools can infer this from limited inputs, like job descriptions and CVs, creating a detailed, dynamic picture of work distribution, bottlenecks, and capacity gaps.
Skills intelligence complements this by mapping what employees can do now, what they could do with targeted development, and the skills (and proficiency) required for given tasks. Together, task and skills intelligence give leaders a granular, holistic view of workforce capability. AI then scales these insights, helping organisations predict future capacity, model workforce scenarios, and optimise resource allocation.
For example, task intelligence might show that a marketing manager spends a surprising amount of their week on reporting and data entry. These tasks that could be automated, freeing them up to focus on strategy and creative campaigns. Meanwhile, a customer service representative may be in a team facing automation of routine inquiries. With strong problem-solving and communication skills, they could be redeployed into a technical support or account management role with minimal training, turning a potential workforce challenge into an opportunity.
When combined, skills and task intelligence provide a holistic, granular view of workforce capability, helping leaders answer critical questions: Which roles are most exposed to automation? Where can current employees be redeployed to fill strategic gaps? What targeted upskilling programs will yield the greatest return?
AI: The engine for dynamic planning
AI is what turns strategic workforce planning from a static exercise into a dynamic, continuous process. By analysing millions of data points across work data, employee profiles and HR systems, as well as the wider labour market, AI builds a connected, dynamic picture of workforce capability, as well as organizational requirements.
This “digital organisational twin” allows leaders to:
- Clearly understand the work being done, and the skills needed for those tasks
- Predict future workforce needs, highlighting gaps before they become bottlenecks
- Model multiple scenarios, testing the impact of business changes such as new technology adoption or market expansion
- Optimise resource allocation, matching employees to projects and roles where their skills and potential will deliver maximum value
Importantly, these insights evolve as new data is captured, keeping workforce planning aligned with reality and business priorities.
A note on AI: While AI can drive smarter decisions, it must also be ethical, explainable, and trustworthy. Workforce decisions affect people’s careers, and leaders need to understand how AI generates recommendations. Transparent AI models and tools, with humans kept firmly in the loop at key moments, help build employee trust, ensure fairness, and provide defensible decision-making frameworks.
Holistic workforce intelligence in action
With AI-powered workforce intelligence, strategic workforce planning becomes far more than a forecasting exercise. It links people, skills, tasks, and operational priorities, enabling organisations to:
- Make better hiring, redeployment, and upskilling decisions
- Align workforce planning with financial and strategic objectives
- Build resilience and agility, anticipating disruptions rather than reacting to them
- Continuously refine strategies with real-time feedback.
Businesses should be able to spot high-potential candidates faster, increase internal mobility, and create more efficient reskilling programs, while reducing bias and improving equity. These changes don’t just improve HR operations: they deliver strategic advantages in industries where talent is a key driver of growth.
Preparing the workforce of tomorrow
The future of workforce planning is clear: skills and task intelligence, powered by AI, will form the foundation of strategy. Workforce planning is no longer a once-a-year exercise; it is an ongoing, intelligence-driven process that aligns people decisions with business strategy.
Organisations that embrace this approach will be able to anticipate change, redeploy talent effectively, and build a workforce capable of thriving in a world where work is evolving faster than ever. For HR leaders, this is the opportunity to move from reactive administration to proactive, strategic influence: turning workforce planning into a true competitive advantage.
Cory Steinle is Head of Growth at Beamery
