Task Intelligence For COOs: Your Secret Weapon For Smarter Workforce Investment

Chief Operating Officers (COOs) face the challenge of managing complex operations while controlling labor costs and driving productivity. Traditional workforce metrics – like headcount, hours worked, or simple output – offer an incomplete picture of how work really gets done. 

To truly optimize your workforce investment, you need more precise insights: starting with a clear, data-driven understanding of the tasks your teams perform, with what frequency – and what other tasks they could be working on, based on their capabilities. 

This is where task intelligence can become a game-changer. By breaking down work into its component tasks and analyzing how time is spent, task intelligence gives COOs (and other line-of-business leaders) a powerful new lens to assess workforce productivity, identify inefficiencies, and make smarter operational decisions.

Understanding Task Intelligence: What It Is & Why It Matters

Task intelligence digs beneath the surface of job titles and roles to reveal the granular activities that make up daily work. Instead of focusing on outputs or time logged, it measures the nature of the tasks employees perform: how much time they spend on value-creating work versus administrative or redundant tasks, and where overlaps exist between departments.

For COOs, this detailed view offers several crucial benefits. You can monitor operational labor costs with precision, highlight bottlenecks, and uncover hidden inefficiencies that traditional metrics miss. For example, task intelligence might show that customer service agents are spending hours each week manually updating internal systems – could automation free up significant capacity? It might reveal that senior engineers are frequently carrying out basic troubleshooting tasks that could be handled by junior staff, or that product managers and UX designers are both, separately, conducting similar forms of user research.

Used in conjunction with skills intelligence – a deeper understanding of the capabilities of your employees and wider talent pool – task intelligence allows companies to redesign roles and redeploy workers in line with business needs. 

And there’s growing urgency to take action: 82% of leaders say this is a pivotal year to rethink key aspects of workforce strategy and operations, with 81% expecting AI agents to be moderately or extensively integrated into their AI strategy within the next 12–18 months. (Microsoft)

By understanding how work is done at the task level, you gain a stronger foundation to streamline processes, reduce waste, and ensure your workforce is focused where it counts.

Linking Labor Cost Directly To Operational Output

One of the biggest challenges in operations is connecting labor investment to actual business value. By showing where tasks are low effort but done frequently, AI-powered Task Intelligence shows COOs where labor costs are generating returns and where they might be eating into margins.

With this level of insight, you can apply the same precision to workforce planning as you do to other areas of financial management. Rather than simply counting hours or staff numbers, you can now track the cost of specific tasks and set clear targets to reduce non-value-add activities. 

This creates a powerful lever to improve productivity without blindly cutting headcount. And that’s key in a market where 47% of organizations believe AI agents and other AI applications will reduce headcount, while 66% expect AI to introduce new roles needed for growth (UNLEASH & Talent Tech Labs).

Task intelligence helps you move with precision – redeploying talent to the right work, rather than reacting with blunt cost-cutting measures.

Revealing Overlaps & Inefficiencies Across Departments

Leaders are under pressure to do more with less: 53% say productivity must increase, yet 80% of the global workforce report lacking the time or energy to do their jobs effectively (Microsoft). At the same time, business leaders estimate that 41% of their time each day is spent on work that doesn’t directly contribute to organizational value (Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends survey). 

Much of that lost time stems from operational inefficiencies – particularly duplicated efforts and overlapping responsibilities spread across teams. For example, manual order entry might be performed by both Operations and Customer Support, or status reporting duplicated between Finance and Sales. These redundancies inflate labor costs and drain team capacity that could be better spent elsewhere.

Task intelligence can help you map these parallel tasks across departments, quantifying the hidden cost of wasted hours and redundant work. With this clear, data-backed picture, COOs can collaborate with CHROs and other leaders to redesign processes and roles: eliminating duplication, clarifying responsibilities, and unifying workflows.

The result: higher productivity, lower labor cost, and a workforce that has more time and energy to focus on work that truly moves the business forward.

Designing A Leaner, More Productive Operating Model

Think of task intelligence as an X-ray that reveals the hidden structure of your operating model. It exposes task overlaps, bottlenecks, and administrative burdens that slow your teams down.

This insight enables you to design leaner workflows by eliminating redundant tasks and automating routine work where possible. Most importantly, it helps you redeploy your human workforce to higher-value activities that require judgment, creativity, and strategic thinking – the kind of work that technology can’t replace.

And you can’t afford to wait: 57% of business executives say they’re missing opportunities because they can’t make decisions fast enough (PwC Pulse Survey). Task intelligence equips you with the visibility and agility to act faster and smarter.

By continuously optimizing your operating model through task-level data, you ensure every part of your operation runs efficiently and with maximum impact, ready to scale as your company grows.

Beamery Can Help

If you’re ready to move beyond traditional metrics and invest your workforce smarter, Task Intelligence provides the actionable insights you need to unlock operational excellence at scale. 

An agentic-AI-powered platform like Beamery’s makes it easy to look across your company's data and external data to get a clear, accurate picture of work: broken down into granular, measurable tasks and connects that data with a dynamic view of workforce skills. This allows you to map how work gets done across departments, track the cost of work at the task level, and identify opportunities to automate tasks, redesign roles, or confidently redeploy talent to areas that deliver greater business impact.

What sets Beamery apart is its ability to connect task data with skills data and business priorities to give you a live, intelligent picture of your workforce in action. So instead of reacting with headcount cuts, you can redesign how work happens and unlock more value from the team you already have.

Explore how Beamery helps COOs move faster, reduce waste, and build more agile, AI-ready operations.