HR Leaders: Workforce Agility Starts With Visibility
Will we ever stop hearing that the world of work is changing quickly? Probably not – because it keeps being true.
In 2025, more than ever, every organization needs to be ready to adapt: quickly, confidently, and continuously. From seismic shifts driven by AI, to fast-moving market changes and evolving customer expectations, businesses depend on their people being able to flex and respond in real time.
But workforce agility doesn’t start with process. It starts with visibility.
For HR leaders, visibility into the workforce is now a strategic imperative. Without a clear view of who your people are, what they can do, and how work is actually being done across the business, it’s impossible to plan effectively, respond at speed, or deliver long-term transformation.
Agility requires a new approach ✨
Traditional workforce planning has focused on how many people you need, what roles they’re in, and where they sit in the org chart.
But in a world defined by constant change, that kind of static view isn’t enough. Roles evolve, priorities shift, and work doesn’t always follow department lines.
To build a truly agile workforce, HR leaders need visibility into:
- The skills your workforce currently has (and which are emerging or declining)
- The tasks your people are performing, across roles, functions, and business units
- The gaps between today’s capabilities and tomorrow’s needs
- The hidden potential within your workforce, often buried in unstructured data
That means going beyond titles and organizational charts to focus on how work is actually executed – and how it’s evolving.
Tapping into existing data 🗃️
You have this critical information already, but it doesn’t all live neatly in one database. It’s often scattered across platforms, and living in unstructured sources: job descriptions, CVs, learning histories, project documentation, and more.
How can HR leaders combine and use this data to make decisions?
This is where AI becomes essential. By extracting meaningful signals from unstructured data, AI can gather, enhance, and normalize this data into a unified intelligence layer — a living map of both skills and tasks across the workforce.
This enriched view becomes the foundation for smarter, faster, and more strategic workforce decisions.
Why visibility is urgent 👀
According to a recent UNLEASH study, talent retention is the number one challenge for organizations of all sizes: and it’s especially acute in mid-to-large enterprises, where two-thirds of leaders cite it as a top concern.
At the same time, nearly two-thirds of HR leaders say improving productivity and the overall skillset of their workforce is a top priority.
That’s no coincidence. When companies lack visibility into their people – their strengths, aspirations, and growth paths – they miss critical opportunities to engage, upskill, and retain talent.
In fact, 39% of organizations say they’re actively trying to uncover hidden skills or talents that aren’t visible in day-to-day operations. This “invisible workforce” represents both a risk and an opportunity. Without visibility, valuable talent goes underused. With it, organizations can unlock new capacity, improve internal mobility, and reduce reliance on external hiring.
AI as an enabler 🚀
There’s a growing consensus that AI will be essential to future workforce strategy, but not in the way many feared. The same UNLEASH study found that while 47% of organizations expect AI to reduce headcount, 66% anticipate it will create new roles needed for growth.
AI is not here to replace HR teams: it’s here to support them, by turning messy, fragmented data into insights HR can act on.
These tools can help HR leaders:
- Infer skills and tasks from unstructured data like job descriptions and CVs
- Connect the dots across siloed systems (HRIS, ATS, LMS, etc.)
- Map talent to changing business needs and surface new opportunities
- Enable more equitable and efficient workforce planning and talent development
The goal isn’t just automation: it’s augmentation. Explainable, responsible AI can give HR the intelligence and context to make faster, fairer, more informed decisions about people and work.
The visibility payoff 💲
When HR teams have real visibility into the supply and demand of skills, and the tasks required vs the tasks people (or bots) are capable of, the benefits compound across the talent lifecycle:
- Strategic workforce planning becomes more accurate and dynamic
- Hiring and internal mobility are faster, fairer, and more aligned to actual business needs
- Retention improves, as employees are more likely to see clear paths for growth
- Productivity increases, because people are better matched to meaningful, high-impact work
And when disruption comes – as it always does – your organization can respond with speed, because you already know what capabilities you have, what you need, and where to move.
Workforce visibility: A new mandate for CHROs 📥
To meet this moment, HR leaders must embrace a new model of visibility – one that’s dynamic, data-driven, and deeply connected to the work itself.
That means:
- Building a skills-and-tasks-based view of the workforce, powered by AI
- Extracting insights from unstructured data sources, not just static HR records
- Connecting insights across the entire talent ecosystem – from hiring and onboarding to learning, performance, and succession
- Embedding those insights into everyday decision-making, not just long-term strategy
The organizations that succeed in the next era won’t just be faster. They’ll be smarter: because their workforce strategies will be built on a real understanding of what talent and technology can do.