TL;DR: Talent agility isn’t about moving fast. Instead, it’s about building integrated systems that allow organizations to assess, develop and redeploy people in response to changing business needs. Brandon Hall Group research shows that award-winning organizations treat talent management as a connected business system, not an HR program, combining strategic alignment, experiential development, personalized learning paths and multi-level measurement to build workforces that can adapt at the speed the business requires.

Defining Talent Agility Beyond the Buzzword

Every organization wants an agile workforce. Few can define what that actually means, or even measure whether they have one.

Talent agility is the organizational capacity to identify, develop and deploy the right capabilities at the right time. It requires knowing what skills exist today, anticipating what skills will be needed tomorrow and closing the gap before it becomes a crisis.

That sounds straightforward. In practice, it requires a level of integration across talent systems that most organizations haven’t achieved.

Why Traditional Approaches Fall Short

Most organizations manage talent in silos. Learning sits in one system, performance management in another, succession planning in a third. Career development happens informally, if at all.

The result is predictable: When business priorities shift, organizations scramble. They can’t quickly identify who has the capabilities they need. They don’t know which skills gaps are most urgent. And they lack the infrastructure to develop people fast enough to keep pace.

Brandon Hall Group research on award-winning talent management programs reveals the scale of the problem. Only 42% of organizations report above-average to excellent alignment between learning and business goals. When learning and talent systems operate independently, alignment becomes nearly impossible to sustain.

What Agile Talent Systems Look Like

Organizations that demonstrate real talent agility share a common trait: They treat talent management as an integrated capability-building system rather than a collection of separate programs.

The most effective organizations connect learning management, goal-setting, career progression and succession planning into a unified infrastructure. These aren’t standalone tools. Instead, they function as components of a single system. When goal setting connects to career pathways, career pathways connect to succession planning and succession planning connects to learning investments, organizations gain the visibility and responsiveness that talent agility demands.

Building Agility Through Assessment

You can’t develop what you haven’t measured. Brandon Hall Group research on award-winning team development programs found that a majority conduct pre-program self-assessments and skills gap analyses, while many layer in competency mapping, 360-degree feedback and team effectiveness assessments.

The most sophisticated organizations combine these approaches, pairing self-assessment with stakeholder feedback, competency evaluation with performance data and individual capability measurement with team diagnostics. This multi-source approach creates the accurate, actionable baseline that agile talent decisions require.

Experiential Learning as an Agility Accelerator

Classroom training alone doesn’t build agility. Skills must be practiced, applied and refined in real work contexts to transfer into actual capability.

Brandon Hall Group research confirms this. Among award-winning team development programs, 71% use interactive and experiential workshops as their primary development approach. Scenario-based exercises, action learning projects and one-on-one coaching are also common features.

Organizations that rely primarily on formal instruction will always lag behind those that embed development in the flow of work. When employees learn by solving real business problems, capability development and business value creation happen simultaneously.

Manager Involvement: The Multiplier Effect

Talent agility depends heavily on managers. They control application opportunities, feedback quality and accountability for skill development. Without active manager involvement, even well-designed talent systems lose their impact at the point of execution.

Yet Brandon Hall Group research shows that time is a significant or heavy constraint on manager involvement in learning for more than half of survey respondents. Organizations building talent agility must address this tension directly, not by adding responsibilities but by simplifying how managers support development through structured conversation guides, performance support tools and clear accountability metrics tied to existing goals.

Measuring Talent Agility

This is where most organizations struggle. They can measure training completion rates. They can track engagement survey scores. But measuring talent agility requires connecting inputs to outcomes across multiple dimensions.

Based on Brandon Hall Group research, effective measurement frameworks address four levels:

• Participation and Engagement Quality — Not just completion, but depth of involvement, including individual development plans and talent pool creation.
• Capability Development — Measuring actual skill gains through competency-based assessments, 360-degree feedback and assessment centers.
• Behavior Change and Application — Tracking whether new capabilities transfer to workplace performance through real-world application that can be observed and measured.
• Business Impact — Connecting talent activities to operational outcomes. Award-winning programs delivered financial impacts ranging from $75,000 to over $1.9 million through improved operational efficiency, reduced time-to-proficiency and enhanced customer experiences.

The organizations that measure across all four levels gain something the others don’t: evidence of whether their talent systems are actually producing the agility the business needs.

Technology as an Enabler, Not a Solution

Technology infrastructure matters for talent agility, but it’s an enabler, not a substitute for strategy. The key is integration. When learning platforms connect to performance systems, performance data informs development recommendations and dashboards give both employees and managers visibility into progress, technology creates the information flow that agile talent decisions require. Without integration, even sophisticated tools produce fragmented data that hinders rather than helps.

Making Talent Agility Operational

Organizations ready to build genuine talent agility should focus on three priorities.

First, connect the systems. Learning, performance management, succession planning and career development must function as integrated components, not independent programs. Brandon Hall Group research consistently shows that organizations achieving exceptional results operate these as a unified system with shared data and aligned objectives.

Second, invest in the application layer. Experiential learning, coaching, manager involvement and action learning projects are what convert knowledge into capability. Without them, training investment doesn’t translate into organizational agility.

Third, measure what matters. Move beyond activity metrics to capability and impact metrics. Track skill application rates, time to proficiency, succession pipeline readiness and the business outcomes that talent investments are designed to produce.

EI Powered by MPS designs learning ecosystems that connect formal development with on-the-job application, manager enablement and sustained performance support. These are the integrated approach that talent agility requires.

As a Brandon Hall Group Platinum Smartchoice® Provider, EI Powered by MPS partners with organizations to build adaptive talent systems that respond to shifting business priorities and deliver measurable capability growth.

Explore research and advisory insights from Brandon Hall Group at www.brandonhall.com.

To design integrated learning and talent solutions with built-in agility, connect with EI Powered by MPS at www.eidesign.net.

Talent agility is more than a program. It’s a capability built through integrated systems, experiential development and measurement that connects people growth to business results.

The post What Talent Agility Really Means (And How to Measure It) appeared first on Brandon Hall Group.

Most AI roadmaps look impressive.

Pilots are underway. Copilots are deployed. Budgets are allocated. Boards are informed. And yet, very few organizations are seeing sustained, enterprise-level impact.

In my recent conversation with Ross Crooke, SVP, BTS Europe, and Fredrik Schuller, EVP and Global Head of Centers of Excellence at BTS, one theme surfaced repeatedly: AI is not stalling because of technology. It is stalling because of leadership.

The first wave of AI adoption has centered on personal productivity. As Ross noted, organizations are seeing strong uptake in tools like Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude. Individuals are drafting faster, researching faster, synthesizing faster.

That matters. But personal productivity rarely redesigns work. It improves tasks without challenging structure.

The organizations moving ahead are doing something harder. They are giving teams both permission and responsibility to experiment. As Ross put it, if leaders limit teams to a single top-down tool, they unintentionally constrain creativity. AI maturity requires confidence at the front lines, not just compliance.

That is where many roadmaps quietly stall.

The conversation shifted when Fredrik reframed the issue. AI expands what is possible. The real question is whether leaders are clear about what is desirable and impactful. Without that clarity, AI becomes fragmented. Teams optimize locally. Enterprise transformation never materializes.

The difference between acceleration and reinvention lies in outcomes.

When organizations stop asking how to automate current workflows and start asking what outcomes need to be reimagined, productivity gains compound. Fredrik described teams completing projects with smaller groups, lower risk, improved quality, and dramatically shorter cycle times. In some cases, productivity improvements are measured in multiples, not percentages.

That kind of change does not come from incremental tool adoption. It comes from redesign. And redesign exposes a deeper constraint: management systems.

Many organizations still reward delivery over evolution. Yet, as Fredrik emphasized, breakthroughs come through retooling and iteration. Leaders must clear obstacles rather than control outcomes. They must create space for experimentation without sacrificing accountability.

This is the inflection point.

Some debate whether AI will produce meaningful productivity gains at scale. Ross is clear that the “productivity paradox” narrative does not match what he is seeing. Where workflows are redesigned, gains are significant. Where AI is layered onto existing processes, impact plateaus.

That is the dividing line. The question facing leaders is no longer which tool to standardize on. It is this: Where are we willing to rethink how work gets done?

Organizations that treat AI as a software rollout will see incremental gains. Organizations that treat AI as an operating model shift will redefine performance.

If this tension reflects what you are seeing internally, I encourage you to watch the full discussion with Ross Crooke and Fredrik Schuller. The examples and insights go deeper into how organizations are moving from isolated pilots to enterprise reinvention.

You can access the session here.

AI is not waiting.

The question is whether leadership is.

The post Most AI Roadmaps Aren’t Failing. They’re Stalling. appeared first on Brandon Hall Group.

Learning professionals have spent decades making promises they couldn’t quite keep. We’ve talked about personalized learning experiences, proving business impact, and creating systems employees actually want to use. The technology just wasn’t there to deliver at scale. That’s changing.

A recent conversation with the leadership team at Thrive Learning showed how deliberately they’re building toward a future that makes sense for how people work. The discussion revealed a company focused on solving real problems rather than chasing trends.

The Market Reality: Too Many Systems, Not Enough Integration

The learning technology landscape has become increasingly fragmented. Organizations juggle learning management systems, learning experience platforms, communication tools, HR systems, and knowledge repositories. Each promises to solve a piece of the puzzle, but none talk to each other in meaningful ways.

This creates real problems. Employees don’t care about technology stacks. They want quick answers, they want to develop skills that matter, and they want it without logging into a dozen different systems.

The competitive landscape reflects this challenge:

• Cornerstone OnDemand offers comprehensive talent management but struggles with user experience and complex implementations requiring significant partner support.
• Degreed pioneered the learning experience platform category with strong content aggregation and skills focus, but organizations still need a separate LMS for compliance and structured learning management.
• EdCast (now part of Cornerstone) provides personalized learning and knowledge sharing, yet lacks the core LMS functionality most organizations require for mandatory training and compliance tracking.
• Docebo delivers solid LMS capabilities with AI features, but the platform can feel disconnected from broader employee experience needs and lacks native mentoring or performance support tools.

What Makes Thrive Different

Thrive launched in recent years and has grown rapidly to serve organizations globally across multiple industries. The company works with brands spanning retail, hospitality, manufacturing, professional services, and government sectors.

The platform combines LMS and LXP capabilities in a single system that customers can configure based on their maturity level. Different organizations use it in completely different ways, from pure compliance tracking to full social learning environments.

Three innovations stand out:

An AI assistant searches across your entire tech stack, not just learning content. The tool can pull answers from various systems including HRIS platforms, communication tools, and internal knowledge bases. It provides performance support in the flow of work, answering questions about company policies, upcoming meetings, and learning requirements.

Advanced analytics capabilities help organizations move beyond completion tracking. By integrating with business intelligence tools, the platform gives L&D teams access to sophisticated data visualization. This approach helps teams demonstrate business impact rather than just tracking course completions.

Automated migration tools make switching from legacy systems straightforward. The company has built connectors that migrate users, content, and completion data from major platforms, helping customers get up and running quickly.

Strategic Acquisitions Signal Intent

Recently, Thrive made two acquisitions revealing where they’re heading. First came a mentoring and coaching platform acquisition that brought expertise in AI-powered matching and program development. This added human connection and development capabilities to the technical platform.

Shortly after, they acquired a smart intranet platform. This addition brings together workplace tools like calendars, messages, and project management systems with AI-powered personalization and federated search.

These acquisitions are building blocks for a unified employee experience hub. The vision includes smart tiles and interactive widgets that let employees complete tasks without switching applications. The federated search capability works across this entire connected ecosystem.

Who Benefits Most

Global enterprises with complex requirements appreciate the scalability. The company works with organizations ranging from small teams to large global workforces across multiple markets and languages. The platform supports dozens of languages and meets enterprise security standards.

Mid-market organizations represent a significant portion of the customer base. Companies in this segment use the platform for structured learning pathways, frontline communication, and knowledge management without lengthy implementation timelines.

Hospitality and retail businesses benefit particularly from the mobile-first design. White-labeled apps put learning and company information directly on employees’ devices. The interface mimics social media, which matters when your workforce expects consumer-grade experiences.

Heavily regulated industries need robust compliance tracking without sacrificing user experience. The platform delivers manager dashboards, real-time tracking, and automated reporting to satisfy compliance requirements while social learning features drive voluntary engagement.

Fast-growing smaller organizations can access capabilities previously reserved for large enterprises. The offering provides the full platform with reduced implementation scope, making it accessible to companies building their HR functions.

What This Means for the Market

The convergence of learning, communication, and employee experience isn’t theoretical. Major players across the industry are making similar moves. But learning technology providers like Thrive may be better positioned to lead this evolution than traditional HR systems because they’ve always focused on engagement and user experience rather than purely on data tracking and process enforcement.

The real test will be execution. Building an integrated employee experience platform is complex. Many have tried. Success requires not just good technology, but the operational excellence to serve customers ranging from small businesses to large global organizations.

Thrive’s approach of combining organic innovation with strategic acquisitions positions them to address the challenge of fragmented workplace technology. The company is betting that organizations want fewer systems, not more, and that learning platforms can become the connective tissue for the broader employee experience.

Whether that vision comes to fruition remains to be seen. But the direction is clear, and the market need is real. Organizations are tired of duct-taping solutions together. They want technology that works the way people actually work.

Brandon Hall Group helps organizations navigate the rapidly evolving learning technology landscape. The Brandon Hall Group Institute provides corporate HR and L&D professionals with research, frameworks, and peer insights to make better technology decisions. For solution providers, our Preferred Provider Program, TotalTech advisory services, and Marketing Services help position innovations effectively in this competitive market.

The post Thrive Learning: Building the Connected Employee Experience Through Strategic Growth appeared first on Brandon Hall Group.

At UKG Aspire 2025 in Las Vegas, UKG unveiled a variety of groundbreaking innovations designed to transform how organizations manage their workforce, with a particular focus on frontline employees who represent nearly 80% of the global workforce. From AI-powered intelligence hubs to innovative recognition platforms, these announcements demonstrate UKG’s commitment to creating a more intelligent, connected, and employee-centric future of work with their Workforce Operating Platform.

Workforce Intelligence Hub: Your Operational Command Center

UKG unveiled the Workforce Intelligence Hub, a first-of-its-kind AI-driven solution that unifies all workforce information, from employee schedules and time tracking to hiring, performance, pay, and industry trends, into one real-time view. This represents a fundamental shift in how organizations can understand and optimize their workforce operations.

The Workforce Intelligence Hub serves as an operational command center, giving executives and managers unprecedented access to the labor insights they need to make better, faster decisions about staffing, productivity, and organizational efficiency. Rather than piecing together data from disparate systems, leaders can now see a complete, unified picture of their workforce in real time.

The agentic platform delivers critical capabilities across three key areas and uses AI agents to make changes that positively influence business outcomes in real-time. It provides demand forecasting that predicts staffing needs based on historical data, business trends, and external factors like seasonality, ensuring the right people are in the right place at the right time while reducing costs and improving service delivery. It detects overtime trends and anomalies by identifying unexpected spikes or patterns in overtime usage, preventing excessive labor costs and proactively flagging potential compliance risks early. And it offers real-time visibility into shift coverage and labor gaps, helping managers rebalance workloads and reduce overtime costs.

Built on the world’s largest collection of workforce data, the hub delivers critical benchmarks to understand how the organization is performing, insights that explain what’s happening and why, and AI-driven actions to trigger changes across UKG and third-party systems in response to evolving conditions. According to Suresh Vittal, Chief Product Officer at UKG, “The Workforce Intelligence Hub provides customers with a complete view of their operation, enabling the faster, data-driven decisions that today’s business environment demands.”

Transforming Real-Time Labor and Staffing Strategies

UKG announced two innovative agentic applications designed to help organizations transform daily operations: UKG Rapid Hire and Dynamic Labor Management. These solutions address two of the most pressing challenges organizations face: hiring quickly enough to meet demand and managing labor in real time as conditions change.

These two intelligent solutions close the gap between planning and action, uncover staffing issues as they happen, and make frontline hiring as simple as ordering a rideshare. This consumer-app simplicity applied to workforce management represents a fundamental rethinking of how hiring and scheduling should work.

UKG Rapid Hire streamlines the frontline hiring process, recognizing that in industries like retail, hospitality, and healthcare, the ability to hire quickly can mean the difference between meeting customer demand and falling short. By simplifying and accelerating hiring workflows, organizations can fill positions faster and reduce the operational disruption caused by understaffing.

Dynamic Labor Management takes workforce optimization to the next level by providing real-time visibility and control over labor deployment. Rather than relying on static schedules created days or weeks in advance, organizations can now respond dynamically to changing conditions, unexpected callouts, and fluctuating demand. This agility reduces labor costs while improving service levels and employee satisfaction.

Together, these solutions represent UKG’s vision for eliminating the traditional lag between recognizing a staffing need and addressing it. In today’s fast-paced business environment, organizations can’t afford to wait — and with these new capabilities, they won’t have to.

Industry-First Network for the Frontline Workforce

In what may be the most socially significant announcement, UKG unveiled a first-to-market, AI-led experience focusing on frontline employees that connects them with a curated network of services and partners focused on supporting their wealth, health, and everyday essentials. This network addresses a critical gap in how organizations support their frontline workers.

Early collaborators include Chime, TurboTax, and OnePay, with additional providers to be announced in the first half of 2026. The network recognizes that frontline employees face unique financial and logistical challenges that traditional workplace benefits don’t always address effectively.

According to a recent UKG global study of 8,200 frontline workers, nearly half believe their organization has two cultures: one for knowledge workers who can enjoy perks like remote work and unlimited time-off; and one for frontline workers, who make up nearly 80% of the global workforce and must be present to do their jobs. This stark finding underscores the importance of creating dedicated solutions that acknowledge and address the distinct needs of frontline employees.

By connecting frontline workers with financial services, tax assistance, and payment solutions through an AI-powered interface, UKG is helping organizations demonstrate genuine commitment to supporting all employees, not just those in traditional office roles. This network approach creates a more equitable workplace experience and helps frontline workers navigate the financial complexities of their lives more easily. UKG also said it is actively exploring partners for both individual and group transportation support, with an eye on changing how organizations can help their frontline employees overcome the logistical challenge of getting to and from work.

UKG Bryte AI: Eliminating the Search for Information

One of the most universal workplace frustrations is the endless hunt for information: clicking through intranets, searching policy handbooks, and trying to remember which system houses which document. UKG unveiled a next-generation approach to operations and employee relations, leveraging its powerful UKG Bryte AI.

Building on nearly two decades of success with the UKG People Assist and UKG Document Manager solutions, UKG has infused agentic artificial intelligence (AI) throughout its solutions to help organizations dramatically reduce two of the most common questions from employees: “How do I…?” and “Where do I find….?”

The transformation is remarkable in its simplicity. With the new AI-first People Assist, employees simply ask a question in conversational format, such as “How do I request parental leave?” or “How do I update my 401 (k) contribution?”, and instantly get clear, personalized guidance with prompts to kick off the process.

Optimized for mobile so that employees can get access anywhere, at any time, the AI experiences in UKG People Assist and UKG Document Manager maximize the power of UKG’s unified People Fabric data layer. People Fabric helps UKG customers by allowing each organization to train UKG Bryte AI on any work-related process and policy, extending well beyond HR to encompass many aspects of operations and procedures.

Coupled with the world’s largest collection of work and sentiment data, this allows UKG to deliver hyper-personalized answers in real-time that are contextualized to their role and situation, making information quicker to access and easier to understand. According to Suresh Vittal, “Finding answers and documents at work should feel effortless, allowing people to quickly get the information they need to do their job, make decisions, and have an impact.”

UKG Beacon: Intelligent Recognition for Small and Mid-sized Businesses

UKG announced the launch of UKG Beacon, a groundbreaking solution that transforms how small and mid-sized businesses engage, recognize, and retain their workforce. This announcement is particularly significant because it brings easy-to-use enterprise-grade employee engagement capabilities to organizations that historically haven’t had access to such sophisticated tools.

UKG Beacon embeds Mo, an award-winning employee recognition and culture-building platform recently acquired by UKG, into UKG Ready’s comprehensive workforce data to deliver intelligent, data-driven employee engagement. This creates something entirely new: a recognition system that doesn’t just facilitate appreciation but actively suggests the right moments and methods for recognition.

UKG Beacon is available immediately and provides three powerful capabilities. It offers real-time achievement recognition, fueled by workforce data in UKG Ready, where UKG Beacon can prompt managers to send immediate recognition or automated rewards to frontline employees during key moments to celebrate. The combination of scheduling data and sentiment analysis allows UKG Beacon to proactively suggest actions and activities for employees through predictive engagement nudges. And when an employee completes a project or task milestone, UKG Beacon will recommend acknowledgement that resonates most with each individual, such as private thanks over public kudos, increasing its effectiveness through personalized, preference-based acknowledgement.

According to Chris Kiklas, GVP and General Manager of UKG Ready, “By combining Mo’s innovative recognition technology with UKG Ready’s robust workforce analytics, UKG Beacon represents a quantum leap forward in employee engagement for the small business and mid-sized market. We’re helping customers simplify work, celebrate their people in the moment, and build cultures where performance and purpose go hand-in-hand.”

The Bigger Picture: AI-Powered, People-First Workforce Management

These five announcements, all revealed at UKG Aspire 2025, paint a compelling picture of where workforce management is headed. The common thread running through each innovation is the combination of artificial intelligence, real-time data, and a genuine focus on improving experiences for all workers, from the C-suite to the frontline.

UKG is positioning itself as a leading global AI platform unifying HR, pay, and workforce management, with solutions built on the world’s largest collection of workforce data, using its people-first approach to AI. This data advantage, combined with sophisticated AI capabilities, enables UKG to deliver insights and automation that would be impossible with smaller datasets or less advanced technology.

What’s particularly notable about these announcements is the focus on democratizing access to advanced capabilities with a clear and consistent emphasis on frontline work. The Workforce Intelligence Hub gives all organizations, not just large enterprises, access to sophisticated analytics. UKG Beacon brings intelligent recognition to small and mid-sized businesses. The Frontline Worker Network acknowledges and addresses the needs of workers who have historically been underserved by technology.

For HR leaders, these innovations offer a path forward in an increasingly complex environment. Labor shortages, retention challenges, compliance requirements, and the need for operational agility aren’t going away. But with the right tools (technologies that combine human insight with artificial intelligence, that work in real time rather than looking backward, and that serve all employees rather than just some), organizations can navigate these challenges successfully.

As the workplace continues to evolve, one thing is clear: the future belongs to organizations that can harness data, deploy AI thoughtfully, and keep the frontline workforce – often the largest, most expensive, and most complex part of any operation –  at the center of everything they do. With these five major announcements, UKG is showing the path forward.

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The tech, consulting and creative industries built their reputations on moving fast. When a client needs a marketing campaign by Friday or when a big-tech company requires specialized AI talent for an urgent project, waiting three weeks for contractor onboarding isn’t just inconvenient, it kills deals.

We recently spoke with Runar Reistrup, CEO of YunoJuno, who shared how his platform addresses this exact problem. With a background in leading technology platforms, Reistrup brings a tech-veteran’s perspective to an industry still dominated by legacy processes. Based in London and New York, YunoJuno has focused on solving the specific deployment speed challenges that plague enterprise contractor management.

The Core Business Problem: When Speed Determines Success

Enterprise procurement categories have evolved dramatically over the past decade, yet contingent workforce management remains stuck in outdated frameworks. The traditional model, managed service providers (MSPs) handling vendor management systems (VMS), works adequately for predictable, high-volume staffing needs. But it creates critical business problems when organizations need highly specialized talent deployed within days, not weeks.

The Speed-to-Market Problem: Projects in modern, knowledge-based organizations often require contractor expertise fast to capture commercial opportunity ahead, sometimes down to days. Traditional procurement processes can’t accommodate these timelines, forcing companies to either miss opportunities or work with suboptimal internal resources.

The Strategic Talent Problem: Companies increasingly view certain contractor categories as strategic assets rather than commodity resources. When a large management consultancy decided their contractor workforce was too important to outsource to an MSP, they needed direct engagement capabilities that traditional systems couldn’t provide.

The Geographic Coverage Problem: Global companies frequently need contractor expertise in markets their current MSPs don’t cover. A multinational company might need 20 highly specialized contractors across regions where their existing workforce management setup has no presence.

Consider what happens when these problems compound: a global consulting firm needs specialized AI expertise for a client project starting next week, across three countries their MSP doesn’t serve, for work that requires strategic oversight rather than commodity staffing. Traditional systems fail at every level.

The gap has created space for Freelance Management Systems (FMS)—platforms designed specifically for direct contractor engagement without the traditional intermediary layers.

How the Competition Stacks Up

The freelance management landscape includes several distinct approaches, each with specific strengths and constraints. Organizations evaluating solutions in this space can benefit from Brandon Hall Group’s technology selection advisory services to understand how different platforms align with their specific workforce management strategies.

Worksome (Denmark)

• Comprehensive compliance engine with worker classification features.
• Ideal for mid-sized companies and departments.
• Worker classification offered as an add-on service rather than built-in feature.

TalentDesk (UK)

• End-to-end freelancer management with customizable onboarding workflows and consolidated invoicing.
• $399 monthly platform fee plus $49 per contractor for Agent of Record services.
• Some users report counter-intuitive interface for invoice submission.

Field Nation (US)

• Specialized platform for field service freelancers with project dispatch and work order management.
• Geographic and industry limitations focused primarily on technical field services.
• Not designed for knowledge work or creative industries.

Where YunoJuno Breaks from the Pack

YunoJuno’s differentiation centers on a few core innovations that address enterprise-specific pain points:

Worker Classification with Indemnification in Under an Hour

• Automated AI-powered classification system that processes worker status decisions within 60 minutes in major markets (US, UK and EU).
• Full indemnification backing these classifications, removing legal risk from client organizations.
• This transforms what’s typically a weeks-long legal review process into an automated decision point.

Under Three-Minute Contractor Onboarding

• Complete onboarding process from initial engagement to contract execution in under three minutes.
• Automated contract generation with real-time compliance checking across 165+ markets.
• Integration capabilities that allow the platform to pull PO numbers from ERP systems and report back to existing vendor management systems.

Enterprise-Grade Integration Architecture

• Modular system design that integrates with existing MSP and VMS infrastructure rather than replacing it.
• Capability to function as the freelance management layer while MSPs continue handling other workforce categories.
• Real-time reporting that feeds into existing procurement and finance workflows.

These capabilities enable what Reistrup calls “weekend deployment”—the ability to identify, classify, contract, and deploy talent between Friday afternoon and Monday morning.

Who Actually Needs Lightning-Fast Contractor Deployment

YunoJuno’s ideal customer profile reveals where traditional workforce management creates the most friction:

Global Consulting Firms

• Organizations that view contractor talent as strategic rather than commodity resources.
• Need for rapid team scaling across specialized skill areas (AI, data science, specialized industry expertise).
• Requirements for direct talent management without outsourcing to MSPs.
• Benefit: Elimination of MSP markup while maintaining enterprise-grade compliance and reporting.

In-House Creative, Marketing and Software Teams

• Companies with highly skilled in-house teams, typically across Creative, Marketing and Software, requiring agile creative deployment.
• Campaign timelines that demand contractor availability within days of brief development.
• Need for specialized skills (motion graphics, programmatic advertising, content localization) not available internally.
• Benefit: Delivery speed that matches market opportunity windows.

Technology Companies with Distributed Teams

• Multi-national organizations managing contractor resources across multiple global business units with varying contractor needs.
• High-leverage specialist roles where speed-to-deployment directly impacts product development.
• Complex compliance requirements across multiple global markets.
• Benefit: Talent deployment velocity that matches product development cycles.

Professional Services with Project-Based Needs

• Firms requiring specialized expertise for client engagements (regulatory compliance, technical implementation, industry-specific knowledge).
• Engagements where contractor quality and deployment speed directly impact client satisfaction.
• International project requirements spanning markets not covered by traditional MSPs.
• Benefit: Client responsiveness that maintains competitive advantage.

Mid-Market Global Companies

• Organizations with 10-30 million in contractor spend: too large for manual management, too focused for traditional MSP/VMS economics.
• Growth-stage companies expanding internationally without resources for multiple MSP relationships.
• Companies transitioning from startup flexibility to enterprise compliance requirements.
• Benefit: Enterprise-grade infrastructure without enterprise-grade overhead.

Strategic Market Position and Outlook

YunoJuno occupies a unique position in the emerging Freelance Management Systems category. This positioning during rapid market evolution suggests strong product-market fit within their target segments.

The platform’s architecture reflects a sophisticated understanding of enterprise procurement: rather than fighting existing vendor management infrastructure, YunoJuno positions itself as the specialized layer for fast-moving, high-value contractor categories. This allows procurement teams to right-size their workforce management approach, using traditional MSPs for volume staffing while deploying YunoJuno for strategic talent needs.

For organizations seeking to validate this approach through peer experiences, Brandon Hall Group’s Excellence Awards® case study library provides insights into how leading organizations have successfully implemented innovative workforce management strategies. Additionally, companies can leverage Brandon Hall Group’s benchmarking services to understand how their contractor deployment timelines compare to industry standards.

YunoJuno’s expansion trajectory to global enterprise clients demonstrates the broader applicability of their speed-focused approach. As more industries face compressed project timelines and increased competition for specialized skills, the ability to deploy quality contractors within hours rather than weeks becomes a measurable competitive advantage.

For procurement leaders evaluating workforce management strategies, YunoJuno represents a new category of solution, one that prioritizes deployment velocity and talent quality over cost minimization. In markets where the right contractor deployed quickly generates more value than the cheapest contractor deployed slowly, this positioning creates substantial differentiation.

The question isn’t whether enterprises will continue needing flexible talent — that’s already decided. The question is whether they’ll accept traditional deployment timelines as business acceleration demands increasingly faster responses to market opportunities.

For solution providers interested in showcasing their innovations to Brandon Hall Group’s community of HR and talent management leaders, learn more about the SmartChoice Preferred Provider Program. Organizations seeking to recognize excellence in their workforce management implementations can explore Brandon Hall Group’s Excellence Awards programs.

The post YunoJuno: Scaling Freelance Management</br> at Speed for the Global Enterprise appeared first on Brandon Hall Group.

The math is brutal: for every 1,000 employees, organizations lose the productivity equivalent of 130 workers, bleeding $11.2 million annually through what amounts to digital evaporation. This is caused by a fundamental inability to see how work actually happens in distributed, digital environments.

I recently spent time with Javier Aldrete and the leadership team at ActivTrak, diving deep into their evolution from activity monitoring to what they now call a workforce intelligence platform. What emerged from our discussion was a stark picture of how enterprises are flying blind when it comes to understanding workforce capacity, where one department might carry the equivalent of 34.6 unutilized full-time employees, while others desperately request headcount. ActivTrak has grown tremendously in the past two years, with 70% year-over-year growth in enterprise deals, suggesting they’re hitting a nerve in how organizations think about workforce optimization.

This type of vendor innovation is exactly what Brandon Hall Group tracks through our solution provider research and advisory services, helping both buyers understand the market landscape and vendors position their unique value effectively.

The Measurement Crisis

The workplace transformation everyone talks about has created a measurement crisis nobody wants to acknowledge. Return-to-office mandates affect 70% of employers, yet companies lack basic visibility into whether people are actually in the office or whether it matters. AI adoption is growing, but organizations can’t tell if that translates to changed work patterns or just expensive chat interfaces. Meanwhile, CHROs scramble to deliver more value at lower cost while operating with less visibility than ever before.

The traditional workforce management tools that worked for call centers and manufacturing floors break down completely when applied to knowledge work. You can’t time-study a software developer the way you time-study an assembly line. You can’t measure creative problem-solving with badge swipes and timesheet entries.

These are the complex workforce challenges we help organizations navigate through our enterprise membership program, where companies gain access to research, advisory services and peer insights on emerging solutions like workforce intelligence platforms.

The Competitive Reality Check

The workforce analytics space has attracted varied approaches, each with distinct profiles:

Teramind features security-focused monitoring, detailed user activity tracking, and data loss prevention, identifying unproductive time and work patterns, enabling managers to direct workforce performance. It does not monitor mobile devices and individual user licensing can be expensive.

Insightful enables real-time work monitoring, project tracking, and automated time mapping to projects. It is primarily focused on time tracking rather than work pattern analysis.

Hubstaff offers GPS tracking for field workers, invoice generation and basic productivity monitoring. It is more suited for hourly/contract workers and lacks advanced analytics for knowledge worker optimization.

Time Doctor provides screenshot capture, website/app tracking and distraction alerts. There has been some feedback about the intrusive monitoring approach. It also has limited strategic insights and is focused on surveillance rather than workforce intelligence.

This competitive analysis reflects the type of market intelligence we provide through our corporate research and advisory offerings, helping organizations make informed decisions about technology investments.

The Intelligence Layer That Changes Everything

The technical differentiation of ActivTrak, a Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards® winner since 2020, centers on three key innovations that transform raw activity data into actionable intelligence:

Workforce Utilization & Financial Loss

• Translates underutilization directly into dollar amounts by department.
• Identifies “untapped capacity” measured in FTE equivalents.
• Shows trending patterns to distinguish temporary dips from systemic issues.
• Early adopters report a 15-20% reduction in idle capacity within 90 days.

Activity Alignment Engine

• Distinguishes high-value work from administrative tasks using AI classification.
• Maps individual activity patterns against role expectations.
• Identifies “misaligned” workers who are busy but unproductive.
• Reveals that top performers spend 70-80% of their time on core activities.

False Activity Detection

• Identifies mouse jiggler and automated activity patterns.
• Validates genuine work versus simulated presence.
• Critical for remote/hybrid environments where trust replaces supervision.
• Addresses the “overemployment” phenomenon where workers hold multiple full-time roles.

Who Benefits from Workforce Intelligence

Mid-market financial services. The industry struggles with contractor billing reconciliation and the complex web of compliance requirements that govern their operations. By implementing automated verification systems that match billed hours against actual activity, these organizations gain visibility into their contractor spending.

Healthcare organizations with distributed teams. Their primary concern is centered on ensuring proper utilization of staff resources while managing the complexities of round-the-clock coverage. Through real-time capacity visualization and schedule adherence tracking, these healthcare providers achieve a delicate balance. They successfully reduce overtime costs that had been straining budgets while maintaining the coverage requirements essential for patient care.

Insurance companies managing hybrid policies. They navigate the complexities of hybrid work arrangements, needing to implement return-to-office policies without sacrificing the flexibility that had become essential to employee satisfaction. Location-based productivity analysis and presence verification tools provide these companies with objective data about work patterns and outcomes. This enables them to make informed, data-driven decisions about office space investments and hybrid work policies that balance organizational needs with employee preferences.

Business process outsourcers (BPOs). They face the dual pressure of demonstrating clear value to their clients while optimizing their own margins in a highly competitive market. By deploying granular productivity metrics directly tied to client deliverables, BPOs gained precise insights into performance at both individual and team levels. This enables targeted coaching interventions that drive per-employee productivity.

Professional services firms. These companies confront the perennial challenge of maximizing billable hours without pushing their talented workforce toward burnout. Work pattern analysis reveals previously hidden inefficiencies in workflows that constrain productivity. Armed with these insights, firms can restructure their processes and eliminate bottlenecks.

Understanding which solution fits your organization’s specific needs requires careful evaluation — the kind of analysis we facilitate through research and advisory services, where we help match organizational requirements with vendor capabilities.

The Analyst View: Beyond Surveillance Theater

ActivTrak occupies an interesting position in the workforce analytics market. While competitors focus either on security or basic time tracking, ActivTrak has positioned itself as the translation layer between workforce activity and business outcomes. Their evolution from monitoring tool to intelligence platform reflects a broader market shift from measuring presence to measuring value.

The company’s privacy-first approach, which allows organizations to dial data collection up or down based on use case, addresses the trust deficit that has plagued employee monitoring solutions. You can start with basic utilization metrics requiring minimal data collection, then expand to process optimization only where needed. This graduated approach reduces resistance while building organizational confidence in data-driven workforce management.

Their customer roster suggests enterprise readiness, though the real validation comes from their ROI metrics. When Echo Global Logistics can identify 34.6 FTEs of untapped capacity in a single department, or when Parts ASAP achieves 122X ROI through workforce optimization, you’re looking at a solution that transcends traditional monitoring.

The AI services layer they’re developing could become their most significant differentiator. As organizations feed AI agents and automation tools, ActivTrak’s procedural work data becomes invaluable for training these systems on how work actually flows through organizations. They’re essentially building the observability layer for the AI-augmented workforce, showing not just whether AI is being used, but whether it’s changing work patterns and outcomes.

For vendors like ActivTrak looking to effectively communicate this type of sophisticated value proposition, our Preferred Provider Program offers strategic guidance on market positioning and competitive differentiation.

Strategic Implications for 2026

ActivTrak sits at the intersection of several converging trends that will define workforce management through 2026. The combination of RTO mandates, AI adoption, and cost pressure creates demand for objective workforce intelligence that goes beyond surveys and assumptions. Their ability to translate activity patterns into financial impact gives them a unique voice in C-suite conversations about workforce strategy.

The challenge ahead lies in market education. Many organizations still conflate workforce analytics with employee surveillance, missing the strategic value of understanding work patterns and capacity. ActivTrak must continue positioning itself as the enabler of workforce optimization rather than monitors of employee behavior.

Their roadmap toward embedded AI training and workflow optimization positions them well for the next wave of workplace transformation. As organizations move from asking “are people working?” to “is work happening efficiently?” ActivTrak’s intelligence layer becomes increasingly critical. The companies that can see and optimize their true workforce capacity, rather than managing to headcount and hoping for the best, will define competitive advantage in the distributed work era.

The question isn’t whether organizations need workforce intelligence — it’s whether they can afford to operate without it.  In a market where a single percentage point of productivity improvement can mean millions in recovered value, flying blind is no longer an option.

For more insights on workforce analytics solutions and how to evaluate them for your organization, explore Brandon Hall Group’s research and advisory services. Solution providers interested in strategic market positioning can learn more about our vendor advisory programs.

The post How Workforce Intelligence Reveals the Hidden Cost of Modern Work appeared first on Brandon Hall Group.

Many HR leaders are drowning in skills taxonomies while missing what actually happens at work. They catalog thousands of competencies, map career progressions and build elaborate frameworks, but can’t answer basic questions about how AI will impact their workforce next quarter. The gap between skills management and work reality has never been wider, and it’s about to cost organizations dearly.

I recently met with Laure Lot, TechWolf’s London-based executive, for a detailed briefing about their workforce intelligence platform. TechWolf has built what they call “the foundational data layer” that connects jobs, tasks and skills data to provide deep workforce intelligence for enterprises navigating transformation.

They’re taking an approach that starts with understanding the actual work being done, then derives the skills implications from there. Having analyzed dozens of vendors in this space through our research practices, this reversal of the typical skills-first approach deserves serious consideration.

The Belgium-based company, now expanding aggressively into the U.S. market with a New York office, represents a different philosophy in workforce intelligence. Rather than building another standalone platform, TechWolf integrates directly into existing HR systems — what they call being “invisible and interfaceless.” In January 2025, Workday announced it would roll out TechWolf’s AI-powered skills intelligence across its global workforce of over 20,400 employees, validating this embedded approach at enterprise scale.

The Market Realities

The workforce intelligence market has become increasingly crowded, with vendors making bold claims about AI-driven insights while delivering variations on the same theme. Through our coverage of this market, featuring in the Brandon Hall Group Institute, we’ve identified key players and their positioning:

Eightfold AI leads the market in talent intelligence with impressive scale and adoption.

Their platform draws on 1.6+ billion career profiles and 1.6+ million skills, creating one of the industry’s most comprehensive datasets. They are primarily focused on talent matching and career pathing.

Beamery has positioned itself as the talent lifecycle management leader. Their platform brings together fragmented data on skills, roles, people, and the market to create a unified source of truth. The broad lifecycle focus may lack the depth needed for task-level transformation analysis.

Lightcast dominates labor market analytics and has compiled more than 18 billion labor market data points, including job postings, career profiles, and compensation data, drawing on over 25 years of expertise. Lightcast’s focus is primarily on the external labor market rather than internal workforce transformation.

Phenom People offers comprehensive talent experience management that is strong in candidate experience and employer branding. They take an experience-focused rather than intelligence-driven approach to workforce planning.

Organizations evaluating these solutions should consider participating in our HCM Excellence Awards program, which recognizes successful deployments of workforce intelligence platforms and provides valuable case studies for benchmarking.

Task Intelligence: The Missing Layer in Workforce Transformation

While competitors focus on matching people to roles or analyzing external labor markets, TechWolf has zeroed in on what they call “task intelligence,” which they define as understanding work at its most granular level. During our briefing, Laure Lot demonstrated their Workforce Intelligence platform, showing how they analyze tasks within roles to determine automation potential, augmentation opportunities and reskilling pathways. Their approach breaks down into three critical innovations that our research team has identified as differentiators:

AI Impact Assessment at Task Level

• The platform categorizes every task as either remaining human, becoming augmented by AI or suitable for automation.
• For each role, it calculates specific hours that can be saved through AI adoption.
• Provides department-level analysis showing which areas face the most disruption.
• Unlike broad predictions about job displacement, this gives organizations actionable data about specific work activities.

Role Overlap Analysis

• The system identifies when multiple roles perform similar tasks, revealing consolidation opportunities.
• During the demo, Lot showed two roles with 63% task overlap, drilling down to show exact overlapping responsibilities and hours.
• This moves beyond traditional job architecture reviews to data-driven organizational design.
• Particularly valuable for post-merger integration or restructuring initiatives.

Dynamic Redeployment Mapping

• Based on task similarities rather than job titles, the platform suggests realistic transition paths for displaced workers.
• Links redeployment opportunities to specific training requirements.
• Considers task-level skills rather than broad competency categories.
• Provides confidence scores for successful transitions based on task alignment.

These capabilities align with findings from our proprietary research, available to Brandon Hall Group members, which shows that organizations with task-level workforce planning capabilities are significantly more successful in transformation initiatives.

Who Benefits Most from Work-First Intelligence

Based on the briefing and our research, several organizational types emerge as ideal candidates for TechWolf’s approach:

Global enterprises undergoing digital transformation

• Need to understand AI’s impact across thousands of roles simultaneously.

• Face pressure to demonstrate workforce planning tied to business outcomes.
• Benefit from task-level analysis for large-scale reskilling initiatives.
• Example industries: Financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing.

Post-merger organizations managing workforce integration

• Must identify role redundancies across combined entities.
• Need a data-driven approach to job architecture harmonization.
• Benefit from overlap analysis to guide consolidation decisions.
• Can use redeployment mapping to retain talent while reducing costs.

Heavily regulated industries facing automation pressure

• Healthcare systems balancing automation with compliance requirements.
• Financial institutions navigating AI adoption within regulatory constraints.
• Need granular analysis of which tasks can be automated vs. must remain human.
• Benefit from audit trails showing data-driven workforce decisions.

Technology companies rapidly evolving their workforce

• Face constant pressure to adapt roles as technology changes.
• Need to understand how emerging tools impact existing work.
• Benefit from continuous monitoring of task evolution.
• Can use insights to guide internal mobility and reskilling programs.

Professional services firms optimizing delivery models

• Consulting firms determining which tasks to automate vs. keep client-facing.
• Law firms analyzing paralegal vs. attorney task distribution.
• Need to maintain quality while improving efficiency.
• Benefit from data showing optimal human-AI collaboration points.

Building the Data Layer for Workforce Transformation

TechWolf’s positioning as an “invisible and interfaceless” data layer represents both its greatest strength and potential challenge. By embedding directly into existing HR systems rather than competing for attention as another platform, they avoid the adoption barriers that plague many workforce intelligence solutions. The recent Workday implementation validates this approach at scale.

However, several factors will determine their trajectory:

• Market education challenge: Organizations accustomed to thinking in terms of skills and competencies need education on why task-level analysis matters. The shift from “what skills do we need?” to “how is work changing?” requires a fundamental reorientation of workforce planning. Solution providers looking to partner with TechWolf should explore our Preferred Provider Program to gain insights into buyer perspectives and market positioning strategies.
• Integration depth vs. breadth: While deep integrations with Workday, SAP and ServiceNow provide strong foundations, the company must balance perfecting these partnerships against expanding to other platforms. Their focus on quality over quantity appears strategically sound given the complexity of the insights they provide.
• Competitive positioning: As larger vendors like Eightfold add work analysis capabilities and Workday enhances its native skills intelligence, TechWolf must maintain its differentiation through superior task-level insights. Their published AI research and open-sourced models provide credibility, but sustained innovation will be critical. Vendors in this space should consider participating in our Excellence in Technology Awards to benchmark their capabilities against industry leaders.
• ROI demonstration: Organizations need clear metrics showing how task intelligence translates to business value. While the platform provides impressive analytics, connecting these insights to measurable outcomes — cost savings, productivity gains, successful transformations — will accelerate adoption. Our advisory team regularly helps organizations build business cases for workforce intelligence investments through our membership advisory services.

Looking forward, TechWolf’s success hinges on a broader market recognition that skills are outcomes, not inputs. Understanding how work evolves — task by task, role by role — provides the foundation for effective workforce transformation. For organizations serious about preparing for AI’s impact, this work-first approach offers something increasingly vital: specificity in a sea of speculation.

The company’s alpha release of their Workforce Intelligence platform, currently in early adopter testing with select enterprise clients, suggests they’re taking a measured approach to market entry. This careful validation with real-world implementations, combined with their deep technical expertise and partnership strategy, positions them well for the challenges ahead.

Organizations looking to stay ahead of these trends should leverage Brandon Hall Group’s comprehensive research and advisory services to develop workforce intelligence strategies that align with their transformation goals. Our certification programs can help HR professionals build the expertise needed to lead these initiatives effectively.

The post Inside TechWolf’s Approach to AI-Driven Workforce Intelligence appeared first on Brandon Hall Group.

In a move that signals a major shift in how organizations will manage their workforces, UKG and Google Cloud have announced a sweeping expansion of their partnership that promises to bring sophisticated agentic AI capabilities to tens of millions of workers worldwide. This isn’t just another tech collaboration — it’s a fundamental reimagining of how AI can transform the daily experience of employees, managers, and HR professionals alike.

A Partnership Built for the AI Era

The announcement, revealed this week, positions Google Cloud as UKG’s primary provider for AI and data analytics. UKG is an industry leader in HR, pay and workforce management, serving over 80,000 organizations across 150 countries. From scheduling shifts at retail stores to processing payroll for global enterprises, UKG’s platforms touch the working lives of tens of millions of people every single day.

By selecting Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise, Gemini models, and BigQuery as the foundation for its AI strategy, UKG is making a bold bet on agentic AI — intelligent systems that don’t just respond to queries but can autonomously handle complex tasks and make decisions on behalf of users.

“Our expanded partnership with Google Cloud builds on the power of UKG’s Workforce Operating Platform, to bring customers a broad range of solutions that drive efficiency and deliver insights that help leaders focus on what matters, their workforce and their business,” said Jennifer Morgan, CEO of UKG.

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, emphasized the significance of the collaboration: “Through our expanded strategic partnership with UKG, we will help organizations use Gemini Enterprise and our AI to leverage workplace data insights in new and more meaningful ways. Our work together will allow businesses to build and deploy sophisticated AI-powered applications that optimize workflows and improve employee experiences.”

Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer and Principal Analyst at Brandon Hall Group, sees this partnership as a pivotal moment for the HR technology industry: “The convergence of UKG’s deep workforce insights with Google Cloud’s advanced AI capabilities represents a significant leap forward in how organizations support and empower their people. What’s particularly noteworthy is the focus on agentic AI that doesn’t just provide information but takes action. This moves us beyond the era of AI-assisted decision-making into AI-enabled workforce excellence. Organizations that embrace these capabilities early will gain a substantial competitive advantage in attracting, retaining, and helping their people thrive.”

The Rise of AI Agents in the Workplace

What sets this partnership apart is its focus on agentic AI — autonomous agents that can understand context, make decisions, and take actions without constant human supervision. UKG is developing three categories of AI agents that address critical pain points across the employee lifecycle:

24/7 Employee Assistance: Imagine never having to wait for HR to respond to your questions about benefits or not having to navigate through multiple systems just to swap a shift. The new AI agents will provide always-on, self-service assistance for common workplace needs. Employees will be able to check schedules, swap shifts, and get real-time answers about pay or benefits whenever they need them — at 2 PM or 2 AM.

Manager Insights: For managers drowning in administrative tasks and spreadsheets, these agents promise to be game changers. By handling complex data analysis autonomously, they’ll eliminate administrative bottlenecks and simplify workforce planning. Instead of spending hours analyzing overtime trends or trying to improve shift coverage, managers can ask simple questions in natural language and receive sophisticated analyses with actionable recommendations. The example UKG provides is telling: a manager will be able to use conversational AI to simply ask, “Show me my team’s overtime trends and recommend three strategies to reduce burnout risk.” In seconds, the platform will deliver a custom analysis with actionable recommendations, enabling leaders to turn complex data into informed business strategies.

HR and Admin Optimization: Behind every smooth-running organization is a team of HR professionals and system administrators handling compliance tracking, payroll administration, and report generation. The new AI agents will automate many of these critical but time-consuming backend processes, reducing manual effort and ensuring data accuracy across organizations.

Breaking Down Silos with Agent2Agent Protocol

One of the most forward-thinking aspects of this partnership is UKG’s commitment to the Agent2Agent (A2A) interoperability protocol. In simple terms, this means that UKG’s AI agents won’t just work within UKG’s ecosystem — they’ll be able to communicate and collaborate with any other A2A-compatible agents, regardless of the provider.

This is crucial because most organizations operate with a diverse technology stack spanning multiple platforms for different business functions. By supporting A2A, UKG is helping ensure that customers won’t face a future where their AI agents exist in isolated silos, unable to work together. It’s a customer-friendly approach that future-proofs AI investments and acknowledges the reality of how modern organizations actually work.

Walking the Walk: Internal Adoption

What makes this announcement particularly compelling is UKG’s commitment to using the technology internally first — demonstrating genuine confidence in the partnership’s capabilities. UKG will be one of the first organizations to deploy Gemini Enterprise for its own global workforce, equipping teams from sales and engineering to customer support with centralized agentic AI and enterprise search capabilities.

This means UKG employees will have instant access to critical information like software documentation and customer service case histories. They’ll also be able to build custom agents to automate workflows like client call preparation. This internal deployment serves as both a proving ground for the technology and a powerful signal of confidence in the partnership.

The Technical Foundation: More Than Just Buzzwords

While AI agents grab the headlines, the partnership’s technical infrastructure is equally impressive. UKG will leverage BigQuery and AlloyDB to provide customers with unified, real-time access to their workforce data through secure, zero-copy integration. This isn’t just about storing data — it’s about making it genuinely useful.

Organizations will be able to analyze UKG People Fabric data alongside other enterprise data sets, generating deeper insights by correlating workforce trends with key business outcomes. Want to understand how employee satisfaction scores relate to customer satisfaction metrics? Or how overtime patterns correlate with quality issues in manufacturing? This unified data foundation makes those analyses possible.

This same data infrastructure also powers the user experience in Gemini Enterprise, giving joint customers a single destination to connect, view, and search their enterprise data — no more jumping between systems or reconciling conflicting reports.

A True Two-Way Partnership

What makes this collaboration particularly interesting is that it’s genuinely reciprocal. While UKG is adopting Google Cloud’s AI technologies, Google is simultaneously expanding its usage of UKG Pro for payroll and global workforce management. Google will leverage UKG’s Bryte AI-powered features to boost productivity and gain workforce insights for multi-country payroll, employee scheduling, and long-term planning.

This mutual adoption creates aligned incentives and ensures both companies have skin in the game when it comes to making the integration work seamlessly.

What This Means for Customers

The partnership includes a joint go-to-market strategy designed to provide businesses with cohesive, expert guidance from initial project evaluation through implementation and ongoing support. Additionally, UKG will launch on Google Cloud Marketplace this fall with UKG Pro Workforce Management, offering customers a simplified procurement path that leverages their existing Google Cloud commitments.

The new integrations across BigQuery and the AI agents are expected to be available in 2026, giving organizations time to prepare their infrastructure and plan their adoption strategies.

The Bigger Picture

This partnership represents more than just a business deal — it’s a vision of how AI will transform the employee experience at scale. Rather than replacing human judgment, these AI agents promise to handle the routine, the repetitive, and the time-consuming, freeing up humans to focus on strategy, creativity, and the interpersonal aspects of work that require empathy and emotional intelligence.

For frontline workers, it means more autonomy and immediate access to information. For managers, it means less time on administrative tasks and more time leading their teams. For HR professionals, it means the ability to focus on strategic initiatives rather than getting bogged down in operational details.

As organizations navigate the ongoing transformation of work — remote and hybrid arrangements, the war for talent, the need for agility in an uncertain economy — having intelligent systems that can help streamline workforce operations becomes not just nice to have, but essential.

The UKG and Google Cloud partnership demonstrates that the future of work won’t be about humans versus machines, but rather about humans augmented by intelligent agents that dramatically enhance productivity and transform how work gets done. And with 80,000 organizations already trusting UKG’s platforms, this vision has the scale to become reality for millions of workers around the world.

The post The Future of Work Just Got Smarter:</br> UKG and Google Cloud’s Game-Changing AI Partnership appeared first on Brandon Hall Group.

The numbers tell a story most HR leaders already know in their bones: traditional performance management is broken.

When Intuit faced the challenge of maintaining alignment, transparency and fairness across its global workforce while transforming into an AI-driven platform company, it needed a new approach. The organization adopted Betterworks to enable agile goal-setting, continuous feedback, and equitable evaluation — building a transparent, flexible, and technology-enabled goal framework that aligned employees around shared company objectives. The results included near-universal goal-setting adoption, improved collaboration through visibility into others’ goals, and stronger manager-employee relationships that drove engagement, accountability, and business growth.

Having recently spent time with Chief Marketing Officer John Schneider and Cheryl Johnson, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Betterworks, I gained deeper insights into how this performance management software company is carving out a distinct position in an increasingly crowded market. Under CEO Doug Dennerline, a longtime executive who also served as president of SAP SuccessFactors, the company has transformed from an OKR-focused tool into a comprehensive performance enablement platform that’s winning major enterprise deals against both legacy HCM suites and modern point solutions.

What makes their story compelling is a deliberate focus on driving measurable business outcomes through performance management — something that resonates strongly with the organizations Brandon Hall Group supports through our Institute enterprise membership program, where HR leaders consistently identify performance management transformation as a top priority.

The Market: Beyond the Annual Review Trap

The performance management software market has become a battlefield of competing philosophies. On one side, you have the HCM giants promising integrated compliance and control. On the other, nimble startups chase the SMB market with consumer-grade interfaces and quick implementations. In the middle sit enterprise organizations striving to modernize performance practices across thousands of employees without losing strategic alignment.

Through our research and advisory services, we’ve observed how organizations struggle with this decision. Many of the companies competing for our HCM Excellence Awards share similar challenges: outdated review processes, disconnected goals, and managers unprepared for continuous coaching. Here’s how key players competing with Betterworks stack up:

• Workday Performance Management: Integrated within the broader HCM Suite, it features goal management tied to compensation planning, succession planning tools with talent matrices. It is built primarily for structured annual processes rather than continuous feedback models.
• SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals: The solution has enterprise-grade cascading goal management and configurable review workflows with audit trails, but is less adaptable to fast-changing organizational needs.
• Lattice: A user-friendly interface optimized for employee engagement, strong 360-degree feedback and recognition features. It has limited scalability for organizations above 5,000 employees.

• Culture Amp: Strong employee engagement surveying and analytics, performance reviews integrated with culture insights and comprehensive reporting on organizational health metrics. The solution is less focused on ongoing performance enablement.

• 15Five is a lightweight tool with a strong focus on manager coaching for the mid-market, though less robust for complex organizational structures.

• Cornerstone Performance: Part of a broader talent management suite, with strong learning integration and competency-based performance assessments. It is less focused than other solutions on continuous feedback.

The Betterworks Differentiators

1. Weekly Active Usage at Scale — While most performance platforms see users log in twice a year, Betterworks maintains weekly active usage across its 750,000-user install base.

At one leading electric vehicle manufacturer, rapid growth meant 80% of managers were new to leadership. By using Betterworks to structure ongoing coaching conversations and feedback loops, the organization helped first-time managers develop faster, sustain its culture, and maintain alignment through explosive growth.

Organizations report significant improvements in on-time review completion and goal achievement when engagement moves from biannual to weekly. This underscores the value of performance enablement as a daily practice rather than a quarterly chore.

2. AI-Powered Performance Intelligence — Betterworks hosts its own large language models purpose-built for HR use cases, helping organizations avoid the privacy concerns common with third-party AI services.

The platform automatically suggests professional development goals based on an employee’s role, past performance and organizational priorities while summarizing feedback from multiple sources to uncover recurring themes.

AI-driven feedback summaries improve the quality and speed of performance reviews by consolidating input from recognition, conversations, and peer feedback into a single, unbiased view. At one enterprise customer, review completion time dropped by up to 75%, freeing managers to focus on meaningful coaching and development rather than administrative tasks.

3. Next-Generation Platform Architecture — Betterworks has incorporated more than a decade of enterprise learning and feedback into a re-architected platform purpose-built for scalability and agility.

Enterprises such as Intuit have leveraged this flexibility to align goals and development across global teams, ensuring transparency and fairness through continuous calibration and shared visibility.

The modular architecture allows organizations to phase their implementation, building adoption gradually rather than forcing wholesale change.

Who Needs Performance Management That Actually Drives Performance?

Based on customer success stories and market positioning, Betterworks excels with specific organizational profiles:

High-Growth Technology Companies

• Industry examples: Electric vehicle manufacturers, streaming services, food technology companies.
• Specific need: Managing rapid scaling while maintaining culture and performance standards.
• Key benefits: Real-time goal alignment prevents mission drift. Continuous feedback supports fast-moving teams. Manager coaching tools help technical experts become effective leaders.

Healthcare Systems and Large Hospitals

• Industry examples: Teaching hospitals, multi-site healthcare networks, specialized medical centers.
• Specific need: Managing diverse workforces with extreme manager-to-employee ratios.
• Key benefits: Lightweight processes that don’t burden clinical staff. Mobile access for shift workers. Customizable workflows for different employee populations.

Financial Services Organizations Implementing Pay-for-Performance

• Industry examples: Regional banks, insurance companies, investment firms.
• Specific need: Connecting individual performance to compensation decisions with clear audit trails.
• Key benefits: Detailed performance data supports fair compensation decisions. Cascading goals ensure alignment from the C-suite to individual contributors. Compliance features satisfy regulatory requirements.

Transformation-Driven Enterprises

• Industry examples: Traditional retailers adapting to digital, entertainment companies pivoting business models.
• Specific need: Driving cultural change and new behaviors across established workforces.
• Key benefits: Transparency features create urgency around transformation goals. Frequent check-ins surface resistance early. Recognition tools reinforce desired behaviors.

Multi-National Corporations Seeking Agility

• Industry examples: Global manufacturing, international hospitality chains, worldwide logistics companies.
• Specific need: Standardizing performance practices while allowing regional flexibility.
• Key benefits: Multi-language AI support, configurable review cycles by region, and centralized reporting with local customization options.

The Analyst Perspective: Bridging the Talent-Performance Divide

Betterworks occupies an interesting position in the evolving performance management market. Its transformation from OKR specialist to comprehensive performance platform mirrors a broader market shift: Organizations no longer want disconnected point solutions for every HR process, but they also resist the rigidity of traditional HCM suites.

Enterprise customer examples — including Colgate-Palmolive, University of Phoenix, and LivePerson — highlight Betterworks’ strength in complex environments where simple solutions fail. These organizations can’t afford to experiment with unproven technology; they need platforms that scale reliably while remaining flexible enough to support diverse workforce needs.

Three strategic observations stand out:

• Betterworks’ focus on measurable business outcomes rather than HR process efficiency positions it well as budgets tighten. When CMO John Schneider described how they help HR leaders build business cases for change, he addressed a challenge we see repeatedly in our advisory work: HR technology must demonstrate value beyond administrative savings. For organizations seeking to build these business cases, our Smartchoice® Preferred Provider Program connects them with validated solutions that have proven ROI.
• The AI infrastructure investment gives Betterworks an advantage over competitors reliant on third-party models. As organizations mature in AI governance — a topic we’re covering extensively in our AI research — having control over model training and data handling becomes a critical differentiator.
• Betterworks’ deliberate move toward the enterprise market positions them in less crowded territory. While Lattice and Culture Amp battle for the mid-market, Betterworks can focus on organizations where their enterprise capabilities provide clear differentiation.

Looking forward, Betterworks faces both opportunities and challenges. Their upcoming release, focusing on succession planning and skills development, addresses critical enterprise needs.

The key question is whether Betterworks can effectively communicate value in business terms that resonate with both HR leaders and the C-suite. As one executive noted during our conversation, the industry remains “too jargony,” with everyone saying similar things in slightly different ways. This communication challenge is something we help both solution providers and enterprises navigate through our strategic marketing services and certification programs.

Organizations evaluating performance management platforms should consider Betterworks when their needs extend beyond basic reviews and feedback. The platform particularly shines when performance management must drive specific business outcomes — whether that’s reducing nursing turnover, enabling rapid scaling or supporting fundamental business transformation. While implementation requires commitment to change management, the potential returns in engagement, retention and performance make it a compelling option for enterprises ready to move beyond the annual review paradigm.

As the performance management market continues to evolve, Betterworks has positioned itself at the intersection of enterprise scale and modern engagement. Their opportunity lies in helping organizations realize that performance management is a business strategy. When executed well, it delivers measurable results every single week, not just once a year.

For more insights on performance management technology and to see how your organization’s practices compare to industry benchmarks, explore our Enterprise Membership options or contact us about participating in our Excellence Awards programs.

The post Why Betterworks Is Thriving in the Performance Management Revolution appeared first on Brandon Hall Group.

I recently had the opportunity to host an engaging webinar with Eightfold AI, exploring how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing HR from reactive talent management to proactive workforce advantage. The response from attendees was phenomenal, with many requesting deeper insights into AI implementation strategies. Today, I’m excited to share key takeaways from our discussion and introduce Brandon Hall Group’s groundbreaking AI Progression Model for Empowering HR Excellence.

Why We Partnered with Eightfold

We chose to collaborate with Eightfold for this webinar because of their proven track record in delivering measurable business impact through their AI-powered talent intelligence platform. Their unique approach combines deep learning AI with a global dataset of over 1.5 billion profiles, providing unprecedented insights into skills, potential, and career trajectories that are transforming how organizations approach talent management.

The AI Transformation Imperative

During the webinar, we identified six critical challenges organizations face:

1. Data Overload and Processing Crisis — Organizations are drowning in talent data but lack the tools to process it effectively.
2. Accelerating Skills Transformation — The half-life of skills is shrinking as technology reshapes job requirements.
3. Workforce Expectations Revolution — Employees demand meaningful growth and personalized experiences.
4. Global Talent Competition — Remote work has created a truly global talent marketplace.
5. Economic Pressure & Productivity Demands — Doing more with less is the new normal.
6. Inclusion & Equity Imperatives — Creating genuine opportunities for diverse talent to thrive.

These aren’t just HR challenges — they’re business challenges that directly impact organizational competitiveness.

Want to see how leading organizations are addressing these challenges? Watch our recorded 60-minute webinar for live demonstrations of AI solutions in action and exclusive insights from industry leaders.

Introducing the AI Progression Model for Empowering HR Excellence

Based on input from 600 HR and business professionals worldwide, Brandon Hall Group has developed a comprehensive five-phase model that outlines the journey from reactive HR administration to AI-powered HR excellence:

Understanding the Five Phases:

Phase 1: Reactive/Ad Hoc (21% of organizations)

• HR focuses on essential administration.
• Manual processes dominate.
• Organizations explore and experiment with basic AI tools.
• No formal AI governance exists.

Phase 2: Standardized (25% of organizations)

• Consistent policies and procedures established.
• Basic HR systems are partially automated.
• AI pilots move to small-scale adoption.
• Initial AI governance structure emerges.

Phase 3: Defined/Strategic (25% of organizations)

• HR policies align with business goals.
• AI tools are integrated into daily operations.
• Comprehensive AI governance framework established.
• Data-driven decision-making becomes standard.

Phase 4: Managed/Transformational (13% of organizations)

• HR operates as a proactive strategic partner.
• AI is widely adopted across HR functions.
• Mature AI governance with automated monitoring.
• Advanced analytics drive business transformation.

Phase 5: Optimized HR Excellence (16% of organizations)

• Continuous innovation defines HR operations.
• Advanced AI embedded in organizational strategy.
• Autonomous AI governance with self-correcting systems.
• HR drives competitive advantage through AI.

Real-World AI Applications Across the Maturity Spectrum

The webinar showcased how organizations at different maturity levels are leveraging AI:

Talent Acquisition Evolution

• Phase 1: Testing AI resume parsing and chatbots
• Phase 2: ML screening pilots with automated first-pass review
• Phase 3: AI-powered ranking with natural language processing
• Phase 4: End-to-end AI screening with agentic workflow management
• Phase 5: Zero-touch selection with fully autonomous screening

Performance Management Transformation

• Phase 1: Exploring AI performance tools
• Phase 2: Online reviews with ML performance prediction pilots
• Phase 3: Continuous feedback with AI insights and GenAI feedback generation
• Phase 4: AI-managed systems with agentic check-ins and coaching
• Phase 5: Self-optimizing systems with real-time performance optimization

Learning & Development Innovation

• Phase 1: Testing LMS platforms and AI writing assistants
• Phase 2: Templates with GenAI content pilots and automated enrollment
• Phase 3: Multi-modal delivery with adaptive learning
• Phase 4: Autonomous administration with AI content factory
• Phase 5: Ambient learning with invisible, point-of-need content delivery

The Business Impact: Results That Matter

During our discussion, Jaclyn Zhuang, VP of Product at Eightfold AI, shared compelling case studies demonstrating the transformative power of their platform:

• Bayer: Achieved a 90% decrease in candidate screening time while scaling their talent marketplace from 16,000 to 100,000 employees in just 8 months
• Amdocs: Increased internally filled positions by 40%, becoming a truly skills-driven organization
• Eaton: Experienced 4x growth in their talent network and 30-40% increase in candidate velocity

These transformative results are powered by Eightfold’s comprehensive talent intelligence platform, which uniquely combines deep worker intelligence (understanding people’s skills, potential, and trajectories) with work intelligence (insights on how work actually gets done across the business). As Jaclyn explained in the webinar, “This dual intelligence approach enables organizations to make better decisions about talent, teams, and transformation at a scale and speed that wasn’t possible before.”

 The Skills-Based Revolution

One of the most significant insights from our research is that skills are 5x more predictive of job performance than education or job history. This finding is driving a fundamental shift in how organizations approach talent:

• Moving from rigid job descriptions to dynamic skill portfolios
• Shifting from degree requirements to capability validation
• Focusing on potential and adaptability rather than just past experience

See Eightfold’s skills intelligence in action! Access the full webinar recording to watch live demonstrations of how AI identifies hidden skills and matches talent to opportunities.

Your Implementation Blueprint

For organizations ready to begin their AI transformation journey, we outlined a practical starting framework:

1. Assess your skills data readiness — Understanding your current state is crucial.
2. Pick one pilot area — Don’t try to boil the ocean.
3. Build cross-functional alignment — IT and HR partnership is critical.
4. Define success metrics — Be specific about desired outcomes.
5. Start with what you have — Perfect is the enemy of good.

Looking Ahead: The Future of HR is AI-Enabled

The integration of AI into HR isn’t just about efficiency — it’s about creating a fundamental competitive advantage through enhanced decision-making, improved employee experiences, and the ability to adapt quickly to changing market conditions. Companies that embrace this transformation today will define the workplace of tomorrow.

Don’t Miss the Complete Discussion

Ready to accelerate your AI transformation journey? Watch our comprehensive webinar recording to:

• See live demonstrations of Eightfold’s AI-powered solutions
• Get detailed implementation strategies from our expert panel
• Learn how to overcome common barriers to AI adoption
• Discover specific use cases for your organization
• Access exclusive insights not covered in this blog

The shift from reactive talent management to proactive workforce advantage is happening now. The question isn’t whether to adopt AI in HR, but how quickly you can move through the maturity phases to gain a competitive advantage. Where is your organization on the AI progression journey?

The post From Talent Management to Workforce Advantage:</br> Key Insights from Our AI Transformation Webinar appeared first on Brandon Hall Group.