Overview

With a market cap of nearly 65 billion USD, Workday’s customer base spans the majority of Fortune 1000 companies worldwide and extends well beyond.

And last week, they gathered that base in San Francisco to look back on the past year, but especially, to look forward.

We were there with 23 energetic wolves, representing TechWolf as an integration partner of Workday, as a vendor helping Workday become skills-based, and as a venture partner after Workday’s strategic investment last year.

We can safely say it was one of the most fascinating conferences yet. Never have we had so much interest and traction at our booth, sessions, product demo’s, etc. 

Our rooftop event at Shelby’s was likely the culmination of it all, with 100 of the most forward-thinking HR leaders in the world, including brands like Bank of America, Red Hat, McKesson, J&J, Genesys, Adobe, and AT&T having a great time!

As a result, we talked to many HR leaders at said F1000 enterprises and are keen to share back in this blogpost our TOP 5 takeaways about the state of HR, workforce intelligence, and … buzzword drumroll… AI.‍

1. The most annoying problem in HR is still: DATA

The promise of skills-based HR, agents, the talent optimization modules, … is an empty promise without the right data in the background. 

All of the organizations coming to our booth showed a mix of excitement for the numerous use cases, and true frustration because of biased, incomplete data that’s intensive to maintain.

Whether it's:

• Data on skills your employees have
• Data on tasks your workforce is performing
• Data on how AI is impacting work in large enterprises
• Or even simple job description data

It can take them years; they’ve lost trust over it with the business, and it has even made some of the most ambitious executives lose faith.

A clearer validation of our focus and Workday partnership, we couldn’t get. The data problem isn’t to be solved by one or multiple platforms; it’s a problem for the interfaceless, platform-agnostic vendors. And we’re proud to be one.

In a matter of weeks, TechWolf's AI can get you & your employees data on the skills they have, the skills they need & the tasks they perform.

• No long-winded and inaccurate employee surveys
• Continuously up-to-date
• And especially, integrated in the platforms you’re already using instead of adding a new one.
  

2. For the first time, HR problems = business problems

Our most successful customers don’t start with skills. 

They start with a business case.

At the same time, it’s been impossible for HR to pitch “the skills-based organization” to the business without losing their interest - fast. In fact, organizations that don’t even mention the word ‘skills’ in meetings with the CTO/CIO/CFO office are more likely to get buy-in.

When we would ask HR leaders two years ago why they wanted to become skills-informed, the top three answers we would get were:

• Internal mobility
• Up-and re-skilling
• Strategic workforce planning

Unfortunately, that’s not good enough. We have learned to repeat that same question until we find a challenge that’s big enough to be meaningful but small enough to be manageable. But especially, until it’s a challenge that shows we’re solving a true business problem.

Today, more than ever, there’s a new reply to the question: 

“We need to estimate and act on the impact of AI on our workforce.”

It’s not just today’s top HR challenge; it’s also, for the first time, the #1 challenge on every CEO’s or business leader’s agenda. And it’s highly measurable if you’re tracking the right data.

Last week, the Financial Times announced the launch of our TechWolf Workforce Intelligence Index, which can be the starting point for answering this burning question.

The Index provides a practical way to understand what is actually happening inside the business. It reveals the work being performed, the skills required to perform it, and how both are evolving in the age of AI.

Built on two billion public job postings of the 1500 largest organizations in the world, the Index offers leaders the clarity to make timely and confident decisions about upskilling, reskilling, and redeployment.

We believe AI workforce transformation is the opportunity for HR to reintroduce ‘the skills-based organization’ to the business, but this time in a language they understand.

"This, I can sell to the business. This has real ROI!" 
— SVP Talent at a Global Digital Business Services Company after seeing our index at Rising

3. Tasks enter the stage, but skills steal the show

Talking about analyzing work, there’s been a lot of noise about task intelligence as a complementary data asset to skills intelligence.

However, at Workday Rising SF, it seemed skills intelligence stole the show once again with a plethora of keynotes by, among others, Lisa Brockman at Genesys, Marquita Williams & Mary Beth Thornton of Advent Health, and Jason Sheffer at Dow.

It might signal that even though tasks make skills data more grounded in actual work, skills data is still a starting point for many organizations, with task intelligence as the second iteration of granularity. 

That being said, when talking about a meaningful link between HR and business problems, it’s essential to get a view of the actual work happening not only the potential of execution.

Marc Ramos, leading learning strategy & innovation at SerivceNow, couldn’t have said it better on the TechWolf podcast:

“Would you rather have a skill that is successfully obtained but never applied or a task that is successfully executed? … At the end of the day, the business wants to see performance. The business wants to see increased productivity. And I think that with AI … what they’re looking for to do their job is primarily at the task level.”
— Marc Ramos, Global Head, Learning Strategy & Innovation @ServiceNow

4. Jobs, jobs, jobs

That brings us to the third most mentioned word at our booth on Workday Rising: Jobs.

If data is the most annoying issue in HR, then the job architecture, job descriptions, job titles, … are the embodiment of frustration.

More than we can count, we’ve had organizations walk up to our booth mentioning they’d love to become a skills-informed organization, but that they’re being held up by bad data on jobs.

When it comes to the job architecture we notice a vicious circle: it’s often a once & done deal, after which it deteriorates over time, needs another big lift to get back up to speed, then deteriorates again, etc.

And it blocks the skill-based transformation as it’s the backbone needed for skills demand, meaning the skills your workforce needs to be able to perform on the job.

As one of our customers put it:

“In our job architecture, the jobs of 4000 people are summarized in one paragraph. That level of description is just not workable.”
— VP People Analytics at a global software development company

Our response to the HR leaders echoing the above challenges?

TechWolf can help.

Witnessing this blocker first-hand with our customers, we’ve developed an agent in the backend of our products to generate, update, and improve job titles, descriptions, and their hierarchical relationships.

The result is an aligned overview of job requirements with skills attached to them, as we did for our customer Workday in a skills-based hiring use case.

5. HR is facing a “Fredrick Winslow Taylor moment”

Finally, in her keynote at Workday Rising, former IBM CHRO Diane Gherson stated that we stand at a defining crossroads in the history of work. Just as Frederick Winslow Taylor once redefined how factories operated, AI is now reshaping knowledge work.

Entry-level jobs risk becoming shallow governance roles, verifying AI outputs instead of mastering a profession. Left unaddressed, this could hollow out the future talent pipeline and trap workers in dead-end roles.

The counter-design must start with a work ledger: a living view of tasks, proven skills, and AI’s role across them. Without this, organizations can’t see where human judgment is the edge, where agents add value, or where handoffs can disappear. With it, leaders can make the hard choices: optimize for cost, speed, or growth; decide whether to build, import, or rent skills; and mark which roles are off-limits because they are the future carriers of human judgment.

Once the ledger is in place, HR must reapply the socio-technical design discipline:

• Joint optimization of tech and people
• Whole tasks are owned end-to-end by teams
• Meaningful work with agency, identity, and mastery
• Participation by employees in shaping their own work systems

Diane told us to treat the ledger like finance treats cash flow: reviewed weekly, owned collectively by the CHRO, CFO, CIO, and COO, and audited for trust. Done right, AI becomes an engine for growth and capability - not the blueprint for a white-collar assembly line. 

HR has the chance to seize the conductor’s seat: to intentionally design work that preserves mastery, meaning, and career progression, while still harnessing the productivity gains of AI.

The “Fredrick Winslow Taylor moment” isn’t just a challenge; it’s an opportunity. With the right data, insights, and design principles, HR can lead organizations into a future where AI empowers professionals instead of replacing their expertise.

Closing thoughts

Workday Rising SF’25 made one thing clear: the future of work is being written now, and HR leaders are holding the pen. From fixing data to aligning with business strategy, from evolving skills intelligence to rethinking job architectures - and now, intentionally shaping how AI changes work - the responsibility has never been greater.

At TechWolf, we believe HR is ready for this moment. Our mission is to give organizations the clarity and intelligence they need to design work with purpose, not by accident.

Workday Rising SF, you’ve been great.

Next up: UNLEASH in Paris and Workday Rising in Barcelona. 

See you there!