Every leadership team is wrestling with the same questions right now. How will AI impact our organization, and what type of workforce will we need in the future?
These aren’t easy questions to answer. Only 19% of companies are effective at planning for their future workforce, according to a July 2026 survey by Gartner. These organizations understand how work will change, anticipate the impact of artificial intelligence, and act to realign the workforce with strategy.
Without this type of planning, organizations create workforce gaps that threaten strategy execution. According to two earlier Gartner surveys from May 2025, 40% of boards cite skill shortages as a top threat to shareholder value, and only 39% of CEOs say they have the talent the company needs to deliver financial performance.
The problem isn’t a lack of workforce data or forecasting tools. It’s that most organizations start their workforce planning in the wrong place.
The case against bottom-up planning
Most workforce planning starts bottom-up from the existing workforce. Leaders consider the roles, skills, and tasks that exist today, then ask how AI could reshape them. The underlying assumption is that if AI can automate or improve something, it eventually will.
AI is proving too costly to deliver on that promise. According to an April 2026 Gartner survey, almost 40% of organizations have exceeded their budget when it comes to AI spending. Supporting AI talent and infrastructure costs are also rising. This means that AI will only become more expensive in the future.
As a result, not every role that can be redesigned because of AI will be, and not every opportunity that AI creates will warrant investment. When leaders plan changes based on the current workforce, they’re several steps downstream from what matters most to the enterprise. Consequently, many leadership teams leave workforce planning discussions with ambitious goals, only to realize they won’t get funding for the changes they’d like to make.
Plan top-down from the enterprise strategy and follow the funding
Progressive organizations flip this approach. Rather than starting with the workforce, they start with enterprise strategy. They ask the following questions:
- What work is most critical to executing our strategy?
- What are the funded AI investments in those areas?
- How will those investments change the work and workforce capabilities we need?
Once leaders answer those questions, they can discuss the future of roles, skills, and head count. Because they have worked top-down from the strategy and focused on the funded AI investments, they can feel much more confident in their outputs. This might seem like a subtle shift, but it fundamentally changes the planning process.
For example, if an organization’s strategy depends on negotiating better deals with suppliers or improving on-shelf product availability, then leaders should plan their workforce to enable those outcomes. Instead of planning everywhere, leaders should focus on the areas where the business is committing resources and expecting change.
Understand the work before you plan the workforce
Another common mistake is making decisions about the workforce without fully understanding the demands of the work.
Part of the issue is that most organizations don’t have language to even describe work. They have roles, skills, and tasks, which don’t truly represent work itself and are far too granular to plan for. As AI advances, roles are becoming less stable and representative of work. As a result, organizations need a way to analyze the work more directly.
Progressive organizations are breaking work down into measurable “work components.” They’re estimating future demand for that work based on the strategy, and they understand that work will be shared out among humans and AI.
For example, a procurement team might divide its work into supplier analysis, sourcing and negotiation strategy, negotiation and supplier engagement, and decision-making. If they make a significant AI investment in this group, AI can handle much of the analysis and strategy development, which frees employees to focus on supplier engagement, negotiations, and decisions. Organizations can then estimate how much work AI performs versus humans across each activity.
Without this level of analysis, organizations are likely to overhire, mishire, and overfire. In fact, Gartner predicts that 30% of employees displaced by AI will eventually be rehired, often at a higher cost. The underlying issue isn’t the technology itself, but a failure to assess future work demand accurately. In other words, it’s a workforce planning problem, not a technology problem.
For large organizations, even a modest workforce reduction can be costly if those employees later need to be rehired. For a 60,000-person organization, reducing headcount by just 2% and then rehiring can result in nearly $100 million in avoidable costs. The lesson isn’t to avoid AI. It’s to first understand how work will change and how work will be distributed among humans and AI before making workforce decisions.
Workforce planning as a competitive advantage
Workforce planning is more than an HR process. It’s a source of competitive advantage. Our research found that organizations with effective workforce planning are 1.4 times more likely to exceed their revenue goals and 1.5 times more likely to exceed their cost goals. Ultimately, effective workforce planning ensures the organization has the capabilities and capacity required to execute its strategy.
But that advantage won’t come from starting with today’s workforce. It will come from understanding the work that you need to deliver tomorrow’s strategy, how that work is evolving, and what workforce you’ll need as a result.
In other words, stop planning for the workforce you have today and start planning for the workforce your strategy requires.
