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.
