For decades, HR leaders have pursued the holy grail: meaningfully connecting people data with business outcomes. Despite the clear value, technical challenges have persistently blocked this integration — disparate systems, resource constraints, specialized data skills and integration complexity have kept this promise tantalizingly out of reach for most organizations.
Visier is finally changing this equation.
At their March 2025 Analyst Briefing, Visier unveiled a strategic shift that delivers on this long-standing promise: expanding beyond traditional people analytics to a comprehensive workforce intelligence platform. By leveraging AI and deep analytics, Visier removed virtually all the technical barriers that have historically prevented HR data from integrating with the rest of the business.
Beyond Tracking Metrics to Driving Decisions
Visier’s platform now unifies disparate systems to answer questions leaders have struggled to address:
- Which employee factors most directly impact business results?
- How do training investments translate to productivity gains?
- Where are the hidden productivity bottlenecks across departments?
The core innovation lies in connecting employee contributions directly to business outcomes. Instead of viewing workforce data in isolation, Visier helps organizations understand how people factors impact critical metrics like patient care quality, sales efficiency and financial performance.
Real-World Impact
The briefing highlighted several compelling customer examples:
- Providence Health linked labor investments directly to patient outcomes and financial metrics.
- A luxury retailer identified traits of top-performing stores and replicated them across the business.
- Sunstate improved sales performance by identifying productivity bottlenecks and comparing rep efficiency.
These organizations moved beyond tracking simple workforce metrics to making strategic decisions based on clear connections between people data and business results.
Platform Innovations Driving Productivity
Visier showcased several key innovations powering its expanded mission:
AI-Powered Insights in the Flow of Work
In addition to Vee Agent (their AI assistant) Visier now features AI-powered capabilities that help customers act on insights rather than merely observe trends:
- Vee Boards: AI-generated insights with citations and drill-down capability for transparency
- Microsoft Copilot integration: Enables natural language questions, visualizations, and statistical analyses inside Office applications
The user experience demonstrated at the briefing was particularly compelling for me. In one example, an analyst working in Microsoft Word was able to ask a question about overtime trends, run sophisticated correlation analyses with resignation rates, generate visualized data relationships, and insert the resulting graph directly into their document — all in minutes, without leaving their workflow.
The Future is Work/People Data Integration
New connectors bring critical work system data (Salesforce, Jira, ServiceNow) into the platform, connecting this information with people metrics to show the complete productivity picture.
Strategic Partnerships
In addition to making big strides in their tech, Visier also announced partnerships with:
- Deloitte, Ember and Lace for workforce planning capabilities
- Who will bring the skill-based organization to life? Maybe Visier with their Techwolf and Lightcast partnership.
- Microsoft Azure for marketplace listings and Copilot integration
This deep integration with Microsoft’s ecosystem positions Visier as a powerful augmentation for enterprise clients where Microsoft 365 remains the dominant productivity platform. The partnership makes sophisticated analytics accessible directly within familiar tools that business leaders already use daily.
A Skills-based Transformation
Visier’s strategic investments in skills technology and partnerships with Techwolf and Lightcast position it uniquely at the center of the skills-based transformation many organizations are pursuing.
By connecting individual-level skills data from Techwolf with job/position level skills data from Lightcast, Visier creates a comprehensive skills intelligence ecosystem that addresses the full spectrum of skills-based workforce challenges:
- Skills visibility: Organizations gain unprecedented clarity into their actual skills inventory across the workforce
- Skills gaps analysis: Leaders can identify critical capability gaps for strategic initiatives
- Future workforce planning: Modeling how skills requirements will evolve with organizational strategy
- Internal mobility optimization: Matching employee skills to opportunities based on business needs
- Learning investment ROI: Tracking how skills development translates to productivity gains
What makes Visier’s approach particularly powerful is how it bridges the historical divide between academic skills frameworks and practical business applications. The integration of skills data with performance, productivity, and business outcome metrics creates a closed-loop system that transforms theoretical skills modeling into practical workforce decisions.
As skills-based approaches replace traditional job-based talent management, Visier’s platform provides the essential connective tissue between HR’s skills taxonomy work and operational decision-making across the organization.
What This Means for Enterprise Leaders
This shift represents the delivery of a long-promised capability: meaningful integration of people data with business operations. By eliminating the technical hurdles and resource constraints that have historically limited HR’s strategic impact, Visier enables a true partnership between HR and operations.
This breakthrough is particularly valuable for:
- HR leaders looking to move beyond administrative functions to driving business strategy through workforce insights
- Line-of-business leaders seeking to understand people factors affecting department performance
- Finance teams needing to quantify the ROI of workforce investments
The platform’s ability to make sophisticated analytics accessible to non-technical users—directly in the tools they already use—removes the friction that has historically prevented widespread adoption of people analytics.
Looking Ahead
Visier continues to enhance its platform with capabilities designed to meet evolving workforce challenges. Their FY26 product roadmap emphasizes:
- Advanced AI agents for deeper insights
- Expanded work system integrations
- Democratized data access for non-technical users
- Support for skills-based workforce models
For organizations navigating workforce transformation in an AI-driven world, these capabilities offer crucial visibility into the complex relationship between people factors and business performance.
As companies increasingly shift toward skills-based organizational models in response to AI adoption and rapidly evolving job requirements, Visier’s investments in skills intelligence could prove particularly prescient. Their ability to connect skills data with both employee metrics and business outcomes addresses a critical gap in most skills transformation initiatives: translating skills frameworks into practical business decisions.
The message is clear: Understanding workforce productivity requires connecting people data with work output. Visier’s platform evolution reflects this fundamental shift in how organizations must approach workforce analytics to remain competitive.
