Betterworks has launched a comprehensive overhaul of its performance enablement platform, redefining how organizations approach employee development and performance management. The company’s new release, Betterworks NextGen, introduces more than 400 customer-requested features designed to modernize the performance management experience.
At its core, NextGen aims to transform how organizations capture, interpret, and act on performance data by embedding AI capabilities throughout the system instead of treating them as standalone tools.
Doug Dennerline, CEO of Betterworks, framed the release around a critical business question facing modern organizations. “The big question facing every organization today is how to enable people to perform and upskill in ways that fuel the company’s next phase of growth—and how AI can provide the intelligence and scale to make that possible,” Dennerline explained.
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Transforming Performance Signals into Strategic Direction
The distinguishing feature of Betterworks NextGen lies in its approach to AI integration. Rather than positioning AI as a supplementary feature, the platform treats it as essential infrastructure woven throughout the performance management process.
The platform’s strength comes from its ability to convert organizational data into actionable guidance by integrating with existing workflows. Performance-relevant information already flows through daily work such as goal progress, peer feedback, one-on-one conversations, and development activities. Betterworks transforms these signals into insights about alignment, engagement gaps, and growth opportunities.
The platform includes detailed AI governance controls that allow administrators to enable AI features selectively by department, region, or team. This supports phased rollouts and accommodates varying regulatory requirements across geographies. NextGen also supports complex organizational structures, including matrix management, enabling multiple leaders to contribute to goals, feedback, and performance evaluations for a more complete and balanced view of performance.
The new Manager Command Center consolidates previously scattered information such as goals, feedback, recognition, and recommended actions into a unified workspace. By bringing these signals together, managers can identify performance trends faster and provide more timely coaching. The platform also introduces external feedback capabilities, enabling structured input from customers, partners, and other external collaborators without requiring full platform access.
Additionally, Performance Summaries automatically synthesize goals, feedback, and achievements into narrative views that surface key themes, progress trends, and development insights, helping reduce recency bias during review cycles.
Preparing Organizations for an AI-Integrated Future of Work
Betterworks positions NextGen as infrastructure “built to prepare organizations for the future of work and the era of AI.” But what does that mean in practice, and how does the platform address the evolving nature of the workplace?
Multiple workplace trends point to a significant transformation ahead. AI integration is accelerating across job functions, changing how work gets done. Skill requirements are evolving rapidly, with technical capabilities increasingly complemented by distinctly human skills such as complex problem-solving, emotional intelligence, and adaptive thinking. Work arrangements continue to shift toward flexible and hybrid models that require different management approaches.
Organizations are placing greater emphasis on employee well-being as a performance factor. Leadership is also changing, with traditional command-and-control models giving way to coaching-oriented, empowerment-focused approaches.
As performance takes center stage, one critical area of transformation involves performance reviews themselves. According to Audra Stanton, Head of Product at Ninety.io, annual performance reviews are fundamentally broken, but major reform is on the horizon. “Over the next few years, performance reviews will transform from formal, annual events into continuous, software-integrated feedback loops,” Stanton said.
This shift from episodic evaluation to ongoing dialogue aligns directly with Betterworks NextGen’s architecture. The platform’s continuous feedback features and AI-powered synthesis tools enable this evolution. Instead of compressing performance discussions into annual or quarterly reviews, NextGen supports ongoing feedback capture and interpretation. Performance Summaries aggregate this continuous data stream into coherent narratives, while the Manager Command Center highlights patterns and recommends timely interventions. This transforms performance management from a periodic administrative task into an integrated aspect of daily work.
Building Performance Infrastructure for What’s Next
Betterworks NextGen represents a strategic bet on how performance management will evolve as AI becomes ubiquitous in workplace software.
The platform’s modular, AI-native architecture creates a foundation for capabilities that extend beyond today’s feature set, positioning organizations to adopt emerging technologies without replacing core systems.
Through its re-platforming, Betterworks aims to provide data-driven perspectives that enable significant advances in individual, team, and organizational performance, particularly in a workforce composed of both people and AI.
