Cornerstone has published new research suggesting organizations are better positioned to prepare their workforces for technological change when their Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs) and Chief Information Officers (CIOs) share responsibility for workforce readiness.
The study surveyed 2,000 HR leaders, IT leaders, and employees across the US, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, finding that 94% of HR and IT leaders believe a more adaptive, shared approach to workforce planning is now essential as organizations respond to rapid technological change.
The findings come as businesses face continued disruption from AI adoption, new digital tools, and changing skills requirements. While the research points to growing agreement between HR and IT on the need for closer coordination, it also suggests many organizations have yet to establish the structures and shared data needed to turn that agreement into action.
The Growing Workforce Planning Gap
The research found a significant gap between the importance leaders place on shared workforce planning and how organizations currently make decisions. Just 35% of decision-makers said AI decisions are made jointly by HR and IT, while 48% said the two functions work toward shared goals.
Organizations with shared ownership between the CHRO and CIO were found to act on workforce changes 13% faster. They were also 67% more likely to say they felt equipped to make decisions at the pace required by AI-driven change.
AI tools and AI-driven ways of working were identified as the biggest source of organizational change by 45% of leaders, followed by other digital tools at 44%, new skills requirements at 41%, and increased productivity expectations at 35%. With 65% of leaders reporting a high level of organizational change over the past year, workforce planning is becoming increasingly difficult to separate from technology planning.
The study found that these pressures are already creating operational problems. Half of leaders said skills gaps were being left unaddressed for too long, while 44% reported delays in decisions around hiring, redeployment, and restructuring. A further 41% said productivity targets were being missed.
The operational problems leaders identified are also reflected in employees’ experience of change. Some 65% of employees said their day-to-day responsibilities had changed meaningfully during the past year, with 58% saying they were learning new skills to support their current role. Yet only 39% reported receiving support from their employer to do so.
As a result, only 17% said they felt completely prepared for how their role would evolve over the next 12 to 24 months. Meanwhile, 60% described their employer’s approach to skills development as reactive, with support arriving during or after change rather than beforehand. However, 89% said more support from their employer would help them keep up with those changes.
Why Workforce Planning Needs to Change
The findings suggest that one of the biggest obstacles is not necessarily a lack of data, but a lack of coordination around it. Some 54% of respondents identified poor alignment between IT and HR as a major barrier to acting on workforce data.
That disconnect matters because technological change and workforce change are increasingly happening at the same time. IT may understand which technologies an organization is introducing, while HR is responsible for understanding how roles, skills, and employee requirements will change. When those decisions are made separately, organizations risk introducing new technology without giving employees enough time or support to adapt.
The research highlighted several consequences of this disconnect, including limited visibility into future skills requirements, difficulties predicting which roles will change, slow reskilling processes, and a lack of joint planning between AI strategies and workforce development. Better coordination between CHROs and CIOs could allow organizations to identify these implications earlier and build workforce preparation into technology decisions rather than treating it as a response to change.
That means bringing HR and IT into workforce decisions earlier. If a company is assessing an AI deployment, workforce implications should be considered alongside technical requirements rather than after the technology decision has already been made. This could give HR and IT a clearer view of which roles will be affected, which skills employees will need, and where additional support may be required.
The research found that companies using AI for workforce planning were more than twice as likely to say they had the processes, data, and tools required to make workforce decisions quickly, at 63% compared with 30% among those that did not. This suggests that better coordination is not simply about improving communication between departments. It can give organizations the information and processes needed to anticipate workforce changes and respond to them more effectively.
Leaders should also treat workforce planning as an ongoing process rather than a periodic exercise. With 69% expecting the high pace of organizational change to continue, organizations may struggle if they rely on annual reviews to anticipate skills and role requirements. Continually assessing changes in technology, roles, and employee capabilities could allow businesses to identify gaps earlier and support employees before those gaps become operational problems.
Finally, CHROs and CIOs need shared accountability rather than simply sharing information. The research indicates that organizations where HR and IT work from shared data and in close coordination are nearly three times more likely to report that employees are better prepared for change than they were a year earlier. That suggests the value of collaboration is ultimately measured not just by how quickly an organization can respond to technological change, but by how well it can prepare its workforce for it.
Turning Workforce Readiness Into a Continuous Process
Cornerstone’s research points to a widening gap between the speed at which technology is changing and the speed at which many organizations can prepare their workforces. While most leaders recognize the need for a more coordinated approach, relatively few currently make AI decisions jointly across HR and IT.
Closing that gap will require more than better communication between departments. Organizations need shared workforce data, clearer ownership of workforce readiness, and processes that connect technology investment with skills planning, reskilling, and redeployment. Crucially, those processes need to bring HR and IT together early enough to anticipate how technological change will affect employees, rather than waiting until those effects are already being felt.
The employee data makes the urgency clearer. If only a small minority of workers feel fully prepared for how their roles will evolve, businesses risk creating a workforce that is continually reacting to technological change rather than being prepared for it.
As AI continues to reshape roles and skills, the organizations best positioned to keep pace will be those where HR and IT work together to prepare employees for change, rather than asking workers to adapt to it after the fact.
