Enterprise leaders are navigating a period of profound and accelerating change. Hybrid and remote work models are now permanent. Digital transformation has become continuous. Regulatory scrutiny is rising. At the same time, leadership teams are under pressure to scale generative and agentic AI responsibly—ensuring compliance, governance, and measurable value—while still moving fast enough to stay competitive.

The challenge is not ambition.

It’s clarity.

According to the Everest Group Survey 2025, 86% of enterprises admit they are not prepared to manage the risks required to achieve higher-order rewards from AI. Compounding this challenge are rising labor costs and growing pressure to align workforce capacity and productivity with shifting business priorities.

In this environment, leaders are being asked to make high-stakes decisions about people, technology, and AI—often without the data needed to do so confidently.

The Workforce Visibility Gap

For most enterprises, the workforce represents the single largest operating expense. Yet it remains one of the least understood.

Organizations have no shortage of data, but they face persistent blind spots when it comes to trustworthy, objective insight into how work actually gets done. As a result, leaders are forced to rely on assumptions, lagging indicators, or anecdotal input when making critical decisions about resourcing, skills, hiring, retention, and technology investments.

Common blind spots include:

• AI is reshaping work faster than planning models can keep up. Tasks are automated, workflows accelerate, and teams create new capacity—but leaders struggle to see where capacity is being created and how to redeploy it intelligently.
• Work is distributed across offices, remote locations, and hybrid environments. Leaders lack a consistent view of efficiency, workload balance, and risk—making it difficult to identify burnout, underutilization, or exposure tied to uneven work patterns.
• Technology and software spend rivals labor costs. Enterprises often cannot determine whether tools are being used effectively, safely, and compliantly—or whether shadow AI and unauthorized applications are introducing security and data-leak risks.

Without visibility into these dynamics, workforce decisions become reactive rather than strategic.

Why Traditional People Analytics Fall Short

Most human capital platforms and people analytics approaches focus on outcomes—financial results, engagement scores, or performance ratings—rather than the drivers of productivity, capacity, and risk.

As a result, leaders face four systemic challenges:

• Lack of transparency: Different functions operate from different data baselines, creating disputes over whose numbers are correct.
• Limited accountability: Activity, cost, engagement, and outcomes are not clearly connected, making ownership and progress difficult to measure.
• Slow decision-making: Functional and data silos delay insight and erode confidence.
• Unclear impact: Day-to-day actions are disconnected from enterprise goals, making it hard to ensure interventions deliver measurable value.

What’s missing is a continuous, fact-based understanding of how work happens across the enterprise.

What Workforce Intelligence Delivers

Workforce intelligence provides a new layer of visibility—one that translates digital work signals into actionable insight.

With a continuous, objective view of how work gets done, leaders can:

• Improve utilization and capacity planning
• Rebalance workloads before attrition and burnout risks escalate
• Strengthen employee well-being
• Maximize returns on digital and AI investments

Most importantly, workforce intelligence enables leaders to move from guesswork to evidence-based decision-making.

Workforce Intelligence: Proof of Value

The impact is already measurable:

• A global bank deployed Sapience across two teams of 1,500 employees to improve productivity and capacity management. Within three months, productivity increased by 5%, underutilized software licenses were eliminated, and insights revealed teams working excessive hours—prompting policy changes to improve work-life balance and employee experience.
• A global insurance company lacked visibility into enterprise work patterns. Sapience revealed significant underutilized hours and excessive meeting time, with employees averaging only four productive hours per day. Armed with this insight, leaders implemented changes that increased productivity by 5 hours per employee, per day.

What the Analysts Say

“Enterprises are navigating profound change,” said Sharath Hari, Vice President, Everest Group. “Hybrid work, digitalization, and rising regulatory demands have redefined how organizations operate. Workforce intelligence provides the visibility leaders need—and platforms like SapienceIQ are delivering outcomes far beyond cost savings, from workload optimization and attrition prevention to stronger employee well-being and measurable ROI on digital and AI investments.”

Industry research reinforces this view:

• Everest Group notes that leaders struggle not with data availability, but with knowing what to prioritize and how to structure insight to generate value.
• S&P Global Market Intelligence reports that improving the use of employee data is the top HR strategic priority, while IT leaders increasingly view workforce intelligence as central to identifying operational improvements.

What Enterprise Leaders Should Expect from Workforce Intelligence

For CFOs, CIOs, CHROs, COOs, and CPOs, a modern workforce intelligence platform should deliver:

• AI-driven transformation: Visibility into AI adoption, safe-use practices, AI-generated capacity, and measurable Return on AI (RoAI).
• Objective performance benchmarks: Clear, role- and geography-based baselines that replace assumptions with data.
• Process flow and context-switching analytics: Insight into how digital workflows really operate—revealing bottlenecks, redundancy, and cognitive overload.
• Privacy by design: Strong safeguards that protect employee trust by preventing capture of PII, keystrokes, screenshots, private URLs, or video.

How Sapience Delivers Workforce Intelligence

Sapience Workforce Intelligence translates digital work signals into actionable insight—helping enterprises align workforce resources, optimize labor spend, improve performance management at scale, and quantify AI-driven efficiencies.

Sapience delivers unparalleled visibility into how work gets done across all workforce types—direct, contingent, onsite, remote, and hybrid—while playing a critical role in preparing organizations for AI-driven transformation by enabling:

• Innovation: Freeing capacity for product development and strategic initiatives
• Customer experience: Redirecting talent to high-value client engagement
• Market expansion: Accelerating revenue growth and time-to-market
• Operational agility: Shifting labor away from low-value tasks toward growth priorities

You don’t lose control — or sacrifice privacy.

You gain clarity.

With accurate data transformed into workforce intelligence, leaders can finally align people, technology, and AI with measurable business outcomes.