Event Recap: Annapurna & Beamery On Putting Skills At The Heart Of Your People Strategy
As the conversation around workforce transformation accelerates, one thing is clear: future-thinking organizations are putting skills first.
At our recent VIP roundtable – hosted in partnership with Annapurna – we brought together senior People leaders to explore how organizations can take a skills-first approach to workforce strategy, and how AI can support this transformation at every level.
The discussion – led by James Ballard and Magnus Okuonghae of Annapurna – featured insights from Beamery’s Nate West (Account Director) and Chris Illingworth (Solutions Principal), who shared real-world experience helping enterprise organizations move from theory to execution on skills-first strategies.
Key takeaways 🗝️
1. Skills strategy starts with task-level clarity
Many organizations talk about skills, but few start with the right foundation: understanding the work itself. The path to becoming skills-first isn’t about creating exhaustive taxonomies – it’s about identifying the high-impact tasks that drive business outcomes, and then mapping the capabilities needed to execute them.
By starting here, organizations can build practical, dynamic skills frameworks that support both hiring and internal mobility.
The group discussed the role of executive roles: in the hiring process, it is more commonly about your softer skills and your leadership skills than any particular capabilities. How do you lead through change management? What is your emotional intelligence like? How can we define these as capabilities for our talent?
With the right visibility into skills, tasks, work and talent, it’s far easier to make good, future-focused decisions – quickly.
2. Ownership is shared – and cultural
Embedding a skills-first approach requires shared accountability across individuals, managers, and leadership. Dashboards and inventories are only valuable when backed by meaningful conversations and clear pathways for growth.
Organizations need to connect skills insights to career development, mobility, and workforce agility – making the “why” behind skills visible to every employee, and ensuring productivity and retention for the longer term.
AI can help provide insights like: What capabilities and skills are leaving the business in the next 5 years? Where do we need to build, buy and borrow talent? What is the business demanding in order to grow in the way it needs to?
3. To add value, AI needs purpose
AI has a powerful role to play in helping organizations understand their workforce, predict talent needs, and make faster, smarter decisions. But to truly deliver impact, it must be deployed with intent. Leaders should ask: Who owns our AI strategy? How do we ensure it’s aligned with long-term workforce planning?
Used well, AI (or AI-powered tools) can free HR to focus on what matters: guiding the business through transformation, not just administering it.
As noted in the roundtable, “The people who will succeed will be those who embrace the abilities of AI.”
4. Change requires confidence – and care
As automation becomes more embedded, HR teams are uniquely positioned to lead the conversation on how we balance efficiency with innovation.
The goal isn’t to replace people – it’s to reimagine how work gets done. That means managing change with empathy, investing in leadership skills like adaptability and emotional intelligence, and using AI to give time back to the organization – not just to cut costs.
As roundtable attendees commented, sometimes we get blindsided by marketing, individual aims, or even straightforward excitement. We must be looking at questions like: does AI help us predict what we need, or what impact can AI have on specific roles within our business?
Let’s build what’s next – together 🫱🏽🫲🏻
At Beamery, we believe that skills intelligence and AI can give HR teams the visibility and agility they need to build future-ready organizations. By starting with real work, understanding (and facilitating) how skills evolve, and making talent decisions with confidence, companies can not only adapt – but thrive.