The Task-Level Advantage: How CHROs Can Lead The Great AI Workforce Redesign
The Great AI Workforce Redesign is underway – and CHROs need to be at the helm. From automation opportunities to shifting skills demand to rising employee expectations, HR leaders face mounting pressure to lead with greater agility and insight. Traditional workforce planning tools based around roles, job families and static org charts no longer offer the clarity or flexibility required to keep pace.
To prepare for the future of work, organizations need a more granular – and dynamic – understanding of how work actually gets done.
That’s where task-level insight comes in.
For the past decade, “skills” have become the core currency of workforce strategy. Skills data has helped organizations identify gaps, power internal mobility, and personalize learning. But without context, even the best skills frameworks can fall short. HR leaders are now asking: Which tasks require which skills? Where are those tasks shifting? And what does that mean for the people doing the work?
By breaking down work into its component tasks, HR teams gain a powerful new layer of intelligence: one that complements and sharpens their skills data.
This task-based approach gives HR teams the visibility they need to lead the Great AI Workforce Redesign: to pinpoint emerging capability needs, identify opportunities for automation or augmentation, and redeploy talent with greater precision. It enables faster, smarter workforce decisions – and transformation – backed by real insight into the nature of the work itself.
Herein lies the task-level advantage.
Why Deconstructing Work Matters
For decades, HR strategies have been built around jobs: defined roles, wrapped in job descriptions, aligned to compensation bands and hiring processes. But role descriptions are fuzzy, high-level constructs that are not well suited to a new era of work.
Take automation, for example. It’s not enough to know that a role is “at risk” from automation – some tasks within that role may be automatable, others not. Similarly, knowing someone is a “Marketing Manager” or “Data Analyst” doesn’t tell you whether they can pivot into a new role without significant reskilling. But if you know what tasks they perform and what skills those tasks require, you can assess risk, potential, and mobility much more effectively.
That’s why leading HR teams are moving beyond job titles and job descriptions to examine work at the task level.
What Task Intelligence Enables
Task intelligence is a foundational capability for organizations reshaping work in the age of AI. It gives HR the tools to redesign the workforce: not around legacy roles, but around the reality of how work is changing.
1. Smarter Automation Decisions
AI and automation technologies are reshaping how work is done – but the impact is rarely uniform across an entire role. AI is unlikely to perform an entire role: but it could tackle low-effort time-consuming work within that role. By using the right data to analyze the specific tasks that make up a job, HR teams can identify which ones are ripe for automation, which should be augmented with AI, and which require human judgment or creativity.
This allows for targeted investment and change management, without over- or underestimating the impact of automation.
2. More Accurate Workforce Planning
When HR understands work at the task level, they gain clearer insight into emerging skills gaps: not just at a team or function level, but across the organization.
For example, they can see that data-related tasks are proliferating in non-technical roles, or that certain regulatory reporting tasks are increasingly consuming time across departments. This helps them model future workforce needs with far greater accuracy.
3. Improved Talent Mobility & Redeployment
The ability to match people to tasks (rather than roles) opens up more nuanced and inclusive approaches to internal mobility. Employees who may not meet all the requirements of a traditional role may still have experience performing 70% of the underlying tasks. That’s a powerful starting point for reskilling, redeployment, or project-based work.
Task-level matching, alongside skills-based approaches, expands the talent pool, increases agility, and reduces time-to-fill.
4. More Effective Upskilling & Learning
When organizations understand which tasks are growing in demand or becoming more complex, they can target learning investments to build the exact capabilities required.
Employees benefit too: they get clearer pathways to progression and more personalized development plans tied to real work.
The Role Of AI In Task Intelligence
Historically, it’s been difficult, if not impossible, for HR teams to get reliable task-level data at scale. Job descriptions often omit key responsibilities or use vague language. Task tracking within organizations is inconsistent. And managers may lack visibility into how work is actually distributed across teams.
This is where AI can play a critical role.
Modern workforce intelligence platforms can now infer task data from multiple sources – job descriptions, performance systems, resumes, and more.
AI models can break down roles into a set of granular tasks, map those tasks to required skills, and analyze how they are distributed across the organization. They can also detect changes over time, highlighting emerging trends or risks.
For HR, this means task intelligence is no longer theoretical. It’s a practical, indispensable tool for redesigning work at scale – and for making the AI era a strategic advantage.
From Roles To Capabilities: A New HR Operating Model
Task-level insight is more than a data upgrade: it’s the foundation for a new way of working in HR. One where roles become more fluid, career paths more dynamic, and strategy more responsive.
This shift also supports a broader move away from role-based thinking toward a capabilities-based approach to workforce planning. Instead of asking “Do we have enough engineers?”, organizations can ask “Do we have enough people who can carry out these specific tasks (code reviews, infrastructure planning, data governance, etc.)? And if not, can we automate some, buy the talent, or build it internally?”
That level of granularity empowers HR to make decisions that are both faster and more flexible.
Making It Happen: What HR Teams Need
Moving from jobs to tasks doesn’t mean reinventing everything overnight. But it does require a new foundation of insight: one that builds on what HR already has in place and strengthens the value of skills data.
1. A Task Taxonomy
A consistent, structured way of categorizing work. This could be homegrown or adopted from industry standards, but it must be flexible enough to evolve as work changes.
2. Skills Intelligence
Skills remain a critical unit of value in the modern workforce. They’re what connects people to opportunities, defines career pathways, and powers everything from recruitment to learning.
Task-level intelligence doesn’t replace skills – it gives them greater clarity and context. When organizations can see which tasks require which skills, they’re better equipped to assess proficiency, spot adjacency, and support more targeted development. In this way, task data makes skills data more actionable.
3. Dynamic Workforce Data
Static org charts won’t cut it. Organizations need real-time visibility into what tasks employees are performing, and where demand is shifting. This data can come from HRIS systems, project tools, or even learning platforms.
4. AI-Powered Insights
Manual task analysis doesn’t scale. The right technology can analyze job descriptions, resumes, and data from across all HR tools to infer the tasks being performed and the associated skills – as well as the frequency of tasks, and effort involved – revealing patterns that would otherwise be hidden.
But insight alone isn’t enough. Organizations also need the right oversight and guardrails to ensure AI is applied responsibly, ethically, and in alignment with business goals.
5. Cross-Functional Collaboration
Work doesn’t sit neatly within HR. To get the full task-level picture, HR must partner with operations, IT, finance, and business unit leaders who understand how work is executed on the ground.
These collaborations should extend to AI governance and steering committees: ensuring that task intelligence is deployed strategically, with shared accountability and oversight across the organization.
Task Intelligence: A Competitive Edge For HR
As work continues to evolve – faster than traditional structures can keep up – organizations that embrace a task-based approach will be better positioned to adapt. They’ll spot risks sooner, unlock capacity more efficiently, and build the workforce of the future with confidence. Indeed, these insights will go beyond traditional HR processes to help companies enter new markets, handle a merger or acquisition, embrace automation, and more.
The Great AI Workforce Redesign is here. HR teams that invest in task intelligence won’t just react to change – they’ll shape it.
That’s the task-level advantage: and it’s fast becoming essential.