Traditional workforce planning is breaking under the pressure of constant business change. According to a new survey conducted with Gatepoint Research, 68% of organizations want to optimize how they perform workforce planning.
No single issue is driving this transition. Instead, organizations are fighting to sustain growth and control costs amidst compounding pressures, including AI adoption, volatile skill demands, and fluctuating operating costs. Collectively, these factors make the old approach to workforce planning untenable.
Here's a closer look at what's pushing organizations to change course.
1. Workforce planning is changing to accommodate AI
AI adoption is creating a different kind of workforce planning challenge. While it's true that AI is used to improve planning and productivity, organizations also need to plan for a workforce that changes as AI takes on more tasks and responsibilities. Moreover, this transition comes with a hefty price tag. As HR and finance leaders look to the future, they are increasingly tasked with finding ways to free up capital to fund expensive AI tokens or enterprise software licenses.
Organizations are facing decisions such as:
- Which jobs and roles can be partially automated?
- Where does AI augment human effort rather than replace it?
- How do you balance investment in human capability versus AI capability?
These workforce strategy questions require a planning solution that can model scenarios across different automation assumptions, not just headcount projections.
Leaders are pragmatic about what they expect. The research shows they want AI to automate manual planning tasks (57%), support predictive attrition modeling (56%), and enable faster scenario planning (52%). In other words, leaders are focusing on the operational value of AI rather than experimentation for its own sake.
2. Cost pressure is making workforce planning a finance priority
Workforce planning is one of the most significant levers available for managing financial performance, whether leaders treat it that way or not. The research supports this connection, with workforce optimization now the top shared goal between HR and finance, cited by 68% of leaders. Aligning talent strategy with financial sustainability follows at 52%.
Yet when HR and finance operate from different headcount numbers, different planning timelines, and different systems of record, financial forecasts and recruitment pipelines are inherently misaligned. Budget variances aren't the exception anymore — they're the norm. The C-suite is no longer willing to accept that level of imprecision.
3. Skill requirements are becoming harder to predict
Skill requirements are changing faster than most organizations can keep up with. Roles that didn't exist a year or two ago are now business critical. Capabilities that previously defined competitive advantage are now being automated.
You can't solely plan for headcount anymore. You have to plan around workforce skills, deciding which ones the business needs, which are fading, and where the gaps are widest.
The research confirms the gap. While 51% of leaders say they want to improve internal talent mobility, few have the tools to model capability requirements systematically across roles, locations, and business units. As a result, an organization’s skill development strategy often defaults to reactive rather than intentional hiring, with leaders bringing in new talent to plug gaps rather than evolving the workforce from within.
4. Location decisions are becoming a workforce planning variable
Where roles are located has direct implications for cost, talent availability, and organizational design. Some organizations are consolidating while others are decentralizing and expanding geographically. Many are doing both across different parts of the business simultaneously.
Location strategy impacts every facet of workforce planning. Shifting roles to new geographies redefines your talent supply, and expanding remote work alters attrition. For example, introducing a hybrid schedule slashed employee resignations by 33% compared to full-time office requirements, according to a Stanford study. If you assess these variables in isolation, you run the risk of unintended cost or other workforce consequences.
Organizations with more mature workforce planning capabilities are bringing location strategy directly into the planning model, understanding the headcount and financial implications of location decisions before they're made, not after.
Scenario planning is critical for workforce planning maturity
If there's one capability that has moved from optional to essential, it's scenario modeling. The research found that 57% of organizations want to model and simulate different workforce scenarios. It's the single most requested capability that leaders say they currently cannot do easily.
The underlying challenge is that market conditions shift and competitors make unexpected moves. Meanwhile, new technologies emerge much faster than annual planning cycles can absorb. Organizations that can only model a single workforce plan, and only update it annually, are operating with a structural disadvantage.
For 42% of organizations, workforce planning is shifting from a static, periodic exercise to an agile, continuous process. Scenario modeling is the catalyst for this transformation, enabling leaders to rapidly spin up and evaluate new scenarios so they are always prepared for change.
Building the planning capabilities to match the ambition
For most organizations, the obstacles to optimal workforce planning are familiar.
- Workforce planning still relies on manual data assembly.
- HR and finance still operate from different versions of the truth.
- Scenario modeling tools are either too basic or too disconnected to support confident decisions.
The Anaplan Operational Workforce Planning application is a foundational tool that helps organizations close that gap. It connects HR and finance around a single, real-time view of your workforce and enables the dynamic, scenario-driven planning that today's environment demands.
With Anaplan, teams always have a clear, position-level view of their entire workforce — filled, open, and planned positions — alongside the financial impact of every talent decision.
- Scenario modeling that once took weeks can now happen in minutes.
- Attrition can be forecast by location, tenure, and job category, so talent acquisition teams can align recruiter capacity accordingly.
- An embedded Workforce Analyst AI agent lets you ask questions in natural language to surface insights and drive action directly from within the application.
The result is a workforce planning capability that evolves continuously with the business, rather than a static annual plan that is already out of date by the time it's published. Achieving this requires connected data, integrated scenario modeling, and the ability to align workforce and financial decisions in real time.
