As you would expect, I am fielding a lot of questions from clients about how to deploy, embed, and integrate AI into their workforce. Some of the questions imply a hasty workforce replacement strategy, while others are more nuanced about how to prepare their workforce to use AI in their evolving work. But all of these leaders are flying blind, because AI doesn’t replace jobs; it replaces tasks. And no leader we talk to has an easy way to look at the tasks being done.

Enter task intelligence, an emerging use case for AI. Task intelligence draws on task-level data, then offers insights about those tasks, such as automation potential, duplication across teams, transferability, cost to outsource, etc. It sits at the elevation that makes sense to leaders — more tangible than job titles but more visible than granular skills data. This level of task intelligence will be key to unlocking meaningful workforce optimization. It’s a lens for understanding how work happens now— and how it can happen better.

Gratefully, tools now exist that can extract and analyze task-level data at scale, from public and proprietary job descriptions. This isn’t just a technical breakthrough — it’s a strategic one. Task intelligence helps leaders answer questions they’ve long struggled with:

  • Where are we duplicating effort across teams?
  • Which tasks are ripe for automation?
  • How do we redeploy talent after a merger or restructuring?
  • What invisible work is keeping our organization running?

It also shifts the conversation from abstract workforce planning to actionable decisions. Instead of debating whether a role should exist, we can ask whether the tasks it performs are still relevant, efficient, or necessary.

Are there ways that task intelligence needs to improve? Of course. Employees do work outside of their job description all the time, so we need an approach like classic job analysis or ethnographic observation of work to fill out the full picture of valuable work and make sure that we don’t cut so much that our organization can’t function or handle pivots and change. Vendors are working on scalable approaches to that as we speak, using, you guessed it, AI.

Task intelligence will become a foundational capability for any leader serious about workforce strategy. I’m excited to have a front-row seat as organizations tackle this underlying challenge, central to the future of work. Stay tuned for more from me on this topic, and feel free to share what you’re learning as you explore and test different approaches.