By 2029, 30% of employees who were terminated and replaced by AI will be rehired, often at a higher cost, as organisations struggle to align workforce decisions with evolving business needs, according to Gartner.
At the research group’s recent HR Symposium/Xpo, Caitlyn McDonough, vice-president analyst in the Gartner HR practice, shared the current talent risks threatening businesses.
“Many organisations are making AI and workforce decisions in the wrong order,” McDonough says. “They decide how many people to let go before they understand what it will take to get work done. The goal should be to understand what work matters most to the strategy, how that work is changing, and the right mix of people and technology needed to deliver business outcomes.”
According to a July 2026 Gartner survey of 297 CHROs, only 19% of organisations have workforce planning practices that effectively help leaders understand how work is changing, account for AI’s impact, and realign talent strategies with business goals.
Yet organisations with effective workforce planning are 1.4 times more likely to exceed revenue goals and 1.5 times more likely to exceed cost goals.
McDonough shared a new enterprise framework for strategic workforce planning.
Moving beyond traditional workforce planning
Most workforce planning is bottom up. Leaders consider today’s jobs, skills and headcount, and assess how AI could change them. But just because AI can do something, doesn’t mean it will. As AI costs continue to rise, organisations are increasingly concentrating AI investments in areas that drive strategy.
Gartner has created a new framework that considers the enterprise strategy first and aligns workforce decisions to the work required to achieve strategic goals.
There are five planning phases:
- Identify the workforce capabilities most critical to executing business strategy.
- Forecast future work demand and capacity requirements.
- Assess future workforce supply, including both human and AI-enabled capacity.
- Quantify workforce gaps and evaluate potential solutions based on cost, risk and speed.
- Establish governance to prioritise and fund workforce investments.
Source: Gartner (October 2026)
A key differentiator of the framework is forecasting future work demand. It helps organisations break work down into measurable components so they understand what work will be done in the future, how much, and the share of work that will be performed by humans and AI.
Enterprise strategic workforce planning ultimately enables CHROs to tell the CEO and board what work and workforce capabilities are most important to strategy, what type of workforce they will need in the future, and what it will take to deliver the workforce.
Rather than attempting an enterprise-wide rollout from the outset, CHROs should partner with leaders to pilot the framework for one to two business capabilities and then scale their approach based on lessons learned.
“To prepare for an AI-driven future, leaders should stop planning for the workforce they have and start planning for the workforce their strategy requires,” says McDonough. “When organisations shift the focus from jobs to work and work demand, they avoid costly workforce missteps and allocate resources more effectively.”