Future HR Skills Transformation

Vijay Swaminathan
3
min read
March 23, 2026

I hope you're doing well.  One of our customers highlighted the need to map the granular future of HR skills.  There is a lot of noise today around AI and the future of HR. Many discussions remain at a very high level. Instead of speaking broadly about AI, we mapped the skills emerging across six HR areas — Talent Acquisition, People Analytics, Employee Experience, Learning & Development, Total Rewards, and Workforce Planning.

For each function, we looked at five layers of capability:

  • Core skills that remain foundational
  • Sunrise Wave 1 skills — AI-assisted capabilities already emerging today
  • Sunrise Wave 2 skills — more advanced capabilities as agentic AI matures
  • Specific AI verification skills (as it applies to the areas)
  • Human skills that remain the real differentiator

An example that illustrates the sample finding in the paper.

In Talent Acquisition, core skills like skills-based hiring and employer branding remain important.
Sunrise Wave 1 includes AI-assisted job description creation and predictive candidate matching.
Sunrise Wave 2 moves toward agentic sourcing and automated interview orchestration.

But what gives a competitive advantage are these specific verification and human skills

The paper is packed with insights.  I hope you like this paper.  Thanks again for your valuable time