Curiosity, systems thinking, judgment, collaboration, and the ability to build trust across handoffs have always been among the most valuable human skills amid transformation. As AI accelerates the pace of transformation, ServiceNow’s Workforce Skills research reveals that human skills will become increasingly foundational for the future of work.
In previous articles, we discussed the skills reshaping work and where those skills are translating to job growth. Here, we consider the importance of moving toward a state of talent readiness—a perpetually ready workforce evolving to deliver what the business needs today and in the future.
Developing a future-ready workforce where humans and AI work alongside each other requires leaders to focus on four shifts.
Instead, the most important step is identifying which work matters most, how it’s changing, and where the human-to-human handoffs are necessary to deliver business outcomes.
That’s the key for a work-first organizational model: starting with the business outcomes you need to achieve and working backward through the products, services, and processes that fulfill that strategy. From there, you can examine the tasks and workflows that deliver those outcomes.
The work shouldn’t stop with mapping individual tasks. It should expand to include a combination of tasks involving informal human-to-human handoffs that make up the process layer.
For example, ServiceNow sought to grow a highly specialized forward-deployed engineering (FDE) workforce to build AI solutions that help deliver customer outcomes. This role requires deep technical expertise with customer-facing responsibilities. Hiring externally is difficult because these individuals are rare and expensive and need ServiceNow AI Platform knowledge.
Starting with ServiceNow’s roughly 30,000 employees, the initial skills review found 14,000 possible matches. Filtering for ServiceNow AI Platform expertise narrowed the talent pool to 1,100. Further screenings for AI proficiency, platform knowledge depth, and deployment-ready seniority revealed 100 internal candidates who met requirements, giving managers and hiring teams a credible list to review before making offers.
The value was that the data narrowed the field and helped leaders ask better questions about who might be ready, what gaps remained, and where targeted development could help candidates prepare.
Organizations can prepare their workforce by developing both the technical skills employees need and the human capabilities that help turn those skills into impact.
Some roles, such as software engineer or cybersecurity analyst, depend heavily on technical skills like AI and data platform capabilities.
Other roles, such as sales director, rely on uniquely human skills like consultative selling and negotiation that can be paired with emerging technical fluency to sell AI-enabled products at scale.
While technical skills are often easier to identify and train in isolation, human skills such as collaboration and change management develop through experience, feedback, and exposure to what works in a specific role, workflow, or organizational context. Strategic curiosity is another example. You can teach people to ask good questions, just not in a four-week course.
By designing experiences rather than training modules, you can help people build both the technical and human skills that are necessary for their roles.
When skills mapping sits solely in HR, it becomes hard to sell its value to business leaders focused on hitting their own targets. Agentic organizations build executive alignment from the top, often led by a strategic people function responsible for workforce transformation.
In many organizations, this starts with a few passionate individuals who recognize there’s a better way to get ahead of the challenges leaders are already facing on the workforce impact of AI. Reframing the conversation from acquiring skills to cultivating readiness for business outcomes makes the case land.
ServiceNow is putting this talent-readiness philosophy into practice through Talent Signature, a system that combines identity, skills, behavioral, and performance data into a living signal of workforce capability that continuously evolves. The goal is to support more personalized learning, dynamic career paths, succession planning, and strategic workforce decisions.
As candidates progress in their careers, as in the FDE example, we track their performance and use that data to keep refining the system. It's a partnership of data and human judgment, not one replacing the other.
Start with priority business problems. Then map critical workflows and connections, not just job descriptions. Identify how AI will change tasks, and use skills intelligence to guide job design, as well as reskilling and upskilling opportunities.
Continuously validate data with human expertise, and build learning, exposure, and experiences into workforce strategy.
Continue building technical fluency, human skills, and learning agility. Practice curiosity and systems thinking while seeking exposure to new problems and cross-functional work. Treat adaptability as a core career capability.
The future of work will be won by organizations that understand how people and AI create value together, and how people and processes can continuously evolve to meet what comes next. In an AI-shaped workplace, readiness—not skills inventory—is the true measure of workforce strength.
Find out how ServiceNow can help you harness the power of AI and skills intelligence.
