Skills Velocity: 6 Secrets to Getting Ahead as AI Shapes HR

For the past four years, we’ve been analyzing key industry sectors and seeing a clear divide emerge: The majority of organizations struggle to keep pace, but the top 5-10% consistently pull ahead.

They set the standard for everyone else. They’re outliers — what we call pacesetter companies. In our research at The Josh Bersin Company, our goal has been to understand what sets them apart: Is it the breadth or depth of their skills, their career development strategies, or how they leverage AI for ROI?

Skills Velocity at Work

Now, we’re starting to uncover the answer, backed by large-scale talent intelligence and performance data. The key insight? The most successful adopters of AI aren’t those with the most skills, but those who can apply them to real business problems the fastest. It’s not just what you know, it’s how quickly you can put that knowledge to work. We call this skills velocity.

That’s the headline. But the real value lies in going deeper — understanding how top HR teams within these leading organizations build and sustain skills velocity. What we’ve uncovered is that it’s not just about tools or tactics. These companies operate with a fundamentally different mindset, one that redefines how they approach business, technology, innovation and talent.

Their competitive edge comes down to six key strategies, or secrets, which we’ll explore in detail. Each one reveals how pacesetters don’t just transform; they accelerate.

1. Prioritize AI and Tech Skills

To drive substantial impact and maintain a competitive edge with skills velocity in mind, pacesetters grow forward-looking roles and ensure their talent mix has the right characteristics.

For example, we found the pacesetters in the automotive industry to have up to three times as many employees with emerging tech expertise compared to the sector average. Looking elsewhere and more specifically, DBS Bank built an internal AI-powered talent marketplace called “iGrow,” integrating AI with workforce planning, learning, and career mobility. As a result, 91% of employees reported feeling empowered to grow their careers; and in 2022, 40% of DBS roles were filled internally, indicating they have the talent they need in their pool.

Both of these examples signal a mindset rooted in innovation, agility, and the integration of advanced capabilities across the entire business, enabling them to have a workforce that embodies skills velocity.

2. Continuous Innovation As the Core

Pacesetter organizations don’t treat innovation as a siloed function within R&D or product development. Instead, they embed it across the entire enterprise as a continuous, organization-wide capability. Innovation becomes part of daily operations, supported by broad investment in innovation skills, experimentation platforms, and design thinking, particularly among frontline teams where real-time insights can drive immediate impact. This is what drives skills velocity.

They promote grassroots creativity through hackathons, crowdsourcing platforms and agile ways of working. For example, the pacesetter pharmaceutical companies prioritize innovation skills across their entire approach to talent, enabling them to outpace competitors for faster drug development. Meanwhile, Toyota pioneered the shift toward EVs — not just by building new products, but by reshaping its entire organization to foster faster prototyping, customer feedback loops, and agile product teams, despite 40% of its workforce being contingent.

The signal is clear for pacesetters: Innovation is not a department. Innovation is a mindset and operating model that ultimately fosters skills velocity.

3. Finally Achieving Productivity-Based Work Redesign

Pacesetters start with a fundamental insight: Outdated roles and rigid structures hinder skills velocity.

Instead of layering new tools on top of old workflows, they strip out bureaucracy, clarify accountability, and focus on high-value, meaningful work done at the top of one’s license. The result? Skills velocity throughout their entire organization.

Providence, for example, has used AI and predictive scheduling to reduce administrative overhead, improving both patient care and clinician morale. In financial services, ING showcases bold transformation through its “agile-first” operating model, dismantling rigid hierarchies and replacing them with cross-functional squads built for speed, accountability and adaptability.

While most organizations continue to struggle with systemic work redesign, pacesetters appear to have cracked the code. These companies treat work not as a static set of tasks, but as a living system, constantly evolving to meet changing business needs, technologies, and workforce dynamics.

4. People Quality Over People Quantity

A few years ago, we coined the term talent density to describe what leadership aims for within their organizations: raising the ratio of highly skilled, high-performing individuals on their teams. Today, talent density is emerging as a defining trait of pacesetter companies and one that leads to skills velocity.

Rather than expanding headcount for its own sake, pacesetters focus on hiring, developing, and retaining top talent; individuals who can drive innovation, boost productivity and adapt quickly to change. High talent density fosters a high-performance culture where every employee plays a meaningful role in business outcomes.

Moderna does this by targeting talent with niche skills in AI and platform biology. DBS recruits technologists to modernize core operations. Scotiabank has revamped its campus recruitment strategy to focus on underrepresented yet highly skilled talent pools.

This approach ensures organizations stay agile, innovative and resilient. It’s the kind of strategy every CHRO should be bringing to the CEO’s attention right now.

5. Embracing Change

Unlike traditional change management, which assumes linear, time-bound transitions, pacesetters strongly embrace navigating ongoing, unpredictable transformation, embedded into roles, structures and culture. These companies are developing specialized roles like change managers, project leads and data analysts to drive this.

The results are measurable. In healthcare, pacesetter organizations have over five times more data mining capability than their peers, enabling them to anticipate needs and adjust course faster.

Leadership plays a central role. ING’s new agile leadership model empowers teams to collaborate, experiment, and innovate as part of daily operations, making transformation in response to change a shared responsibility rather than a top-down directive.

And all of this has a clear link to skills velocity, allowing them to acquire and apply the latest knowledge to the situations they’re facing at that moment.

6. Systemic HR

Pacesetters are also redefining the role of HR — and the CHRO — in driving enterprise-wide impact; to what we at The Josh Bersin Company call systemic, data-driven modern HR. This is more than HR modernization; it’s a complete shift to integrated, business-aligned HR practices built for speed, insight and skills velocity.

Pacesetter companies do this by tightly aligning talent management, workforce planning, and organizational development with overarching business goals. This approach requires embedding HR Business Partners (HRBPs), people analytics experts and organizational designers into flatter, cross-functional HR teams that are empowered to act at the pace of the business.

The data proves the model: leading healthcare organizations have 2.5 times more HR systems capabilities than their peers. Insurance sector pacesetters employ three times more HRBPs, while automotive pacesetters maintain 3.5 times fewer HR managers, a deliberate shift toward leaner, more agile HR operating models.

Ultimately, pacesetters recognize that strategic HR isn’t a support function; it’s the engine of transformation. When designed systemically, HR becomes the connective tissue that enables innovation, adaptability and ultimately skills velocity.

Where Do You Want To Go Next?

For me, this moment is both inspiring and challenging. For years, we’ve talked about driving transformation through skills — but now, for the first time, we have the data, models and real-world proof to turn that vision into action. We finally understand what sets the top five to 10 percent apart — the quiet leaders who’ve been delivering extraordinary results while others were still searching for the path forward.