2025 Future of Work Leaders Priorities & Predictions

Today, many forward-looking organizations have initiated more targeted and strategic focus on “the future of work.” This often involves appointing a leader of this focus, and sometimes a team, to explore work scenarios and innovations given the rapid changes to work processes, the workforce, and the workplace. Though the exact components of the future of work may vary by organization, there are a few common factors and capabilities, specifically:

• The organization’s ability to create realistic scenarios, and strategically plan for an agile and competitive workforce and work processes.
• How it deconstructs work and reimagines, engineers, and perfects workplace models that address highly fluid labor markets and changing talent dynamics.
• How it prepares its workforce to thrive in an AI-enabled future of work.
• How it equips and supports leaders to influence effectively regardless of work model, reporting relationship, demographic, or shifting industry dynamics.

While Future of Work Board members are projecting modest increases in investment in the function, we anticipate it will see growth in 2025. Two telling signs that reinforce this are that 21% of CHROs indicate that Future of Work will see some of the strongest investment of resources in 2025 and 32% of CHROs indicate the same for organization effectiveness (OE). Notably, the implications of the future of work on OE include a heightened need for adaptability, a focus on a skills-based market internally, the embrace of automation and AI, a shift towards more flexible work arrangements, and a greater emphasis on employee wellbeing and mental health, all of which align with where organizations are focusing their Future of Work efforts.

Priorities

Advance the skills of both employees and leaders on how to leverage AI—today, most companies (79%) say their workforce is not fully prepared for GenAI at work. The biggest impediments are a lack of organizational knowledge about AI (39%) and a lack of AIspecific training (27%). Seventy-three percent (73%) of organizations today either don’t offer AI training or only offer it to a select group of employees yet, organizations that are already operationalizing and scaling AI are nearly 10x more likely to offer AI training to all employees compared to those still experimenting (i4cp, 2025).

Expand the utilization of AI—a key strategy for how most organizations are envisioning the future of work and staying ahead of the competition is broadening and increasing the utilization of AI. Critical to this is getting executive-level buy-in and comfort with AI. Recent i4cp research found that organizations that are already operationalizing and scaling AI are generally high-performance organizations and are much more likely to have executive teams who promote and model the use of the technology.  

Become a skills-centric organization and leverage an internal talent marketplace— both are challenging given current organization structures and leader mindsets that prefer traditional job-based architectures, yet both can also be improved and accelerated through AI. For example, AI can be used to streamline the process of cataloging and categorizing the skills of its workforce, and matching skills to opportunities. It can also recommend specific development paths to fill organizational capability gaps and drive proactive development discussions.

Deconstruct jobs and redesign work for future task automation—to overcome workforce fear of fully automating certain jobs and roles, co-creation of the future state is a necessity. Progressive organizations have gained the trust of the workforce to identify what aspects of their day-to-day tasks could be augmented or accomplished by AI, with the belief that doing so will only improve their efficiency and allow for more time to focus on strategic initiatives.

Ensure a future-ready workforce and culture— i4cp research has found that future-ready cultures are learning centered, inclusive, results-driven, customer-centric and collaborative. Future-ready cultures are also essential for future-ready organizations. These organizations are vastly better at cataloging current skills (48% vs. 10%), forecasting skill needs (45% vs. 11%), identifying skills gaps (45% vs. 13%), and offering upskilling opportunities (55% vs. 7%). This type of strategic readiness has a remarkable impact on the business—boosting market performance nearly twice as much as AI readiness alone, per i4cp’s statistical models (i4cp, 2025).

Increasing employee well-being— leaders of future-ready organizations realize that a workforce that is skilled for the future must also be motivated and healthy to achieve sustainable results. Combating burnout by balancing workloads, offering more autonomy over work schedules and location, and providing programs and resources for employee well-being are top of mind for board members. Previous i4cp research identified six areas of well-being that companies should holistically focus on: physical, mental/emotional, financial, community, career, and social or relational well-being.

“ AI will continue to be the big disruptor, so 2025 will focus on advancing proven HR strategies to grow dynamic work and teaming capabilities designed to succeed in transformative and disruptive environments. Work structures will continue to become ever more fluid as organizations seek new ways of engaging talent to advance organizational agility, and team-based learning promises to take center stage as workers are challenged to adapt urgently and in new ways, collectively. The pivotal role of the manager will evolve emphasizing connecting and empowering individuals, teams, and technology to identify and optimize opportunities for value creation."

Karen Kocher, Global General Manager Future of Work, Microsoft

Future of Work Predictions

• There will be a growing recognition for the need for this function—particularly in larger organizations, the investment implications for future workforce readiness necessitates a more targeted focus and ownership internally. As GenAI tools, capabilities, and applications progress, it is also expected that the increased implications for the workforce and work processes will make strategic workforce planning a more complicated endeavor.
   
• Skills-based marketplaces will stall without a culture shift—the future of work at high-performance organizations is project- as opposed to job-based, is one in which leaders value and enable the mobility of people and capability across the enterprise ecosystem as opposed to keeping it to themselves, and is one in which a company’s social capital (i.e., the relationships and trust) is managed and measured with as much rigor as its human capital. Technology such as an internal talent marketplace may enable this, but it’s the mindset of leaders (at all levels) and the culture of the organization that will determine the extent to which it proliferates.
   
• Those that incorporate AI into the flow of work will further separate from laggards—organizations that are operationalizing and scaling AI today across the enterprise will further separate themselves from the AI plodders. Today, the AI leaders already enjoy higher market performance than companies that are merely experimenting with or researching AI applications, and are 20x more likely (61% vs. 3%) than those that have yet to adopt GenAI to characterize their workforce as prepared to use the technology at work. Scarier for the laggards is that employees in AI-leading companies say they could improve their productivity by 30% or more with additional training.
   
• A new leadership skillset is emerging; leaders who are equipped to effectively manage and influence within distributed environments will be sought after as organizations increasingly value agility throughout the enterprise. People-leader capability needs to account for new work models (hybrid, flexible, remote, etc.) yet most employers’ systems and efforts to attract, develop, and reward leadership capabilities are severely outdated. Focus and support for new leadership skills will need to evolve in order to create a future-ready workforce.

To read the rest of the predictions from i4cp's other boards, download i4cp's 2025 Priorities & Predictions.