Move people analytics beyond dashboards

Published in October 2025, the Fosway 9-Grid™ for Talent & People Success looks at the talent management and people experience solutions market for EMEA’s HR leaders – here, Fosway analysts discuss why it’s time to move people analytics beyond dashboards.

The ability to provide holistic insights across the entire employee and workforce lifecycle has now become a critical factor in selecting talent solutions. HR tech buyers are seeking platforms that can aggregate and analyse data from multiple sources to provide a comprehensive view of their workforce. This combines traditional HR data with skills data, real performance metrics, and engagement scores, but also now external labour market information too.

At the heart is a shift to performance / value-centred HR, and the need for HR teams to articulate their impact and value as much as their efficiency. Better analytics is still high on HR’s agenda. But it is early days; only 7% of HR teams have connected all their HR data, and only 40% have a people analytics team. The rise of specialist people analytics tools has accelerated, and vendor roadmaps are pivoting to AI-supported analytics, rather than static dashboards.

Skills, employee listening, engagement coaching, talent acquisition and learning lead the AI evolution

AI has been pivotal in enabling the skills-based organisation (SBO) concept for some time now. The use of AI in the development of skills, task and work ontologies has accelerated further, especially in modelling the future workforce with people and AI. It is difficult to see how most SBO initiatives could now progress without AI, e.g. for skills inference, proficiency profiling, ontology generation / connection, people matching or curation of development opportunities. At the core is skills and people data.

But with the expansion of AI into employee listening with its rich unstructured data, new possibilities emerge for network analysis of skills as well as recognition, engagement and managerial and team behaviours. The combination of structured and unstructured sentiment data redefines how organisations can support their people. Learning content is already being hugely disrupted by Gen AI, as is adoption of Gen AI in talent acquisition to support the production of job ads and recruiting campaigns. For recruiters, not using the right tools means they could lose their best candidates, or worse, only ever engage with second and third tier talent pools.

Coach-bots and chatbots are critical AI features

The emergence of AI assistance is reshaping how users interact with HR systems. Co-pilots and assistants are being added, often as a parallel interface, providing an assistant side panel next to usual HR processes. As well as offering shortcuts and deeper insights, they highlight key contextual data to enhance employee, manager and HR experiences. Just as search is evolving on the public internet, a new style of enquiry and interaction is also shaping talent processes. Nowhere is this most dramatically displayed than in the use of AI coaching for managers from employee listening, with behavioural nudges to prompt better engagement and performance management styles.

From an HR business partner perspective, chat interfaces augment people analytics across the employee lifecycle. Engagement solutions can support the coaching and role-play of challenging conversations and help managers better manage people and work issues.

This is an excerpt from the 2025 Fosway 9-Grid™ for Talent & People Success. Get the full insight and discover all the latest market and solution trends by reading the whole report here.

What should you do next?

• There’s been little structured analysis of what AI features are live and delivering value for people experience teams. This is where Fosway’s Talent & People Success AI insights come in. More here.
• Phase Two of Fosway’s AI project is live; build your evidence-based AI strategy with Europe’s most experienced HR industry analysts. Sign up here

Other recommended reading

• Our latest cycle of research into EMEA’s HR leaders is here for you to benchmark you and your team’s experience: HR Realities 2025.
• The 2025 Fosway 9-Grid^TM for Cloud HR – full report. Released in September, it’s all the latest market and solution trends in Cloud HCM – get the full analysis today.

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