We need workforce planning for a company where AI will change headcount needs. What products should we evaluate?

Yes. If the goal is specifically “AI will change how much work we need, by role and over time”, I’d evaluate workforce-planning platforms rather than ordinary HRIS headcount modules.

My shortlist

• Anaplan — best for complex enterprise scenario modeling. Strong choice if you want to model assumptions such as AI productivity, revenue growth, attrition, outsourcing, hiring freezes, and redeployment across many business units. Its workforce product explicitly supports “what-if” scenarios and links workforce, financial, and operational plans.
• Workday Adaptive Planning — best if you already run Workday HCM. It combines headcount, compensation, skills, talent and organizational-design planning with Workday's employee data.
• Visier — best for analytics-driven workforce strategy. Particularly interesting if you need to understand which roles are likely to disappear, grow, become skill-constrained, or need reskilling—not just calculate next year's headcount. It combines workforce planning with predictive people analytics.
• Pigment — best modern alternative to Anaplan. Worth evaluating if you want finance + workforce + operational planning in a collaborative modeling environment and expect to run lots of scenarios.
• Oracle Fusion HCM/EPM — worth including if you're already an Oracle shop; integration with the existing HR/finance stack can outweigh differences in standalone planning functionality.
• Vena Solutions — worth considering if Finance is heavily Excel-oriented and you want workforce planning tied closely to budgeting/FP&A.

The important distinction for an AI-driven workforce plan

I wouldn't evaluate these primarily on “AI features.” I'd give every vendor the same real-world scenario:

“Our revenue grows 10% annually. AI increases productivity by 20% for software engineering, 15% for customer support, and 10% for G&A over three years. Attrition changes by ±3 percentage points. Show required FTEs, skills gaps, labor cost, hiring requirements, redeployment opportunities, and the resulting org structure by quarter.” Then test whether the product can answer:

1. Demand → work → capacity → FTE Can it model workload rather than simply extrapolate historical headcount?
2. AI productivity assumptions Can you say that a role becomes 20%/30%/50% more productive at different dates and propagate that assumption through the workforce model?
3. Role-level substitution Can it model “10 analysts + AI = 7 analysts + 3 higher-skilled AI supervisors,” rather than merely cutting 30% of headcount?
4. Skills transformation Can it tell you which people can be reskilled versus which capabilities need external hiring?
5. Multiple scenarios Base / aggressive AI adoption / slow AI adoption / recession / high-growth should be easy to compare.
6. Financial linkage Every workforce scenario should automatically flow into salary, bonus, benefits, contractor, severance and other labor-cost forecasts.
7. Actuals vs. forecast Six months later, you should be able to see whether the AI productivity assumptions were actually correct and revise the model.
8. Org design Ideally you can model changes in spans/layers, locations, managers, teams and reporting structures—not just FTE totals.

How I'd narrow it

The market is also moving toward continuous workforce planning rather than an annual headcount exercise. That's particularly relevant for AI because your productivity assumptions may change every few months. Workday, Anaplan and Visier all now position their products around continuous/scenario-based planning.

My recommendation: put Anaplan, Workday Adaptive, Visier, and Pigment into the first RFP. If you tell me your company size, current HRIS (Workday/Oracle/SAP/etc.), industry, and whether Finance or HR will own the model, I can turn this into a much tighter 3–4 vendor shortlist and a vendor scorecard/RFP specifically for AI-driven workforce planning.

When evaluating workforce planning products for an AI-driven shift in headcount, you need tools that do more than track basic org charts. You need platforms that connect skills intelligence, financial modeling, and operational capacity so you can map out where AI will augment roles versus where you genuinely need human headcount growth.

The top software categories and products to evaluate break down by their core strengths:

1. People Analytics & Headcount Forecasting (Best for Strategic Workforce Intelligence)

• Visier Workforce AI: Widely regarded as a leader in workforce intelligence. It provides deep people analytics, predictive attrition, and scenario modeling to help you see how productivity shifts impact actual vs. planned headcount.
• Workday Adaptive Planning: Excellent if your organization leans heavily on enterprise data. It acts as a robust workforce intelligence platform that merges financial budgeting with continuous headcount adjustments.

2. Finance-Connected Headcount & Cost Modeling (Best for CFO / HR Alignment)

• Anaplan: Features AI assistants (like Anaplan Workforce Analyst) designed to align talent supply with business demand. It treats headcount planning as a dynamic financial and operational model, letting you test "what-if" cost scenarios when AI automation changes output per employee.
• Planful: Strong for finance-led workforce cost planning, making it easy to tie productivity gains from AI tools directly to labor budget constraints.

3. Skills-Based Planning & Org Design (Best for Task/Role Transformation)

• Eightfold AI: Exceptional at skills-based planning. Rather than looking strictly at job titles, Eightfold maps individual skills across the enterprise—helping you identify which employee segments can transition into new tasks as AI absorbs legacy workflows.
• ChartHop: A highly visual, AI-powered people operations platform. It connects workforce, business, and financial data, allowing for seamless scenario-planning for reorganizations, structural changes, and transitional hiring.
• Orgvue / Agentnoon: Niche leaders specifically built for organizational design, modeling restructures, and visualizing operational layers when headcounts shrink or shift shape.

4. Embedded HR & Operational Platforms (Best for All-in-One Operations)

• Rippling: Ideal if you want headcount planning tightly embedded in a unified HR, IT, and finance ecosystem.
• ActivTrak: Offers capacity and workload analytics dashboards that help visualize team bandwidth and utilization in real time, showing where teams are stretched thin versus where AI is freeing up capacity.

If you can share your company size and whether your primary goal is shrinking labor costs via automation or reskilling/shifting current talent , I can narrow down which 2 or 3 specific vendors fit your stack best.

Yes. For an AI-driven workforce planning initiative, I’d evaluate planning platforms rather than just HRIS headcount modules. The key requirement is being able to model how AI changes productivity, role mix, skills, demand, and therefore FTE requirements—not merely forecast attrition.

My shortlist

The three I'd put through a serious evaluation

1. Anaplan — best overall for sophisticated scenario modeling

I'd put this at the top if your question is something like:

"If AI increases engineering productivity 25%, reduces support workload 40%, changes manager spans, and increases revenue 15%, what should our workforce look like in 2027–29?" Anaplan is particularly relevant because its strategic workforce planning can translate business drivers—including automation and AI—into role-level workforce demand and compare alternative scenarios.

2. Workday Adaptive Planning — best if Workday is already your HCM

The advantage is the connection between the planning model and actual employee/position data. Its current product supports unlimited driver-based scenarios and organizational-design scenarios, including moving positions and seeing the resulting headcount and workforce-cost effects.

3. Pigment — strongest modern challenger to test

I'd definitely include Pigment in the bake-off. Its workforce product is built around collaborative headcount planning and what-if modeling, while the broader platform is moving aggressively toward AI agents that can analyze plans and simulate scenarios.

One important distinction

I'd separate "AI will reduce headcount" from "AI will change the workforce model."

The second is much more interesting—and should drive your product requirements.

Your model should let you define things such as:

• Demand: revenue, customers, transactions, cases, projects, etc.
• AI productivity effect: hours/task ↓ 20%, 40%, 60%
• Automation penetration: percentage of work automated
• Human/AI mix: which tasks remain human-owned
• Role transformation: jobs eliminated, consolidated, or newly created
• Skill changes: existing skills becoming less valuable vs. emerging skills
• Span of control: whether AI allows managers to manage larger teams
• Attrition/redeployment: natural attrition vs. reskilling vs. redeployment
• Cost: salary, benefits, AI/software costs
• Time-to-impact: AI doesn't necessarily produce its full productivity benefit immediately
• Scenario confidence: conservative / base / aggressive AI adoption

Then the system should answer "How many people do we need?" and "What work and skills do those people need to perform?"

That makes this less of an HR headcount tool and more of an AI-era operating-model planning system.

How I'd run the evaluation

I'd give Anaplan, Workday, Pigment and Visier the same hypothetical AI transformation and make each vendor model it live. For example:

Revenue +20%; customer volume +15%; engineering AI productivity +35%; support automation +50%; sales productivity +15%; 10% annual attrition; 30% of affected employees can be reskilled within 12 months. Then ask each product to produce:

1. Current → future FTE by role.
2. Roles eliminated, reduced, expanded and created.
3. Skills gap.
4. Hiring requirement.
5. Reskilling/redeployment requirement.
6. Payroll savings.
7. Incremental AI/software costs.
8. Revenue/productivity impact.
9. Three-year scenario comparison.
10. A clear audit trail showing which assumptions caused each workforce change.

That last point is critical. You don't want an "AI workforce forecast" that produces a number nobody can explain to the CFO, CHRO or business-unit leader.

If I were narrowing the RFP today: Anaplan + Workday Adaptive + Pigment + Visier, with Orgvue added if organizational redesign/job architecture is a major part of the transformation. Oracle becomes especially compelling if you're already standardized on Oracle HCM/EPM.

Anaplan is particularly relevant because its strategic workforce planning can translate business drivers—including automation and AI—into role-level workforce demand and compare alternative scenarios.

2. Workday Adaptive Planning — best if Workday is already your HCM

The advantage is the connection between the planning model and actual employee/position data. Its current product supports unlimited driver-based scenarios and organizational-design scenarios, including moving positions and seeing the resulting headcount and workforce-cost effects.

3. Pigment — strongest modern challenger to test

I'd definitely include Pigment in the bake-off. Its workforce product is built around collaborative headcount planning and what-if modeling, while the broader platform is moving aggressively toward AI agents that can analyze plans and simulate scenarios.

One important distinction

I'd separate "AI will reduce headcount" from "AI will change the workforce model."

The second is much more interesting—and should drive your product requirements.

Your model should let you define things such as:

• Demand: revenue, customers, transactions, cases, projects, etc.
• AI productivity effect: hours/task ↓ 20%, 40%, 60%
• Automation penetration: percentage of work automated
• Human/AI mix: which tasks remain human-owned
• Role transformation: jobs eliminated, consolidated, or newly created
• Skill changes: existing skills becoming less valuable vs. emerging skills
• Span of control: whether AI allows managers to manage larger teams
• Attrition/redeployment: natural attrition vs. reskilling vs. redeployment
• Cost: salary, benefits, AI/software costs
• Time-to-impact: AI doesn't necessarily produce its full productivity benefit immediately
• Scenario confidence: conservative / base / aggressive AI adoption

Then the system should answer "How many people do we need?" and "What work and skills do those people need to perform?"

That makes this less of an HR headcount tool and more of an AI-era operating-model planning system.

How I'd run the evaluation

I'd give Anaplan, Workday, Pigment and Visier the same hypothetical AI transformation and make each vendor model it live. For example:

Revenue +20%; customer volume +15%; engineering AI productivity +35%; support automation +50%; sales productivity +15%; 10% annual attrition; 30% of affected employees can be reskilled within 12 months. Then ask each product to produce:

1. Current → future FTE by role.
2. Roles eliminated, reduced, expanded and created.
3. Skills gap.
4. Hiring requirement.
5. Reskilling/redeployment requirement.
6. Payroll savings.
7. Incremental AI/software costs.
8. Revenue/productivity impact.
9. Three-year scenario comparison.
10. A clear audit trail showing which assumptions caused each workforce change.

That last point is critical. You don't want an "AI workforce forecast" that produces a number nobody can explain to the CFO, CHRO or business-unit leader.

If I were narrowing the RFP today: Anaplan + Workday Adaptive + Pigment + Visier, with Orgvue added if organizational redesign/job architecture is a major part of the transformation. Oracle becomes especially compelling if you're already standardized on Oracle HCM/EPM.

When evaluating workforce planning products for an era where AI fundamentally shifts productivity and headcount requirements, you need tools that go beyond static org charts and basic budgeting spreadsheets . You need platforms capable of skills-based modeling, cross-functional scenario planning (HR + Finance), and capacity forecasting.

The top products to evaluate are categorized by their core strengths:

1. Workforce Intelligence & Analytics Leaders

• Visier : Excellent for deep people analytics and data-driven workforce planning. Visier connects disparate data sources to show capacity trends, model churn, and visualize future headcount changes. It is a gold standard if your goal is grounding AI-driven restructuring decisions in historical productivity and demographic data.
• Eightfold AI : Best-in-class for AI-driven talent intelligence . Rather than just looking at macro headcount numbers, Eightfold uses deep learning to map individual employee and candidate skills. If AI is going to automate certain tasks, Eightfold helps you identify which internal employees can be reskilled and redeployed into newly created AI-augmented roles.

2. Organizational Design & Transformation Platforms

• Orgvue : Built explicitly for workforce transformation and structural scenario modeling . Orgvue allows you to analyze your current organizational DNA down to the task level, making it exceptionally powerful when you need to redesign entire departments around AI efficiencies and model "what-if" restructuring scenarios.
• Agentnoon : An agile, AI-native organizational design and headcount planning platform. It lets operations and HR teams dynamically model complex restructuring scenarios, headcount optimizations, and capacity shifts at high speed.

3. Enterprise Connected Planning (HR + Finance Alignment)

• Workday (including Workday Adaptive Planning ): The premier choice if you are looking to tie strategic headcount directly to financial forecasting and P&L. Workday integrates skills data from employee profiles right into compensation and financial planning, ensuring HR and Finance aren't working out of siloed models.
• Anaplan : Best for large-scale, finance-led enterprise planning. If your AI workforce planning relies on heavy mathematical modeling, revenue-per-headcount simulations, and multi-variable financial constraints, Anaplan's Hyperblock engine connects headcount shifts to every other operational lever in the business.
• Pigment : A modern, highly visual business planning platform growing rapidly in the enterprise space. It bridges the gap between rigid enterprise software and flexible modeling, allowing for fast iteration on how AI adoption curves impact operational capacity and budgets.

4. Mid-Market & Visual Headcount Tools

• ChartHop : Combines rich organizational visualization with headcounts, compensation analytics, and scenario planning. It’s user-friendly, highly collaborative, and ideal for mid-market to enterprise organizations wanting a transparent, single source of truth for headcount changes.

To help narrow down this list, could you share:

• What size/scale is your company (headcount range)?
• Are you looking for a tool driven primarily by Finance (budget/cost) or HR (skills/reskilling)?
• Do you already use a core HRIS like Workday or SAP?

For a company planning around AI-driven changes in work, I would evaluate products that go beyond traditional headcount budgeting. The key capability is scenario modeling of work, skills, productivity, automation impact, and workforce transitions (hire, reskill, redeploy, outsource, or reduce).

A strong evaluation shortlist:

Evaluation criteria I would use

1. AI impact scenario modeling

Ask vendors:

• Can we model “AI adoption reduces workload by 20–40% in function X”?
• Can we translate productivity gains into required FTE changes?
• Can we model different adoption speeds?
• Can we compare:
  • hire
  • automate
  • outsource
  • reskill
  • redeploy

2. Skills intelligence

Traditional workforce planning asks:

“How many people do we need?”

AI-era planning asks:

“What capabilities do we need, and which people can develop or provide them?”

Look for:

• skills inventory
• inferred skills from work history/projects
• skills adjacency
• future skills forecasting
• role decomposition

3. Connection to finance

The system should connect:

• headcount
• compensation
• contractor spend
• technology investment
• productivity assumptions
• business forecasts

4. Organization design modeling

Useful capabilities:

• redesign departments after automation
• simulate spans/layers changes
• model new AI-enabled roles
• identify redundant activities rather than just redundant jobs

5. Data foundation

Check integrations with:

• HRIS (Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle HCM)
• ERP/finance systems
• project systems
• CRM/service systems
• learning platforms
• productivity data (where appropriate and governed)

Suggested evaluation approach

I would probably run a shortlist of 3–5 vendors:

Enterprise HR-centric

1. Workday
2. Visier
3. Anaplan

AI transformation / skills-centric 4. Lightcast
5. Eightfold AI or TechWolf

Then test them against 2–3 real scenarios:

Example:

• “AI assistants reduce software engineering effort by 25% over 24 months.”
• “Customer support automation handles 50% of tier-1 volume.”
• “Finance operations automate 30% of manual processing.”

Measure whether the tool can answer:

• How many roles change?
• Which skills become more valuable?
• Who can be reskilled?
• What is the cost impact?
• What hiring changes are required?
• What is the timeline?

For most large enterprises, I would expect the strongest architecture to be a combination:

• HRIS + workforce planning platform (Workday/Anaplan/Visier)
• skills intelligence layer (Lightcast/TechWolf/Eightfold)
• finance planning integration

rather than a single “AI workforce planning” product.

Evaluating workforce planning products in an era where AI alters headcount requirements means looking beyond basic org-chart trackers. You need platforms that handle skills-based intelligence, dynamic capacity modeling , and tight HR-Finance alignment.

The evaluation landscape is split into distinct categories depending on your core focus:

1. Talent & Skills Intelligence (Best for mapping what tasks AI can replace vs. augment)

• Eightfold AI — Exceptional at deep AI-driven skills mapping, identifying current capabilities vs. emerging technological gaps, and matching internal mobility before looking externally.
• Gloat — Focuses heavily on the internal talent marketplace and AI workforce intelligence, helping organizations shift from static headcount counts to dynamic skill deployment and productivity modeling.

2. Cross-Functional Headcount & Scenario Planning (Best for modeling "What-if" AI efficiency gains)

• ChartHop — Combines people analytics with visual org modeling and flexible scenario planning, allowing you to run fast "what-if" models on structural changes and compensation impacts.
• Anaplan — The heavyweight for enterprise connected planning; bridges HR and Finance to tie operational headcount forecasts directly to enterprise P&L and revenue drivers.
• Pigment or TeamOhana — Modern, highly visual collaborative planning platforms built for high-growth or fast-changing teams to run real-time budget and hiring scenarios without getting trapped in siloed spreadsheets.

3. Enterprise HCM Native Suites (Best if you are already standardized on a single ecosystem)

• Workday Adaptive Planning — Integrates workforce forecasting and financial budgeting directly with core enterprise HR data, minimizing data latency between what your HRIS says and what Finance projects.
• SAP SuccessFactors — Offers extensive enterprise-grade analytics and strategic workforce planning modules geared toward long-term global restructuring and labor forecasting.

To help narrow this down, could you share:

• Your company size and industry?
• Are you trying to model wholesale job displacement via automation or productivity amplification (e.g., getting 2× output from the same headcount)?

Evaluating workforce planning software in the era of AI requires tools that go beyond basic headcount tracking. You need platforms capable of scenario modeling, skills-based capacity planning, and integrating AI productivity metrics into talent forecasting.

Here are the key categories and top software products to evaluate:

• Workday Adaptive Planning - Excellent for enterprise-grade financial and workforce modeling, allowing you to build complex multi-scenario forecasts for shifting labor demand.
• Visier - A powerful people analytics platform that uses AI and workforce data to model capacity, predict turnover, and identify skill gaps resulting from automation.
• Orgvue - Specialized in organizational design and workforce planning, helping you visualize different structural scenarios and model how roles evolve or merge under AI adoption.
• Anaplan - Highly flexible connected planning platform that links strategic workforce plans directly with operational and financial drivers across the entire business.
• Leena AI / Beamery - Platforms focusing on talent intelligence and skills mapping, helping organizations understand existing internal capabilities and how they align with automated workflows.
• Deel / Remote - While primarily global payroll and compliance tools, they offer workforce insights that are useful if AI-driven restructuring involves shifting toward a global, blended contractor-and-employee model.

To help narrow down this list, could you share:

• What is the approximate size of your company?
• Are you primarily trying to reduce headcount, reskill employees , or restructure teams around AI tools?

Yes. For AI-driven workforce planning, I’d evaluate a mix of traditional workforce-planning platforms and newer work/skills intelligence products. The key distinction is whether the tool can model work and tasks changing—not just forecast headcount.

My shortlist

If AI-driven headcount is the central problem

I'd put Orgvue, Beamery, Workday, and Eightfold through the first round.

The reason is that I'd avoid buying a tool that essentially answers:

“How many employees will we have?”

You want one that can answer:

“What work will exist in 12/24/36 months, how much of it will AI perform, what capabilities will humans need, and therefore what workforce should we have?”

That means your evaluation should explicitly test:

1. Task-level AI impact — Can it decompose jobs into tasks and estimate automation/augmentation?
2. Scenario modeling — e.g. 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% AI adoption and compare FTE/cost/output.
3. Skills inference — Can it infer current skills rather than relying entirely on employee-entered profiles?
4. Redeployment vs. hiring — Can it identify employees who could move into the jobs created by AI?
5. Financial linkage — Can Finance see labor savings, productivity gains, severance/retraining costs and timing?
6. Organizational design — Can you model entirely new structures rather than just add/remove positions?
7. External labor-market data — Can it tell you whether a capability should be hired, developed, contracted or automated?
8. Actual-vs-plan feedback — Can you continuously update assumptions as AI adoption and productivity data become real?

One important procurement test

Give every vendor the same hypothetical business unit and ask them to model:

• 1,000 employees today
• 20 job families
• 5-year revenue growth target
• 30% of tasks potentially AI-automatable
• three AI adoption curves
• normal attrition
• a fixed labor-cost target
• required productivity improvement
• reskilling budget

Then require the system to produce three future-state workforce scenarios, including FTEs, skills, cost, roles eliminated/created, redeployment opportunities and assumptions.

That exercise will reveal much more than a standard feature comparison. Current products differ substantially in whether they are primarily financial planning, people analytics, talent intelligence, or true workforce transformation/scenario modeling platforms.

If I were running the evaluation, my initial order would be: Orgvue → Beamery → Workday → Eightfold → Visier → Anaplan, with the order changing depending on your existing HRIS/FP&A stack.

When evaluating software for an AI-driven workforce transition, you need platforms that do more than track standard open requisitions . You need tools that map task-level capacity, model skills-based supply and demand, and align organizational restructuring directly with financial P&L models.

The market divides into distinct categories based on what specific problem they solve. The top products to evaluate are organized by their core strengths:

1. Task, Workflow & Capacity Intelligence (Best for mapping what AI can actually replace)

These platforms focus on understanding how time and work currently flow through your organization so you can quantify capacity gains before cutting or shifting headcount.

• Gloat (Workforce Intelligence & Signal): Excels at mapping tasks, workflows, and skills across the enterprise to assess where AI delivers maximum ROI, helping you identify true capacity expansion rather than guessing headcount reductions.
• ActivTrak: Offers work intelligence and productivity optimization dashboards that track how teams spend time on repetitive vs. high-value work, helping identify operational bottlenecks and real-world capacity shifts post-AI adoption.

2. Skills-Based Talent & Restructuring Platforms (Best for redeploying and redesigning roles)

When AI absorbs specific tasks, roles don't just disappear—they morph or split. These tools excel at internal mobility, skills mapping, and structural redesign.

• Eightfold AI: A deep talent intelligence platform that uses AI to build dynamic skills inventories, matching internal talent capabilities against shifting business demands and future-of-work requirements.
• Orgvue / Agentnoon: Specialized organizational design and restructuring platforms. They allow you to visually drag-and-drop layers, model structural changes, and analyze the cost-to-capacity ratio of flattening or redesigning teams.

3. Visual Headcount & People Operations (Best for collaborative "What-If" modeling)

If HR, department heads, and leadership need a shared, visual space to test hiring freezes, automation offsets, and team growth scenarios.

• ChartHop: Combines visual org-chart modeling with people analytics. Its AI-generated headcount features allow you to model restructuring or automation impacts in real time while tracking demographic and compensation data.
• TeamOhana: Purpose-built for modern headcount governance, connecting approvals, budget tracking, and real-time scenario changes across HR and hiring managers without messy spreadsheet handoffs.

4. Enterprise Connected & Financial Planning (Best for tying headcount to the P&L)

If your primary goal is ensuring that labor cost forecasting and AI productivity assumptions tie strictly back to overall revenue and cash-flow targets.

• Anaplan: The enterprise standard for connected planning, featuring AI agents (like Anaplan Workforce Analyst) that help align large-scale talent supply with business demand and financial budgets.
• Workday Adaptive Planning: Ideal if you are already anchored in the Workday ecosystem, uniting workforce metrics with deep financial planning and labor cost forecasting.
• Pigment: A modern, highly visual alternative for fast-growing businesses that want seamless, multi-variable scenario modeling between finance and HR.

To help narrow down this list, could you tell me:

• How large is your current headcount?
• Are you trying to reduce costs/headcount via AI automation, or scale output with existing staff?

Yes. If the premise is “AI changes the amount and type of work required, so our workforce plan needs to model tasks, productivity, skills, and headcount—not just hiring budgets,” I’d evaluate a slightly different set of products than a conventional headcount-planning RFP.

My shortlist

The important distinction

I would not make this a conventional “which workforce planning system has the best headcount forecast?” evaluation.

For AI-era planning, I'd require the vendors to demonstrate this scenario:

Revenue +20%, AI automation increases productivity 25% in selected workflows, attrition remains at X%, and we need to launch two new products. What happens to our workforce over 12/24/36 months?

Then require the system to show:

1. Work/task demand — not just job titles.
2. AI productivity assumptions by function/role.
3. Human capacity released by automation.
4. Redeployment opportunities before new hiring.
5. New skills/capabilities required.
6. Net headcount requirement after productivity gains.
7. Labor cost and financial impact.
8. Multiple scenarios with different AI-adoption curves.
9. Actual vs. planned productivity so assumptions can be recalibrated.
10. A path from scenario → approved org → requisitions/HRIS.

That's important because “30% of the work can be automated” does not automatically mean “30% fewer employees.” The affected tasks may be distributed across roles, demand may grow, and freed capacity may be redeployed. That scenario-modeling problem is increasingly recognized as central to AI workforce planning.

How I'd narrow it

If you're a large enterprise:
Start with Orgvue + Anaplan + Eightfold + Workday Adaptive.

If you're already heavily invested in Workday:
Start with Workday Adaptive + Orgvue + Eightfold.

If Finance is driving the project:
Start with Anaplan + Workday Adaptive + ChartHop.

If the CEO/CHRO question is primarily “how does AI change our workforce?”:
I'd put Orgvue and Eightfold at the top of the demo list, with Anaplan/Workday as the financial-planning layer.

If you're mid-market and want speed rather than a multi-year transformation:
I'd look hard at ChartHop, then compare it with Visier.

One other point: I'd evaluate AI capability itself skeptically. A vendor saying “AI-powered workforce planning” isn't enough. The real differentiator is whether it can represent the causal chain business demand → work/tasks → AI productivity → human capacity → skills → roles → headcount → cost rather than simply putting an AI chatbot on top of a traditional headcount model.

If you tell me your company size, current HRIS/ERP (e.g. Workday, SAP, Oracle), and whether Finance or HR owns workforce planning, I can turn this into a 5–7 vendor RFP scorecard with weighted criteria and specific demo questions.