Editor’s Note: As part of its partnership with CFO Leadership Council’s Finance & Accounting Technology Expo November 13-14 (join us!), Sapient Insights Group will host four interactive roundtable discussions to help senior finance leaders navigate and capitalize on the growing intersection between HR and finance technologies. For more details and to register for these complimentary sessions, click on the links below.
Headcount to Impact: A CFO’s Playbook for Workforce ROI
How to Make Smart AI Investments
Where Cost Control Meets Innovation: Using Compensation Intelligence as Profit and Growth Drivers
2026 Compliance Playbook: Mitigating Risks and Unlocking Business Opportunities
While AI has been hogging center stage for the last year, we’re seeing many examples of business growth and innovation that aren’t tied to AI. Organizations are finding ways to increase the value of existing tech investments by using more built-in functionality, putting greater emphasis on data analysis and rethinking business models and workforce strategies.
Following are several areas in which HR and finance teams have applied out-of-the-box thinking and technology tools to increase revenue, adapt to external pressures and improve business outcomes.
Data + Analysis = Business Outcomes
These days, almost every organization is swimming in data. Practically every business unit or department has systems churning out information every day. Additionally, there are now many external sources of valuable data—from government databases to research firms to industry and market reports.
Those organizations investing time and resources into analyzing internal and external data and using the resulting information in new ways are saving costs, increasing revenue and gaining market advantage.
Since labor is almost always the biggest cost for any company, I advise HR and finance leaders to prioritize managing and analyzing workforce-related data. It’s hugely important to go beyond standard metrics such as revenue per employee and delve into workforce details. For instance, time and attendance data can tell you who’s working—as well as when and where; with follow-on analysis, you can assess if you’re putting employee skills to best use with current schedules.
Insights gained from skills data is hugely helpful in workforce planning, helping you make important decisions related to hiring and investing in employee training. Internal compensation data, when compared to external compensation data (such as for your industry segment, company size or locations), will ensure you’re paying employees fairly and help you better manage recruiting as well as turnover and retention rates.
Partnering with HR for Business Adaptability
In today’s world, adaptability is a key requirement for success. Few companies can continue to succeed by doing business exactly the same way as they did even five years ago.
Tax changes, tariffs, supply chain uncertainties and skill shortages—these are just a few of the factors that demand adaptability and build uncertainty into most business models. A strong partnership with HR can help you identify and capitalize on new business opportunities and make required changes.
For instance, the just-announced change in H-1B visas, raising the cost per petition to $100,000 for some, is forcing many companies to quickly pivot from past hiring practices. Rather than bringing employees to the U.S., some are planning to outsource product development, customer services and other work to employees living abroad. Such changes introduce new compliance and compensation complexities and may even require opening new offices in foreign countries.
HR expertise and data from existing solutions can help your team determine how best to adapt and address the challenges involved. What are the benefit, compliance and compensation implications for hiring in various geographies? What are the specific skills needed and how do you most efficiently find employees with them? How should work performed abroad be assessed and managed? Do current HR- and work-related solutions need to be modified in any way?
Too often, business changes are decided upon without full input and support from HR leaders and teams. In addition to helping assess the impact of decisions before they are executed, HR leaders can create communication strategies, monitor employee sentiment and engagement, and prep managers and supervisors—all of which can increase the chance of success of any business change.
Prioritizing AI Investments
The HR tech market now offers hundreds of choices when it comes to investing in AI tools and solutions. You’d be hard-pressed to find a vendor that isn’t promoting some kind of AI tool, embedded AI functionality or an AI-inspired partnership.
Our most recent research shows that the use of AI and machine language tools at work has gone up from 12 percent in 2023 to 31 percent in 2025, a 158 percent increase. And this statistic doesn’t tell the whole story, since it reflects only the use of “official” tools. When we asked HR professionals if they were using AI / machine learning to accomplish personal job tasks, the number went up to 81 percent.
Commonly, the incentives for AI investment are to improve efficiency, increase the effectiveness of important work processes, or reduce costs (or all of the above.) While these are all worthy goals, we advise companies to first think about where the use of AI can actually drive revenue growth. When creating value is a priority, AI can empower employees to do more and better work, build stronger customer relationships, and make better decisions.
Take, for example, the universally despised automated menus you get when trying to get some kind of customer service. Certainly, these tools reduce call center staffing and, when implemented well, can eventually direct your call to the appropriate service team. But too often, these bots have you shouting into the phone when your call gets misdirected or your voice misunderstood; you’re sent back to the main menu and have to start all over again—frustrated and angry.
In sharp contrast to these frustrating automated menus, consider how AI enhances job performance and customer experience in the following scenario.
A retailer integrates AI into its e-commerce platform, which you use to make online purchases; based on your actions, the system also creates a personalized user profile for you. The system is designed to also give in-store sales reps and customer service agents access to your profile and purchasing history, along with other product data.
When you call or visit a store with a purchase complaint, employees have at their fingertips information about your past purchases and personal preferences, as well as current inventory information. The employee doesn’t waste time on tedious transactional work or require you to look up SKUs or show receipts. Instead, the employee can focus entirely on resolving your issue and making suggestions for replacement.
Rather than focusing solely on cost reduction, this retailer also sees an increase in revenue and customer retention. This is an aspirational example, for sure. But we all know how customer interactions—positive and negative—significantly impact loyalty to a company. Such use of AI is not about job replacement, but about employee empowerment and customer satisfaction.
