Cornerstone Connect - Field Notes

I flew from WAW to LHR on Monday night and spent a solid 10 minutes hunting for the baggage claim for flights from London. So yes, ask me again how this European tour is going. After a nap and some air con, though, it was all cylinders for Cornerstone on Demand Connect.

Let me start at the edges, because that's where I tend to flock.

Psycho Skillers, Serial Skillers... or Taskmasters and Taskaholics?

Skills have been the sacred cow of every workforce transformation for the last decade. Taxonomy first. Skill ontology second. Everything else, eventually, maybe, somehow, yeah.

CSOD is flipping that model. Instead of starting with a list from Aviation to Zoology, they analyze job descriptions for tasks and infer skills from there. The resulting data hierarchy: Domain, Work, Task, Skill...or DWTS. (Not "Dancing With The Stars," though the acronym absolutely slaps FWIW. Disco, Waltz, Tango, Samba. 10/10.)

I liked this muchly. For one thing, Skills vs. Tasks have been a fight that rivals the Sharks and The Jets. I picture two Learning Technology vendors meeting in a dark alley, snapping fingers in perfect choreography, ready for a rumble. Stay cool, Daddy-O. Secondly, a skill is just a nebulous weight of measurement. They tell you what someone can do, not what work is actually being done. If we do not know the latter, then we cannot prepare for the immediate time when workflows will be fluid and malleable as agents take over tasks. It places CSOD in a strategic position for its ultimate north star, “Workforce Readiness” (more about that later).

Now, this is certainly going to be a challenge for countries with tight data privacy and utilisation rules (Hello, Betriebsrat, Comité Social et Économique, and Ondernemingsraad. When I posed this question to the leadership team, it was stressed that the platform is designed to be configurable to meet regulations. Having worked 1:1 with these entities, this will still be a sticking point beyond CSOD’s control.

Non-Jealous Architecture

At one point, CSOD did have a reputation (rightly or wrongly) for being a closed-system that was difficult to partner into. There are likely numerous reasons for this: integrations are hard work, expensive, and difficult to prioritise. Likewise, why have a slice when you can have the whole pie? Now, they have actively tried to shake this off for a few years now, but are truly leaning in with current strategy. Companies seek flexibility in their PeopleTech stack. So, in a smart move, CSOD systems are open to meet customers where they are at. Whilst they are sunsetting Saba, and SumTotal (RIP, thank you for your service), they are flexible in what platforms can be plugged into their ecosystem. Stuck on a learning platform but still need the workforce analytics and insights from Elevate+ or Intelligence+? You do not need to rip that out and rebuild. Integration is possible.

This is going to cause anxiety for vendors who lock customers into three-year contracts, hoping this will increase reliance. CSOD is making it very easy for companies to achieve transformation, one piece at a time, patiently chipping at the core, should a prospect choose.

Workforce Readiness (I Promised)

The through-line of Connect was a single question: What business problem are you trying to solve? On the surface, not revolutionary. We have been told to align with the business for decades. The elusive ROI conversation has been the Moby Dick of L&D.

But here's what's different now: whether you're rightskilling your workforce, mapping what's in your talent wallet, or trying to deploy niche skills into projects at speed, it all reduces to the same urgent problem: Workforce Readiness. And no company is weathering the current moment without that data.

I also genuinely appreciated Guna Jayaraman's take on mass layoffs. Companies are firing thousands while simultaneously posting hundreds of roles for the following quarter. Is that actually good business? Or is it throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater because the alternative requires harder thinking? CSOD wants to be part of that conversation. Call it the warm and fuzzies if you want. It landed with me.

Hence the CSOD tagline: Human to the Power of AI. The intelligence to know. The wisdom to act.

Wait -- Where Was Capital "L" Learning?

So, learning was definitely at the party. CSOD is keeping innovation pace with the industry in the form of AI coaches, simulation-based learning, and pathways to personalisation and contextualisation. Likewise, with agentic interface and headless MCPs from an admin and backend standpoint. However, L&D was not a main character. I do not disagree with this decision (although I regret I titled my book “The Eight Levers of EdTech Transformation”).

The truth is that learning is not going to slot well into Workforce Readiness until we get the underpinning infrastructure right. We need to know what is being automated, what skills we have and need, what tasks are being done, in order to activate learning properly. Sure, we can, and must, act in the meantime, but I would argue L&D is more in a supporting role in the near term. That said, it will need to evolve into a new entity, and fast. I have loads of thoughts about that, natch.

The other stuff

A standout for me was the breakout session on "Know, don't guess. How workforce intelligence saves you from expensive guesswork" Paul Scott & Dan Tesnjak expounded upon People Graph data, as well as how data insights can inform people strategy.

The keynote from Bo Lykkegaard from IDC was a masterclass in stellar data analysis, bringing forward not just statistics, but actionable insights. I was especially impressed with their take on workforce composition (see slide below).

Things that made me ponder:

• Are we building for sameness? If everyone is receiving the same AI coaching toward the same skills, do we engineer out the X Factor? The weird edge (where I reside)? The person who does the thing differently and turns out to be right?
• What about opt-outs? If someone declines this type of data collection, can we guarantee equivalent access to internal mobility and development opportunities? Or does opting out become a career penalty?
• Will people game it? They always do. Necessity is the mother of invention, and performance metrics are basically an invitation to optimise for the metric rather than the thing the metric was supposed to measure.

These aren't questions just for CSOD. They're questions for all of us.

When people ask 8Levers "what's the best platform," I counter with the same question: what's the best pair of jeans? Durability? Fashion? Comfort? Petite cut for those of us closer to the ground (like moi)? It depends.

CSOD in its current form is for an enterprise moving in complex directions, that treats people as a genuine strategic asset, and is actively preparing to redesign work for the agentic AI era. A lot of CEOs will raise their hands for that description. The harder question is whether they're truly ready to act on it. As in, back away from the nine-box grid, retire the annual performance review, and invest seriously in change management.

PSA: Not a paid endorsement. I wrote this in a long-form article because I had 7.5 hours to kill from LHR to YYZ and a working Wi-Fi connection. In full transparency, I was fed and watered by the CSOD team (with genuine thanks to Kate Graham, Mini Peiris and so many more!).