Share with your CHRO
Remadevi Thottathil, CHRO at LatentView Analytics, argues that the HR Business Partner role is due for a full architectural rebuild, not a refresh. Her case is that workforce AI and analytics have moved fast enough that HR leaders who still report engagement scores and learning hours are now measuring the wrong things entirely. The replacement vocabulary she prescribes includes talent ROI, skill liquidity indexes, and capacity allocation, concepts borrowed directly from finance and operations, not HR tradition.
What this means for your business
The argument lands hardest for CHROs sitting inside data-forward organizations, analytics firms, tech companies, any business where the CFO and COO already run their functions on quantitative models. If your peers in finance can trace every dollar of supply chain spend to a margin outcome but your workforce reporting still stops at headcount and attrition, the credibility gap Thottathil describes is already visible to your board. The question isn’t whether to modernize HR’s analytical posture; it’s how far behind the function already is relative to every other cost center in the room.
The “Data-Rich but Information-Poor” diagnosis is the most useful framing here, and it’s worth taking seriously on its own terms. Most enterprise HR platforms now produce enormous volumes of people data. The problem is that the data pipelines were built to answer HR questions, not commercial ones. Connecting a training program to project delivery speed, or mapping internal mobility patterns to revenue retention, requires a different data architecture and a different analytical team than most HR functions currently house. Buying a workforce analytics tool doesn’t close that gap; restructuring what questions HR is even authorized to answer does.
The sharpest falsification condition for Thottathil’s thesis is this: if AI continues to automate the pattern-recognition work she assigns to machines, the residual value of the HR leader depends entirely on whether they can own strategic judgment, not just translate finance concepts. CHROs who adopt the CFO’s vocabulary without developing genuine commercial accountability will have borrowed the language without earning the authority. The organizations where this shift actually sticks will be ones where HR leaders are held to business outcomes, not to the quality of their dashboards.
Concept deep-dive: Skill Liquidity Index
A skill liquidity index measures how quickly a workforce can redeploy its capabilities across different roles or business units, think of it as the organizational equivalent of how fast a company can convert an asset to cash. High skill liquidity means talent can shift toward new priorities without expensive external hiring or long retraining cycles. It matters now because technical skills in AI-adjacent domains are degrading in market relevance every 18 to 24 months, making workforce flexibility a direct input to competitive response time.
Based on reporting from Tomorrow’s HR leaders will need to speak the language of the CFO and COO: LatentView CHRO, originally published 2026-07-20 01:23:00.
