A few years ago, the Future of Work was a prominent research topic. While progress was made on working and collaborating from anywhere, the broader question of how work itself should evolve has remained unanswered.
Meanwhile, enterprises have pursued successive transformation initiatives for customer-facing roles in sales and service, creating change fatigue and making new initiatives harder to execute.
Today, AI breakthroughs dominate the headlines, leaving change management and people-centered transformation in the back seat. But realizing AI’s full potential depends on engaging the workforce, addressing concerns about jobs, and redefining how work should get done and how roles should evolve.
Against this backdrop, Centrical’s announcement of its Workforce Orchestration System grabbed my attention.
During my briefing ahead of the launch, Centrical Founder and CEO Gal Rimon shared three customer stories illustrating these challenges: JP Morgan Chase introducing new products, Verizon pursuing a strategic transformation, and Unilever transforming its workforce with AI. All three require translating business goals into changes in frontline employee behavior, a complex undertaking at scale.
Centrical offers performance management software for frontline teams across service and sales. Over the past 13 years, it has built an integrated suite to support workforce transformation, accumulating data and codifying best practices for teaching new skills, changing behaviors, and making human-centered transformation successful.
Its new Workforce Orchestration System builds on this foundation to address a critical challenge: translating business goals into comprehensive programs and coordinating execution across teams and systems.
The system works in three stages:
Build translates business goals into the skills to develop or practice, behaviors to change, KPIs, and program elements needed.
Run configures Centrical and other systems to deliver the program, learning, practice, coaching, and challenges.
Get smarter adjusts the program based on actual results, creating a learning loop that continuously improves performance.
Under the hood lies Centrical’s Frontline Codex, which combines two key building blocks: a context graph connecting business goals, KPIs, roles, program elements, employees, teams, and behavior changes; and a body of codified best practices. Together, they provide the context and guidance needed to turn strategic objectives into workforce transformation programs.
Parallels can be drawn with SAP’s recent acquisition of TechWolf, a workforce intelligence specialist. While the two offerings address different aspects of workforce transformation, both reflect a growing recognition that understanding workforce capabilities and managing how work and behavior evolve are essential to succeeding in the agentic AI era.
I have become increasingly passionate about bringing the transformation of work, its redistribution between AI and humans, and the management of associated role changes to the top of the agenda. I look forward to seeing how enterprises put Centrical’s new Workforce Orchestration System to work and how it advances this important cause.