Forrester The Skills Intelligence Solutions Landscape, Q1 2026

Your workforce data is costing you more than you think

Skills intelligence has emerged as one of the most strategically consequential categories in enterprise technology — and it’s moving fast. The Skills Intelligence Solutions Landscape, Q1 2026 by Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent overview of 27 vendors in this space, the use cases buyers are prioritizing, and the market dynamics shaping where this category is headed.

Eightfold AI is among the vendors Forrester included in this report.

In The Skills Intelligence Solutions Landscape, Q1 2026, Forrester Research, Inc. identifies several interconnected challenges that HR, technology, and business leaders are navigating right now:

• Workforce skills data is broken by design. Forrester Research finds that “the tools that most enterprises have…to understand current skills and anticipate future skills needs are subjective, manual, and theoretical.” The result is talent decisions built on incomplete and unreliable information.
• Invisible skills drive unnecessary external hiring costs. According to Forrester Research, “without visibility into what skills exist across the workforce, organizations are slow to redeploy talent, defaulting to external hiring when internal capability already exists.”
• Human capital is your largest unmanaged asset. Forrester Research cites a 2020 US Securities and Exchange Commission finding that “intangible assets drive over 80% of a company’s value, including human capital” — yet most organizations lack the tools to manage workforce skills at scale.
• The adoption gap is real. Forrester Research identifies a primary challenge in this market: “HR’s lack of AI and data fluency inhibits the growth and maturity of this market” — meaning the organizations that close this gap first will hold a structural advantage.

Inside The Skills Intelligence Solutions Landscape, Q1 2026, you’ll find:

• An overview of 27 vendors — mapped by size, geographic focus, industry focus, and deployment model
• Core and extended use cases, including enterprise skills graph development, workforce planning, talent deployment, and job architecture
• The functionality buyers should evaluate vendors on — from skills inference and ontology management to agentic AI and explainable AI models
• Key market dynamics: the main trend, primary challenge, and top disruptor shaping this category right now
• Practical guidance on how to buy in an emerging market — what successful implementations have in common

The Skills Intelligence Solutions Landscape, Q1 2026, Forrester Research, Inc., March 16, 2026.
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