AI for Workforce Navigation: Building Measurable, Auditable Worker Journeys

The article discusses the need for a 'navigation layer' that can orchestrate worker journeys end-to-end, with metrics, auditability, and clear human control, rather than relying on disconnected systems and 'bolted-on AI'.

Details

The article highlights the challenges faced by workforce programs, employers, staffing firms, and others when trying to support workers through disconnected channels and systems. This results in workers receiving duplicated, irrelevant, or conflicting messages, and programs struggling to prove what is actually working. The solution proposed is a 'navigation layer' that can orchestrate worker journeys end-to-end, with metrics, auditability, and clear human control. This involves thinking in terms of worker journey states and transitions, rather than isolated campaigns, and creating a 'Journey Layer' that listens to events from various systems, maintains a canonical worker journey state, and decides what should happen next. The article emphasizes the importance of starting with a clean, consistent event schema that can be audited before implementing AI, as a simple, boring event schema is more valuable than a fancy model that no one trusts.