What Is People Analytics? Why the Definition Is Changing

If you have been asking what people analytics is, and whether your organization still needs a team dedicated to it, the answer has shifted in the last two years. Cole Napper, author of People Analytics: Using Data-Driven HR and Gen AI as a Business Asset and Chief People Intelligence Officer at HRBench, joined Joey Price on Joey’s HR Lounge to make an uncomfortable argument. People analytics has become a commodity. And when something becomes a commodity, it stops being a value-add function.

What replaces it, in Cole’s framing, is people intelligence. Here is what that means, why the shift is happening now, and what it changes for HR leaders at organizations of every size.

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What is people analytics?

People analytics is the practice of using workforce data to make better decisions about hiring, pay, performance, retention and workforce planning. It draws on HR systems, payroll, engagement surveys and business results, then turns that raw material into evidence a leader can act on. Some organizations call it HR analytics or workforce analytics. The labels differ. The job is the same, which is replacing gut feel about people with something you can defend.

For most of the last decade, people analytics lived as a specialist function inside HR. That structure is what Cole believes is now coming apart.

Why people analytics became a commodity

Back in 2022, Cole gave a deliberately provocative talk at an invite-only people analytics conference under the title “Is people analytics a luxury we can’t afford?” The timing mattered. The era of near-zero interest rates was ending, and companies were starting to question the speculative functions they had built during the boom.

His position then, and now, is that people analytics undeniably creates value, but practitioners have to prove it. The gap he saw was not technical skill. Most analysts could handle the data science. What many lacked was the business acumen to connect their work to outcomes leadership actually cared about.

The correction that followed was blunt. Some of the largest companies had built people analytics teams of 300 people. As Cole put it on the episode, it was hard to imagine what 75 people would do, let alone 300. Those teams were doing everything under the sun, some of it valuable, some of it not. The reckoning that followed made the profession leaner, and in his view, better.

The Tree of Value: four disciplines becoming one

One of the most useful frameworks in Cole’s book is the Tree of Value, which began as an article and now anchors his third chapter. The tree has four branches:

• People analytics
• Workforce planning
• Talent intelligence
• Behavioral science

Each branch arrived from a different origin story, which is precisely why they struggle to collaborate inside the same organization. Each one tends to believe it is the one true function that knows the way. What connects them is a shared trunk, and what feeds them is a shared root system: the value of human capital and labor data.

Cole’s newer argument, which he is developing into a manifesto, is that those four branches are collapsing into one. Not four disciplines coordinating better, but a single intelligence layer drawing on the wisdom all four have built over the last hundred years.

From people analytics to people intelligence

People intelligence is the name Cole gives to that layer, and it is in his job title at HRBench. The distinction he draws is worth sitting with. If people analytics is now a commodity, value has to come from somewhere else. Part of it still comes from the data. The rest comes from the intelligence built on top of it, delivered to organizations of every size at a price point that makes it accessible rather than exclusive.

He also points out where the word intelligence comes from in most companies. It comes from business intelligence, a term he jokes has little to do with business and even less to do with intelligence, because in practice it means dashboards and reports. The other lineage is the intelligence community, where signals, human sources and geospatial data are synthesized into a single briefing for a head of state. His provocation is simple. What would change if your leadership team had that quality of intelligence about their workforce?

What happens when the talent you analyze is not human

This is where Joey pushed back on the model. His view is that we are not going to live much longer in a world where the only talent you analyze is human. Agents and increasingly autonomous software are doing real work. If that is true, the people function becomes a work function, and the tree grows a branch nobody planned for.

Cole agreed, and named the version he has been working on: people intelligence on one side, work intelligence on the other, where work includes both humans and technology. Then he identified the blocker, and it is a measurement problem.

There is no equivalent way to measure human work and technology work today. A leader trying to decide whether a problem calls for deploying people or deploying technology has no shared unit of comparison. The command center that would make that decision possible does not exist yet.

Why small and mid-sized companies matter most in this shift

If you run HR for a small or mid-sized organization, you likely have a one-person analytics function. Or a zero-person one. That has always been framed as a disadvantage. Cole’s read is the opposite.

HR needs are roughly equivalent at every company size. Hiring, pay decisions, compliance, retention, planning for next year. What differs enormously is the staffing you can put behind those needs. And if AI proves as transformative as its advocates claim, large organizations start operating like medium ones, medium ones like small ones, and small ones like startups. The lean end of the market stops being the exception and becomes the model.

That makes technology leverage a requirement rather than a nice-to-have. Connected systems, so the data is in one place. A small set of numbers leadership and the board actually act on. The ability to answer a workforce question without losing a week to spreadsheets.

The measurement problem has an ethics problem underneath it

The most sobering stretch of the conversation is about what building that measurement system might require. Cole wrote a short fiction piece in December called The Camera, about a company that buys a tool which sees through walls, reads biometrics, tracks whether you are paying attention, and feeds it all back into the operating model. It pings employees when a bathroom visit runs long. It suggests you seem a little down today and might consider being happier.

It reads as dystopian. His point is that, aside from seeing through walls, all of that technology already exists. The only things standing between an organization and that future are will, knowledge and budget. Which raises the question he keeps returning to: do you have to build a soft dystopia just to get equivalent measurement between humans and technology? He calls it an area rife for regulation, and it is hard to disagree.

For what it is worth, Cole ends the conversation optimistic. His grandparents went from horse and buggy to the moon landing inside one lifetime. He thinks we are due for a stretch of change that rivals it.

Listen to the full episode

Resources from this episode

• People Analytics: Using Data-Driven HR and Gen AI as a Business Asset by Cole Napper
• The Data Driven HR Academy
• The Directionally Correct podcast
• HRBench
• The Power of HR by Joey Price
• More episodes of Joey’s HR Lounge

Frequently asked questions about people analytics

Is people analytics still worth investing in?

Yes, but the case has to be made in business terms. The argument on this episode is not that the work stops mattering. It is that the basic capability has been commoditized, so value now comes from the intelligence layer built on top of the data rather than from having an analytics team at all.

What is the difference between people analytics and people intelligence?

People analytics is the analysis of workforce data. People intelligence, as Cole Napper defines it, is the synthesis layer that draws on people analytics, workforce planning, talent intelligence and behavioral science together, and is designed to inform decisions rather than to produce reports.

Can a small company do people analytics without an analyst?

It can, and increasingly it has to. The practical starting point is connecting your existing systems so workforce data lives in one place, then agreeing on a small number of measures leadership will actually use. That is a technology and governance problem more than a headcount problem.

Need help making sense of your own workforce data?

Jumpstart HR helps small businesses, startups and nonprofits build HR operations that hold up under scrutiny, including the reporting your leadership team and board rely on. Get in touch to talk through what that would look like for your organization.