Held in Austin, TX, annual Outsmart event brought together over 400 Visier customers, prospects and partners for two days of Workforce AI insight and inspiration.

Visier, the globally recognized leader in Workforce AI solutions, announced record-breaking attendance at Outsmart 2025, its annual global customer conference, held this year in Austin, Texas. The event brought together over 400 Visier customers, partners, and prospects from around the world for two days of inspiration, innovation, and Workforce AI strategy.

Kicking off the event, Paul Rubenstein, Visier’s Chief Customer Officer, delivered a powerful opening keynote urging HR and people analytics leaders to embrace change and take bold action. “In a world defined by constant disruption – economic, geopolitical, social, and technological – we can’t afford to sit on the sidelines,” Rubenstein said. “We are experiencing the most profound workforce transformation in over a century, driven by the rise of AI. HR and people analytics leaders must step forward, embrace change, and focus on the business impact of their workforce. Building a Workforce AI Edge is no longer optional; it’s essential for competitive advantage.”

Key Themes from Outsmart 2025

Over two days, Outsmart delivered 25 information packed sessions across three key themes:

• Innovation and impact at the intersection of people and work
• Continuous planning for the adaptive enterprise
• The changing role of people analytics in the age of AI

Underscoring these themes, and central to this year’s event, was the urgent message that HR must become better attuned to the challenges of the business, orienting to productivity and other critical impacts at the intersection of people and work. To drive home this point, customers and partners showcased dozens of examples of innovation on Visier’s people data platform, including:

• A hospital with 12,000 full-time employees used Visier to reduce their agency labor spend by 70%, allowing them to re-invest over $50M to target retention and turnover.
• A healthcare system with over 125,000 caregivers used Visier to bring together operational and financial data to gain a unified view of workforce productivity and make better staffing decisions that directly impacted profitability, quality of service and, ultimately, patient outcomes.
• A global luxury retailer used Visier to understand the people and leadership factors that impacted same-store sales performance, linking together point-of-sale data with a variety of people data across multiple systems.
• A technology company used Visier to combine finance requisition data to provide executive-level insights that impacted productivity and performance.

Recognizing Visier Customer Achievements

As the customer showcase demonstrated, AI is catalyzing the most profound workforce transformation in over a century. Visier is helping organizations navigate that change, finding productivity pathways through augmentation, redefinition, and at times, replacement of roles with AI. By unlocking new strategic advantages across every dimension, economic, social, geopolitical, and technological, Visier customers are redefining what it means to lead in the age of Workforce AI. To that end, Visier recognized customers at Outsmart for their achievements in people analytics and workforce AI with the coveted Vizzie Awards. This year the awards included:

• Business Performance Impact – Tampa General Hospital
  • Tampa General Hospital has demonstrated the powerful ROI of people analytics, using Visier to drive a 70% reduction in agency spend and eliminate the need for inpatient travel nurses. By translating insights into action, they achieved a vacancy rate below 10% and reinvested over $50M into team member compensation—boosting retention, rehires, and overall workforce stability.
    
    
• Best Use of AI with Vee – T. Rowe Price
  • T. Rowe Price has set the standard for AI adoption with a thoughtful, data-driven approach to training users on Visier’s AI digital assistant, Vee. Their commitment to continuous improvement, user feedback, and data literacy ensures Vee is not only embraced across the company, but optimized for real business impact.
    
    
• Rookie of the Year – Eaton Corporation
  • Eaton’s Visier rollout set a new standard for implementation success. Despite the added complexity of building a data mesh simultaneously, their strategic planning and flawless execution led to an outstanding launch, with widespread and growing user adoption and great enthusiasm for Visier all around.
    
    
• Best Technical Innovation – IQVIA
  • IQVIA is redefining what’s possible with people analytics, leveraging Visier in groundbreaking ways to drive strategic decision-making. From optimizing global hiring with Top Location Recommendations to integrating financial KPIs for deeper business insights, their innovation spans multiple functions, including HR, finance, and executive leadership.
    
    
• Perfect Pair: Best C-Suite Partnership – Kong Inc.
  • The power duo at Kong of Mark Tucker, Director, HR Technology & Analytics and Gunjan Aggarwal, Chief People Officer, exemplifies how partnership between people analytics and HR leadership can drive real business impact through data. Their collaboration has fueled executive adoption, bringing data-driven decision-making into strategic discussions and growth planning. Their focus on performance, engagement, and workforce planning is shaping the future of Kong’s talent strategy.
    
    
• Democratizing Data Within HR – Docusign
  • Docusign has made people analytics truly accessible across the organization, ensuring HR teams and business leaders alike have the insights they need to drive decision-making. Through innovative dashboards, tailored training, and automated reporting, they’ve empowered HRBPs, Talent Acquisition, and leadership teams with real-time, actionable data. Their efforts have increased Visier adoption by 75%, while also eliminating manual reporting, making data-driven decision-making seamless, efficient, and impactful at every level of the business.
    
    
• Democratizing Data Beyond HR – Johnson & Johnson
  • Johnson & Johnson is setting a new standard for cross-functional data alignment by bridging the gap between HR and Finance. Their groundbreaking work in headcount reconciliation has created a unified source of truth, enabling the C-suite to make more informed workforce decisions. With headcount accuracy now aligned with Finance’s records, they’re driving stronger collaboration and expanding Visier’s impact beyond HR to business and finance teams across J&J.
    
    
• Content Excellence – Providence Health & Services
  • One of the greatest drivers of people analytics adoption across business functions is well-designed content. In Visier’s 2024 Customer Guidebook Competition, we posed the question of “what ‘great’ looks like” to our entire customer community and Providence Health & Services was voted the best of the best. Best practices in people analytics content design were based on five factors: usage, diversity of personas consuming people data, visual appeal, ability to act on information, and business impact.

Mainstage Speakers Signaled What’s to Come for Business Leaders

Kate O’Neill, author and “tech humanist”

Kate O’Neill delivered a compelling keynote exploring the transformative role of AI in today’s business landscape. With her signature blend of insight and humanity, Kate examined the evolving intersection of work, data, and organizational success, urging attendees to view these shifts through a human-centered lens. Drawing on real-world examples and strategic frameworks, she highlighted how organizations can harness AI not only to drive agility and performance, but to amplify human potential at every level.

Susan Cain, acclaimed TED Talk speaker and bestselling author of Quiet

Susan Cain captivated the audience with a thought-provoking keynote on “Quiet Leadership,” drawing on original research, neuroscience, and psychology. Susan challenged conventional assumptions about leadership and collaboration, highlighting how introverted individuals often drive the most creative and impactful contributions within organizations.

Productivity: How to Rethink the ‘Work & Force’ in the Age of AI

Speakers Stacia Garr, Co-founder and Principal Analyst, RedThread Research, and Jeremy Shapiro, AVP, Human Resources, Workforce Analytics, Merck, joined Visier’s Chief People Officer, Paul Rubenstein to discuss how AI is reshaping job roles and organizational structures, not just automating tasks. They highlighted a critical gap between AI adoption by HR tech vendors and user awareness, urging companies to rethink how work gets done. The key, they noted, is using AI to augment human potential and build more agile, responsive workforces.

Open for Builders Success Stories

“Open for Builders’ isn’t just a theme for Visier, it’s a reflection of how our customers are transforming vision into reality,” said Keith Bigelow, SVP and Chief Product Officer at Visier. “Year after year at Outsmart, we see incredible examples of customers unlocking the true business value of their workforce. Their innovation and ingenuity continue to expand what’s possible, and we’re proud to support and learn from the groundbreaking ways they’re driving performance across their organizations.”

In their session on Strategic Workforce Planning in the Age of AI, Deloitte’s Marc Solow and Russell Klosk explored how organizations can build resilient, future-ready workforce strategies amid economic uncertainty, shifting demographics, and AI-driven change. They demonstrated how to leverage internal and external data, AI-powered forecasting, and process governance to model, plan, and adapt workforce strategies. Case studies illustrated how combining Visier’s analytics with Deloitte’s planning approach enables more responsive, data-driven workforce decision-making.

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Source: PR Newswire