From Intention to Impact: Generative AI Makes its Mark
The speed and scale at which generative AI has become part of everyone’s vocabulary and swept across the global business landscape is unprecedented. Over the last 12 months, business leaders have moved past the point of consideration to embrace the potential of AI as an accelerant for insight, process optimization and business growth. The next frontier is deployment and measuring impact at scale.
Yet, the speed at which AI is infiltrating the world of work is creating a clear divide between employers and employees. Almost half of business leaders already believe AI will translate to business growth as early as this coming year, while our own research finds 50% of workers fear the impact of AI on their roles.1 This uncertainty around the eventual impact of AI for companies and employees highlights the fact that we are still in the early days of the adoption of this game-changing technology across organizations of all sizes.
Moving forward, our focus is to help leaders understand the full potential of AI and guide their workforce through this period of transition, while ensuring people have the skills to maximize the technology investments their companies are making. In our recent Experis Tech Talent Outlook study, seven in 10 employers reported that they plan to boost upskilling efforts to fill AI needs within their organization.
From our perspective, we believe the full impact of AI on the workforce will play to the strengths of human capabilities. AI will augment the human capacity to analyze, strategize, communicate and connect better with each other on issues that drive value for organizations. AI can also reduce repetitive and lower value-added tasks as part of any given job. Realizing this potential requires new skills applied to new ways of working. That is our focus as we deploy AI across ManpowerGroup to build our business: connecting our people to deep insights and emerging trends – in real-time – and sharing that knowledge with our clients and candidates.
*"As one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies", we are committed to leveraging AI to grow our business while keeping data privacy, strong governance and industry-leading ethics front and center. That’s why we have brought together innovation, legal, technology and HR leaders from across our enterprise to lead our Ethical AI Taskforce. This group holds responsibility for evaluating the use of AI within our organization so we can innovate at scale and maintain the high ethical standards and commitment to privacy and security we know our clients and candidates value.
- “Building A People-First Strategy For AI-Powered Workforce Productivity”,
ManpowerGroup, June 2024
Our DDI Strategy — A Platform for Profitable Growth
We believe that achieving success in today’s dynamically changing environment requires a distinct strategy to address technological evolution, looming structural talent scarcity and growing demand for specialist talent to drive greater productivity gains.
These forces underpin our strategic choices on how and where to compete. Our DDI Plan (Diversification, Digitization, and Innovation) is our roadmap to address these market opportunities while pursuing three clear objectives: strengthening EBITA, growing our overall revenues and positioning our company for many more successful decades to come.
- Diversification is how we increase the weight of higher-margin offerings across each of our brands – Manpower, Experis and Talent Solutions – by applying data-driven insights to identify where we can move the needle to win in the market. Demographic shifts and tech acceleration are driving talent scarcity and generating demand for more specialist skills. We are responding by developing skills specializations, industry segmentation and training capabilities within our Manpower and Experis brands.
In 2024, we evolved our organizational structure to create even deeper vertical expertise across targeted industries, including consumer goods, financials and real estate, healthcare and life sciences, industrials and tech. We equipped our already talented teams with new insights and specialist offerings to win in these priority verticals.
Now, our AI-enabled dashboards, sourced from our global data platforms, are enabling us to do even more. We can track industry trends even more closely and reduce volatility to market variances, move with greater agility to pursue new market opportunities and prioritize our sales teams’ time to focus on the opportunities that can provide the greatest business impact. - Digitization enables productivity, revenue growth opportunities and Innovation. We have made deliberate investments in best-in-breed technology for our front and back office to establish an industry-leading foundation for business optimization and value expansion for our clients and candidates. This approach to buy the best and build to differentiate ensures we maintain the highest standards in data security and privacy, while retaining the ability to create proprietary solutions that stand apart in the market.
With 80% of our global revenue now running through our industry-leading platform, PowerSuite, we have enhanced our ability to scale innovation across our operations at speed, which will generate positive impact through 2025 and beyond. PowerSuite is key to harnessing our rich, high-quality global data and applying AI to focus our activities where they will create the most value: unlocking candidate potential and enabling our talent agents and recruiters to focus their time on mentoring, coaching and guiding the millions of candidates we interact with each year to find successful careers at our client companies.
Our AI integrations are also enabling predictive modeling of organizational workforce needs. These predictive insights work in tandem with our tools to create personalized career development pathways for individuals – maximizing client investment in every worker.
Our Focus: Winning in the Market – Those Who Own the Talent, Own the Future
While we have worked hard to navigate the macro forces that continue to reshape our industry, we have never lost focus on the core tenets of our business strategy, to build deep communities of skilled, diverse talent that will ensure our clients have the workforce they need to be successful today and adapt to tomorrow.
We know that the brands that attract and retain the best talent win in the market. That’s why we continue to seek new ways to meet our candidates where they are and to be the employer of choice: ready not only to help them find meaningful, rewarding work today, but to guide them throughout their entire career journey.
The jobs we are filling and the skills we are building are increasingly future-focused. Despite the shifting political winds in some regions, the global green transition remains a priority for businesses and communities around the world and we expect the need for green-focused talent to continue to expand alongside a growing need for new skills like AI. Filling global talent gaps is vital to the expansion of these emerging industries and growth sectors.
At the same time, legacy industries are eager to keep pace and modernize. More than ever, enterprises in these sectors are intent on retaining talent already within their ranks by providing valued workers with opportunities to unlock their full potential and develop new in-demand skills that will benefit all.
Success at ManpowerGroup has always been defined by winning in the market and growing our business, by contributing to our clients’ success, improving the lives of millions of people, building more prosperous and resilient communities and a stronger, more sustainable planet. We believe the market dynamics at play today continue to support this client focused, people-centered growth perspective.
Building Our Future
The foundational drivers of change, which we have tracked for many years, continue to accelerate and generate opportunities for our business. Shifting demographics, technology-fueled transformation and the rise of individual choice are shaping a future that is different from the past. Still, we believe employers will continue to place a premium on uniquely human skills like creativity, problem-solving and adaptability, as they seek new ways to upskill and reskill talent and increase mobility within their organizations. We are very confident in the outlook for our business and remain laser focused on the actions we need to take to increase shareholder value in the short and long term.
We will continue to transform our business at pace, investing in technology and talent to encourage greater global collaboration and coordination across and between our brands to serve our clients’ global needs, all while maintaining a strong local presence in every market we serve.
We will work even harder to compete with small, nimble and niche competitors in our chosen market segments and industry verticals. By strengthening our brands, deepening our vertical expertise and building communities of talent with increasingly specific technical and human skills, we will continue to expand our offerings in the fastest growing markets to capture long-term opportunities.
And, we will always uphold the belief that meaningful work has the potential to change the world for the better.
I am grateful for our clients who place their trust in us, and for the millions of workers eager to contribute their skills and talent to making those client companies successful, while learning and growing to meet the moment of tomorrow. Our dedicated teams work tirelessly to serve our clients and candidates and continue to transform our organization.
Lastly, I’d like to thank you, our shareholders, for your continued support of ManpowerGroup.
Chair & CEO