Do you have the full picture of how work gets done, what it costs, and how those choices affect performance? 

However, when organizations need to reduce workforce costs, they often begin by scrutinizing contingent workforce spend because it appears to offer a relatively straightforward source of savings. But without a complete view of how work is distributed across the workforce — and what that work actually costs — cutting spend in one area can simply shift costs elsewhere, creating unintended consequences and undermining the savings organizations set out to achieve.

• Work is delivered through a blended ecosystem of employees, contingent workers, partners, shared services, agentic AI, and automation. 
• These different workforce models give organizations access to critical skills, flexibility, and scale. 
• Siloed ownership of different workforce models across the people function, procurement, finance, IT, and operations creates fragmented data, duplicated spend, and unmanaged risk.
• A Total Cost of Work (TCoW) lens enables organizations to connect costs, capabilities, and capacity so they can assess how work is allocated across different workforce models. 
• Leaders can apply the TCoW lens to Total Workforce Planning, which relates to how organizations combine talent (internal and external) with technology enablement to meet demand.

Work is no longer delivered by a fixed population represented in an org chart, but through a more fluid delivery system of employees, contractors, consultants, freelancers, shared services, offshore teams, and agentic AI. At the same time, AI and automation are changing the nature of work itself. Organizations are increasingly deconstructing jobs into tasks that can be automated, augmented, redesigned, or created anew.

Marsh’s Global Talent Trends 2026 reinforces the urgency of this shift. Sixty-three percent of C-suite respondents identify redesigning work to incorporate AI and automation as a top people priority that would generate ROI. But few organizations are ready to act. One of the barriers to action is the fact that only 32% of executives believe their workforce can optimally combine human and machine capabilities. 

The reality is that technology adoption alone will not deliver performance gains. Organizations need the right work design, skills intelligence, and governance to allocate work effectively across internal and external talent, automation, and AI in ways that improve productivity, control costs, and optimize capacity.

Meeting these goals requires leaders to determine how work is best distributed. Yet many organizations still lack a complete picture of which people and systems deliver work, the cost of this undertaking, and the impact it has on performance.

The limited visibility into the full cost of delivering work reflects how work has historically been governed:

• Procurement manages contingent labor as a category of spend.
• The people function manages the permanent employee lifecycle.
• Finance manages the cost of work through budgets, accounting, and reporting lines.
• IT manages costs and activity associated with technology, AI, and access.
• Operations manages delivery.
• Shared services coordinates the transactional and administrative processes. 
• Payroll processes salary, wage, and contractor payments.
• Legal, risk and compliance oversee worker classification, contracting, and regulatory obligations.
• The facilities and workplace function manages the physical workspace and related employee support costs.

Each function has a legitimate perspective, but no single function sees the whole system. This creates multiple blind spots:

• There is no consolidated view of the cost of delivering work across onshore and offshore employees, contingent workers, suppliers, agentic AI, technology, and enabling overheads.
• There is poor visibility of skills, capacity, and critical dependencies, including business-critical knowledge held by long-term contractors.
• Duplicated spend occurs across hiring channels, suppliers, tools, and overlapping capabilities.
• There is inconsistent onboarding, access, safety, recognition and communication practices that create a two-tier workforce experience and a cultural divide.
• Unclear accountability occurs for worker classification, data, intellectual property, compliance, and the quality of work.
• There is limited visibility of demand, with work often framed as headcount rather than tasks, outcomes, and capabilities.

This is fundamentally an enterprise delivery and operating model problem that leads to weaker workforce investment decisions, unmanaged cost, and business risk.

The solution is not to extend yesterday’s employee processes to every worker type. It is to start with the work, the business outcomes it must deliver, and the most effective way to meet changing demand. This work operating model is explored by Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau in Work Without Jobs. Optimizing the composition of the workforce and understanding the cost of delivering work requires the same cross-functional, enterprise-level strategic thinking leaders apply to changing a business model, entering a new market, or restructuring legal entities. Leaders must be able to identify which work creates value, how it should be delivered, and how the operating model will drive sustainable business growth.

Organizations make commercial decisions every day about where to invest, how to deploy capacity, how to respond to demand, and how to improve performance. These decisions are only as good as the understanding leaders have of how work is actually delivered.

When different parts of the workforce sit in different systems, the organization cannot see the full costs involved, the contributions needed, the capacity required, or the risk involved in delivering work. The consequence is not just administrative fragmentation, it is weaker decision-making on productivity, workforce investment, operating leverage, and risk.

The business case for visibility is often framed around savings and agility. These benefits matter, but they are only part of the story. A consolidated view of work and the workforce allows organizations to make better decisions about how work should be designed, allocated, governed, and scaled in support of commercial priorities.

An integrated approach still allows for different forms of engagement that require different policies, controls, and experiences. What such an approach changes is that all material contributors to the organization’s work are visible, appropriately governed, and properly considered in enterprise decision-making.

Integration can improve efficiency, but the greater value is enhanced decision quality, resilience, and risk control. Without this, organizations will appear flexible on paper but remain fragmented in practice. 

Organizations need a complete view of the cost of delivering work before they can compare and determine the most appropriate delivery models. You cannot make a strategic trade-off between hiring, contracting, redeploying, partnering, offshoring, or automating if the salaries, invoices, accounting treatments, and technology consumption sit in separate systems. The people function may see salaries and benefits, procurement may see supplier invoices, finance may see different accounting treatments, and IT may see software, AI token, and cloud consumption. Each view is partial.

TCoW, as outlined in Work Without Jobs, is a framework that brings the above areas together. It is not simply a larger cost report. It is a decision lens that connects the investment required to deliver work with the capability and capacity that investment creates.

• Direct compensation, contractor fees, benefits, incentives, and statutory obligations
• Agency, vendor, recruitment, and talent acquisition
• Technology, AI, cloud, equipment, workspace, and other enablement
• Management, onboarding, training, change, and transition
• Opportunity costs, including ramp-up time, productivity loss, and duplicated or stranded capability

A TCoW lens helps leaders answer questions such as those shown below.

TCoW can then inform Total Workforce Planning, which involves the allocation of cost, capability, and capacity across all human contributors and AI enablement. This more integrated view delivers better talent foresight by using workforce intelligence to anticipate talent needs, identify risks, and act sooner. TCoW helps organizations move beyond managing only static internal talent pools toward a broader view of capability across the full work ecosystem. In this way, TCoW provides an economic and operational foundation for more forward-looking decisions about skills, capacity, and delivery.

But better visibility alone is not enough. Real value comes when organizations translate that insight into a different set of management assumptions, governance principles, and operating practices. The shift is illustrated in the transition table below.

The final principle matters especially in the human–machine era. Work redesign, workforce intelligence, and HR reinvention are tightly connected. A new tool cannot compensate for an old process, and a new workforce strategy cannot succeed without the operating model to execute it.

As work and skills become more dynamic, and human–machine collaboration becomes more common, the boundaries between talent, procurement, AI, technology, and operations matter less than the outcomes the enterprise must deliver. The cost of delivering work is therefore an enterprise-wide issue, not simply a resourcing concern. 

TCoW provides the economic lens, while Total Workforce Planning helps leaders apply that lens to decisions about redeployment, contingent labor, hiring, and AI-enabled delivery. Together, these frameworks support more deliberate choices about how work gets done and how value is created.