Promoting the wrong person is expensive and happens all too frequently. Anywhere from 30% to 50% of executive hires fail within the first year and a half. Workhuman, an employee management platform, has created a new AI tool, Future Leaders, to help improve promotion decisions.
The tool, which the company announced on Tuesday, can “pinpoint high-potential employees likely to become senior leaders three to five years before promotion.”
CEO Eric Mosley told a crowd at Workhuman’s annual conference in Orlando, Florida, about Future Leaders, saying the company tested it by setting its data to the year 2020, “when we were all watching Tiger King.” The tool was able to predict promotions with around 80% accuracy.
He says Future Leaders is able to reverse engineer why people get promotions. For example, when asked why one person was promoted to VP, it gave a detailed explanation, pointing out that the responsibilities the person had been given meant that they were extremely valued and trusted. The AI called this “strategic trust,” Mosley explained. He said this made him realize that strategic trust was “a key indicator that somebody in the future will be promoted.”
Since Future Leaders is trained on a large dataset of leaders, it can distill the patterns that make great leaders, and thus find and recommend employees who match this pattern. Mosley pointed out that the tool can be used to ensure companies don’t miss talented employees who deserve a promotion.
Several companies have already been implementing AI to help with promotions. According to a 2025 Resume Builder survey, 77% of managers already use AI to assist with deciding on promotions. Tools like Future Leaders go a step further by letting managers “peek” into the future.
However, even with 80% accuracy, making the final call on who gets promoted may still come down to something that no AI tool can define. As Mosley pointed out, it’s still important to use human judgment, and at the end of the day, an AI is only as effective as the human who prompts it.
