Peter Beven is a recognised leader at the interface of education, technology innovation and organisational transformation.
In an era of constant disruption, skills shortages and the rapid evolution of work, the business world is beginning to reckon with a tough reality: Traditional approaches to learning, workforce development and innovation are no longer fit for purpose. Despite large investments across multiple “tech” domains, a critical capability gap continues to grow, leaving organizations disconnected from the true levers of productivity.
Enter capabilitytech—an emerging category of technology aimed at building real, measurable and adaptable capability in people and organizations. Unlike legacy systems that operate in silos, capabilitytech platforms harness the power of AI to integrate learning, performance and innovation into a unified system focused on building workforce capability at scale.
The Productivity Paradox: Technology Without Traction
Across industries, leaders are grappling with a tough reality: While technology has advanced dramatically, productivity has not kept pace. Many organizations have invested heavily in hoped-for transformative technologies, yet they’re struggling to convert those investments into measurable performance gains. This is the modern productivity paradox—more digital doesn’t automatically mean productivity improvement!
Why? Because while technology tools are evolving, the capabilities required to use them effectively, adaptively and strategically haven’t kept up. And existing tech categories—like edtech, HRtech, productivity tools and innovation platforms—aren’t always equipped to fix that.
How Existing Tech Can Fall Short
Despite their strengths, the tools we’ve relied on to up-skill workers and improve performance might fail to bridge the capability gap. When each operates in a silo, there can be critical limitations.
• Edtech: This boom brought us microcredentials, distributed content models, online academies, AI-curated courses and mobile learning. It recognized that knowledge is a commodity and democratized its access, but in my opinion, it hasn’t necessarily built applied capability. Moreover, edtech can focus too heavily on engagement metrics such as time spent learning or course completion rates, without measuring the actual impact of learning on job effectiveness, business outcomes or sustained productivity gains.
• HRtech: HRTech has made huge strides in tracking performance, managing talent and building competency frameworks. Today’s platforms can analyze skill inventories, manage succession pipelines and identify high potentials with impressive precision. But too often, HR systems are built for record-keeping and reporting—not for capability activation.
• Productivity Tools: These systems, including project management tools, workflow platforms and digital collaboration hubs, are the operating fabric of modern work. However, they operate on the assumption that capability already exists and can hide gaps behind automation or templated workflows. Such tools are execution engines, not development platforms. As a consequence, productivity tools can inadvertently lock teams into shallow efficiency, not deep capability
Solving The Productivity Problem
The promise of capabilitytech is its ability to address the growing divide between digital investment and human effectiveness. I believe capabilitytech can bridge the gap by:
• Ensuring that skills-validated learning is targeted to actual tasks, roles and business objectives. resulting in a closing of the gap between training and performance.
• Delivering development experiences when they’re needed through AI-powered agents, micro-coaching, smart nudges and targeted performance recommendations in real time.
• Shifting from traditional training to measurable outcomes: project success rates, customer satisfaction, time-to-delivery and innovation throughput. This allows leaders to treat capability like an asset class—something to manage, grow and optimize.
• Enabling adaptability, not just efficiency, by doing the right things faster, better and smarter.
Putting Capabilitytech Into Practice
To shift the focus to capabilitytech to drive productivity transformation, let these considerations guide you:
• Shift ownership to performance leaders rather than HR. This means making the functional leadership accountable for the outcomes of the business owner. In project-driven environments, this could mean placing capability ownership within the project management office (PMO), transformation office or operational leadership.
• Perform a productivity-capability audit. Map out the capability needs of your core value-creating roles and projects. Identify where your existing system’s tech layers fall short in enabling real-time skill application. Assess where learning is happening and whether it’s making an impact.
• Embed capability into workflow, not beside it. Invest in AI-powered tools that bring learning, coaching and capability support into the flow of work. This might include micro-coaching agents, contextual knowledge prompts, capability dashboards or in-task learning journeys.
• Rethink metrics. Measure capability in terms of outcomes, not activity. Moving beyond course completions and training hours. Instead, link capability development to key productivity indicators like project delivery time, quality metrics, rework rates or innovation throughput.
• Build a system, not just a program. Capabilitytech is not a single platform or tool—it’s a system that connects learning, performance and innovation. One way to start on the journey is to start with one high-value project or team. Use it as a testbed to connect systems, embed tools and generate data on capability growth and impact. Then, scale across functions or business units.
The Future Of Capabilitytech
Alan Kay, the noted computer scientist and former head of R&D at Disney, famously stated, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
So, here’s my prediction: Capabilitytech will emerge as not just a new technology category but rather a whole new approach to capability building and will become the most important lever to address the productivity gap. It will integrate across silos to define new approaches to measure, inform and direct the application capability at every level of the organization. And it will do so with the real-time intelligence of AI.
Rather than asking employees to step away from work to learn, capabilitytech can bring capability into the work itself with data-informed precision.
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