The next People Analytics platform won't be built by HR vendors
The people who built Workday's product strategy, technology architecture, and chief technology office just left to start over from scratch.
Not to improve what exists. To replace it.
Sol (meetsol.com), founded by Pete Schlampp (former Workday EVP Products and Chief Strategy Officer), Jim Stratton (former Workday CTO), Erin Yang (13 years at Workday Ventures), and Jon Ruggiero (former Workday SVP and Chief Technology Architect), describes its mission in three words: "Work changed. Your HR system didn't."
Backed by Sutter Hill Ventures and NEA, their bet is not incremental. It is architectural. And if they are right, the implications for People Analytics are more profound than anything that has happened in the field since the first Workday implementation.
From Recording the Past to Shaping the Future
The dominant HR technology of the last two decades was built around a single concept: the system of record. Capture transactions. Store data. Maintain compliance. The HRIS became the custodian of what happened - who was hired, who left, what was paid, when the review took place. An audit trail dressed as strategy.
The shift now underway is different in kind, not degree. The System of Action does not just store what happened. It shapes what happens next. It executes. It decides. It captures not just the transaction but the context behind the decision, the workflow that preceded it, and the outcome that followed. As Sol puts it directly: "Agentic systems need data, but HR systems capture transactions, not how work actually gets done."
That sentence is worth reading twice.
For many years, People Analytics teams have been trying to extract insight from systems that were never designed to capture insight. They have been running queries against the wrong data model. Transaction logs masquerading as people intelligence.
This is also, at its core, a story about HR's identity. The system of record encoded a particular version of HR: passive, administrative, reactive. It recorded what others decided. The system of action encodes something different - an HR function that shapes decisions in real time, that acts rather than reports, that is embedded in the workflow rather than downstream of it. That shift in system architecture is also a shift in what HR is for. And most HR functions are not ready to accept what that implies about how they have operated until now.
What the Data Literacy Gap Looks Like From Here
The Triple Talent Challenge - geopolitical displacement, AI-driven disruption, and a structural global labor deficit - demands a different kind of People Intelligence infrastructure. Not more dashboards. Not faster reports. An infrastructure that connects actions to outcomes in real time, at the pace decisions actually happen.
Most People Analytics functions are not ready for that world. And the gap is widening.
AI does not close the data literacy gap - it amplifies it. The PA teams already equipped to ask sharp questions, frame decisions clearly, and read evidence without illusions will be supercharged by agentic tools. Everyone else will become dependent on outputs they cannot interpret, from systems they do not understand, feeding recommendations they cannot validate.
The System of Action makes this divide more consequential, not less. Because when the platform starts generating its own data about how work actually gets done - decisions made, workflows triggered, outcomes measured - the teams that can read that signal will have an enormous advantage. The teams running headcount reports from a transaction system will not.
The Blueprint Already Exists - In Europe
While Silicon Valley is building the new platform, a European firm has spent years doing the harder conceptual work: defining what needs to be designed before the platform is built.
Volker Jacobs and his team at TI People have argued for several years that the three-pillar HR model - Business Partners, Centers of Excellence, Shared Services - was never truly delivering on its promise. As Jacobs puts it plainly: "This promise was rarely fulfilled." What he proposes instead is a shift from HR as service provider to HR as product team - a model in which employees and managers are treated as users, friction is tracked as a design failure, and every HR intervention is measured by the actual behavioral change it produces in daily work, not by whether a ticket was closed or a form submitted.
His firm's 2025 research, co-created with 151 experts across 15 major European enterprises including BASF, Deutsche Bahn, and Novartis, goes further. It maps precisely how AI is reshaping HR roles, which tasks are being automated, and what new capabilities HR professionals need to remain relevant. TI People's AI Impact Assessment tool can profile AI's influence across an HR function in under 48 hours. The research projects that organizations implementing product management principles in HR show 40% higher returns on technology investments - not because of the technology itself, but because the design logic changes.
Here is why this matters for the SOR-to-SOA shift specifically.
A System of Action is only as good as the problems it was designed to solve. If the design logic is still built around HR process inputs - who submitted what, when, through which module - the agentic layer will simply automate a broken model faster. What Jacobs calls "work friction" - the accumulated drag between intention and execution in day-to-day work - is precisely the signal a System of Action needs to capture in order to be useful. Not the transaction. The friction around the transaction.
People Analytics teams that have absorbed product-thinking principles already understand this. They ask not "what happened?" but "what slowed it down, what decision did someone avoid, what context was missing?" Those are the questions a System of Action can start to answer - if it was designed to ask them.
Sol describes its architecture as capturing "the context behind decisions." That phrase is Volker Jacobs' thesis rendered in infrastructure. The European practitioner community defined the design requirement. The Silicon Valley engineers are now building it.
The Signal From Silicon Valley
Josh Bersin, writing in April 2026 on Workday's own transformation, framed the central question precisely: "What value or role does a 'system of record' play in the future?" Even the incumbent is asking this question. Workday acquired conversational AI (Sana), recruiting intelligence (Paradox), and agentic capabilities in direct response to the architectural threat.
The fact that the people who built Workday's original architecture are now rebuilding it from scratch, with AI-native design, agentic workflows, and a stated goal of "capturing the context behind decisions", is not a minor product announcement. It is a market signal about where the center of gravity is moving.
First customers go live on Sol in early 2027. That is not far away and I am already curious to check the first outcomes and feedback.
Beyond the Hype: Something Real Is Being Asked of HR
It is worth pausing here to separate signal from noise. The word "agentic" has been attached to enough vendor decks in the last eighteen months to earn genuine skepticism. And the honest reality is that many organizations are already living a partial version of the System of Action - they just do not call it that. AI-assisted drafting in recruiting, predictive attrition flags triggering manager nudges, dynamic pay recommendations surfaced at review time. These workflows exist. They are already collapsing the distance between data and decision in dozens of large enterprises.
What Sol and the next generation of platforms represent is not the arrival of something entirely new. It is the arrival of something at scale, by design, from the ground up - rather than bolted onto a transaction system that was never built for it.
But underneath the technology debate, there is a quieter expectation forming that HR has not fully acknowledged. Business leaders are not just asking for faster and cheaper HR processes (they always did). They are asking HR to graduate from a function that records to a function that acts. The passive architecture was always a symptom of a deeper problem: an HR function that positioned itself as an operation provider rather than a decision partner. The system of record suited that positioning perfectly. It captured what happened after the business decided. The system of action requires something different - an HR function willing to be present before the decision, inside the workflow, with a point of view.
That expectation is not coming from the technology. It is coming from the business. The technology is simply making it visible.
People Analytics has always understood this, at least intellectually. The entire premise of the field is that better decisions come from better evidence - and that HR should be the function generating that evidence in service of outcomes the business actually cares about. Revenue. Risk. Performance. Not engagement scores in a quarterly deck. The DNA of People Analytics is not reporting. It is actionable insight that creates measurable change. The System of Action is not a threat to that mission. It is the infrastructure that finally makes it achievable at the speed and scale the business requires.
The question is whether PA teams will step into that role - or wait to be assigned a dashboard slot in a system someone else designed.
What This Means for People Analytics Leaders
The PA function has spent the last decade fighting for a seat at the table by demonstrating its ability to extract insight from imperfect data. That positioning made sense in a world of static systems of record.
In a world of Systems of Action, the fight shifts. The question is no longer "can we find the signal in the noise?" The question becomes "are we embedded in the workflow where the signal is generated?"
People Analytics teams that are not part of the decision architecture of these new platforms will become downstream consumers of outputs they did not design. They will receive recommendations generated by systems they were not consulted on, built on data models they had no input into, serving business questions no one asked them to define.
This is not a technology question. It is a positioning question.
The Contrarian Observation
There is something almost poetic about the fact that the next generation of HR infrastructure is being built not by HR people, but by enterprise software engineers who understand data architecture, agentic systems, and workflow design at a level that most HR functions cannot access.
Sol's Chief Work Officer is Cara Brennan Allamano, a former CPO. But its founders are technologists. That inversion matters. The last generation of HR tech was designed by HR people who understood process. The next generation is being designed by engineers who understand data. The outputs will look very different.
People Analytics should be at that table. Not as a buyer. As a co-designer.
The profession that positions itself as People Intelligence - the measurement and proof layer connecting AI adoption to measurable business outcomes - has a natural claim to that role. But only if it moves now.
The systems of record are not disappearing next quarter. But the architectural center of gravity is shifting, and the people who built the old center are already building the new one.
The question for every People Analytics leader reading this is not whether to watch Sol and the generation of agentic HR systems it represents. The question is: when the data model changes, will you have helped shape it - or will you spend the next decade working around it?
📚 Sources and references used in this article:
- Sol / meetsol.com - company website, product positioning and founding team bios (Sol Intelligence, Inc., 2026): https://www.meetsol.com
- Josh Bersin - "The Reinvention of Workday: From System of Record to Platform of Agents" (April 2026): https://joshbersin.com/2026/04/the-reinvention-of-workday-from-system-of-record-to-platform-of-agents/
- Josh Bersin - "The Great Reinvention of Human Resources Has Begun" (January 2026): https://joshbersin.com/2026/01/the-great-reinvention-of-human-resources-has-begun/
- Volker Jacobs / TI People - "HR Operating Model for the AI Era" research (2025), co-created with 15 European enterprises: https://www.ti-people.com/hr-operating-model-for-the-ai-era/
- Volker Jacobs - "To Flatten the Trough, HR Must Become the Product Team" (FlexOS, June 2025): https://www.flexos.work/learn/to-flatten-the-trough-hr-must-become-the-product-team
- David Green / myHRfuture - "How AI Is Reshaping the HR Operating Model" podcast with Volker Jacobs (2025): https://www.myhrfuture.com/digital-hr-leaders-podcast/how-ai-is-reshaping-the-hr-operating-model
- HR.com - State of People Analytics 2025–26 Research Report
Originally published in The Agentic HR Shift on LinkedIn.