Annual headcount plans used to feel like enough. You locked in a budget, set your hiring targets, and reviewed it again six months later. That rhythm made sense when the pace of change was slower, but it doesn’t work anymore.
At Transform 2026, ChartHop CEO Ian White sat down with Brandon Sammut, Chief People & AI Transformation Officer at Zapier, to talk through how workforce planning is actually changing inside fast-moving organizations. The conversation covered spreadsheets, AI, talent agility, and why the tools your team uses either enable good decisions or quietly block them.
When asked what workforce decision companies would stop making in spreadsheets, Sammut didn’t hesitate: all of them.
Spreadsheets don't have all the data you need to make decisions. When our team at Zapier is trying to make decisions about how to allocate talent, we're not just looking at org charts or hiring plans. We're looking at sentiment data, skills data, and so on.
The issue isn’t that spreadsheets are bad at math. It’s that headcount decisions aren’t math problems. They’re multi-dimensional decisions involving people data that doesn’t fit neatly into rows and columns. When you try to force that complexity into a spreadsheet, the model breaks down exactly when you need it most.
Sammut’s take on the biggest shift in workforce planning wasn’t a technology story. Rather, it was about timing.
For companies that a few years ago maybe did staffing plans every year or even every six months, that is way too infrequent given the pace of change. We need our business to operate closer to the tempo at which the world is changing around us.
Most organizations don’t plan more frequently because the prep work is too heavy. Assembling the data, reconciling numbers across systems, and getting Finance and People teams aligned takes long enough that doing it quarterly, let alone monthly, feels impossible. That’s not a willpower problem, it’s a tooling problem.
Reducing that friction with a modern workforce planning solution is exactly what makes more dynamic planning realistic.
One of the more interesting threads in the conversation was about who should be making workforce decisions. Sammut made a point that often gets lost in discussions about centralized HR strategy: the people closest to the work carry context that never shows up in a data layer.
The hardest role in an organization is that middle manager who's trying to plan a team. If the decision-making can be pushed down the org chart, that's a really powerful thing.
That’s a different kind of argument for self-serve analytics. It’s not just about saving the HR team time. It’s about giving the engineering director or department head the ability to scenario-plan without waiting on a data request.
According to Sammut, AI has two real superpowers: making sense of large, messy datasets and turning those insights into action quickly.
For HR teams, that means less time building data pipelines and more time doing the strategic work. To deliver on that goal, teams need AI that doesn’t just surface information, but helps close the loop from insight to action, whether that’s updating a plan, delivering targeted training, or rethinking a location strategy.
He also flagged something worth paying attention to: internal mobility looks completely different in a world where skills don’t map neatly to job descriptions. Someone in a non-technical function might now be able to contribute to product development in ways that weren’t possible two years ago. Organizations that can identify and act on that have a real advantage.
This perspective led Sammut to see significant value in ChartHop AI Pro. He says three things in particular stood out:
His framing: great AI tools matter, but they have to sit on top of a well-organized data layer. Without that foundation, you don't get the full value.
If workforce planning still lives in spreadsheets at your organization or if your planning cycles are too slow to keep up with how the business is actually moving, it's time for a change. Discover how ChartHop approaches workforce planning, or dig into our headcount planning resources to go deeper on the frameworks and maturity models behind this work.
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See how AI-powered headcount planning helps HR and Finance teams build scenarios faster, model real-time budget impact, and make confident workforce decisions without the spreadsheets.
Zapier’s Chief People & AI Transformation Officer explains why annual planning cycles are broken, why spreadsheets can’t keep up, and what it actually looks like to make workforce decisions in real time.
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