Walmart and Unilever wanted a practical way to prepare workers for roles displaced by automation and changing business needs, but traditional role-based career planning hid transferable skills and made it difficult to identify viable pathways within or across organizations.
Reported impact
The pilot showed that AI-based skill inference can surface hidden worker capabilities, create credible transition paths and help large employers treat upskilling and cross-company mobility as a faster, more equitable response to workforce disruption.
As part of a World Economic Forum future-of-work pilot, Accenture helped Walmart and Unilever build an AI-assisted talent-mobility model around skills rather than job titles. The core technology came from SkyHive, whose quantum labor analysis breaks roles into underlying skills, measures overlap between declining and emerging jobs and identifies the specific skills a worker would need to learn for a successful transition. Accenture used those outputs to build upskilling pathways and test whether people could move across functions and even between organizations in realistic time frames. The pilot ran from December 2020 to February 2021 and linked skill inference, role matching and pathway design so the companies could expose hidden capabilities, reduce bias in career planning and show managers that talent mobility can be treated as an operational business capability rather than an ad hoc HR exercise.
Role and labor-market data are broken into granular skill profiles by SkyHive and its quantum labor analysis engine, then compared through skill matching to identify adjacent jobs. Accenture uses those matches to build upskilling pathways that show workers and employers what training is needed for internal or cross-company moves.
"Accenture partnered with SkyHive, an award-winning Canadian startup that uses quantum labor analysis to assess labor market supply and demand."
"The AI eliminates human bias in terms of who's truly capable of doing which job."
"The pilot showed that people could be upskilled for new roles in different functions within just six months."
"Using SkyHive's technology, however, that number jumps to 34."
"Walmart and Unilever initiated a collaborative, cross-industry pilot program to figure out better, smarter ways of preparing people for new career paths based on their interests and skills."
Review how this reference was scored and trace each normalized claim back to its documented source.
Scoring methodology
Customer Reference Value measures usefulness as a customer reference. Evidence Confidence measures the quality and traceability of available evidence, not independent verification.
Traceability
Field coverage shows which facts each source supports. Dates are shown only when documented by the source.
Related
Accenture Sample Feb 3, 2026 SXD SXD needed a way to reduce material waste in fashion design so discarded textiles could become commercially useful products instead of creating more landfill and emissions. up to 69% in material consumption SXD AI Accenture Sample Feb 7, 2025 De Beers Group De Beers Group needed a trusted way to prove diamond provenance and authenticity across a fragmented global supply chain where manual tracking made ethical sourcing, transparency, and participant coordination difficult… US$3.4 billion AI · IoT · Tracr 
PwC Sample Oct 9, 2026 PepsiCo PepsiCo’s Global Sustainability Office had to coordinate hundreds of processes and data sources, but forecasting and planning still took weeks and stakeholders needed faster, more consistent sustainability insight. 17 agentic loops designed across core process areas AI-enabled data management layer · agentic loops · governance framework 