The Great Convergence: Why Your HR and IT Teams Will Share a Budget by 2027

This shift is already underway. Analysts see steady growth in human capital technology as a durable part of the enterprise stack, not a fad, per Fortune Business Insights. At the same time, many companies are juggling a patchwork of tools and platforms—each solving a sliver of the problem and creating friction along the way—captured in this PeopleGoal summary of Josh Bersin’s HR Tech report. It’s no wonder more HR leaders plan to increase tech budgets in the near term, as highlighted by UserGuiding’s research roundup.

Why budgets are blending

Picture a typical week inside a growing company. HR is asked to validate who can step into a client-facing role next quarter. IT is asked whether the current stack can surface skills across regions and tie into downstream systems. Finance wants one number everyone trusts.

That’s one problem, not three.

When the business needs a single, current view of skills, certifications, readiness, and capacity, you’re not buying “HR software.” You’re investing in shared infrastructure: reliable data pipelines, secure APIs, analytics, and AI that turns activity into insight. It’s the same muscle that keeps customer data clean and finance data auditable. Now it has to work for people data, too.

The hidden tax of fragmentation

If you’ve ever updated the same employee detail in multiple places, you know the pain. Fragmented systems create quiet costs: duplicate entry, mismatched records, manual audits, and missed deadlines. Benefits are a good example. When enrollment, payroll, and HRIS systems don’t communicate with each other, small errors can become time sinks or—worse—compliance headaches, as outlined in Lift HCM’s analysis of hidden costs.

Some organizations try to bridge the gaps with custom builds. Sometimes that makes sense. Often it leads to fragile integrations that age fast and cost more than a well-integrated platform would have in the first place, a tradeoff explored in Concise Studio’s build-vs-buy cost guide.

What’s new: AI-level skills intelligence

The real change isn’t one tool replacing another. It’s AI changing the shape of the work.

Skills aren’t static. Roles evolve. Career paths are dynamic. Manual spreadsheets can’t keep up, and annual reviews are too slow to steer a business. That’s why many leaders are moving toward systems that infer skills from real work, verify them in context, and surface patterns the moment they matter.

Think of it like this:

• Live view of capability. Instead of relying on surveys or self-reports, AI can read signals from projects, learning, performance, and certifications to keep profiles current.
• Early warnings. When a client proposal requires expertise you’re light on, you find out before it blocks delivery. The system flags risks and suggests options—reskill here, rotate there, or open a requisition if needed.
• Personalized growth. Employees see where they stand for the roles they want and what they need to do to get there. Managers don’t guess. They coach.

Industry groups expect major skills shifts over the next few years. The headline isn’t the percentage—it’s the pace. Without a real-time approach, you’re planning this year with last year’s picture.

A simple story: how this looks in practice

The economic case (without the spreadsheet)

Treating workforce intelligence as shared infrastructure changes the math:

• One source of truth. Fewer reconciliations. Less rework. More trust in the numbers.
• Fewer vendors to wrangle. One integration strategy. One security model. Cleaner handoffs.
• Faster decisions. When executives see skills supply and demand side-by-side, planning gets real. Internal mobility becomes the default, not the exception.

The HCM market outlook reinforces this direction, and you can feel it on the ground too: the less time your team spends stitching systems together, the more time they spend solving business problems—see the broader market perspective via Fortune Business Insights.

What to do now

You don’t need a grand reorg to get started. A few practical moves will build momentum:

• Map the current flow of people data. Where does it originate? Where does it get duplicated? Where does it die? You’ll spot quick wins fast.
• Name joint owners. Bring HR and IT leaders together in the same room with a single charter: to deliver reliable, real-time workforce intelligence that the business can utilize.
• Consolidate with intent. Keep the systems that play well together. Sunset the ones that don’t. Favor platforms with open APIs, clear data models, and proven integrations.
• Start with a critical path. Pick a use case that matters to revenue or risk—bid readiness, regulatory skills, a large-scale reskilling—and design around that. Let outcomes, not features, guide the plan.
• Design for the employee experience. If updating a profile feels like busywork, people won’t do it. Use inference and verification where possible to keep the system useful without requiring extra clicks.

Why 2027 is a reasonable line in the sand

Budgets move on cycles. Strategies take a year to shake out. Integrations take another. By 2027, many organizations will have either:

• merged HR and IT spend for workforce intelligence, or
• built a joint governance model that makes the budget lines almost irrelevant.

Either way, the behavior will look the same from the outside: one integrated capability that informs hiring, mobility, learning, and planning with the same clarity you expect from sales and finance.

A human payoff

There’s a business case for convergence. There’s also a people case. Employees want to see where they can go next and what will help them get there. Managers want clarity on who’s ready now and who could be ready with support. Leaders want to move the company without losing the culture. A shared system for skills and growth makes that easier.

Ready to explore your next step

If you’re staring at a stack of overlapping tools and still can’t answer simple questions about skills, it’s time to simplify. Discover how a unified approach can minimize noise, enhance confidence, and provide your teams with a clear path forward.