APJ Organisations Losing Millions Annually Due to Workforce Culture and Capability Gaps, Cornerstone Report Finds

Cornerstone OnDemand Inc., a global leader in workforce readiness solutions, today announced new research showing that organisations across Asia-Pacific and Japan are losing millions of dollars each year to preventable workforce capability gaps tied to culture.

The report, The Hidden Number: The Economic Value of Culture and Capability, finds that for every 1,000 employees, the cost of unaddressed culture and capability failures is estimated at SGD 1.25 million in Singapore, INR 7.03 million in India, JPY 62.38 million in Japan and AUD 1.64 million in Australia. Notably, around 85% of these costs are tied to retention and absenteeism, pointing to existing teams rather than hiring pipelines as the largest source of workforce cost.

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The research measures workforce capability across six pillars to highlight where organisations are losing value and demonstrate how culture and capability investment translates into commercial outcomes. The findings expose a consistent disconnect between how leaders perceive their organisations and how employees actually experience them.

HR leaders across Asia-Pacific and Japan rate their organisations' workforce capability significantly higher than employees do in every market surveyed, a gap that holds whether the market is high-growth or mature. Researchers warn the disconnect may be distorting strategic decisions on AI investment, restructures and hiring.

Among the report's findings:

●    APJ HR leaders rate workforce capability at 81.5 out of 100, while employees rate it more than 15 points lower across every market surveyed, a consistent gap regardless of market maturity.

●     Around 85% of the economic cost tied to capability gaps comes from retention and absenteeism rather than hiring inefficiency.

●    AI and Workforce Planning is the most significant blind spot region-wide, with employees reporting far lower confidence in their preparedness for automation and role change than HR leaders assume.

●     Indonesia and India lead the region in HR leader confidence but record the largest disconnects between leadership and employee perceptions.

●     Japan posts the lowest capability maturity score in the region and the weakest employee confidence in AI readiness.

●     Capability gaps widen in larger enterprises, where organisational complexity amplifies disconnects in leadership credibility, workforce planning and internal talent mobility.

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The findings echo a separate Cornerstone study recently released, which found that in a survey of 2,000 US and UK employees, 46% reported using AI tools at work without any formal training from their employer, and 65% were building AI skills independently outside of work.

The consistent pattern of employees navigating AI adoption without adequate organisational support points to a structural gap in how organisations globally are managing the human side of AI deployment.

"The most important drivers of performance in modern organisations have historically been invisible. They sit across attrition, lost productivity, delayed hiring, contractor reliance and failed transformation outcomes, but are rarely measured as one workforce lever," said Brenton Smith, Vice President, Asia-Pacific & Japan at Cornerstone OnDemand.

"This research gives APJ leaders a new way to see their Invisible P&L. The organisations that will outperform over the next five years are those that treat workforce capability as a measurable commercial system, not a soft HR metric."

To help organisations address these gaps, Cornerstone launched Cornerstone Workforce AI™, the intelligence platform for workforce readiness, designed to deliver the insights leaders want, the skills people need, and AI agents that make action easy.
 
At its core are the Cornerstone People Graph™ and Cornerstone Skills Engine, which combine to turn two decades of workforce data across 45 million users, terabytes of labour market intelligence, a taxonomy of more than 55,000 skills, over 1 billion workforce profiles, and signals from systems-of-record into an inference layer that powers every decision.
 
The rich, dynamic context this creates, coupled with agentic orchestration, makes Cornerstone Workforce AI a powerful ally for organizations who want to deliver strategic outcomes faster and turn continuous workforce readiness into a competitive advantage.