Change the Course of Your People’s Careers with Capabilities AI

It sounds simple. But as anyone working in HR, L&D, or talent development knows, it rarely is. 

Executives want to see ROI on learning. Managers just want to get through the latest round of reviews. Employees want growth, recognition, and promotions—and they’ll leave if they don’t get them. 

Meanwhile, you’re juggling siloed tools, systems, and spreadsheets, trying to make sense of learning metrics, performance data, and talent needs—none of which talk to each other. 

That’s why we built Capabilities. 

Meet Capabilities

Capabilities provides one home for learners, leaders, and organizations to track performance. Designed to give every person in your organization a clear path forward—one they can own—and every HR leader proof that development has an impact. 

With Capabilities, you can: 

• Clearly define what great performance looks like for every role 
• Assess people in real time, with 360-degree feedback 
• Develop a plan to get them where they want to go  
• See who’s ready to move into a new role 
• Track the impact of behavioral change on business goals over time. 

What normally takes anywhere from six months to three years and tens of thousands in consulting fees, Capabilities AI can do in minutes.

What is Capabilities AI? 

Our approach to AI is grounded in providing more context for learners, not more content. That means showing every employee what they need to learn, why it matters to their performance, and how to grow into their role—not just surfacing another video or course. 

Capabilities AI is built to work with humans, not instead of them. It reads your business strategy and job data to identify the capabilities people need to succeed. Then it maps those capabilities to roles, cohorts, and content to build tailored development plans—automatically, but never unreviewed. 

You stay in control of approvals, language, and strategic direction. Capabilities AI does the tedious heavy lifting, so your team can focus on the moments that need a human touch. 

Whether you’re starting from scratch or importing an existing framework, Capabilities AI meets you where you are. 

How does the AI work? 

Capabilities AI uses purpose-built agents running on foundational models accessed via Amazon Bedrock. This keeps everything within a secure, IRAP-compliant environment. 

These agents apply natural language processing (NLP) and classification techniques to parse your business documents—like strategy decks, frameworks, or job descriptions—and extract the most relevant capabilities. 

But here’s the key: It’s always a first draft, not a final decision. All suggestions can be reviewed, edited, and approved by your team. You control the language, the structure, and the rollout. The AI does the heavy lifting—so you can focus on the strategy, nuance, and context that only a human can provide. 

How is Capabilities different from performance management tools? 

Traditional performance systems track completions, skills, and annual reviews. Capabilities tracks real growth. 

Instead of focusing solely on skills (which change fast and lack business context), our platform is led by cumulative, dynamic capabilities—or the knowledge, skills, tools, processes, and behaviors that show how someone’s improving over time. 

And unlike legacy systems that stop at course completions, Capabilities uses frequent assessments to track: 

• How someone is performing right now 
• What content helped them improve 
• What’s changed as a result 

Take Jane, a new team leader. She self-assesses her leadership communication at Developing—below the Proficient level required for her role. Her manager agrees. 

Capabilities assigns her a targeted workshop. Over the next 90 days, she applies what she’s learned, runs structured team check-ins, and receives weekly coaching from her manager. 

At her next assessment, her: 

• Team rates her higher in 360 feedback 
• Manager moves her to Proficient, citing clear improvement 
• Dashboard updates to reflect her growth, with clear evidence linked. 

Rather than a yearly, anxiety-fueled ranking, both Jane and her manager have on-demand access to her performance data. This creates the psychological safety they need to talk about and support her performance. 

How Capabilities works 

HR leaders are already managing massive tech stacks. Capabilities isn’t another platform to babysit—it’s the connective tissue between your systems. 

With Acorn LMS 

Give your people meaningful career pathways from hire to retire by connecting Acorn’s internal and/or external LMSs with Capabilities. Start building development plans from day one.

With your LMS 

Using APIs, upgrade your LMS to a Performance Learning Management System (PLMS) by mapping capabilities to content, and finally show the impact of your learning programs.  

Standalone 

Help learners and leaders have productive performance conversations with one platform for capability assessments. Everyone sees the same information in central dashboards; no need to manually cobble together data.

5 ways Capabilities AI does the heavy lifting  

1. Define what great looks like 

Upload your business strategy or goals, and Capabilities AI finds the right capabilities from our Capability Library.  

Need something industry-standard? Import an existing framework like SFIA, IFW or even your own and let the AI set it for you. Every suggestion comes with editable proficiency levels and plain-language definitions, so you can fine-tune into your business’s tone of voice or add or remove capabilities as needed. (Remember, you’re in control.) 

2. Map capabilities to cohorts 

Drag-and-drop up to ten job descriptions (PDF, DOCX, even LinkedIn profiles) and watch the AI align each one to the right cohort—or flag gaps where a new cohort is needed. 

Oh, and no longer does HR have to be the subject matter expert for every department. Create a shareable link for team leaders to edit, approve, and add local nuance before launch.  

👉 Read the step-by-step on cohort mapping here →  

Optional: Map capabilities to content 

If you’ve connected Capabilities to an LMS, now’s the time to map content to capabilities. It’s as simple as selecting a capability, it’s proficiency level (yes, you can get granular), and choosing the content that best matches:

• Courses 
• Live learnings 
• Videos 
• Resources 
• Third-party content 
• Workshops.

👉 Read more about mapping capabilities to content here →  

3. Run timely assessments 

Set a cadence (quarterly, monthly—your call) and the platform handles the rest: automated email nudges for self-assessments and manager reviews with built-in guidance on proficiency levels.  

Real-time dashboards show gaps in proficiency or those performing higher than their current job level, turning what-could-be awkward conversations into focused coaching moments backed by evidence. 

👉 See how you can empower managers to have more productive conversations →  

4. Launch development plans 

Based on the core capabilities and proficiency level assigned to each role, and the content you’ve mapped to each, Capabilities will put the most relevant content in a learner’s development plan as soon as they’ve finished an assessment. 

Content suggestions are based on a blend of learner history, job role, AI tagging, and capability mapping, meaning that every single person in your organization gets a truly personalized development plan. No manual work required. 

5. Track progress over time 

Our selection of capability reports zoom from an organization-wide view of capability down to an individual’s progress in a few clicks. That helps you: 

• Spot what roles and capabilities are missing in certain teams 
• Determine if training content impacts performance 
• Find where you may need to hire externally based on capability maturity 
• Start better performance conversations between leaders and learners 

👉 Read more about identifying workforce capability gaps →

The bottom line 

Your people want to grow. You just need the system to help them get there. Capabilities turns fragmented people data into workforce strategy with one clear source of truth. 

Change the course of your people’s careers with Capabilities.