Total Talent Intelligence
Consultancy Services

Talent Visibility | Talent Intelligence | Talent Mobilisation | Talent Capitalisation

AI powered Learning & talent intelligence Consultant

From Sprint to Strategy

Capacity When you Need it

HR and People teams are under constant pressure: ER fires, CoE projects, restructures, M&A, redundancies and board‑level succession demands.

I provide targeted expertise in talent intelligence, AI‑readiness and leadership development, working as your fractional specialist – from a single project sprint, block‑booked days or weeks, to 0.2–0.6 FTE over 12 months.

Imagine clearing your desk of those high‑impact talent projects while delivering board‑ready intelligence and AI‑capable leaders that drive EBITDA and de‑risk growth.

Success Metrics that Matter

I combine technical analytics with a commercial lens to deliver tangible ROI – linking talent intelligence and leadership development directly to performance and EBITDA improvements.

Every project is tied to clear, measurable outcomes: stronger succession pipelines, AI‑ready leadership capability and reduced risk in your most critical roles.

As a qualified coach and facilitator with 30+ years in talent systems, I also build the people leadership that AI transformation demands – ensuring your teams thrive as technology accelerates.

I unlock EBITDA hidden in your Talent by Aligning People, Purpose and Performance using Data Analytics

4 Stages of Disparate Data Desperation

Stage 1 — Reactive

“We’ve got people and skills data in lots of places, but no single, trusted view — and our CEO can’t see a clear pipeline on one page.”

Firefighting mode. Talent issues are dealt with only when something breaks — no real visibility, lots of surprises.

Talent activity is ad-hoc and event-driven. Hiring happens when a seat is empty. Training happens when something goes wrong.

There is little or no unified talent strategy, little or no data – often scattered across systems, spreadsheets and manager memory, and no connection to business outcomes.

Succession plans live in static decks that are quickly out of date, ratings are subjective and inconsistent, and the CEO cannot see a clear leadership pipeline in one place.

The cost shows up as succession blind spots, emergency external hires and strategic decisions made without any real talent input.

Stage 2 — Compliant

“We run talent reviews and generic development, but high-potentials and successors are still mostly based on gut feel rather than validated evidence.”

Process‑driven but box‑ticking. You have reviews and programmes, but they exist mainly to satisfy policy, not to drive value.

 

The organisation has processes in place — appraisals, induction programmes, mandatory training, talent discussions — but they exist as mandatory management activities rather than drive engagement or performance.

 

Talent is maintained not managed. High-potential lists are largely based on manager opinion, and successors haven’t been validated against future role requirements.

 

Individuals don’t always understand their own unique value or how it connects to where the organisation is going.

The cost is development spend going to the wrong people, real high potentials becoming disengaged or leaving, and succession plans that look complete yet fail when they’re needed.

Stage 3 — Misaligned

“We have some good data and frameworks, but strategy decisions are usually made first — then we scramble to find or move the talent afterwards.”

Talent activity and business strategy are out of sync. Decisions about markets, products or structure are made first, then you scramble to find the people and skills to catch up.

 

You may have frameworks, skills data and some good process, but you can’t reliably deploy the right people and capabilities to where the business needs them most.

 

Skills are not consistently mapped against strategy, and big strategic moves — growth, cost reduction, M&A, automation — are often decided before anyone has modelled the talent and skills impact.

The cost is strategic error driven by talent blindness: entering markets you cannot resource, acquisitions with hidden skills gaps, or automation choices that quietly create critical capability risks.

Stage 4 — unproven

“We invest heavily in people, but we can’t clearly show the board what that investment returns in commercial terms, like EBITDA or margin.”

Significant money is spent on people, but the commercial impact is unclear. You can’t convincingly show the board what talent investment is returning in hard business terms.

 

You invest heavily in people, engagement and leadership, but you can’t clearly evidence what any of it returns in commercial terms. You sense there is a lot of untapped discretionary effort and value in your organisation, but the board still sees talent as a cost centre rather than a competitive asset.

 

Engagement scores may look healthy, yet you struggle to isolate how this links to performance, margin or EBITDA.

The cost is missed competitive advantage, budget pressure on people investment, and an inability to make talent decisions with the same rigour as any other capital allocation.

I unlock EBITDA hidden in your Talent by Aligning People, Purpose and Performance using Data Analytics

4 Stages of Talent Intelligence Maturity

Talent Visibility | Talent Intelligence | Talent Mobilisation | Talent Capitalisation

Stage 1
Talent Visibility

“What do we want to do with the talent we now see clearly?” That visibility becomes the foundation for every subsequent decision.

After we work together, you move from scattered data to a single, trusted view of your talent and skills.

Core people data is consolidated across systems into one coherent source of truth, and succession, readiness and risk are visible at a glance.

Succession pipelines and contingency/key workers are identified, consistent and evidence-based, giving the CEO and board a clear, current picture of the leadership pipeline and critical roles as well as succession readiness risks.

Stage 2
Talent Intelligence

“We have validated, data-backed confidence in our future leadership bench.”

At this stage, you understand not just who your best people are, but why they are successful — and how to scale that success.

 

We establish a robust talent intelligence framework: talent cards, calibrated peer reviews and a shift from “High Potential” to High Impact Potential, linking behavioural data and learning agility to future role performance.

 

Development investment follows evidence rather than instinct, and individuals gain a clear sense of their unique contribution and career direction.

Stage 3
Talent Mobilisation

“Our strategic decisions are informed by clear talent and skills insight before we commit, not as an afterthought.”

Here, talent intelligence actively shapes strategy. Future skills are mapped and developed proactively, and a skills-first internal marketplace enables people to move where they add most value, as part of planned development not reactive firefighting.

 

We put in place scenario modelling for your workforce — growth, cost, M&A, automation — so leaders can confidently decide when to build, buy, borrow or automate capability.

 

Talent mobility becomes embedded in individual development plans and succession, not treated as a separate initiative.

Stage 4
Talent Capitalisation

“We invest heavily in people, but we can’t clearly show the board what that investment returns in commercial terms, like EBITDA or margin.”

In the final stage, talent becomes a measurable competitive advantage — fully integrated into how you create value.

 

Engagement, development and performance are designed and managed as a single system, creating a visible multiplier effect on results.

 

Individuals operate with clarity of purpose, meaning and contribution, generating unforced discretionary effort and continuous learning without relying on mandates. A strengths-based, strategically diverse culture and high-trust environment make high performance the natural outcome, not a campaign.

My work is focused on helping organisations move decisively through these stages — building the people, systems, governance and culture that make Stage 4 not just aspirational, but achievable and sustainable.

My methodologies draw on Agile, Lean Six Sigma, NLP, BPS psychometrics, and the Korn Ferry Leadership Architecture, applied pragmatically to the specific context of each organisation — not as off-the-shelf templates, but as tools in service of a clear commercial goal.

I unlock EBITDA hidden in your Talent by Aligning People, Purpose and Performance using Data Analytics

what Else I Can do for you?

Bespoke Consultancy

Here are some of the ways I can help you with your Strategic talent goals

There are a lot of companies and boutique consultancy that can do talent and learning and development. What I offer is the chance to augment services with AI, quickly processing complex tasks, providing slick dashboards on progress and efficient use of your time and mine.

Learners can access to online courses and  resources including learning tools and assessments in my own Virtual Academy, or it can be added to you own LMS/LXP services, or hosted on your own bespoke platform.

Learning Consultant

A learning professional and Head of Learning, there is not much I have not done or seen. That said, I like pushing the boundaries using the latest technology, principles and practices, so look out for something a bit different too (AI is here after all)

Talent Consultant

When I first took a role in Talent Development in 2007, I was tasked with building an executive pipeline for the CEO. I challenged conventional thinking at the time, inviting everyone to take part, not just the ‘top’ 10% leading to higher engagement, higher performance and 8% EBITDA!

Experienced Contractor, Consultant and Facilitator

Projects and Cases Studies

  • Situation: Proposed a new total talent management approach for senior leaders to help drive retain critical contributors, motivate continuous growth and reward high performance. Little or no development existed for c300 senior leaders across the global business.
  • Actions: Investigation, identified success profiles including; competencies, traits, drivers, agility, and linked to role performance and succession suitability. Identified underlying model of high performance, then mapped across to talent development requirements, identified risks and mobility plan, captured within existing systems using AI/data analytics tooling to dashboard and inform executive teams on a monthly basis.
  • Result: Succeeded in creating Top 200 (VP + above), then Top 600 (ED + above) STEP framework (Succession, Talent Development, Engagement, Performance. Built success profiles for key roles leading to 85% bench-strength coverage across 30 countries and a strong 3-5yr pipeline leading to a 45% swing to succession hires for senior executive roles.
  • Situation: Little or no training or development existed for a predominantly technical/professional skilled workforce except compliance training with low completion rates. Attrition and retention and employee engagement were key challenges. Budget predominantly spent on external conferences.
  • Actions: Focused activity into functional swim-lanes (compliance, operations, marketing, tech, central services, product, leadership) later hiring learning managers for each and developing the concept of Skills Academies based on subject matter experts (not ‘trainers’) developing experts and specialising content to role skills required that spanned several years.
  • Result: Supported the business double in size against 4x revenue growth. Improved engagement from 78-84%, then 92%, reduced attrition by up to c40% in entry roles, increased delivery from 1,500-30,000 training completions per year including 73%-92% increase in compliance completions.
  • Situation: Create a way to track and manage senior leadership talent across the 4 brands to provide flexibility and growth of the business.
  • Actions: Proposed and built database tracking system and conducting interviews and coaching for senior leaders across the 4 brands (c100 leaders).
  • Result: Completed the database and coaching in 3months allowing senior leaders to identify and track talent capability, readiness and development requirements.
  • Situation: The client wanted a new performance management system and process due to issues with system scalability, growing requirements, new enterprise challenges that were not linked to performance and management resistance to outdated/nonsensical frameworks
  • Actions: Led the Design phase; migrated data to SAP successfactors, collaborated with CPO, CEO, CTO, HRD and senior team leaders to design and implement a new process, system, and skills development approach for all employees and managers at all levels.
  • Result: Succeeded in reducing operational costs by 50% and delivered the project including design and delivery of masterclass training and full systems implementation in 6m, resulting in contract extension to design and build management and leadership capability.
  • Situation: AI implementation leading to risks of customer service skill redundancies. No application existed in the market to identify and predict skill redundancies.
  • Actions: Working with tech developers and infrastructure product manager to build a career impact assessment. Scoping, market research, analysis and workflow design.
  • Result: Application available for annual fee to help identify skill redundancy risks, advise on mitigation approaches, development and alternative career development to secure successful future career.
  • Situation: Wanted to augment AI into the role of Talent Development. HRIS systems are cumbersome and hard to configure or change. Dashboards are inflexible.
  • Actions: Designed an augmented agentic AI team to understand the problem and identify a solution then develop the solution to production level.
  • Result: Total Talent Intelligence Dashboard that is HRIS agnostic that can build beautifully branded dashboards for clients with data and intelligent analytics that are relevant to their business.

Ready To Take The Helm?

Need help achieving your Talent Goals - then Book a free 30-minute Discovery Call to explore your situation and see how I can help you.

Still not sure how I can help? Check out the resources below on CEO Talent Priorities and Strategies

Book A Consultation Today

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martin@martinlewisknowles.com

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martin-lewis-knowles

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