Tanner Health Deploys AI to Combat Staffing Crisis and Upskill Workers

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – May 28, 2026 – In a move to address the healthcare industry's persistent workforce challenges, Tanner Health is partnering with infrastructure company Worki to deploy a new artificial intelligence platform aimed at supporting its frontline employees. The nonprofit health system, which serves communities across west Georgia and east Alabama, will implement Worki's Career Amplifier to provide personalized career guidance, boost employee retention, and prepare its staff for the evolving role of AI in medicine.

This partnership comes at a critical time for the healthcare sector, which is grappling with projected worker shortages of 11 million by 2030, high rates of burnout, and an average annual nurse turnover rate of approximately 20%. By leveraging AI, Tanner Health aims to turn the tide, transforming how it manages employee growth, engagement, and career mobility in an increasingly complex environment.

Confronting the 'Fragmentation Tax' in Healthcare HR

At the heart of the collaboration is an effort to solve a costly, systemic problem that Worki calls the "fragmentation tax." For years, healthcare organizations have accumulated a patchwork of separate digital systems for human resources, learning and development, scheduling, and credentialing. While each platform serves a purpose, they rarely communicate, leaving valuable employee data locked in isolated silos. This fragmentation creates a hidden tax on efficiency, increasing administrative burdens and making it nearly impossible for leaders to get a holistic view of their workforce's skills and potential.

Worki's solution is not to replace these established systems—many of which, like Workday and UKG, represent significant investments—but to build a smart connective layer over them. The company's AI Workforce Unifying Infrastructure acts as a central nervous system, pulling together disparate data to create a single, actionable source of workforce intelligence. The deployment at Tanner Health marks the first live expression of this ambitious vision, demonstrating how unifying data can unlock new possibilities for supporting employees at scale.

"We've spent years investing in our people and building programs to support their growth, but scaling that impact has been a challenge," said Jill Anelli, senior vice president and chief human resources officer at Tanner Health, in a statement. "Worki lets us turn everything we know about our workforce into personalized, real-time guidance and supports our team as the work itself evolves."

Career Amplifier in Action: A New Tool for Frontline Workers

The first product to emerge from this infrastructure at Tanner is the Career Amplifier. This AI-powered tool is designed to deliver personalized career counseling on a scale previously unattainable. For frontline workers, from nurses to technicians, the platform offers a clear view of potential career paths within the organization. It helps them identify skill gaps, connects them with relevant training resources, and provides a tangible roadmap for professional growth.

Behind the scenes, the Career Amplifier automates many of the laborious tasks associated with career counseling. The AI conducts initial employee intake, drafts preparation materials for human counselors, and generates structured follow-up plans. This allows Tanner's HR professionals to focus their time on high-value, person-to-person guidance, dramatically increasing the number of employees they can effectively support. By making internal mobility more visible and accessible, the health system hopes to improve retention and show its employees that they have a long-term future within the organization.

Preparing for an AI-Augmented Future

Beyond addressing today's staffing shortages, the partnership is explicitly designed to prepare Tanner's workforce for tomorrow. As AI automates more routine tasks, job roles across healthcare are set to change dramatically. This transition can cause significant anxiety among employees who fear their skills may become obsolete. Worki's platform is built to ease this anxiety by empowering workers to evolve alongside the technology.

The platform operates on a design principle called the "Conductor model," where AI agents work around and beneath human professionals to augment their capabilities rather than replace them. The Career Amplifier continuously updates employee skill profiles, identifies emerging competencies required in an AI-driven workplace, and proactively connects staff to learning resources. This gives every worker a credible path to upskill and adapt, transforming the narrative from one of replacement to one of evolution.

"Healthcare organizations are sitting on untapped workforce potential — the real challenge is orchestrating it," noted Craig Allan Ahrens, chief executive officer and co-founder of Worki. "Career Amplifier shows what AI Workforce Unifying Infrastructure looks like in practice. It makes workforce data visible and actionable... and helps every employee evolve as AI changes how work gets done."

A Strategic Partnership Forged by Investment

This collaboration is more than just a typical vendor-client relationship; it is a deep strategic partnership solidified by a direct investment. Healthliant Ventures, Tanner Health's own venture capital arm, recently co-led Worki's pre-seed funding round. This move signals a profound belief in Worki's technology and its potential to solve core industry problems.

Healthliant operates as a "healthcare proving ground," using Tanner's five-hospital system as a real-world environment to validate and refine solutions from promising startups. Their investment in Worki was not based on a sales pitch, but on the technology's performance within their own operational context. This model of a health system acting as both an early adopter and an investor provides powerful validation and helps accelerate the development of solutions tailored to the industry's actual needs.

The investment reflects a growing consensus that the future of healthcare HR technology lies not in replacing legacy systems, but in building intelligent infrastructure that can unify them. For Tanner Health, this partnership is a proactive step to build a more resilient, engaged, and future-ready workforce, setting a potential blueprint for other health systems navigating a period of unprecedented change.