Cornerstone

Cornerstone sells learning and talent software to about 7,000 organisations, and in May 2026 it relaunched its platform as Cornerstone Workforce AI, with a skills engine at its core. The standard skills features come with its learning and talent products: they suggest skills for each person, count the ones employees confirm, and set skill levels from ratings and a system prediction. Two add-ons, Skills Architect and People Graph, work out what people can do from their work, their learning and the way they collaborate. Cornerstone does not publish a price for any product, and the skills library costs $0 extra, so far, on top of its learning and talent products.

By Ashish Manchanda Published 16 Sep 2026 Last updated 16 Sep 2026

In one line

The skills features included with Cornerstone’s learning and talent products, built on suggestions people confirm and rate, with add-ons that work from people’s work at extra cost.

Buy it if

You already run Cornerstone for learning or talent, you want each person’s skills to shape the learning recommended to them, and you are ready to run a campaign that gets people to fill in and confirm their profiles.

Do not buy it if

You need skill levels to reach Workday, or you want the included features to fill in skills without anyone confirming them.

Price

Not published for any Cornerstone product. The skills library costs $0 extra, so far, on top of its learning and talent products, and Skills Architect and People Graph are add-ons.

How it works

What it does, and how a skill reaches someone’s profile

The standard skills features start with a skills library that comes with Cornerstone’s learning and talent products and holds more than 55,000 skills. Cornerstone’s Skills Graph attaches skills to each employee’s job title, drawing on data from more than 250 million profiles, and adds those skills to your library automatically, with your administrators able to screen them before employees see them.

Skills also come from what people put on their own profile. An employee who lists “playing guitar” as an interest gets a skill called “Guitar” added to your library, so that it can be suggested to them. A library-building tool can generate suggested skills for every active employee at once, and copy the skills people have listed in the CV section of their profile into your library. AI reads uploaded CVs for external job applicants, whose skills profile moves across when they are hired, but existing employees do not have that option.

A suggested skill starts to count once the employee declares it. Employees mark which skills they have, which they want to develop and which they want to ignore, and the first two kinds count. Colleagues can then endorse each other’s skills, managers and HR can confirm someone as an expert, and a performance review can include a section that collects skill ratings.

A person’s level in a skill is a weighted average of four inputs: a system prediction based on their work history, the average rating from their managers, the average from their peers, and their latest rating of themselves. The skills assessment is a rating with an optional comment. Your administrator sets the weights, which must add up to 100%, and recalculating every score after a change takes up to 24 hours. Three levels come as standard, and you can add more up to ten. How the system prediction is calculated is set out in a support article for customers, so ask for it before you decide how much the prediction should count.

Cornerstone can also tag your courses with skills, reading each course’s title, description, keywords and subjects, once a setting called Content Skills Tagging is switched on.

On top of the standard features sit two add-ons built for Workforce AI. Skills Architect infers employee capabilities “from actual work” and identifies gaps across people, teams and the whole business. People Graph connects “work, learning, and collaboration signals” to model skill gaps, risks and readiness, drawing on the project management and work execution systems that integrate with Cornerstone. Cornerstone describes the result as capability data on “how people actually work”, “instead of how they describe themselves on paper”.

A Cornerstone customer therefore has two layers to choose between: an included skills record that fills as people confirm and rate their skills, and add-ons, at extra cost, that work from the signals in people’s work. Which layer answers your question decides whether you pay for more than the standard product.

Cornerstone’s skills technology arrived in stages: it bought Clustree, a French company with a skills engine and a skills library, in January 2020, bought SkyHive’s skills technology and team in May 2024, and relaunched the platform as Cornerstone Workforce AI in May 2026. You may also meet the names SkyHive by Cornerstone and Cornerstone Galaxy for parts of the same platform, so ask which version a demo is showing.

Money, size and leaving

What comes included, and what costs extra

Cornerstone does not publish a price for any of its products. Each organisation pays a different amount depending on its needs and size, and Cornerstone gives an estimate after a demo.

Bought with Cornerstone’s learning and talent products, the pre-built skills library costs $0 extra, so far, and recommending learning from skill gaps and matching people to internal opportunities come included. Identifying gaps across people, teams and the whole business sits in the Skills Architect add-on, and modelling skill gaps, risks and readiness sits in the People Graph add-on, so a view of skill gaps across the whole organisation is the part that costs extra.

Skills Architect also comes as part of Cornerstone’s talent development package, and People Graph as part of its top package, for organisations “orchestrating readiness at enterprise scale”. Josh Bersin, the HR industry analyst, wrote that existing customers get the new Workforce AI capabilities by upgrading what they own to a new licence tier, and that upgrade has no published price.

Vendr, which benchmarks software purchases, put the median contract for the whole of Cornerstone OnDemand at $27,402 a year in September 2026, with a typical minimum of 100 to 250 users, and quotes that depend on the number of users, the modules chosen, content subscriptions, the scope of implementation and the length of the contract.

US federal orders show what large organisations spend. The Navy’s order for Cornerstone licences for the year to 23 September 2026 is $6,447,500, a Department of Defense order for licences and content for the year to 14 August 2026 is $5,636,059.25, and the Social Security Administration’s order for a year ending in September 2026 is $1,061,667.50. Those orders do not break down modules or seats, so they give no price per person. An older order does: $413,847.04 for Cornerstone training software for 1,700 users at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, over five years from November 2018 to November 2023. It began before the Skills Graph launched in September 2020, so it is a price for training software rather than for skills.

More than 70% of Cornerstone’s clients are small and midsize businesses, which it defines as typically fewer than 1,000 employees and generally 1,000 to 5,000, and it sets no minimum company size for its skills products. The customers on its page for smaller businesses, at 260, 800 and 2,500 employees, talk about learning, HR, content, reporting and training rather than skills, and its preconfigured packages for those businesses can be deployed in as little as six weeks. If your organisation is in that size range, ask for a reference customer of your size that uses the skills features.

While you are a customer, anyone with the right permissions can pull skills data into Cornerstone’s own reports. Before you sign, ask for a sample export that includes every rating and who gave it, because that history is what you would take with you if you left.

There is a second route to this. The same job, built on the systems you already run, is usually a narrower piece of work, and we have mapped what that version looks like. See it as an agent

Fit

Where it makes sense

For an organisation already running Cornerstone’s learning or talent products, the standard skills features fit four situations.

You already run Cornerstone for learning

Your existing courses can be tagged with skills automatically, so the learning recommended from each person’s skill gaps can draw on courses you already have. If the job you have been given is pointing people at the right learning, you can start with what you already pay for.

You want people and managers to own skill levels

You decide how many levels to use, up to ten, and how much a person’s own rating, their managers’ and peers’ ratings and the system prediction each count towards their level. If you want managers’ ratings to count for more than the system’s estimate, you can set it that way.

You also run Workday

A connector keeps the skills people have declared in step between the two systems in both directions, and sends the skills they are developing across to Workday. It needs a Cornerstone Learn or Elevate subscription, and ratings do not travel with it, so Workday receives the list of skills without the levels.

You already have a skills framework

You can import another skills framework into Cornerstone and load ratings from other systems. When you bring your own, switch off Cornerstone’s automatic skill imports so that the two lists do not clash, which means deciding early which list your organisation will run on.

Limits

Where it stops

Six limits shape what Cornerstone will do for you, and the company’s finances deserve a look before a long contract.

Skill levels do not reach Workday

The Workday connector does not carry ratings or the skills attached to jobs and courses, so if promotion and succession decisions are made in Workday, the levels agreed in Cornerstone will not arrive there through the connector. Setting it up takes more than switching it on: installing it in a test environment needs a statement of work submitted through your account manager, and customers on Workforce AI match each Workday skill code to its counterpart in Cornerstone.

Profiles fill only as far as people take part

At AMS, a recruitment outsourcing firm with more than 8,000 employees, workshops and support material got employees to complete good skills profiles, a step AMS calls crucial for using Cornerstone’s Talent Marketplace, and agreeing what counts as a skill across the organisation took change management. Cornerstone’s setup wizard includes sample messages to help employees build their profiles, but persuading your people to confirm their skills is work your own team will do, so budget for that campaign before launch.

The included library comes with the learning and talent products

Cornerstone publishes no price for its skills features on their own, so if you want them without its learning or talent products, ask whether it sells them that way and what it charges.

Course tagging cannot be switched off

Once Content Skills Tagging is enabled it cannot be undone, so settle which skills framework you are keeping before you turn it on.

Its AI agents are set up with Cornerstone’s engineers

Custom AI agents are typically delivered within two to four quarters, which is six months to a year, and every Cornerstone agent is set up together with its own engineers, a group it calls its “forward-deployed engineering team”. Skills Architect is one of those agents, so expect it to arrive as a project with Cornerstone’s engineers rather than as a setting you switch on, and ask whether the two-to-four-quarter timeline applies to it.

Workforce AI is new

Bersin wrote on launch day that the Workforce AI offering was not fully complete yet. He had talked with customers including a wealth management company, a large media company and Cisco, whose Chief Learning Officer says Cornerstone gives Cisco the skills intelligence to develop, deploy and mobilise talent across the organisation. When you ask for references, ask which parts of the product each customer uses.

Cornerstone has been privately owned by Clearlake Capital since October 2021, so one public view of its finances comes from the lenders who fund it, who report what their loans are worth. In their filings for the quarter to 30 June 2026, three lenders valued their Cornerstone loans at between 57% and 64% of face value, which means each dollar owed was valued at 57 to 64 cents. Ares Capital put the largest of its Cornerstone loans, $137.5 million, at $88.0 million, Blue Owl put its $160.4 million loan at $92.2 million, and Blackstone Private Credit Fund put a $17.8 million loan at $11.4 million. Six months earlier, Ares and Blue Owl had valued those two loans at about 90% of face value. In the quarter to 30 June, Ares marked its Cornerstone holdings down by a net $43 million, the largest fall among the companies it named. These are lenders’ valuations of Cornerstone’s debt and say nothing about the software, but they are a reason for a three-year contract to state how you get your data back, and how the service continues, if Cornerstone’s ownership or funding changes.

Before you sign

What to ask on the demo

Show us a new starter’s skills profile on their first day. Which skills appear only as suggestions, and which count towards their skill level before they have confirmed anything?
What does the system prediction based on work history look at, and can we read the article that explains it before we sign, without a customer login?
What exactly do Skills Architect and People Graph read, which of our systems do we need to connect, and what does each cost on top of the included skills library?
Would we buy Skills Architect as an add-on or through the talent development package, and what does each route cost us?
Across customers our size, what share of employees have confirmed and rated at least five skills after a year?
Your Workday connector does not carry ratings, so if we leave, can we export confirmed skills with their ratings, who gave each rating and the system predictions, in one file?
Because Content Skills Tagging cannot be switched off, what happens to our course tags if we change our skills framework later?
Lenders’ filings for June 2026 value your loans at 57% to 64% of face value, so what does our contract say about getting our data back and keeping the service running if your ownership or funding changes?
For custom agents “typically delivered within two to four quarters”, what does the subscription include, and what is billed as your engineers’ time?

Other options

Alternatives to Cornerstone’s skills add-ons, including buying nothing

The closest alternatives to Cornerstone’s paid skills add-ons, Skills Architect and People Graph, are Microsoft People Skills and TechWolf, or the skills library already included with Cornerstone, with nothing new to buy.

If you already run Cornerstone for learning, start with what you already have. Switch on the included skills library, run the campaign that gets profiles confirmed, and look at what comes back before anyone prices Skills Architect or People Graph. If confirmed skills with manager and peer ratings answer the question you were asked, you can stop there, having bought nothing new.

If skills worked out from the work itself are what you want, price Skills Architect and People Graph against Microsoft People Skills and TechWolf, which our guide to skills intelligence software names as products built for that. Microsoft People Skills reads Microsoft 365 only and costs $0 extra, so far, on top of a Copilot or Viva licence. Microsoft says it is not designed for promotion or pay decisions, so if skill levels are meant to feed those decisions, it is not the product for that job. TechWolf does not publish a price, and the smallest customer it names in a case study is Cotality, at about 5,000 people, so if your organisation is well below that size, ask TechWolf whether it takes on organisations like yours.

If you do not run Cornerstone at all, our guide to skills intelligence software sets out which jobs need skills worked out for each person, and which are served well by a simpler tool that asks your people directly.