The Mobility Function Is Being Redesigned in Real Time. AIRINC Just Measured It.

AIRINC's new Benchmark Insights piece on Global Mobility Function Design opens with a premise we've been circling on this blog for months: the mobility team as a purely operational function is fading. In its place, organizations expect mobility leaders to be strategic partners, talent integrators, data-driven influencers, and skilled vendor managers — all while keeping the human experience at the center of every move.

That's a tall order. What makes this piece worth your time is that AIRINC put numbers behind the transition, and some of those numbers reveal just how far most functions still have to go.

A few findings that stood out:

Structure is consolidating, but not uniformly. 76% of organizations have one global leader owning all mobility, and 58% run a fully centralized function, while 35% take a hybrid approach with some responsibilities handled regionally or locally. Mobility most commonly sits under Total Rewards. There's no single "right" model: AIRINC is clear that program size, location count, policy complexity, and degree of outsourcing all shape the answer. Team sizes range from a single FTE to 30+, with larger programs sometimes managing 200+ cases per FTE by leaning on outsourcing.

Vendor reliance is the norm, which makes vendor management the skill. 76% of companies partially outsource their mobility program, with the mobility function most commonly owning the vendor contracts. AIRINC's takeaway mirrors what we see every day: the value of outsourcing isn't captured at signing, it's captured through strong ongoing vendor management that drives efficiency, cost control, and consistency.

The technology gap is real. 61% still rely on Excel and manual tools to run their program, though more than half are looking to adopt or upgrade technology. This echoes the point from a recent Mercer piece we covered: real AI and tech progress in mobility looks smaller than you think, and it starts with fixing the unglamorous friction points, not chasing moonshots.

Financial visibility may be the biggest constraint of all. Only 31% of mobility functions regularly track total program costs. Read that again. Organizations are asking mobility to influence talent strategy while two-thirds of teams can't reliably say what the program costs. That's the "governance gap" we explored in When Did Your Mobility Program Stop Being About the Move?: programs that have mastered move execution but haven't built the data and oversight layer that strategic influence requires.

And that's the connective thread. Being told to "be more strategic" without the structure, technology, and financial data to do it is exactly the trap we described in "Be More Strategic" Has a Mobility Problem, Too. AIRINC's data suggests the mandate has arrived before the infrastructure has. The functions that close that gap: right-sized structure, well-managed vendor partnerships, modern systems, and real cost visibility — are the ones that will actually get a seat at the talent strategy table rather than just being asked to pull one up.

AIRINC calls this a crossroads moment for mobility leaders, and we agree: now is the time to reimagine how the function is designed and delivered. If you're rethinking your own function's design — structure, outsourcing mix, technology stack, or cost governance — that's exactly the kind of conversation our consulting team loves to have.