Teri Zipper - The State of HR Technology: Lessons from 2026 and Predictions for 2027

[00:00:03] [SPEAKER_00] Welcome to the HR Data Labs Podcast, now part of the WorkDefined Podcast Network. Join us as we explore the vital role of compensation, strategy, data, and people analytics in navigating today's complex business world. With the resources of WorkDefined, we're now bringing you deeper insights and actionable ideas from top experts. Now, here is your host, David Turetsky.

[00:00:29] [SPEAKER_00] Welcome to the HR Data Labs Podcast. We're here in Las Vegas, Nevada at the Mandalay Bay. Hi, HR Technology. I am so excited to introduce my friend and CEO of Sapient Insights.

[00:00:44] [SPEAKER_02] Hello.

[00:00:44] [SPEAKER_00] How are you? Good to see you too. Terry and I have known each other forever, and I'm not going to bore you with that, but Terry, what have you been working on lately?

[00:00:52] [SPEAKER_02] Oh my gosh, lots of interesting stuff. Some new podcasts myself. I don't know if you listen to the new podcast, The Pivot Effect.

[00:01:00] [SPEAKER_00] I have not heard it yet.

[00:01:01] [SPEAKER_02] It's been really fun and just a different, it's for a different audience. I mean, it's definitely, you know, it's not, but it's not for HR, but it's not an HR podcast. It's really more for the people, the individual, the employee, the candidate. Oh, that's cool. People who are out there, you know, looking for their next gig or thinking about where they want to go or what they want to do, or maybe considering a big change in their career because they've found something that they like and they want to go through it.

[00:01:30] [SPEAKER_00] So, which a lot of people have been doing lately, which is really cool.

[00:01:33] [SPEAKER_02] It is. It's fun. And it's, we're, we're trying to get it out to the broader audience. We're kind of, you know, being an HR company, we're kind of still sitting under that HR umbrella.

[00:01:43] [SPEAKER_02] So we're trying to figure out how we get it out to more people because people have a lot of great stories. So we interview people on their stories. How did you get here? What were some of the big pivots in your life? How did you navigate that? What were the skills that you earn or that you learned that you took along the way that maybe you never even thought those would be important later in life? Yeah, it's, it's just really a fun podcast.

[00:02:10] [SPEAKER_00] Is it released yet?

[00:02:11] [SPEAKER_02] It is. We've done a couple of them.

[00:02:14] [SPEAKER_00] Okay. So what we're going to do is in the show notes, we'll actually put a link to, what was it called again?

[00:02:19] [SPEAKER_02] The Pivot Effect.

[00:02:19] [SPEAKER_00] The Pivot Effect. We're going to put some of the show notes, links in the show notes. But Terry Zipper.

[00:02:24] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Other than that, adding, trying to grow the research, that is amazing. And that data has grown significantly over the last few years. And just the interest in that still, it amazes me every year because people, they want to provide their data because they want to get back the information. Like they're, they're very interested in understanding where the HR technology market is going. And so is everybody else?

[00:02:53] [SPEAKER_00] And it's moving so fast. So keeping ahead of that is, I'm sure, or, or not being behind in that is a huge concern for a lot of people. Yeah. But one fun thing that no one knows about Terry Zipper.

[00:03:06] [SPEAKER_02] Oh my goodness. Because you are an open book. I feel like I've done this podcast a lot and they probably know my one thing they don't know about me.

[00:03:15] [SPEAKER_00] Anything recent?

[00:03:18] [SPEAKER_02] That's a good question. I don't know. I've been over this. My biking, my hiking, working at a cemetery.

[00:03:26] [SPEAKER_00] Wait a minute. I don't think I've ever heard of you working in a cemetery.

[00:03:29] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Yeah. Long time ago and far, far away. That was one of my early pivots. I was, I was working at a cemetery, drawing the maps for the great diggers. Oh wow. So the, the funeral homes would call me and say, Hey, you know, Miss Smith passed away and she's buried in, you know, such and such plot over there. Wow.

[00:03:51] [SPEAKER_02] So I'd go get out this big deed book, get a finder. And then I'd take this map and I'd draw out exactly where she was supposed to be buried and give it to the guys.

[00:04:01] [SPEAKER_00] Wow. That's one where you definitely want to be accurate.

[00:04:03] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[00:04:03] [SPEAKER_00] So Miss Smith isn't parked next to Mr. Johnson.

[00:04:06] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. We did have, interestingly enough, right when I started working there, we were doing a dis, uh, in a disinter, where you take the back out of the ground because somebody had buried them in the wrong spot.

[00:04:19] [SPEAKER_00] Oh my goodness.

[00:04:20] [SPEAKER_02] Yes. And that was when the deed book was in pencil.

[00:04:25] [SPEAKER_00] Pencil. So people. That's a really bad thing for, for a cemetery deed book to be in pencil.

[00:04:32] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. So I started using pen. Yeah. Write the names.

[00:04:35] [SPEAKER_00] Magic marker maybe.

[00:04:36] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[00:04:37] [SPEAKER_00] Well, that's fascinating. But Terry, today what we're going to be talking about is something a little bit less macabre. Yeah. Although it could be. We're going to talk about the state of HR technology in 2026 and some of the really cool things that might happen in 2026. But before we do, I have one pivot. Today is HR technology and we're coming out with Work Carousel. And so one commercial message, workcarousel.com forward slash join so that you too can be a part of Work Carousel.

[00:05:04] [SPEAKER_02] Yay.

[00:05:05] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah.

[00:05:05] [SPEAKER_02] I can't wait.

[00:05:06] [SPEAKER_00] I can't either. But let's get into it.

[00:05:33] [SPEAKER_00] Terry, 2026 has been awash with kind of the fallout from last year and 2025's really huge impact of artificial intelligence. What did you see? What did you learn? What has 2026 taught you? Because we're in October already. Yeah. I mean, I can't believe it, but we're in October. It seems like this year has fallen by. Did anything really change so dramatically from 2025?

[00:05:58] [SPEAKER_02] You know, it felt like a lot of the same, especially with, you know, announcements of people cutting their forces and, you know, all of the AI hype. What I think was a little bit different was everybody's now using AI in some way. Like prior to that, organizations were kind of saying, hey, you can't use chat TPT. Right.

[00:06:21] [SPEAKER_02] You know, people were just, and some people were just afraid to use it or just didn't want to use it. Thought they were very efficient on their own.

[00:06:29] [SPEAKER_00] Why do I need artificial intelligence?

[00:06:31] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. And I feel like this year, I don't know anybody who's not using it, truthfully, in some way, shape or form. Organizations have moved towards increasing, you know, building their processes so they can automate them better. But I think the big reality is, you know, organizations are not seeing the bottom line.

[00:06:53] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. The impact.

[00:06:54] [SPEAKER_02] Right. They're seeing lots of work being done. They're seeing really cool things. Some of the things that, you know, I do using AI are much better than I would have done it myself. I'm like, this is really good and I can build on it. Right. Like it's all me.

[00:07:08] [SPEAKER_00] But that's because you've also learned skills about how to use it. Yeah. In the context of what you do. Right. When we first got these tools, one of the problems was, was that the prompting had to be very specific where you got back slop. Right. For those of you who don't know, slop is crap. Right.

[00:07:24] [SPEAKER_02] You still get back slop.

[00:07:26] [SPEAKER_00] You do. But you have to be very, well, you have to be more accurate about how you're positioning your prompt and make sure that the prompt is more, not just specific, but you've learned skills in being able to generate the prompt in a way. And by the way, the AI has also learned how you are.

[00:07:44] [SPEAKER_02] Yes.

[00:07:45] [SPEAKER_00] And you've chosen the correct models. You've chosen the correct applications to use. Right.

[00:07:50] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[00:07:50] [SPEAKER_00] And so this is a very different world for us than it was a year and a half, two years ago.

[00:07:55] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Even a year ago. It's very different. And it's exciting. It's interesting. I think there's going to still be a lot of great things to come from it. But it's kind of slow going. Slow to go fast. Right.

[00:08:10] [SPEAKER_00] Well, you have to be thoughtful about using it for privacy reasons, but also because it's expensive.

[00:08:17] [SPEAKER_02] It is. It is expensive. We're getting, I don't know if you guys are experiencing this. I mean, we've been using it to help us speed up the data cringing and writing and getting the research done and those tokens add up.

[00:08:33] [SPEAKER_00] One of the, actually a few of the months that we've been using it, we've gotten into multiple thousands of, not 10,000, but not far away from $10,000. And for those of you who are like, wait a minute, that sounds like a lot of money. One prompt costs about $13. Because when you go over, then you actually have to start paying for each prompt you do.

[00:08:55] [SPEAKER_00] Right. And so to consider, so you actually see the bill, it's like, well, $13,000, $1,300, sorry, $13. You can really see how fast it'll add up, especially when you're doing recursive stuff and you say, okay, well, I did it this way. Now let me try and do it that way. Right. So have you thought about building your own internal models on your own internal software and hardware?

[00:09:17] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Yeah. We are looking at that, working with some firms that help us do that. We're also doing some competing things where, you know, we have some of the different, you know, we've got Claw, we've got ChattyBT, we've got Copilot, you know, Perceptics, one of them's Perceptics, I think is one of them. We have them compete against each other on things, which is pretty interesting. And sometimes they improve upon each other. So, you know, they're very different styles.

[00:09:44] [SPEAKER_02] Right. But it's also expensive to do that. Yeah. For writing, it's okay. You know, you don't really, it's when you really start doing the heavy duty stuff. I wouldn't do it for that because that would be really expensive.

[00:09:53] [SPEAKER_00] One of the things we did was we invested in two NVIDIA boxes. They're called DGX Sparks, which are, they're like these small golden things that sit on your desk. We invested in two of them and we're building our own RAD, which is basically retrieval augmented generation. Yeah. Where you basically take all of your stuff and you put it in. Yeah. And you're basically training models on what you built. And so it's using your brain power.

[00:10:20] [SPEAKER_02] Right. Yeah.

[00:10:21] [SPEAKER_00] It's expensive. So each one was like five grand.

[00:10:24] [SPEAKER_02] It's the technology has gotten expensive again because, you know, memory used to be pretty cheap.

[00:10:31] [SPEAKER_00] Not anymore.

[00:10:32] [SPEAKER_02] Oh my gosh. How say any sort of computer with any computing power in it, the prices have just gone.

[00:10:39] [SPEAKER_00] Well, when people figured out that you could actually buy a Mac mini and use some of these models, whether it's open claw or some kind of homebrew thing and actually put models on it. And actually has really good power.

[00:10:52] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[00:10:52] [SPEAKER_00] The price of a Mac mini went through the roof and I buy Mac studios and they went through the roof too. And I just got in before that happened. So I bought a 2026 model right before the prices skyrocketed and Terry skyrocketed.

[00:11:06] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Yeah. It's astronomical.

[00:11:11] [SPEAKER_00] So where do we go from here though? Because 2027 is only two months away. And every time we do this and what's fascinating is we're going to do some retrospective to see over the last four or five years, because we've been doing this for four or five years. What has, you know, how it's, how these things have migrated. What do you see for 2027 and is it going to be very different than 2026?

[00:11:33] [SPEAKER_02] You know, crystal ball. Yeah. Yeah. Crystal ball. Crystal ball. I think it's good. I think we're going to start to see some of the real gains from it. I also think we're going to start to see some of the new needs, the new jobs start to develop, you know, because I know everybody's worried that these jobs are going to go away and never come back. I don't subscribe to that at all. There are going to be jobs.

[00:12:02] [SPEAKER_02] They will look very different. Yep. They will feel very different, just like they have the past 150 years. I know. Other big, you know, revolutions. So, yeah, I don't know if 27 is going to be the year where we immediately notice a big difference, but the wheels are turning and, you know, businesses are changing the way they're doing things pretty quickly.

[00:12:29] [SPEAKER_02] So, I think we're going to start to see those efficiency gains become reality. And then start to see organizations look at, okay, now how do we, how do we leapfrog? How do we do the next thing? Right. And that's where you start to see those things.

[00:12:50] [SPEAKER_00] Do you see the world looking at these tools and looking at technology, by the way, with the lens of what's the ROI? What have we invested in and what's been the ROI? And to your point, hiring people who might actually be able to then focus you in the right areas. Yeah.

[00:13:12] [SPEAKER_02] I mean, I think that's still the gap, right? And there, I don't know that anybody's figured out exactly how to measure the ROI yet. You know, it's not all bits and bytes. It's not all piecework. There are certainly industries where you can measure that a whole lot more than others. But in the information age, it's a bit harder to measure, you know, where those real gains are coming from.

[00:13:37] [SPEAKER_00] Hopefully, we don't put it in AI models and AI models. So, yeah, of course you have to invest in AI. It's not preservation here.

[00:13:43] [SPEAKER_02] Yes, of course. But, I mean, you know, and it's interesting in the 1850s, something like 75 to 90 percent of people were in farming.

[00:13:56] [SPEAKER_00] Yes.

[00:13:58] [SPEAKER_02] And today, we feed more people than we did then. And we, what is it, 1 or 2 percent? People are in the farming, you know, have farms, they live on the farm.

[00:14:09] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah.

[00:14:09] [SPEAKER_02] So, and yet people are employed.

[00:14:11] [SPEAKER_00] Well, it's also, well, I don't necessarily know about the last part. But, and we've certainly seen a lot of changes happen in mom-and-pop farms. Yeah. And there's a lot of struggle right now in the mom-and-pop farms being able to, not just with the cost of the way things are, but also just finding people to be able to work on their farms. Yeah. And with the way immigration is right now, it's very difficult to find people, workers, to be able to actually go and do that work.

[00:14:40] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[00:14:41] [SPEAKER_00] It's tough.

[00:14:41] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. I know there's industries that have, you know, they're definitely, you know, the Amazons and the Teslas and the really big companies that are, you know, using the AI automation robotically. That was the thing I think that, you know, to the rest of us has kind of faded into the background for the moment. Like we don't have robots working at McDonald's yet.

[00:15:07] [SPEAKER_02] And, you know, they realized that, hey, we could do all this, you know, brain work with just a desktop, right? Yeah. A computer.

[00:15:15] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah.

[00:15:15] [SPEAKER_02] So that, that's kind of swept things. But I feel like we'll get back to some of the, the robotic side of things. I think that can be a lot more expensive, but I also think that, you know, there are a lot of jobs that, you know, we'd rather not have humans do because they're dangerous.

[00:15:33] [SPEAKER_00] Well, we've seen manufacturing, especially in auto manufacturing and heavy equipment manufacturing using robotics for decades now. Oh, yeah. And the ROI is definitely there, especially from a safety perspective. Yeah. But, you know, to your point, if you, let's go back to the Jetsons where, you know, we used to have the, I forget her name. Was it Daisy? Who was the maid, you know, in the Jetsons household. And she did the jobs that no one else wanted to do.

[00:16:02] [SPEAKER_00] She cooked, she cleaned, she took care of every kid, whatever. We're still out there. I mean, we saw a flying car from Tesla the other day.

[00:16:09] [SPEAKER_02] That was pretty cool. I'm ready for my flying car because I'm, you know, going to be spending all that time in airports these days is not fun. If I can take my flying car and just fly to where I need to go.

[00:16:21] [SPEAKER_00] Well, but if you were from the New York State Thruway, if I had to deal with people over me as well as people trying to cut me off, my son and I almost got killed the other day by someone trying to cut us off. They literally went right past us. I can't imagine a three-dimensional, you know, driving situation.

[00:16:38] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, that'll be interesting. It seemed really cool on the Jetson.

[00:16:42] [SPEAKER_00] It certainly did. But, you know, the thing that we romanticize about flying cars and as well about automation is that they will do things for us in ways in which allow us to do other things, especially easier. What do we find ourselves doing though? Yeah. Every time something automates something for us, we work harder. We double down. Yeah.

[00:17:02] [SPEAKER_00] So, I'm hoping, I'm not going to go away my 20, 2027 thoughts yet, but I'm hoping that all does foment into a way that we can actually enjoy life from our home.

[00:17:14] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. And we built it. You and I are on the same page with that because one of the things I hoped with AI, with all the challenges that we were having from wellness and mental health and all those kinds of things was how can I use AI to help me work smarter?

[00:17:31] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah.

[00:17:31] [SPEAKER_02] Well, it's not this, and I don't want to say harder. We all, it's part of us as humans. It's part of us. Yeah. We compete. We want to do better. We're perfectionists. You know, we want to push ahead. So, trying to imagine thinking, okay, I'm not going to work so hard today is kind of not in our nature. But we need to be, you know, we need to think about ourselves. We can't always go 175 miles an hour, right? Right.

[00:18:02] [SPEAKER_02] We have to slow down. We have to spend time in the moment. And I really hoped AI would do some of that. To some extent, I don't, I don't, I see it making us worse.

[00:18:14] [SPEAKER_00] I totally agree.

[00:18:15] [SPEAKER_02] Now we've got more. Oh, well, we'll finish that. Exactly.

[00:18:18] [SPEAKER_00] Exactly. And I'm approaching 60 right now. And at some point, I'm going to have to slow down. I don't see that ever happen. Because now I have so much, I'm not going to say extra time, but now I have so much other bandwidth to be able to do other things that I find myself going and doing something else.

[00:18:35] [SPEAKER_02] Right.

[00:18:36] [SPEAKER_00] And I want to be able to spend time with my kid. But now that I'm on my computer next to my kid on the couch, him and I watching television, by the way, he's on his iPad too. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Keyboardless computer. He likes fun. Cause he's a, there's something about iPads, but anyways.

[00:18:53] [SPEAKER_02] How old is he?

[00:18:54] [SPEAKER_00] Uh, he's 14 now.

[00:18:54] [SPEAKER_02] Okay. All right.

[00:18:55] [SPEAKER_00] So he gets embarrassed when I say iPad. And that's our cue to end the, no, okay. But, but I think there's that problem where because you and I always look for that edge, we've always looked for that thing that enables us to get more done.

[00:19:10] [SPEAKER_02] Right.

[00:19:10] [SPEAKER_00] This is just going to be another excuse to get more stuff.

[00:19:12] [SPEAKER_02] I know. I know. That's the part I'm worried about, which is fine. I mean, you know, ever, we all go through those stages. Like I'm at that point in my life as well, where I'm like, okay, maybe I won't work. Maybe I'll go take a bike ride in the middle of the day. Right. Because I need to exercise. I'm going to get outside. Exactly. You know, get some sunshine and then I'm more energized when I come back. Whereas it used to feel, I don't know about you, especially when I first started working

[00:19:38] [SPEAKER_02] remotely many years ago, I was afraid to even get up and go wash a load of clothes until after five.

[00:19:45] [SPEAKER_00] Absolutely.

[00:19:45] [SPEAKER_02] Because I was like, I'm on work.

[00:19:47] [SPEAKER_00] I know. And somebody might be watching my keystrokes on my computer. No, but seriously. And there have been certain edicts from companies to say, if you're not doing your job constantly as if you were at work. By the way, they forget about the fact that when we're at work, we used to get up and go to the bathroom. We used to get up and talk to other people. We used to walk down the hallway. We used to get up and go snack. Yeah. We used to actually walk outside for a little bit.

[00:20:12] [SPEAKER_02] I work way harder than I did at the office. Oh my God. People were always bugging me at the office. And now it's like, I'm at my desk. I have to get up just to not get a crank and I'll hang from sitting.

[00:20:22] [SPEAKER_00] I know. I know. Well, this thing tells me when I'm not moving. The ring tells me I'm not moving. Yeah. I got to go. But hopefully, what we figure out in 2027 is we start using those mindfulness tools that artificial intelligence can bring to us. Yeah. And I'm sure Calm or something else is here that we'll have to revisit. But that's how I hope. But what we're going to do is next year, we're going to go and look back on what we said in

[00:20:49] [SPEAKER_00] 2026 and say, did we do any of this?

[00:20:52] [SPEAKER_02] One thing I'd like to see, and sometimes I think we're getting there, is when are we going to stop calling it AI? I mean, I know we've only given it a new name. But I don't mean, I just mean, at some point it's going to become just like our life, like the phone. Yeah. Right. I mean, this has become, I can't imagine getting through the day without my phone. I know.

[00:21:19] [SPEAKER_02] In fact, I was recently out in LA and Susan and I had gone out there together. I dropped her off to do a half day session. And then I was supposed to go to three meetings and my phone wouldn't turn off.

[00:21:30] [SPEAKER_00] Oh my God.

[00:21:31] [SPEAKER_02] And I couldn't do anything. And I'm like, how am I? I don't even know how to get to these offices. I know. I'm going to have to pull up my GPS to find out where to drive to.

[00:21:39] [SPEAKER_00] Do you have a GPS? No, seriously. A lot of the cars that we're in now use our phones as a GPS.

[00:21:45] [SPEAKER_02] Right. So I was like, I don't even know. I can't call her to say, tell me how to get to your office. I can't, I can't go on, you know, Waze and put the address. You need to get a second phone. No. It's called redundancy. I got pretty nervous. And then I remembered this trick that they had taught me one time to do, hold down all three buttons for 10 seconds. Yeah. And I finally got it to reboot.

[00:22:09] [SPEAKER_00] It's basically like a force.

[00:22:10] [SPEAKER_02] It's a hard reset. Yeah. And I was just like, I was in a panic for probably 10 minutes thinking, trying to get it on, trying to figure out what to do. And then I was like, how, what do we want to do about this thing?

[00:22:22] [SPEAKER_00] And, and to that point, I think what we're, what we faced back in the early nineties, late eighties was starting to learn how we deal with what a personal computer could do for us. Yeah. And it became part of every day. We don't say where's my computer.

[00:22:38] [SPEAKER_02] Right.

[00:22:38] [SPEAKER_00] Because right now a computer means different things. It could mean your iPad. It could mean your, your, your literal box that you bring around like our laptops, whatever it is. And there were times we used to go on business trips without our computers and you used to have the slide deck literally physically in our hands. Actually, remember the days where you step transparency? Yes. I remember transparencies too. Transparencies. For those of you who remember what those are. Yeah. And we used to bring them and God forbid, we dropped them on the floor because sometimes they weren't numbered. Yeah.

[00:23:08] [SPEAKER_02] We're way dating ourselves.

[00:23:09] [SPEAKER_00] Oh yeah. Way. But that's the point though. They became part of our lives, the computers, the computing, all that could be a part. And to Terry's point, this technology will also be, by the way, we've been using AI for about 12 years now as Siri, Alexa, Hey Google and whatnot. Yeah. And it sucked and it kind of still does in some ways. It does. But now those consumer experiences we're experiencing with TGPT, open AIs, Anthropics, whatever models

[00:23:35] [SPEAKER_00] you use, they have taught us that there's a better way. And so now Apple, Google, Amazon are upping their games.

[00:23:43] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Not to bag on Apple, but they're kind of sucking in the AI.

[00:23:48] [SPEAKER_00] They have, but they're actually building new stuff into the new technologies that are supposedly, Terry, going to be really cool. I'm looking forward to it. We're going to see that in 2027. So Terry, thank you so much. This has been so much fun. It's always a pleasure sitting and talking with you. I love it. And we'll have to do it again. I know. I know. Me too. And when we don't do it in person, it kind of sucks, but it's still good to see you. And thank you very much. Take care and stay safe. Bye.

[00:24:17] [SPEAKER_00] Thank you for listening to the HR Data Labs podcast. Don't forget to hit subscribe and share it with your network. You can also check out the recordings on Spotify or the HR channel now on Roku and Fire TV. Thank you. Take care and stay safe.