Spilling the Tea on HR Tech - A recap of major tech conferences, ServiceNow's UKG partnership to integrate AI agents, and how AI is affecting ageism across industries - starting at age 29 in tech.

[00:00:00] There was a lot of conversation that we had here at the event about just the idea that we as an industry have to be part of leading the AI conversation because we, better than anyone else, understand data and data privacy and how that's going to impact workers. And we cannot stand back and wait for this conversation to come to us. We have to be leading it, right?

[00:00:23] So that was a really, really good conversation. I really appreciated Workday bringing us in to sort of partner with that conversation. I got a chance to talk at their booth to some of their senior leaders here. And, you know, Workday is really investing heavily in their agentic platform and the push they're making for AI. Welcome to the HR Huddle Podcast presented by Sapient Insights Group, the ultimate resource for all things HR. It's time to get in the huddle.

[00:01:00] Welcome to Spilling the T on HR Tech, where we focus on the hottest HR tech news everyone needs to know to be in the know. You'll see I'm joining today, not from my usual background, but from the beautiful Las Vegas environment where we've got conferences and events. We break down the news of the week and help you make sense of what it means for our industry and how it can impact our or your organization. And we are recording today on May 9th, 2025, correct? Right? Right, right, right, right, April, May, we're in May at this point, right?

[00:01:29] I'm like, how did we, how did we get past April at this point? Spring is here, right? Summer's coming down the road. We bring you all the news that you need, you can use this week. I'm your host, Daisy Harris, Chief Research Officer and Managing Partner for Sapient Insights Group, a research and advisory firm. And joining me today is my co-host and our conversation, Cliff Stevenson, our Director of Research and Principal Analyst for Sapient Insights Group. Cliff, well, we've been on the road kind of nonstop the last couple of weeks.

[00:01:54] So, and we're both in, I'm in Las Vegas. You just got back from Las Vegas for conferences and events. So, just what kind of tea are we going to get into this week? There's a lot, but it's not, it's a lot of different stuff, right? Yeah, it's a wide range of conversation. I'm very excited. We don't have as much just straight up stories about acquisitions and funding. We've got some pretty interesting partnership stories, and we do have stories of that nature, but it's kind of on some broader topics.

[00:02:23] So, you know, we're also going to talk a lot about all of these trips we've been on. We've been on a lot. We're going to give you the information you really can't get anywhere else unless you happen to be at these conferences. I know a few of you have said hi. So, for those of you really appreciate it, we're going to keep talking about where we're going. Yeah, we're going to get through everything that we've got, and I know that, you know, we're back on the road again. But some really, just really in-depth stories about, of course, AI, right?

[00:02:53] Yeah. But also about some pretty interesting stories regarding things like ageism and different ways that we are experiencing work. I want to leave it a little vague, a little intriguing to stick through how it works.

[00:03:13] And even some cool just like HR process concepts and things about personal improvement plans and how we make sense of the inner office communications that are going on. So, hopefully that sounds interesting to you. I'll also mention that you said it was summer, but I know we've got a lot of people in the Southern Hemisphere that listen to us. So, winter for you, but still the seasons are changing and this is a big time for all of us.

[00:03:37] HR practitioners globally are going through it right now and we're here to help. Yeah, it's a crazy kind of time. But we're on the road doing a lot of events, but we've also got a lot of guest podcasts coming up. We've got a lot of webinars coming up. So, but just in the next week, by the time I think you'll be there when everyone starts listening to this, you'll be in Denver at the WorkHuman event, May 12th through the 14th, right, Cliff? You and Susan Richards are our founder. So, that's going to be fun.

[00:04:06] Also, May 19th through 21st, Terry Zipper. I obviously have not had enough sleep this week, but that's okay. You guys all get it. Terry Zipper, our CEO, will be at the, will do it at the Total Rewards Conference. And she'll be talking about AI as well as compensation and how all of that works together. And then you and I will both be in Fort Lauderdale at the UKG Analyst event. That's an analyst-only event, and that's going to be May 22nd.

[00:04:32] So, we'll come back with some more insight as to what's going on in the UKG environment, similar to what we have with working at Oracle in the last couple of weeks. And then you and I will both also be at Cornerstone Spark event in Las Vegas, May 27th and 29th. That is their users conference. But also, I'll be speaking at their executive track. You'll be going to kind of touch base with everyone. We've got lots of updates we'll get from there. And then I am doing iSolve's Connect event in Chicago, June 3rd and 4th. Now, that's going to be a big one.

[00:05:00] And we are, if you're interested in joining, to hear some of the new research, they're going to open that up to the public for quite a few of the sessions. I'm really excited because we will be launching our big report on leveling up HR, understanding how bias and other things are impacting the HR function. And we did a little bit of an early preview this week in Charlotte while I was here. And I'm just really excited about this research because I think it's a conversation that right now we need to have.

[00:05:29] We need to understand what's happening in the HR space. And we have to be willing to look at the data around it. So that's going to be a really good event. We'll also, I think, be doing the week after that a live presentation in that report data on LinkedIn Live. I have not done a LinkedIn Live session in a while. So we're going to see how that goes. So we'll give you guys details on that. There will also be, the week after that, a Workday webinar on demystifying the AI environment.

[00:05:54] And that's going to be me and Sadie Bell from HPE co-presenting basically a little bit of what we did here at Unleash. And that's very exciting because I think we'll have more time. We had 20 minutes on stage here at Unleash, which was not enough to get into anything about AI and how it's being done inside of organizations. We're going to have a full 60 minutes to talk about how we're seeing AI come out in the data. And she'll have time to talk about how HPE is creating an AI-enabled environment.

[00:06:24] And more importantly, the governance and the structure. You and I talk a lot about that, that goes around it. And then I think, Cliff, you're going to be also then back at iSolved for their partner event right after that, right? And June 16th and 19th? Yeah, Partner Connect and Sales Kickoff. I'll be presenting at both of those. Again, you know, those are for specialized environments. But anything that's not under NDA, we'll be happy to talk about and bring you updates on what is going on in the worlds of iSolved. And obviously, Workday before that and UKG.

[00:06:53] So we'll really be able to get some of that insider tea. Yeah, it's a lot of events that we're going to. And a lot of, I think, the conversation right now everywhere we're going is AI plus, right? Like everywhere we're at. And so I think we're going to get into a lot of that today, which kind of, I get frustrated. That's what I told a lot of conversations today or last week that I've been having at Unleashed has been, I want to talk about payroll and how AI is working in payroll. I want to talk about talent and learning and how AI is.

[00:07:22] And I would really like to shift this conversation back to the work that's being done. And so that's going to be our goal in a lot of the work that we do. And part of that we're going to be able to do because we're going to have data from the survey coming out. We're going to tell you how people are using it inside each of those application areas. So we had our big public release of the survey on May 1st. So just congratulations. Just a nice little clap for Cliff and team. Just everybody. I mean, our team, Cliff and Tammy and Cole work so hard.

[00:07:51] Three months up to the event where we launched the big survey. We're updating questions. We're looking at vendor names. We're making sure we got the right categories. We're rearranging conversations. Talking to lots of people about what should be in that. Cliff, what are some of the big things you think in the survey this year that people should be aware of before we jump into all the news this week? Well, not surprisingly, we're going to have a lot of focus on AI. More so than we even did.

[00:08:17] We've prided ourselves on advancing the AI conversation within the survey rather than just asking, are you using AI? Which, of course, we ask. But also, why not if you aren't? Are you using it as part of embedded systems? Are you having any sort of ethical guidelines? Well, we're expanding even on that. We're saying, okay, all of those. But also, what are you using it for and where are you finding success? What sort of business initiatives overall are you seeing? Right?

[00:08:45] And then we can tie that in to those AI questions or any of the other questions in the survey. So really getting more of that business focus and those sort of initiatives. We're going to be asking about what sort of tools are you bringing in from outside of work and how are you using it? Are you using Chad GPT on your own? Are you paying for it? Right. I asked that question in the session I did this week and about half the hands went up and said they weren't paying. Like, they weren't paying, which means they're using a free version, right? Exactly.

[00:09:12] So because I think that will give us a more complete picture. And that's what we're really looking to do. We keep expanding it. We sort of somewhat joke about the fact that it keeps getting bigger every year. But I do want to say, and I know I say this every time we get on, we have put in a lot of effort. All that work that Stacey was just talking about, a lot of that work actually goes into your experience. Just like any company, any of these tech companies talks about the user experience, we're thinking about the same thing. What is it like for you to take it?

[00:09:40] We make it as easy as possible, streamline, get to the point for what matters to you and what you want to talk about, and then make sure that that is worded correctly, that you get it, that we can move you through it, and you can make your voice heard because that's what really matters. And I also always love to reiterate that because we're the largest global HR tech system view there is, we're just simply the biggest one. I'd say the best too, but that's subjective.

[00:10:09] But objectively, we're the biggest. Organizations look at us as the sort of true sense of what's really going out there, meaning if they see a comment from our paper, if they see what you've put in there, they take that to heart because they know it's statistically meaningful. This isn't just, okay, well, one person's yelling at us from the comment section. This is, okay, this is really what's going on. We need to make these changes. We need to figure out our service bureau or whatever the case may be.

[00:10:36] So this is a chance to be heard in a forum that is held dear by the executives at these organizations. So whether it's compliments or criticisms, know that those are going to the very highest level. Yeah. Yeah. I always like the conversation that, you know, people are always like, oh, you know, my percentages are so much higher for people using AI. And we were like, it feels that way when you're hearing the hype.

[00:11:02] And if you were talking to the top 10% of companies in the market, those are the emerging tech. And yes, it's exciting to know what they're doing. But when you talk to everybody in the market, from the smallest company who is, you know, a restaurant out in Idaho to the biggest companies running healthcare in the UK, right, in the world, there are just differences in how they're. And not everybody is ready to jump right into the newest trends, nor should they be, right? Like we're going to talk a little bit about that, which is understanding benchmarking and how to use it. But I don't want to get too far into it.

[00:11:32] So Cliff, I know we got to get into kind of where we're at this week with the news. So one of the first things are the events that we've been at. Do you want to talk a little bit? Because we just came back from Unleash. And then I'll kind of cover maybe Oracle and iSelf. You were at Unleash the day before I was. So what were some of your experiences with Unleash in the last couple of days? Yeah, I did a very heavy focus on trying to meet as many companies as I could. I think you were speaking there. I think if I had to summarize our two approaches, you went with the sort of quality and I went with quantity.

[00:12:01] That's not to say that I didn't find quality in those conversations. I really, you know, I had a lot of meetings, a lot of people I want to talk to. You know, so I had really good meetings with, you know, People Insight, which you may know as a higher road. Before I am talking about what they're doing, Findum, Experian, who we'll probably be talking about a lot. We've mentioned before as they continue to grow in the HR tech space. There's Daxtra, who's been here a while, but is really looking to become more well-known.

[00:12:31] JobSync. And some interesting ones that you may not have heard of that I'm just going to do a quick. This is just my thoughts. You know, this isn't anything from them. Interesting one I saw called RAIN that they do earned wage access, but instead of doing sort of a loan based on your pay, right? So the on-demand pay, they treat it like you would like a healthcare deductible or something like that, where they take a deduction out of your paycheck and then give it back to you as you need it going forward. So that's kind of interesting.

[00:13:01] And I also found when talking, they said, also, we don't have access to any data. We don't want access to any data. And it's so different from how we hear most companies that are datafied. And the reason why is that way they don't have to go through all of the integrations, all of the permissions, the security, privacy. They're safe from that. And that allows them to be up and running. And according to them, five business days. So pretty quick turnaround. But it's a different approach. And I found it interesting.

[00:13:31] Octopied, which has a very strange name, but perhaps guessing from that name, you can see that they're in town acquisition, right? Using a large AI model to parse, grab resumes, pull all that information in from as many sources as possible. And Guild, who I had a really great conversation with their CEO, you know, acting as a sort of intermediary on addressing the skills gaps that have been identified by maybe a light cast or something like that,

[00:13:58] and then getting them to the right resources. And then the most interesting thing, actually, to me, had nothing to do with any of the tech. It was a sort of chance encounter. I normally don't get a chance when I'm doing all of these meetings to get to sit in on any of the conversations. It has to do with more of the process side with the sort of people that are in HR, right? And that might be going into like, oh, here's how to do this rather than the tech around it.

[00:14:27] And by chance, I walked in to Winner's Circle, which is an organization that helps place people that were previously incarcerated. If you live in the United States or if you are familiar at all with the statistics in the United States, that is a massive population. For various reasons we don't have time to get into here, that is a huge workforce that's often overlooked. And I found it fascinating because I'll admit, I overlooked it. I didn't think about that.

[00:14:53] I've seen these same types of programs for veterans, for people with disabilities, where we say, okay, this is a big workforce. There's a lot of positives. You shouldn't look at this as charitable work. You should look at this as this is an underutilized group. And Stacey, you talk all the time about where we are with labor in terms of availability of it and how much we're going to lose because of different reasons. There's a lot of it having to do with people aging out. Well, this is a huge group.

[00:15:23] And their tagline, or at least the one that I heard from listening to their presentation, was don't think of this as lowering your expectations. Think about it as lowering your barriers. Meaning, you know, consider this group. They have high levels of retention. They're often coming in with degrees and certification. So anyway, unpaid. I don't even think they do payments. I think they do a lot of work through donations. But it was just different than I normally get to see. So I really want to shout out the great work they're doing. Yeah.

[00:15:52] No, those are, you know, and I didn't get to be there the first couple days because I was at the ISOL event doing their keynote for their Charlotte People Connect. And what, but I did hear that there was a good kickoff here at Unleash with the Lenovo session where they were kind of talking about how they were using AI in the healthcare space and how it's changing the dynamics of what was happening. Right.

[00:16:12] So I think, you know, when you get to hear those inspirational sessions, it really helps us remind us that, you know, payroll matters because it impacts everybody in the organization and it impacts the mission of the organization. When you have a really powerful mission, that's an important thing. Right. So, so all, all great things. I was here for just the last day of the Unleash event. It was good to be here. We haven't been, I haven't been to the Unleash event for several years here in the U.S.

[00:16:39] They are sort of a, sort of an all in focus on HR process and HR technology event. I got a really good chance to catch up with Victoria, who's head of their events planning here. And we talked about how, you know, they're planning to expand what Unleash is doing over time. And I'm, I'm excited to hear about some of that.

[00:16:56] One of the things that I had the opportunity to do while I was here was Workday asked me to be on stage with, with Sadie Bell, who was again, the head of, I'm going to get her title wrong, but basically she oversees all the HR technology and all the integrations of that technology for all of HPE, which is a major job. And we had a conversation about demystifying AI, like I had said earlier, that we're going to do the PowerPoint on and the webinar on.

[00:17:21] But it was, it was great to, to get in the audience confirmation on a couple of things, which is, you know, a lot of hands went up when I asked about, you know, you know, how many AI sessions they had been to, right? Like everybody in the room had been to an AI session. We had about half the room's hands go up when I asked how many people had downloaded the AI, an AI element and were using it. And then half of them went down when I asked if they were paying for it, right? You know, so a lot of people using the free solution still.

[00:17:50] There was a lot of conversation that we had here at the event about just the idea that we as an industry have to be part of leading the AI conversation because we better than anyone else understand data and data privacy and how that's going to impact workers. And we cannot stand back and wait for this, this conversation to come to us. We have to be leading it, right? So that was a really, really good conversation. I really appreciated Workday bringing us in to sort of partner with that conversation.

[00:18:20] I got a chance to talk to, at their booth, to some of their senior leaders here and, you know, Workday's really investing heavily in their agentic platform and the push they're making for AI. I know Ashna, who's their head of product, did a major session earlier this week. Melanie did a session also as well here. She's one of their HR strategy roles in the organization. I think they just, and she was, she's a good friend of ours because she used to be an analyst as well in the Gartner space, Melanie Luget.

[00:18:46] And I just think that it's, it's a conversation that everybody should be having. And it's a, it's a good opportunity to, I think, branch out of that conversation and the practical ways the organizations are doing it. The other events that I've been at this week, oh, I should probably mention, I also had some conversations this week because I was, I did have a little bit of time with, I did stop by, talk to Julie Devlin over at UKG's booth. Love Julie Devlin, those of you who know her know she's on the road constantly at every event.

[00:19:13] She's, she's kind of repping her brand of what's happening in the HR market. And I really love her approach to sort of a positivity in the HR space. I got a chance to stop by the HiBob booth and talk to our friend who helped us do the webinar over there, Rachel. And that was really fun. So we got a chance to do a couple of pictures over there. I got to talk to the iSolve team. They were trying to figure out how I got from Charlotte to this event as quickly as I did. So that was, that was fun. We had a lot of conversation and they had a great hydration booth.

[00:19:39] Let me just tell you, if you're at an event and you have a hydration booth, very nice idea for events. Cause I was drinking water a lot at this event. Did you get one of the pink water bottles? I did. I don't use it. For those of you on YouTube. But it's in color for us, right? Yes. I have one too. I know. I did. I did do, I did do the iSolve bottle. I also got to talk to a couple of people that I haven't had a chance to catch up with. We talked to EnBorder about their onboarding solution, their new one.

[00:20:07] I got a chance to talk to Wellaba, who I haven't seen in a while. And they're talking about how they're increasing their role in the U.S. And Wellaba really does, I think, a really interesting employee perspective on the sentiment of what your employees are dealing with and the challenges they're having. But they don't do it through surveys. They're a no survey kind of company. They do it by gathering data in other external ways. And it was fascinating to see how they've grown over the last year or two since we briefed with them. So we're going to put up a new briefing with them. So yeah, it was a good event here at Unleash.

[00:20:35] You know, I think I had a lot of conversations with the solution providers and the vendors. But we'll kind of see, I'm hoping to get to their Paris event as well and get an opportunity to have more conversations on the practitioner level about where these markets are heading. I also, is it just last week? I think it was just last week. Was that Oracle or the week before I was at the Oracle event? And I do, so the week before we were at Workday Summit, you and I talked about that on the last podcast. This one, we were, I was at the Oracle Analyst Summit right before we did our last podcast.

[00:21:05] So I did want to talk a little bit about what we saw at the Oracle Analyst Summit. That was their Oracle Applications and Cloud Summit. And what's really nice about Oracle is they bring everyone, finance, HR, ERP, AI, all the analysts together. We do a big kind of entry-level conversation. Then we all break out into our individual areas. Their big focus, without a doubt, up front was generative AI and agentic AI and sort of how all that is working together. A lot of focus on the healthcare industry still, a lot of focus on federal industry as well.

[00:21:33] A lot of focus on bringing customers who are buying the whole suite, right? Like that was a big conversation. One of the things I really, really liked was the conversation they had at a panel of customers. One of them was Baylor University. And they went live with EPM, PPM, HCM all in 2020, which is a crazy time. And their go-live date, I think what he really talked about was the amount of change management. And I love that conversation because he basically said, we couldn't have done this effectively. We hadn't built in a really strong change management process with it, right?

[00:22:03] So that was a really good presentation and conversation. We also heard from Yvette Cameron, who runs their product strategy over there. Her big focus on generative AI, agentic AI, and traditional AI working hand-in-hand, where some of them we are seeing are kind of moving from generative AI to agentic AI. We're seeing them sort of build all that together. A lot of explanation on retrieval augmented generation or RAG. If you haven't started to put that in your bucket of AI terms, I really think you should.

[00:22:28] That is the technique of AI enhancing the accuracy of large language models by assessing the relevance of the responses generated by large language models. So it doesn't completely get rid of all the hallucination, but it does a much better job of it. And you're starting to hear that, that you want to make sure if any of your vendors are using LLMs, that they're using RAG as well behind it. Oracle also talked quite a bit about their local payroll push.

[00:22:54] 60 payrolls now with 48 on-site configuration, 48 local configurations. And then they have some where they've got partnerships on helping configuration into the regions. So that was a pretty big number. They're really pushing that they are the largest. I was really intrigued by their industry focus. Their biggest industry is retail, hospitality, and travel. Their second biggest industry is government and education. And their third biggest industry is healthcare and life sciences for who their customers are. Not far behind that manufacturing, production, and technology.

[00:23:23] So I think there really are kind of leaning into what I would consider is more frontline worker environments, right? Similar, though, to what we heard the previous week at Workday. So, you know, right? And what we're hearing from SAP. So I think, you know, the big three are really going after those high employee volume environments. The interesting thing about, I think, Oracle's data set was they gave us sets about sort of where they were at with their clients as far as headquarter locations. And they had 45% in North America.

[00:23:53] The remainder were across the global market. That was slightly higher than what we see in some of the other big players. Definitely global is their big conversation. And I had a great conversation with Nancy Zoder over there, their GP, junior GVP of Oracle Cloud Strategy. And she was talking about how much work they're doing in the Middle East and how many implementations they're doing in the Middle East. They really are owning that category in that area, as well as quite a bit in Africa as well.

[00:24:21] And then we also had a good conversation with Yvette and a couple others about their focus on mid-market. So, you know, I think we're hearing different stories about the same conversation at Global means something different to Oracle right now, right? Versus what we're seeing at Workday versus what we're seeing at SAP. Each of them are kind of picking their markets and their targets. And then we did have a lot of focus on their talent management areas, including an Oracle Grow product, which I think is going to be interesting. It's a wrapping around of their talent management solutions.

[00:24:48] But there was some really good AI built into that that we had the opportunity to see, to talk to Chris Hervor about and the work that she's doing there. So it was a good event. I'm excited to see where we take this conversation for big enterprise platforms. Because one of the other big announcements this weekend was the ServiceNow event, right? Like that was, you're going to talk a little bit about how that company is changing the idea of HCM and AI, right?

[00:25:16] Yeah, that's very interesting, too. And I also, I didn't think I realized until getting a chance to hear everything you've been talking about, about this real strong focus on sort of frontline workers. That's something we definitely saw in different ways sort of predicted or at least trending from our data, right? We saw a lot of more interest in ASOs, PEOs that tends to lean towards that. But now we're seeing it very directly.

[00:25:42] A lot of the, that was the truth from all those events you saw as well as what we just saw from Unleash, which, you know, is kind of broader, not specific into it. But, of course, the other big topic is AI. ServiceNow had a number of different announcements. But I would say a lot of them fall under this banner of AI. One of the big ones, I think, is that they are now having an AI platform. So ServiceNow is an AI platform.

[00:26:06] And as they phrase it, you put any AI, any AI agent or any model good across the enterprise, right? So they are working with the biggest companies to provide sort of hardware for this, right? Your NVIDIAs, Microsoft, Google, right? So giving you the ability to use whatever AI system you have across the ServiceNow platform with their AI platform.

[00:26:30] We've talked a little bit about organizations doing things with sort of a kind of an overview, right? I know we talked about this with Workday, for instance. You know, they've kind of got an AI management platform. This is along those lines. And really interesting to see from ServiceNow, part of that sort of move into the AI world is a collaboration as well with UKG.

[00:26:53] One that, you know, we had an inkling of, but, you know, we're waiting for sort of the NBA to clear, which it only did at the time of recording just a couple days ago. But, yeah, they are collaborating on working with that AI platform, specifically on the UKG side in employee productivity and efficiency,

[00:27:16] something that is definitely a big move, as we see, again, that continued stronger connection between what's done in HR and business results. It's something that is very familiar to us here at Safe and Insights Group. We've been talking about this years, but now we're seeing this happening in the real world. And it's huge news.

[00:27:39] I mean, we saw Jen Morgan get up on stage at the ServiceNow event, UKG's ServiceNow. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Jen Morgan, president of UKG, on stage with Bill McDermott there of ServiceNow. And this is ServiceNow's knowledge event. So it's their big customer conference that was here in Las Vegas, same time we were doing Unleashed. So a couple of us sort of attended a little bit of both.

[00:28:02] And what I think was interesting from what I caught on all the conversations is there, again, with the T conversation, right? A lot of people know that Workday and ServiceNow used to have a strong partnership, and it kind of fell apart a little bit over time, just because they are competing a little bit about who wants to be the front door of the HR technology environment, right? And ServiceNow really has been making inroads as an HCM platform with onboarding, front door, and the ownership of the data.

[00:28:30] So we did see a little bit of that sort of schism, although they still work really good together. I just think you didn't see as much of that relationship as you have in other places. Now there's another thing that they're kind of directly competing with, which is a Gentic AI platform, right? And Workday is definitely focused on being a Gentic AI, that platform. They want to be the go-to place. ServiceNow is basically rolling out the same conversation.

[00:28:51] And UKG kind of partnering with them on this, I think, gives a sense of, okay, they're kind of taking that conversation with them at a much broader level, right? Because it's not directly competitive with some of the work that they're doing. So I think it's going to be interesting to see how this dynamic plays out, because we know from our data that in the Fortune 500 space, right, ServiceNow is one of the top players, because they are one of the top IT help desks.

[00:29:16] And so a lot of HR professionals just kind of have added on things like onboarding compliance and managing your IT and managing your on-insight technology and managing your help desk environment from an HR perspective, right? And they've added a lot to focus on employee engagement kind of in their own way, ServiceNow has. So this is a bigger deal, I think, than it's not just an announcement.

[00:29:41] It is a direct kind of like we're all coming out guns firing on the agentic AI platform conversation, right? A statement of purpose. And I wonder, too, if there isn't some of the reasoning based on what we talked about two weeks ago, meaning this is a very resource-intensive tool, the hardware required to run AI. We've talked a lot, I think really in the last two episodes, about considering the cost and what it takes to run these systems.

[00:30:11] And if you're sort of sharing a bit of that cost, perhaps, by partnering with these hardware, you know, these big providers, maybe that helps offset some of the risk about how much usage you are going to provide and at what cost by, you know, working together on that. But that's not part of the announcement. That's me spilling tea. I'm not even sure it's tea. It's an imaginary brew. Yeah, yeah. I think there's more to come here. We'll probably get some more insight.

[00:30:39] We haven't talked to either UKG or ServiceNow about this since this announcement was just made. But there was a lot of other announcements, but I think these were the two big ones that we were paying attention to, right? Yeah. So let's talk about some of the other sort of HR tech news, as we like to do. We often talk about money being raised and even in, you know, these sort of volatile times, that's still going on. So humanly announced a $7 million raise.

[00:31:04] And, you know, that's, you know, very much in talent acquisition space, showing that maybe it isn't being a top priority, as we might have seen, you know, in terms of spending and where people are looking. But that doesn't mean it's going away. It's still top five. Talent acquisition is there. As we mentioned, going through all of those companies at Unleash, you probably might have noted that's a lot in the talent acquisition space, a lot of the companies we've been talking about. It's not like it's going away.

[00:31:33] It's just maybe won't be as much. But if you're there and you're taking an innovative approach to it, there's clearly still interest from investors and from the market. So that continues to go. And another, we just have to make a moment, high volume hiring was the thing, right? Like, again, this idea of those large workforce models, those are the areas where I think we have to admit that they are still struggling to get the workforce.

[00:32:01] Yes, we have a thousand resumes for a project manager at a tech firm right now. But they are still struggling to get people working on the front lines. And that's something we just have to be aware of, right? That's right. This is kind of an interesting one. I don't know if this counts as sort of inside baseball or anything like that. But HR architect, that's an HR and then kind of like architect, if you haven't seen it before. They're one of the kind of groups that we work with and see quite a bit.

[00:32:27] They signed a letter to acquire UKG's Telestaff from J.K. Siva. And this all works in the sort of the HR tech consulting world, right? This isn't a direct software play, but it still falls in the world of, you know, helping organizations with the sort of issues that come up specifically around HR technology. It's implementation and services. And HR architect has been one of the broader, what we would call mid-tier sort of HR consulting firms who do implementations.

[00:32:56] They're a big implementer for UKG. This was interesting because UKG Telestaff is something that we don't talk a lot about. It's a smaller piece of the bigger UKG conversation. But for HR architect, it allowed them to broaden their offerings in the UKG space. And so I just thought it's, I think we're going to have to start paying more attention to the advisors and the consultants in this space. Because they are going to become part of the ecosystem that builds out the services that make these viable.

[00:33:26] No longer are they just implementing. They're now adding AI agents. They're now adding integrations. They're now doing maintenance. Adoption a lot of times comes down to your partner conversation, right? Right. So as much as we, you know, I think there's always been this split between the tech firm and the implementer firm. I think we're going to see those lines merging a lot more as they try and figure out where do they play in this space where implementation doesn't bring me the big numbers,

[00:33:52] but maintenance and update and extensions to that system are where I'm able to make the financials, right? Yeah, that's a, it's a brilliant observation, Stacy. And I hadn't thought about it till now because we've definitely over the last year, ever since you came out with the Stacy Harris cluster model, I'm trademarking that just by saying it. I know that's not how it works, everybody. But this idea, we think about that in terms of clusters of technology, but maybe it's also the services that go along with that, that make part of that ecosystem.

[00:34:22] And for you listening or watching on YouTube, hi, you should maybe think about it the same way, right? Think about everything that goes in, not just the tech stack, so to speak, or, you know, all of this different systems, how they talk to each other, but also what is the support that's going to be needed to make everything work for your business? Yeah. That is very interesting. So speaking of. Hey everybody, it's Libby again with fearlessness. So what's fearlessness?

[00:34:50] It's that underlying grit that empowers us to forge ahead, even when hope seems distant. It's the courage to walk through those fires of hell, knowing that we're going to come out better and stronger on the other side. Stay tuned and learn how to get fearlessness. You know, partnerships, integrations. Helios announced a integrations with Verimark. You might be able to tell from the name of Verimark does background screening verification. And that's something we have seen a lot of, a higher interest more than more.

[00:35:19] Every week, it only grows in interest for these sort of services, probably mostly due to outside pressures based on what we're seeing in the legislative and regulatory market. But that makes it no less interesting or you should focus on this just as much regardless of where it's coming from. Because that has always been a concern, but I think it's just a higher concern now. It's really critical.

[00:35:45] And what was interesting to me about this one, Verimark, is that it's a global focus on global teams for background check. And a lot of times you see they're very regionally focused. Like I'm a North America background check because of the regulations and stuff. This one kind of goes globally. I'm interested to see where Verimark and Helios is really pushing that they are going to be a global platform. I think they're still early days. I haven't quite got as many customers yet, but I know that's really where Rick's trying to push that, right? Yeah.

[00:36:13] And it leads right into another one we saw. Don't have exact numbers on it, but Workday Ventures, their sort of investment arm, whatever you want to call it, is investing in, I think it's VEZA, V-E-Z-A. I don't want to say Visa because people might get confused. So we'll go with VEZA. And they do identity security, specifically focus on things around AI.

[00:36:35] You talked, I think, last episode about this new trend or at least topic stories that are going around about people putting in for fake jobs. You know, are they real people? How do you identify and create identity security? So all of the security, privacy issues, all of that has only increased the need as we get into the AI era. It's creating some problems as well as solving it, isn't it? So another one that was pretty interesting.

[00:37:03] And this is something that was actually on our docket to speak about last episode. And we touched on it briefly, but I really wanted to give it some time because Microsoft, you've probably heard of, did announce, and I just sort of made the headline announcement because it was such a big episode, that they are introducing new capabilities within Copilot, their big AI program.

[00:37:25] So this comes straight from Satya Nadella, their CEO, that the big areas that they're focusing on is they're going to have new agents. They're going to have researcher and analyst agents. I'm going to fight those robots. Don't listen to those analysts. Just kidding. It's totally different kind of analysts. You know, it's a lot of that sort of reasoning and aggregating.

[00:37:48] I think it's probably not unrelated to what you were talking about with the research augmented generation, that rag that you mentioned before, which is an idea of looking at all of that information coming in and then kind of verifying it, right? So some more capabilities there. There are notebooks capabilities, added new search capabilities within Copilot that goes across larger apps, including ServiceNow, which is pretty interesting. Google Drive, also interesting.

[00:38:16] You don't think about them working together with those sort of data, but I found that fascinating. And the big one for at least what I think about, the kind of work you and I do, Stacey, was Create. So increased capabilities in that one. So according to Stacey, you'd be able to turn PowerPoints into videos, turn spreadsheets into PowerPoints, et cetera. Now, for those of you not watching on YouTube, Stacey had a visual reaction. It was like one of those YouTube reaction videos. We have been trying to make that dream happen.

[00:38:46] I've not seen it happen yet. If it happens, very cool. I haven't seen it. It's good to know. Yeah. It's good to know. Not without working through other applications. And even then, it's not easy to do it in a format that matches what you're trying to do. If you want to just use their format, it works a little bit better. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a true believer if this happens, I will love it because I spend a lot of my time formatting, you know, master slides on PowerPoint decks, right? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:39:14] And we'll have some time to talk a little bit more about how we're sort of changing the norms around how that work is done, right? You know, how much of it is just like, okay, AI handles this and then someone else handles that. And where is that editing and those fine tuning? And, you know, how do we sort of approach that work? But let's talk a little bit about some people news. We always like to mention when we get some movement in the industry. So John Wilson is now the VP of product management at Allegius. Now, I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that right.

[00:39:44] But I will tell a story that while watching commercials, videos, anything I could find for this company, it's A-L-E-G-E-U-S. Hoping they would say their name. I saw a really funny one because they're in the, you know, the healthcare world, right? In fact, John Wilson had come from PlantSource, who we've talked about on the show quite a bit. But so they're sort of gimmick, the sort of, you know, joke of the commercial is what if everything was run like U.S. healthcare?

[00:40:13] And it starts off with a couple that are at a restaurant and they sit down and they get the menu and they're like, there's only two things on here. And the waiter says, yes, there's the extremely expensive meal and there's the value meal. And they're like, okay, I can't even see what's in it. It's all written in French. I don't speak French. And the waiter goes, well, I don't either. So good luck. So it is kind of, I guess, funny. But it's funny. When you were explaining to me earlier, I was like, oh, that is so, yeah.

[00:40:42] Because I remember when they first started doing this whole, you're going to get to pick your own doctor. You're going to get to pick your own health, right? And then you're like, no, because there's no real explanation and there's no real, like you don't, like the options aren't a reality, right? Like that. And so I, yeah, you know, I'm interested to see. I like John Wilson a lot. You know, I've had a lot of conversations with him when he was over at PlanSource. I'm interested to see where this goes. So I thought this was an interesting move for him, right? So yeah. Yeah. So pretty cool. And hopefully I'm pronouncing it right, John.

[00:41:12] And then one we touched on last week as well that I think we want to spend a little more time on is one that came out of the U.S. Department of Labor. And this came from a post from the Deputy Secretary of Labor, Keith Sunderling, talking about this initiative that's been put forth by the current administration on increasing investment in AI from people, meaning they're going to do a number of different things.

[00:41:39] They're going to give financial incentives to increase participation in AI training programs, setting up basically more or less apprenticeships. Our colleague and good friend Mark Moschetto actually did a post on this. By the time you're listening or watching this, that will already be up. You can just go to Sapien Insights, find our newsletter, go to our LinkedIn page, and you can find that where he kind of breaks down, you know, what's old is new again, talking about

[00:42:06] this idea of an apprenticeship is a way to learn new technologies and talking about, you know, how this is meant to work. So it is an idea of what do we do when we have sort of transformational technology? How do we get this to become part of our, the fabric of our society? You have to basically have the people that know, teach people that don't know, and the university systems may not be the fast, best, and certainly not the cheapest way to do it

[00:42:35] if we want to upskill quickly. And upskilling is certainly a topic that anyone that works in HR knows all about. Yeah. And Keith Sonderling has been around for a while and his new role in the department, I think is going to be something that'll be interesting to see because he was at a lot of events last year, getting to know a lot of the HR tech analysts. Actually, he just came out. I think that this week just came out by the time you hear this about two weeks on as, as one of the listed top 100 HR tech influencers, right? That's interesting.

[00:43:03] I don't know that I've ever seen a government official on that list from HR Executive Magazine. So I was intrigued to see him there. I've met Keith. Keith, he's a great guy. But he's also, I think, working in a really tough time right now and trying to promote agendas that are oftentimes concerning for people, right? And so I think, you know, trying to balance the positivity where we're going with the market with some of the changes that are happening in our government. It's a tough space to be in right now, right? Yeah, absolutely.

[00:43:31] And as we talk about this idea of upskilling, reskilling, putting in new skills, it connects a lot with what we saw from Cornerstone that they've launched Community, which is a centralized hub for a lot of different activities. But a lot of the peer-to-peer connections, they also have a Cornerstone U, as in the letter, like Cornerstone University, that is an LMS where you can kind of do that sort of self-paced learning, directed learning.

[00:43:59] In that sense, they had a number of different announcements. You know, all the old sum total customers that were in the old community are now in the Cornerstone community with the C, you know, big capital C, as in that's what it's called. And so they've got a big group. And we've seen this from a number of providers and seen a lot of success when they are able to create peer-to-peer networks. When they're able to connect to each other and, you know, find these sort of learnings,

[00:44:25] you can find a very quick way to do what we just talked about in the previous story, right, of creating these sort of apprenticeships, mentorships, shared learning going forward, along with formalized structures, right? And that's what Cornerstone is looking to create, is taking all of these, something we're going to talk about a little later, you know, these sort of networks and making sense of how they happen and letting you see how there's a path forward towards creating more skills. And Cornerstone's had a bit of this for a long time.

[00:44:53] I think the idea of kind of getting some customers who are on smaller platforms now merged all into this. I think the bigger conversation here is, you know, as a buyer, one of the things you should really check out is the vendor's community approach. How are they helping that peer-to-peer network? What is the approach they're doing to ongoing learning? What is the approach they're doing to ongoing education? We know less, more than 50% of the market has been in their current roles less than three years based on our data.

[00:45:21] And we know how much education is important. They're in need of it. We hear it all the time. They don't have enough knowledge, right? So this is an important one. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And actually, you mentioned that whole thing about people being in their role less years. So I want to kind of jump around a little bit here because one of the other stories that you brought up that I found pretty fascinating was about something that we've touched on and a few others, right? We talk about the need for more skills as people are aging out.

[00:45:49] But at the same time, we've got people that are coming in. As you said, the majority of people in the HR sort of tech role have been there less than three years. Literally, I think it was 54%. I think we're almost pro. So there's now this other sort of effect that's happening, right? How is AI affecting this concept of ageism, right? So some of the stats that came from this story in this post was, you know, is AI, you know,

[00:46:19] a threat to these aging populations as that keeps growing? And an interesting sort of industry statistic that came out. And we will see if we can share this chart. I'm not sure we'll be able to, but if not, I'll have a link to it. But it said, at what age do people start experiencing ageism because, you know, because of their age at work? And in different industries, it's different, right? In the public sector, it's much older, but IT and tech, right? And IT and tech, it's 29 years old.

[00:46:48] Almost not quite half, meaning they're already experiencing ageism before they're 30 because they're just scenes behind the times, you know, and much different in the public sector where, you know, you basically you can be 50 before you encounter ageism according to these self reports. But this gives you an idea of how AI is affecting all this, right? You know, if you I know already from my own personal and I'm going to say where I fall on the spectrums, I don't think I'm on any of these charts.

[00:47:18] But, you know, if I show that I don't want to use AI for something, whether it's because I like my own writing style, whatever the case might be, I often kind of jokingly get called a Luddite by my nephews or whatever, you know, whomever. You know, man, you got to you got to use it. Oh, my God. You know, it has its uses. We say that all the time. But yeah, it is a real concern. How AI is affecting how we work does have effects on other things. We mentioned in the last episode how it can affect gender equality, but it also can affect,

[00:47:48] you know, how you are perceived and how ageism creeps into the workplace. So I thought that was a fascinating article. Yeah. And a really good call out for this conversation is Lexi Martin's work on pivoting, right? Pivoting your career. She actually uses AI to analyze all of that data to do a lot of that work. And they ask a question here in this research, what happens when one in four people globally is over 65, which is coming pretty quickly, that it is a conversation we have to have about,

[00:48:15] again, if the system has a bias and AI has a bias already because it's built off of all the stuff that's on the Internet and what we're teaching it, we have to be aware of that, right? Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Then, you know, I want to, we've got some pretty interesting conversations coming up about some of these other things going on. One that I think we want to just talk about, if we could quickly, that you might have just seen the story because this was on the newswire.

[00:48:44] You know, we just mentioned some of the government efforts from the Department of Labor, but this one was one that came through Reuters, right? It's one of the big wire services that's out there. And because you know Workday so well, Stacey, I thought you might be able to address some of, you know, your thoughts on this. And the story is that Workday got the contract for the OPM, for the Office of Personal Management. If you're not familiar with the United States, that's basically the United States HR department. Easiest way to think about that.

[00:49:11] In fact, you can probably tell from that old school nomenclature, personnel. That's what we used to call HR. Not to give ageism out, but for the youngs, that's what we used to call HR. But anyway, so Workday got this contract. Apparently, there were no other bids, but there was a quote from OPM, that's Office of Personal Management, and they keep calling them that. So it said Workday had unique ability to meet agency needs. And so, you know, we have not really talked to Workday about this. We don't have any insider information.

[00:49:40] I would say besides the fact that this idea of unique needs is certainly not unique, meaning that when we see our survey go out and we get all these results back, we often write within that. And when we talk about it, Stacey, when you're up there, we often try to say, be careful about trying to, like, benchmark, which we're going to do later. But think about it. It's not just a best system. Maybe not even be a best system for your industry.

[00:50:06] Your organization has to look at all the capabilities of these systems and figure out what works best for them. And that may be the case of what happened with OPM here. I don't know. Do you know anything else on this? Yeah. So I think anybody who's worked in the government for a long time know that a lot of their platforms and systems are, they've been working on what we would consider on-premise, sometimes homegrown systems. And a lot of times they do that because there are a lot of different needs in the federal government here in the United States and even globally, right? If they've got other government agencies, both for privacy,

[00:50:36] being able to stay secure and out of the hands of any other sort of untoward entities that might want to get a hold of that data, but also because of how our government works. It's very decentralized. As much as it feels sometimes like it's a big federal thing, it's very decentralized. And so a lot of little agencies and a lot of state groups roll data up and they have to roll it all up through then to the big OPM. And so many years ago, I had done an opportunity to work with OPM on some of their systems.

[00:51:04] And that was the biggest hindrance was this roll-up model that they had, right? And so what I understand from reading this, and again, this is in the Reuters article. I recommend taking a look at it, is that due to some of the Doge layoffs and to some of the changes in the market, they had several homegrown systems that were now simply not working effectively because the people who had built them were no longer there. If I understand the language around this, that's my take on reading this article, right?

[00:51:32] And it looks like they had consulted with some other players in the market, looking at the various systems and felt like Workday was the only one because of their scale and working with other large vendors like other large organizations like Walmart, because this is a massive number eventually that it will roll out to, not initially, but eventually, that could handle this immediate need to fix the broken issues that are important for payroll for our government and be able to roll out long-term.

[00:52:00] Now, there's probably going to be some pushback in the market. We've already seen some commentary on some vendors saying, hey, a closed bid is not something that we're comfortable with. And so you're probably going to get some pushback. Whether or not that will make a difference or not, we don't know. What is in the article, though, is that Workday had a statement that it was honored to partner with OPM to modernize its HR systems via the 12-month $342,200. I'm assuming that's $342,000 and not million. They did that contract.

[00:52:30] OPM did not respond to requests for comment on the memo, but Workday definitely said they were honored to do this partnership. The contract was awarded on May 2nd, and it puts Workday in charge of HR-related tasks, such as payroll, hiring, time and attendance, tracking. Those are big things, particularly time and attendance, because Workday's time and attendance and scheduling tools is a little on the newer side of all the other tools, but not that much more. So I think this is, it's just going to be interesting

[00:52:59] to see how this plays out. Again, we did not get any comments from Workday on that. We don't have any comments from anybody at the OPM on this. We just read this directly out of Reuters. But I think people should be aware, because I, and just again, telling kind of how the industry is thinking about this, there was a perception, I'll just say a perception is a good way, that Oracle was going to be doing a lot of, because they do a lot of DOD work, they do a lot of federal work, because there has been a lot of investment from their senior leadership, Larry in particular, in a federal relationship, right?

[00:53:29] And making sure they have the servers and they're secured. But we also heard last two weeks ago when we were at the Workday Analyst event that Carl was very focused, that yes, we are going to stay in the federal space. We're going to work there. So obviously some of these conversations were probably in works a little bit there, or maybe we're in works, I should say, at that point. So there will be a conversation about who's, because federal contracts are big. And once you get them, you have them for a long time. And there is also this conversation about

[00:53:58] how much do we have to have the same systems to make sure they're all connected from a data flow perspective. So if you get one, do you kind of get more? And that's the big thing. The assumption is that if you get one, you're going to get more. So this is really early tea. And I think it's going to be something we're going to have to watch as an industry, right? Absolutely. And I often have to at least translate for myself because Stacey's too smart for me. So just in case anyone else missed any of those, she mentioned DOGE. That's the Department of Government Efficiency,

[00:54:26] which if you're lucky enough to not know what that is, God bless you, don't even bother looking it up. But basically it's a group that's been going around theoretically creating more efficiency within the government. So that's what that term means. She mentioned closed bid as opposed to an open bid, meaning the person who is looking for the work controls who receives bids. That's a closed bid. As opposed to an open bid, anyone can submit their bid to be the provider of that service, just in case any of that passed you by.

[00:54:55] Because I'm going, oh yeah, right. Right? No, no. There are so many acronyms in terms of... I know, especially in the government. Like just to know that is a whole business model, right? So yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So this is something you and I, I had a great talk about in the green room that we've sort of mentioned a couple of times during this episode that I thought was really cool. It came through an email newsletter that you passed around, but it was on the titles,

[00:55:23] focus on the norms around AI generated work. And the idea is that there's this sort of trend going around of people sending ideas or sending things over on a quick email or through chat or whatever. It says, yeah, here's some ideas from ChatGPT. Here's a draft I wrote with the help of ChatGPT. Expand on this. And then it sort of puts the onus of work on the other person. And Stacey's in this whole reaction, if you don't mind me saying Stacey, it was like, oh yeah, that's nonsense. That's bogus. And I said, well, I think it depends on

[00:55:52] the style of work or what you're doing. Meaning that if this was something where it was, for instance, this podcast and you sent me a ChatGPT thing that said, hey, give me a roundup of the last, you know, the biggest news stories you saw. And it was able to do that. And then you said, this came from ChatGPT. What do you think? Can you go work with this? I would say, yeah, that's fine. I don't see any problems with that. But if I were to submit a paper that was supposed to go to a client, a white paper that I sent to you, and I said, yeah, here's a draft ChatGPT did. Let me know what the editor says. I'd be fired.

[00:56:24] At least be on a PIP. We'll talk about that later. But it speaks to a bigger point, which I think is what the author here is trying to say, which is we have not created norms. We haven't created what this should look like, right? And it reminds me of the early days of social media when we didn't quite understand what are the things we're supposed to share on Facebook. There are still some people who don't get that, admittedly. But at the beginning, people were just writing like, I had lunch. And then if you're going, oh, we hadn't created the norms

[00:56:54] of what it was for or the structure of it or what's considered rude and what isn't. And it's always important things to remember in the workplace that because we're sort of relying on outside information. In fact, that's something we saw in our paper for the last couple of years. What are the ethical guidelines you have around AI use? And most people don't have any or don't know, which is essentially the same thing. So that also means that internally

[00:57:24] we don't have guidelines, right? We don't have what's proper, what's okay. So much so that people are finding a little pushback. Like, that's not cool, man. You can't just send me here some ideas. You wouldn't do that otherwise. But we as a group have to talk about this, right? We have to have these conversations of setting these norms. It's the only way it happens. Otherwise, people just feel like, as this person is saying, a lot of people feel sort of lessened, right? You're telling me I have to do the work?

[00:57:54] It should be done ahead of time, right? Stacey, I know you're a big believer. I am as well, by the way, that anytime using AI, there's got to be a check long before it goes to anyone else, right? It's got to be edited. We ran into an issue just recently, just today, where someone said, is this the right use of your statistics? I'm like, where'd you get that? And I'm like, oh, I had AI summarize it. I'm like, okay, well, I can see why it went wrong. And I'm glad you asked us, but this is that sort of idea. We need to set norms around how we use AI and work.

[00:58:22] And we have to do it consciously. We have to talk about it, is my takeaway. I don't know if you have some thoughts on that as well. I think, yeah. And I mean, I think you're at your point on, I mean, I laugh when I was first doing Twitter. I think someone had to come and explain to me that hashtags didn't go at the top, they go at the bottom of the Twitter, right? I think it probably was Sarah White. Because those norms and changes, we're all kind of trying to feel our way through this. But I do think that part of what we're going to have to teach in school and part of what we're going to have to teach in the market

[00:58:50] is how to use AI in a way, even with the community we're working with, right? And I do think that for all of us, we have to realize that the worst thing to do would be to stop having the cognitive thinking that goes into the work that we do just because AI is doing some of that thinking for us. Like there was a whole study that I found about that. Like, are we going to lose some of our cognitive capability

[00:59:18] because AI is doing some of the heavy lifting early on? And I don't know. I think, you know, it's the same as calculators back in the day, the same as, you know, farm machines back in the day, right? Like every innovation has its opportunity to sort of leapfrog, but it also has the opportunity to help, you know, you lose some skills along the way. But I do think that in this particular case that we have to not put onus on other people to do the heavy lifting that we are normally expected to do in our work, right? I should not expect someone to read something

[00:59:47] that I've kind of posted and have to kind of figure it out because I didn't do the work of, you know, doing my subject matter expert on that environment, especially in a work environment where we have people who maybe are, who work either peers to us or who are maybe work in positions that are not reporting up to us, but maybe reporting up to our peers. And they feel that they have to put the time into that and we haven't put the time into it, right?

[01:00:16] So that's my two cents on it. Yeah. No, I like that. That's exactly, I would agree completely. So I mentioned the PIP, that personal improvement plan or performance improvement plan, I should say. This came up because of a story going around and speaking of not having AI sort of summarize things, this is a headline that's been going around that I think we can help out the community by sort of demystifying or explaining a bit more because the more sensationalist headline that had been happening was that Microsoft is getting rid of their PIPs, right? Their performance improvement plans

[01:00:46] and instead giving 16 weeks of pay, the severance pay, right? Not just have it. But actually what's going on is they're giving a choice. And I actually found this pretty interesting because both you and I are practitioners, Stacey, foreign practitioners and at least the sort of rule of thumb, the sort of understood adage was that you don't put someone on a performance improvement plan. You're basically just letting them know that they're gone because they're going to leave either way.

[01:01:14] And so I think what this shows is a interesting take on an age old problem. You know, you want to improve performance without alienating the employee. So give them agency, give them a choice. So that's what it really is. It's not that they're eliminated. They're saying that you can choose between going on a performance improvement plan with the understanding that you will need to reach whatever those goals may be

[01:01:40] or take that, you know, four months of severance pay and just say, look, this is not for me. This isn't going to work out or I feel disenfranchised even by being called out on this, whatever the case may be. It gets into this very human side. We've talked so much about AI, but remember that, you know, HR is beyond just tech. We're talking about this because I think it's a good counterpoint to everything else that's been going on with all of this stuff is really understanding human motivation, human psychology, some of the things that underpin

[01:02:10] what makes HR practitioners so special is their understanding of how humans work and trying to make things better for them. Give them that choice, right? I'm not, this is a tough call to make because we're not talking about a very happy time. We're not talking about this really cool thing. We're going to make, you know, improvements and benefits or whatever the case may be. But let's not forget that that is statistically always going to happen, that there are people that underperform and you need to find a way to ideally keep them on,

[01:02:39] especially in the current environment where, as we've talked about, there's not as many people in the workforce or whatever the case may be. So how do you do that? I think this is actually a pretty interesting solution. Obviously not ideal, but I think it's a step in the right direction. And it's interesting because this is not an AI story at all, is it? It's a sort of story about human motivation. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, as you said, this isn't new. Like we've seen Zappos do this in others, right?

[01:03:08] Like this has been in the industry for a while. I think the bigger news here is Microsoft's such a big name and it's a larger amount, right? Like a lot of them are more frontline workers, those kinds of things, right? And this is definitely for sort of, I think, more manager level, more of the office work environment, right? Like I think that this is sort of tailored on. What I do think here is there is, this also, I think from a human motivation, like you said, Will gets into the fact that

[01:03:36] if you make the decision to not take that buyout, then maybe you're a little more vested in your PIP because you knew, I think PIPs are oftentimes, like you said, they are seen sometimes as, oh, this is your warning that you're going to be fired, right? And we know that's not how they legally are. And it's not, you know, there's a lot of compliance around them. But I think in this situation, there's a little bit more buy-in both from the company and from the employee that if I'm going to do a PIP, I got to work at that, right?

[01:04:03] And so, yeah, I don't know if I'm for or against this. I think there's a lot of legal things you got to take around this. I think it depends on, I think there could be a lot of bias and adverse impacts that we aren't aware of. So one of the things that was brought up in the commentaries was, well, what happens if more women take that buyout versus men? Then how does that impact your demographics? What happens if, you know, there's pressure from the managers for certain areas, right?

[01:04:31] Like, so you have to manage that very, very carefully. But it is an interesting perspective, like you said, on behavior. Because I know we have run our time. And I know you and I both have to sort of wrap up today because I've got an airplane to catch and there's a lot of good stories. So I know there's more to go that we'll sort of cover in the next conversation. And you'll probably put in the notes. But I do want to say thanks for sort of, these are great. We had good conversations this week. I think part of it is because we're on the road. So I do love being on the road because we get to have a lot of, I think, interesting dialogues with a lot of people. So first of all, I love being on the road.

[01:05:00] So just hi to everyone out there that we're getting a chance to see. As we wrap today, just a couple of other big pushes. Be, please, please participate in the survey. That is the biggest question. If you are a vendor who wants to distribute to your customers, let us know that we are happy. That is the biggest thing about us. It does not, we do not charge anyone to be in this research. We do not charge anyone to take the survey. Like they get the full report back. It really is a value prop to the whole community. We want as many people to participate as possible. Also, just to be sure that if you want to sign up on our website for our newsletter

[01:05:30] or for any ongoing events or where we're going to be at, please do that. Also, be sure to listen to our sister HR Huddle podcast, HR We Have a Problem, hosted by our CEO, Terry Zipper. If you like these podcasts, please be sure to support, subscribe and download and like them and rate them. Stay up to date with immediate breaking HR tech news and get all the behind the scenes context. You can follow us at Sapien Insights on LinkedIn and Instagram. Cliff, thank you for all the time you put into pulling all this together. I know there's a lot of work that goes into it as well as the post. If you listen to this at all,

[01:05:58] please know if you follow Cliff and me on LinkedIn and you connect with Cliff, you will see he puts out every week a very good summary with links to all of this. So that's a great way to sort of make sure you're getting all the details from it. Also, thanks to Brand Method Media Group who helps us produce the podcast and is run by our amazing founder, Kelly Kelly, our marketing team, Summer Rolano, Cole Harris, and as well as Mark Machetto. Thanks to our listeners and community. We couldn't do this without you. And that's it for this episode of Spilling the Tea on HR Tech coming to you live from all the places that we're at.

[01:06:28] We hope it's been just the brew you need to get just the engine started this week. And we'll be back in two weeks with another pot of boiling hot HR tech updates and insights. Bye everyone.