Spilling the Tea on HR Tech - Deel-Rippling corporate espionage, more executive moves and product announcements, and recent survey findings on pay equity and AI use among small businesses.

[00:00:00] There's also a question in both of these cases, both of them, about data security and who has access to what inside the information, inside the organization. And I think that, you know, we take very, we're a company, we're only a small company, and all of our data is highly secured behind firewalls and you can't access it, and it's got ISO protections and they're only people who need to see stuff have access to stuff. We have everything behind very sort of tight password protections and dual password protections.

[00:00:30] And, you know, my question was one, why did whoever this person was who seemed to be more of a payroll role have access to all this information? But on the flip side, why would anybody at another organization be asking someone to do this? And so there's kind of, on two sides of this, a conversation about, you know, security and your data access is a really critical issue in this day and age.

[00:00:53] And it is a bigger critical issue in the day and age of AI because what you don't want to have happen is anybody pull any data down and dump it into an AI environment because then it becomes almost unable to get it back from that, right? Like there's a difference between like passing off information, but once it's not open, it's hard to get it back too. But in an AI environment, it really gets hard to figure out where things have gone to.

[00:01:15] 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. Welcome everyone to Spill in the Tea on HR Tech, where we focus on the hottest HR tech news everyone needs to know to be in the know.

[00:01:41] 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 your organization. We are recording today on March 27th, 2025, wrap it up the March month, bringing you all the news you can use this week. And I'm your host, Stacey Harris, Chief Research Officer and Managing Partner for Sapient Insights Group. We are a research and advisory firm. And joining me today is my co-host, Cliff Stevenson, Director of Research and Principal Analyst for Sapient Insights Group. Cliff, welcome to the show.

[00:02:10] What kind of tea are we going to get into today? Because it's been kind of a crazy week on HR Tech, right? It has been. There's a lot of news that has sort of breached containment that's gone on to the New York Times and things like that. We don't want to spend too much time on that because we do have, you know, our usual blend of sort of the news you need to know. We will, of course, talk about some of those subjects. There hasn't been as much M&A activity, as many mergers and acquisitions as we've seen in the previous few episodes.

[00:02:40] But a lot of individual movements, some big names in the industry, moving up, moving on, moving to different places. And, of course, AI. We'll see a lot of expansion of AI capabilities and some new things about that. Yeah, start your drinking game now. We mentioned it, right? That's right. But a lot of really interesting sort of thoughts and reports. And, of course, we'll talk rippling deal. You know, we know why you came. It is tea.

[00:03:10] We'll talk about it. We'll have it. It'll be on here. But before we get into all that, we do want to tell everybody where we can be found over the next couple of months. So lots of events that we'll be attending. One will be in the next week. I will be down up in New York at the Annaplan customer event. That is April 1st. So if you're in the New York City area and would like to touch base, let me know. I've got, I think, an extra half hour maybe in between all the events. Cliff, you're going to be doing the HR Rebels. It's a virtual event, but you're going to be doing with Cindy Maurer on our team on April 9th, correct?

[00:03:40] That's right. We're going to be talking about what buyers need to know, something we've talked about before, but focusing a little more in this sort of informal environment for that group. Yeah, I love the HR Rebels. It's always a fun group to kind of work with. And then we're going to be doing our webinar with HiBob on April 22nd. That's going to be both Cliff and I. And we're going to be talking about the HR Tech Playbook, Smarter Investments for Long-Term Growth. That's going to be a lot about how to think about making decisions in HR technology when you're more of a mid-market SMB organization,

[00:04:09] and how to think about it with the eye towards where organizations are going to get the most bang for that buck, right? Like what's going to get you the most value. And then I'll be back again in San Francisco. Well, actually, I'll be in Napa Valley, but I'll be out on the California coast for the Workday Innovation Session, April 22nd through 25th. Take a little jaunt over to Hawaii to see my granddaughter. So I'll have some pictures for everyone when I come back of my granddaughter. And then I'll be coming back to the Redwood, California for the Oracle Analyst Summit.

[00:04:39] Both that's April 29th through 30th. So those are going to be fun. We'll see back-to-back conversations from two of the big players on what they're doing. I'm sure there'll be a lot of AI in there, but there will also, I think, be a lot of conversation about how they're going to keep up the functionality while they're doing all the AI work that we know is important. We'll also be in at the iSolved People Connect event. I'll be doing my first keynote for that session on May 6th and 7th in Charlotte, North Carolina. We'll be launching a really important research effort there on how to level the playing ground for HR.

[00:05:07] We'll talk a little bit more about that as we get closer to it. I may be in Minneapolis at the Unleash event. Cliff and I are talking about that May 6th to 8th. I'm not sure we're still working through those details, but you will definitely be at WorkHuman May 12th through 13th in Denver, Cliff, right? That's right. And as I mentioned before, that's always really nice, you know, in that employee recognition and reward space always has a sort of nice vibe to it. And I'll be there and happy to meet with anyone who's in the Denver area. I'll probably be going over to Boulder.

[00:05:35] I also have family on the West Coast. So I'll be around for some of the weekend beforehand if anyone wants to meet up. I was telling someone the other day that I want to do more events in Denver, and you get to go all the events in Denver. I'm a little jealous on this one. That is true. I know. I normally complain about all the Vegas, but you're right. I know. Yeah, Denver's a nice one. We will be in Miami. Both of us will be at the UKG Analyst Day, May 22nd, and Miami. So we will be getting to experience a little bit of the Florida weather then.

[00:06:03] And then both of us will also be at the Cornerstone Spark event, May 27th and 29th. And I'll be speaking at the executive track there. And that's going to be fun because Cornerstone is going to be launching, I think, some new AI information that we'll be able to talk a little bit more about at that event. And you'll be at the iSolve Partner Connect NSKO June 16th and 18th, right? That is, we'll be in Las Vegas, right? That's right.

[00:06:24] And I'll be speaking at both of those, main stage on both the Connect and then again for their sales kickoff, presenting a lot of what we have here at Bar Data for Sapient Insights Group. They love to see it.

[00:06:37] iSolve has always been keenly interested in having us present our information from that sort of objective third-party view and really hoping their partners understand what's coming up in the future based on our data, which will be pretty interesting because we'll just be having kicked off our own report for this year. Probably be too early to have any data for that, but we'll be in the heart of our report data gathering.

[00:07:03] Yeah, and we'll probably do a little bit of an update from our last iSolve conversation and event and our ADP event that we just went to. So as we wrap up and then I think just you'll also, we got a lot of other things coming up. We might be in Dallas that week of the 16th and 18th. Well, I might be. We're also talking to someone about doing a London event those weeks. So we're trying to figure out if we can fit all that in. So we will let you know if we are going to be in all of those locations and areas. If you want us to do an event or if you are interested in having us at your event, definitely get your information into us early.

[00:07:32] We can't go to everything. We try as much as possible to make as many events as we can to talk to both the practitioners as well as the vendors about what they're doing and prep for the survey. And Cliff, just before we dive into all the stuff going on this week, I mean, we do have to let everybody know we are in the final phases of finishing up the survey work this next couple of weeks. You want to maybe talk a little bit about what people can look forward to in the survey and when it's going to be launched? That's right. We, as always, as a whole, we're always looking for ways to tweak the survey.

[00:08:00] If you are someone who has taken the survey before, you know that we ask for a lot of detailed information. It's what we're known for. But that doesn't mean we want to make it cumbersome or onerous to you. So we're thinking about ways to add in definitions, to streamline the questions, to make things where it's only of interest to what you're doing and to make this survey process taken easier. Last year, we created a video kind of outlining it.

[00:08:23] If you're the kind of learner who wants to go through that way, we've changed the language up front to make sure you understand exactly how to make it happen.

[00:09:01] And what you can expect for 2026. It's your opportunity to be heard, to get your voice out there. It's also your opportunity to learn what other people are talking about. I think the launch dates, the formal launch date is that first week in May, but I think you might see it a little bit earlier. Some of our distributors will be launching it the last two weeks in April. So it is coming up very, very quickly. And Tammy, our data analyst, would love to see early data. And we're also doing beta testing right now. So if you're interested in being a beta tester, let us know.

[00:09:29] All right, Cliff, we went to two events this week. So just to kind of catch up on the audience on that, both you and I were at the iSolved Analyst Summit, the first analyst summit that they've done. And I think it's maybe to get our audience a little bit who maybe don't know sort of the industry analyst kind of space. There's kind of three types of events we tend to go to. One is the conferences that these vendors put on for their practitioners. And then we oftentimes get invited to those, talk to the practitioners, to speak sometimes. And a lot of times they will do like an update on what is going on in that company for the analyst.

[00:09:59] The second thing that we oftentimes get invited to are industry analyst only events. So those are events where basically they just bring the analyst together and they do a whole session on just information about analyst. We get a lot of NDA information when we're in those sessions. But we also, that's an opportunity for us to hear maybe some behind the scenes planning before we get to the customer event. I think the most interesting thing about that is that iSolved has never had that. It's usually only the biggest companies who can do an industry analyst event. So someone like a workday in Oracle, right?

[00:10:28] That UKG does one generally. That iSolved's getting to the stage where they're having this is a pretty big win. And then the third event, sometimes we get to go to some partner events sometimes where they'll bring us in to have conversations with their partners like you're doing with the SKO event. So Cliff, you were at the iSolved event with me. Anything that really struck you? I know I wrote a whole thing on LinkedIn about it, but things that maybe you didn't get a chance to talk about because you didn't because you know you were rushed off to another event. Well, it kind of relates to our first story.

[00:10:54] It's something that, as you mentioned, sometimes we learn things under NDA and we've long known about iSolved's connection with Applicant Pro. And having come from the recruiting world myself, I was very interested to see that expansion capability. So we'll go into a little more in just a minute. And I think that, you know, they've always been very thoughtful, iSolved I mean, about how exactly anything that they're rolling out will impact the end user.

[00:11:21] They work with a lot of quote unquote smaller businesses, you know, not huge enterprises. So they're really tuned into the fact that they don't want to have any fluff, any extraneous sort of features, but at the same time, they don't want to leave anyone needing something that they don't have. So kind of growing with their customers and seeing that sort of continue through this event when they're talking about their future roadmap and how much of it is so thought out under what exactly is the problem they're trying to solve.

[00:11:51] That is wonderful to hear. So I was really left with that great impression. And specifically, I loved hearing some of the Applicant Pro stuff. ADP, much larger company. You know, that's who we are. And what was fascinating to me was in the time I got to spend with some of the leadership group and talk to them about how they're using AI.

[00:12:12] And they're also being very deliberate in a lot of the same way of what exactly are we hearing from our customers that they're trying to solve with this. They understand that they have the data, right? That's the biggest thing, right? They are the biggest company in terms of gathering this sort of payroll data in terms of number of data points that they can gather with the number of customers that they have. How do they make the best use of that in a way that helps their customers?

[00:12:41] You know, just having all that information. It's a quantity issue, but they want to make it a quality issue. And this whole idea of effectiveness over efficiency is totally the byword for them. And that will serve them well, especially as we move towards more volatile economic times.

[00:12:58] And I really was interested to learn a lot about they are being very sort of, again, you know, deliberate in how they think about the agentic model of AI, where they see that their competitors are rolling out these AI agents. And they're trying to figure out, is that the best move for us? And, you know, how exactly would this help? And actually going and doing sort of a roadshow and talking to their customers directly. I think that's a very fascinating approach. And I love to hear that.

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[00:13:57] Yeah, I think, you know, what we're seeing from most of these vendors is that, you know, particularly those dealing with small businesses, is that they are going carefully into the AI conversation. And the biggest thing that these larger firms are, like an iSolved and ADP who have, you know, iSolved has about 180,000 customers. ADP has, I think, over, I think the last number was way over like a million at this point, right?

[00:14:23] Like they're at 780,000 and then there's the plus they got their PEO and their support AMS and managed services groups, right? And so I think, you know, the thing that we see over and over again with these organizations is that it's the power of their aggregate data set that really sets them apart. And what allows them to be able to give back to the small business area on the AI. But they're also being very careful about it, right? I really found, because at the iSolved event, I got a chance, which I really appreciated, to sit next to Mark Duffield during dinner, which is their CEO.

[00:14:52] And to also get a chance to talk to Todd Lefevre, who's their president and COO, who's kind of their founder. And to see the distinction between kind of the focus where Mark's very focused on not just internal operations, but the employees and what they need. Because his belief is that if the employees get what they need, that the customers are going to get what they need. And you see that internally with iSolved. Their culture is really important to them. Their CHRO and their chief marketing officer work hand in hand, making sure their culture internally matches what they want to do externally as well. And Todd, which I really like his perspective, is much more on those channel partnership relationships.

[00:15:21] And so you have these two sort of senior leaders who are really thinking distinctly about how to get the most, I think, energy going with what was going on within iSolved, right? Which is both internally with their employees, externally with their partners, and how to make those things work well, and how to use that kind of energy.

[00:15:39] And I think the thing we learned, which I didn't realize, was how they had sort of self-funded a lot of the work that they're doing, both on the research side, as well as on the sort of acquisition side with the talent acquisition system that they picked up with that organization. Because of the finances they were making off of the work they had done with the partner model, right? Like their services were really paying for a lot of the emerging work that they're doing on the tech side. I think it's interesting because they're privately held.

[00:16:09] I think there was a big conversation from all the analysts about, you know, will they continue to be private? Will they think about an IPO? I don't think there's any answer out there in the market on that. We didn't get anything behind the scenes around that. But I do think that there is a feeling right now that there's a lot of value. Like they're making money, so the private firms don't need to think about an IPO or something to gain money. So that kind of generally plays into a lot of those conversations. The other thing that I saw that I thought was really important is that iSolved is definitely taking the user experience to a...

[00:16:37] They've always gotten positive user experience in our data set. But we saw, I think, the investment that they're making in not just an easy user experience that's kind of simple and easy to sort of gain, but to a user experience that's more focused on how to ensure that their customers, both employees and managers and administrators, are using all the tools effectively. I think that was the thing that I really liked is that they are kind of doing more cross-integration. They're doing more showing things where, hey, did you know you could do this?

[00:17:07] Or, hey, did you know you have this available? And that's a real positive for them because it's additional modules that obviously a lot of organizations, particularly on the SMB side, don't know that they have access to that they oftentimes will buy other systems for. And so we're seeing them push a lot in that direction. So I was really excited about where they're heading, but I also think they're going to be like a lot of vendors in their space. And as we get into some of the upcoming stories, which is, can you scale services as you move up market?

[00:17:34] And we have seen some organizations do that very effectively and some organizations have not been able to do that. And that's going to be the real test of the conversation for iSolve is can they take what is a really solid service model and scale that to much larger organizations over 3,000 employees? Right now, that's not their target, but I think they're going to get there pretty fast based off of what we're seeing in our data. Right. Yeah. And part of that's going to come from, as we mentioned briefly, this full integration of ApplicantPro.

[00:17:58] So ApplicantPro has been sort of 100% under iSolve, but was treated as sort of a separate entity, so to speak. But one of the announcements that was made was that this is now public, that ApplicantPro, now it will be, oh, help me out. I think it's talent acquisition. I solved, yeah. Now I got to go back to the press release and see.

[00:18:25] Yeah, it's talent acquisition, iSolve, like iSolve talent acquisition. So I think they're definitely going for that conversation about all-in-one model, which is the conversation we see all the time, which is, do I keep that applicant tracking brand? And I don't, I mean, all brands have value, but I think at SMB level, we find that organizations are much more focused on, am I getting this all in the same paper? Do you have the deep integrations?

[00:18:52] And that was the conversation that we heard here was that iSolve is doing the deep integrations. And it's called iSolve Talent Acquisition. That is what it's called. Yes, formerly ApplicantPro. That's right. Formerly ApplicantPro, yes. But this isn't going to change, I think, anything for iSolve customers, except for the fact that you're going to see that just more tightly integrated. I think for new buyers, what this will be is just an easier sort of add-on to the organization, right? That's right. And it can be a standalone solution. It can be fully integrated as well.

[00:19:21] So all of those same possibilities of how you might purchase are still there. And just a greater emphasis on, you know, automation and doing a lot of things that are really focused on going back to people working in talent acquisition, small business, some workflows, automate campaigns. You know, again, someone who's come out world, very time intense considering, you know, it's obviously very important, but you put a lot of time in it for something that, you know, you're not getting as much back.

[00:19:50] And that's exactly where you want to see that type of automation and those sort of functionalities that are based on, let's make this a more efficient and more cohesive process from start to finish. You don't want anything lost along the way. You want to make sure you get all the information out and you need to be able to do this very quickly, especially when you're dealing with, and small businesses still do high volume hiring, right? Just because you're small doesn't mean you don't do high volume. In fact, a lot of times when you all are a small retailer, that's how you're doing, especially in seasonal.

[00:20:20] So you need to be able to quickly put out these sort of campaigns and this messaging and make this run through quickly. And a lot of the focus is on that. Yeah. And we should note that we saw, I think there was a 400% uptick in iSolve customers picking up talent acquisition as sort of a module. It is the second highest module behind payroll. So oftentimes organizations will get payroll and recruiting even before they get a full HCM in an SMB market. And then onboarding usually is within there.

[00:20:46] So it is really a critical role for many of the SMB organizations. So I'm not surprised where they're investing here. Then we've got a lot of news about people. A lot of really cool news. Hugo Sarazin, who we knew from UKG, and he is joining Udemy as their CEO. So speaking of sort of hiring and contingent labor and all that sort of world, that's pretty fascinating to go through that.

[00:21:15] I've known Hugo through some of his work. He's got a very entrepreneurial mindset. I think that'll serve him well. He's always, you know, he's very creative. You know, you think of him as that kind of asset founder, and he's always excited by anything new that's been created. And he's always probably the first one to jump in and answer questions, even when the questioning sometimes get tough at these events that Stacey mentioned earlier that are just analysts. And people could be a little more, I guess you'd say, honest.

[00:21:43] And they'll just say, OK, this is exactly how long this is going to take. And he's always been really great about that. So I think those are good leadership qualities. Yeah, and I think we see Udemy showing up a lot more in the applications and the learning side that are being used by corporate organizations. So I think you're probably, if you go there, you're going to see them probably moving more into the B2B world versus the B2C world. And so that'll be interesting to see as well. Yeah, exactly. That's what I was thinking of, you know, when you're hiring these workers and you're trying to get them upskilled so quickly.

[00:22:13] We also see an internal promotion. This is pretty neat. Meredith Riley, speaking of IceHalt, is going to be the new chief sales officer. And, you know, it's something, you know, Stacey, you mentioned that we don't talk about this enough, these internal promotions, because, you know, it makes a bigger splash when someone's at a new company. Like, oh, that's news noteworthy. But it should be just as noteworthy when someone's moving up, especially someone that we've known and worked with and talked to for some time.

[00:22:40] And just like Hugo, someone whose qualities we've had a chance to, you know, see firsthand. So another person I think will do very good in that role, takes a very personal approach, which I think sits well in the IceHalt brand. As you mentioned, they're known for their services. They're known for their high-touch philosophy. And Meredith, I think, epitomizes that from any of the interactions I've had with her. Yeah, I had a long conversation with Meredith while we were there.

[00:23:08] And not only did I appreciate how she was rethinking the sales model and rethinking the relationship and very aware of, because she came from the partner channel side of it, which I think is really powerful for them to have someone who understands direct sales and understands partner sales, right, in the model they've created. But she also came from paychecks and the PEO world, right? And so she's been in the space for a while. So I think we're going to see – but I do agree that we oftentimes pay a lot of attention to people who have moved from one organization to another.

[00:23:37] We don't spend enough time talking about people who've been moved up in organizations. So that was, I think, a win for them. And again, that's not to say there's anything not exciting about someone joining from another company, especially when it's a list of names that we've known. So AnchorBot is going to be joining Rippling. Speaking of Rippling, as we will be and have mentioned.

[00:23:56] So what's interesting about Anchor, and I think was one of the reasons, Stacey, you had sort of noticed this, is that he's going to be joining as a sort of a VP of AI. He's going to be heading up their AI department. He was previously at Eightfold as their VP of Engineering. He was at SAP as their Chief Technology Officer. And this is sort of the tip of the very beginning of trend learning. Stacey, I know you're famous for sort of being the Oracle.

[00:24:25] And you mentioned that this earlier, in a previous episode, you mentioned that we're going to see more and more of this, as this is a new role, the head of AI. I don't know if they've come up – would it be Chow as the Chief AI Officer? Is that the correct spelling? Oh, wow. That's good. I hope that, but yeah. That would have been nice. The acronyms, the acronyms. Yeah, I know.

[00:24:43] But although we haven't seen that yet, we do see at least at the VP level and certainly at the director level where that's their entire job is to be the head of any of the AI developments. So really looking at what's going to be new, what can be brought in, what can be scaled, which is specifically what AnchorBot points out, is how to scale some of these as they grow, which is tripling. It's definitely a high-growth company.

[00:25:09] Yeah, and I think I said it in the last one, so I'll just repeat, which is that these VP of AIs or the heads of AIs, right, is that we see a lot of the chief technology officers who generally they're reporting into saying, oh, that's a job role I want. When they have to write out that job role, can someone else do the CTI role for me, right? Because I think the chief technology officer, it's a lot harder. It's infrastructure. It's all the pieces, parts. It's all the product areas, right?

[00:25:39] So that's a lot harder. So I think the chief technology officer, which is internal and external, this role is going to grow in most organizations. Particularly, I think we're seeing it come out first in tech organizations, but I think you're going to see it almost everywhere. One of the presentations I'll be doing for Unleash is with the HR operations role, who heads up their AI strategy for HR. And the conversation will be about how she fits into a much broader HPE sort of conversation about AI. And they have a lot of different roles who are sort of owning that.

[00:26:08] And then there's sort of a roll-up role. And so I think all these organizations are building this out. And if you haven't already started to have that conversation, your organization and you're a large organization, you probably should be. I think most are already starting to do it. And speaking of movement, we're getting some sort of geographical movement from UKG. UKG Ready is now going to be available in Canada for our good, good friends up to the north. We still love you, Canada.

[00:26:36] So yes, all of our Canadian friends, you're our family. So I just want to say that. No particular reason. Anyone listening to this like 10 years now is like, what is he talking about? So anyway, UKG Ready will be available in Canada. I realize this episode's got a lot of sort of inside baseball about analyst stuff. But it is, you know, we're spilling some tea. And I will say that this is another one where they worked a lot with analysts and with anyone, especially that had any connections to Canada,

[00:27:03] to suss out what is the data that's specific to Canada and to Canadian buyers? What's of interest to them? How are they different? They work directly with us. So I can say that they're not doing this just as a pure, let's go to Canada. But really because they were thoughtful about who, where is our product of need? And what are we seeing that's different? And how can we help there? You know, obviously there's a lot of compliance issues that are different.

[00:27:27] And the view of how to use HR and the view of HR and compliance needs is separate. And they took that in mind and decided, you know, this is something that would be of great value to them. And of course, to us as UKG as a company leading that move. So that's really neat to see. It is. And I think the most interesting thing here is that it's the full suite, which includes kind of the time management, the talent, but also an SMB native payroll solution for small and mid-sized businesses.

[00:27:56] And I think, you know, when you think about how organizations are moving globally, native payrolls are a lot harder and a lot, take a lot more energy than sort of partner payroll, right, conversations. And so I think one of the conversations we're hearing about Ready is that not only are they moving up market for UKG because UKG's got UKG Pro, which works pretty well at the higher level, but they're definitely moving up above that 3,000 plus size. Because UKG Ready now, in our data at least, goes all the way up to, I think we've seen as high as, you know, 2,000.

[00:28:24] I think their number right now is in that 1,000 employer range, but we're definitely seeing them sort of think, look, if you're going to go global, you've got to have some international sum reach, right? And so if you're going to go larger, right? And so this is going to be a play for them to kind of leverage that technology in a lot of different ways. So it's exciting to see them expand it. They've been talking about it for quite some time. This is a win for that product in that area for UKG.

[00:28:49] And as you mentioned, sort of the partner, how all their partners work, we see Cornerstone expanding their partner ecosystem, bringing Easy Generator in. So Easy Generator does authoring, you know, not surprised it's sort of because a lot of things are now. Obviously, it has some AI involvement there, but, you know, help filling out some of the content, especially when it's sort of specialized expertise that's needed.

[00:29:14] But that's a lot of what you'll get with this sort of expanded marketplace offering and partnership for Easy Generator. Yeah. And we're going to see more of this, right? I think that's the big conversation is content creation is the... Like, I think our list of AI that people can pick that they're using, like, at least a third of them are film and content creation tools, right? So you're going to see these kind of tools, I think, being picked up or partnered pretty tightly with a lot of organizations.

[00:29:44] I think Cornerstone made a bigger splash on this one because this fits right in with the AI and the agility conversation and skills conversation they've been trying to have in the market. But content creation, which has been actually a side note for a long time on the learning side, is taking the front road again because it is part of what AI is doing, right? Yeah. Kind of what it's most known for down to the name of it, generative AI, at least the ones that we often think of. Yeah.

[00:30:09] So as we're doing all of our conversations today, before we dive into our next topic, Cliff, let's talk about staying ahead in the HR conversation. Making the right choice isn't just about following the latest trends. It's about having the right conversations and asking the right questions. As you know, we are now part of Work Defined Podcast Network, and we encourage you to engage with the whole community you'll find there. Okay. Let's jump back into the tea this week, Cliff. What is our next conversation? Well, that was a commercial break. Everybody knows.

[00:30:38] I'm reading this. I'm realizing we're going to have to figure out a better way to do that. But we want to make sure that you're engaging with those audiences that are outside of our world as well. So sorry. I just realized how scripted that was. It's okay. Okay. That's all right. It's our first time, everyone. We're all learning together. We were just talking about learning platforms. Perhaps we can use some. Yeah. So there was some interesting. We've been talking about DI. It's been a hot topic for both general media reasons and because we've seen our report.

[00:31:09] There's been a lot of reports going out. So this one's specifically about the sort of equity, at least pay equity. And it's from PayScale, who puts out a number of reports. They put one out just last month. A sort of broader sort of trend. In terms of pay, this one is specifically on the gender pay gap. In fact, it's called the gender pay gap report. And it was put out. And sort of the big takeaway, I guess, is that we're not seeing a shrinking of that gap. In fact, in some places, they might see a widening.

[00:31:36] That is the gap between what males in general for a role are paid and what females are generally paid for a role. There's been a number of different sort of speculative reasons made in that report way that might be. And one that wasn't brought up, you know, and some of that being the political issue that there's just not as much sort of legislation around it, or maybe there's just not as much interest in it. In fact, people may be backing away from it for various political reasons.

[00:32:06] But one thing that wasn't brought up, Stacey, that you kind of were talking about in the green room beforehand, was that when we talk about higher paying roles, you had a term I had not heard before, the quote unquote pink discount. Pink discount, yes. These may have been hiring women for certain roles because they were paid less. And when that happens, and when we see maybe less of that, then we won't see that, you know, that may be why we're not seeing so much of a tightening of the gap, right?

[00:32:34] We're not seeing that equity because people are taking advantage of it and they're not taking advantage of that anymore. Did I explain that correctly? You did. You'd explained it. Yeah. And, you know, I think the peak discount is something that, you know, came out a lot in the late 90s, 2000s when we were having these conversations, right? But what's interesting is there was sort of a report that Vizier recently did, Andrea, who's their head of research, who's amazing, kind of analyzed their own customer data, right? And they've been doing this year over year as well.

[00:33:04] And they saw that for the companies that they were analyzing, and every company is a little bit different, right? So, but for the companies they were analyzing that not exactly where it had stayed the same like this one, but that it had shrunk a little bit. It went from 14% to 9% in their data set. And part of what they saw was that the females had made a higher percent rate, not if they were managers, it was overall, right? Like that was 7% increase in wages versus 3% increase in wages for females versus males.

[00:33:31] And I thought, well, I wonder in some sense, I could be very wrong on this. It's an economics conversation, right? Is we've seen a lot of layoffs, particularly in tech and large companies. And in those layoffs, we know that the focus has been on higher salary ranges, right? There are a lot of mid-manager levels. And so could we be seeing that as they were doing layoffs of higher salary ranges, that the females who did not have the higher salary ranges may have been more likely to stay in an organization.

[00:34:00] This is all conjecture. I don't look at the data. But you think about these things when you're thinking about economics and social and sort of how all this behavior plays out, which is that sometimes these dynamics have an impact on what's happening both economically as well as what's happening globally around the market, right? Absolutely. Sort of speaking of that, protections and equality. We have to talk about AI, right? I know we've mentioned it.

[00:34:27] But broadly, we've had talked, especially over the last couple of years since AI has become a big topic, impending legislation. I think this is one of the first times I've seen a story kind of roll across the desk that has been about stripping back this legislation. So what may come is not a surprise to some people. The current U.S. government administration is rolling back some of the AI guidelines that were put in place.

[00:34:53] Now, this happened just this week of March. Well, it's March 27th is when we're now. We might change next week. So we got to give the day of the week. And so one thing that we had reported on was a creation of the USAI Safety Institute. I believe that was last year, the year before. But certainly it's a recent thing. They put in basically guidelines. There wasn't very much there, but those guidelines are being rolled back.

[00:35:20] So there had been sort of directives issued ensuring that if you are putting AI, it doesn't violate worker rights or diminishes job quality. And those are being cut back along with cuts directly to that AI Safety Institute. Pulling people out of there is part of that broader culling of the workforce, the public workforce that's been going on in the United States for the last few weeks. So it's kind of interesting because we were just talking the last episode.

[00:35:50] So what about California putting in some legislation at the federal level? We're actually seeing it rolled back. It's a real push-pull, isn't it? I was just going to say, I think the hard part for businesses, both technical businesses who are trying to find their way through this and corporations who are buying the technology and using the technology, I think you're going to have to figure out, I think we're going to have to do a lot like we do with our employment laws. If we're compliant in New York and we're compliant in California, we're most likely to be

[00:36:15] compliant, not all the time, but it at least gives us a likelihood that we are at the higher levels. I think another one is Colorado. We're seeing a lot more of the regulations being in those areas. So I do think you're going to have to really do that, look at this at a state by state level. Where do you have your employees? But I think this is one of those times where doing the right thing, like just like if you feel icky about what's going on, you should really question if you should be doing it, right? Because even though the regulations are being rolled back now, that doesn't mean they won't

[00:36:45] come back. Doesn't mean they won't overwrite some EEOC requirements, which may not fall directly under AI, but will be impacted in sort of the hiring or the biases or some of those mandates. So sometimes it's just better to be, to err on the side of more caution in the space, right? Would be my sense. Yeah. I think so. And on sort of the flip side, when we talk about the positive aspects of AI, paychecks

[00:37:11] survey, I found that at least within the 500 or so paycheck customers that they surveyed, that they found a lot of empowerment. And I think that the way they tell us empowering small businesses was 72% feeling positive overall about the use of AI. So one I liked that was interesting is that though, despite all these sort of positive moves

[00:37:36] and people on the hand feeling think there were something like 76% anticipate have a moderate to significant impact to their businesses. 82% of respondents found AI is helpful to their business. But interestingly, from the same report, we see that 18%, right? And so nearly one in five respondents said they'd face difficulties using AI due to poor data quality.

[00:38:02] Taking us all the way back to something we have, you know, you'd think we were being paid by the Data Governance Institute or something if such a thing exists, because we're always talking about you can't do anything with these new cool technologies if you don't have good data. Right? And we've seen in our own report that people have consistently said that they don't have necessarily guidelines on how to use AI. We're going to be asking this year a lot more about specifically how AI is, you know, stored

[00:38:31] and use all these sort of data governance type questions about, you know, what are we using this information for? Where's this information coming from? So finding that out was pretty interesting. In the same report that we're talking about these positive, quote unquote, vibes that people are having towards AI. So a significant portion of them saying, you know, data is causing us problems when we're trying to use this. Yeah. Vance Beaumont, who's Paycheck Senior Vice President of Data Analytics and AI, and I've had some conversation with Vance in the past.

[00:39:01] He works a lot on the partnerships on their AI side. AI, his comment was AI allows a business to punch way above its weight. And I agree with that on some front. What I will say is our data was very clear and we'll see where it plays out this year as we get into this year's data that big companies got, we're definitely seeing business outcomes of our business metrics. So better business metrics in our data set and SMBs under 500 were less likely to see those kinds of outcomes.

[00:39:29] And I think part of that is, is that there's a difference between efficiencies and just maybe moving a little faster and business outcomes that I'm translating that into. And so I do think there's going to be a conversation for the SMB side, which is, can I take just moving faster and move that into business outcomes? Because that's going to be the next conversation everybody's going to ask is, can this AI get me something that I can't get in some other way? Right. And that's the next, the value conversation versus just efficiency. Right. Yep. That's exactly it.

[00:39:56] And that was also the sort of major theme, I think, of what we saw from the I-Phenom event, which we didn't attend, but looked over everything that came out of that. And a big part of what they're doing is sort of pushing the AI to find that sort of little missing link, that magic space that we've always talked about between your HR strategy and your business outcomes. So they're really developing a lot of their AI towards that.

[00:40:22] They've also announced, Phenom that is, announced a partnership with Deloitte along with that. But what I found interesting is that Phenom now describes themselves as an applied AI company specializing in HR rather than an HR company that uses AI. So they're really seeing AI is driving that space to help them create solutions that allow businesses to succeed. So pretty interesting.

[00:40:48] But now let's finish off with the, I don't know if it's the, it is the biggest story for sure. It's the biggest story? Okay. Yes. Go ahead. We're going to throw in a lot of legends. For the 1% that might not have heard this on LinkedIn somewhere. But we're going to, we do want to talk about how this could affect you. We don't want to just rehash it. We will, of course, give you an update on what's going on because this is where you've heard it. I'm sure you've heard it probably need the news enough that I was getting it from people

[00:41:17] I know outside of the HR world. There are those people apparently. But yes, there's been more developments in the Deal and Rippling drama. So true tea right here. Since we last spoke, dear listeners or viewers, we also have a YouTube channel. Deal and Rippling, we've mentioned before when they got into a marketing kerfuffle and called each other out and Rippling even made a little snake game where you could eat what they call Deal's marketing untruths.

[00:41:45] They have since, Rippling has sued Deal for what they said was a, basically a spy in their midst. Sort of a corporate espionage type thing. And if you read the whole story, we won't get into too much details, but it is like a John Le Carr novel. There's people flushing fun down outlets. There's honeypots created, black messaging. I think there might have been a signal group chat. No, no, wait, that's a different story. Never mind that one.

[00:42:14] So anyway, yes. The Deal and Rippling drama is interesting. Now, Stacey and I spent some time kind of really getting into it. What does this mean for you as a buyer? And I think that's, it's kind of interesting because you start to understand the more you look at these companies, how similar they are, right? Stacey saw that when you looked at their customer numbers, that they're both between that sort of 15 to 20K range. 15 to 20K thousand, yeah. Yeah, they're both valued at around 12 to 13 billion.

[00:42:43] They both come out of Y Combinator, sort of Silicon Valley incubator of these startups. They have, I believe, separate funding at this point. Although I wouldn't be surprised if there's some crossover in terms of investors. So you can see kind of why they personally might be neck and neck. But I would love to hear from you, the listener, especially if you are someone who would consider buying a business customer. How does this affect you? Because that's what we kept thinking about.

[00:43:11] Because in our research, we've consistently seen Rippling and Deal be very highly rated by those that use it, right? Those customers, we don't always get enough that they appear in the charts. I think Rippling appeared for the first time after Stacey the year before. You had said, keep an eye out for Rippling because people use them, love them. We just don't have enough to be statistically accurate. We don't want to go out there and say for sure this is what the stats say until we cross the mathematical threshold to say so.

[00:43:40] So deals in this space. And we expect Deal to be very much there this year, right? Exactly. So we'll see how that goes. So what were we saying? We're saying these are high growth companies from similar backgrounds. And I can't imagine a scenario wherein a potential buyer looks at all of the different things going on and says, well, I'm going with this company because they won the lawsuit. Or if anything, it's likely to put off people that could potentially be interested.

[00:44:07] When we ask those data points from you, from you taking the survey, from all of those survey respondents, we ask them specifically, what caused you if you gave a certain rating, a low rating or above rating, basically off a standard deviation? What caused you to give this low rating when you talk about vendor satisfaction? And sometimes it is the perception of the brand, right? That company is that to me makes me not think well of this particular vendor.

[00:44:36] And this is where I worry that this is going to head and it's going to affect those numbers. And we may see that. So there's a it's a salacious story. I'm not going to say it's not interesting. I do like reading and hearing it. But I did want to we did want to kind of bring it into how is this affecting you? And I think you, the listener, are the only person who can really know that. And so we'd love to hear back from you. Yeah. And I think the only other thing I would add to that, Cliff, because I think, you know, there is that is is is all is all marketing, good marketing or all name recognition, good right, right.

[00:45:05] Like there's always that conversation. But but there's also a question in both of these cases, both of them, right, company about data security and who has access to what inside the information inside the organization. And I think that we take various we're a company of we're only a small company. And all of our data is highly secured behind firewalls and and you can't access it. And it's got, you know, ISO protections. And they're only people who need to see stuff, have access to stuff.

[00:45:32] We have everything behind very sort of tight password protections and dual password protections. And, you know, my question was, one, why did whoever this person was, who was seemed to be more of a payroll role, have access to all this information? But on the flip side, why would anybody at another organization be asking someone to do this? There's there's kind of on two sides of this, a conversation about, you know, security and your data access is is a really critical issue in this day and age.

[00:46:01] And it is a bigger critical issue in the day and age of AI, because what you don't want to have happen is anybody pull any data down and dump it into an AI environment, because then it becomes almost unable to get it back from that. Right. Like there's difference between like passing off information. But once it's not open, it's hard to get back to. But in an AI environment, it really gets hard to figure out where things have gone to. And so I that's my only two cents on this. I think I think brand they've all got to worry about. But I think the bigger issue is this data security and data access.

[00:46:29] And everyone should be really talking about those conversations, too. We saw it back when we saw the big issue with UKG. We've seen it in other organizations who have had security breaches like those have to be part of the conversation, too. And so I hope both these organizations step back, look at the value proposition, have a good conversation internally and really think about how can we shore up our organizations and make sure our customers are feeling comfortable with where we're at. Right. Yeah, that's very well said.

[00:46:57] I think there's always lessons to be learned, even if it is. It may seem, yeah, something that doesn't couldn't pertain to the organization. But I think there's lessons to be learned about, yeah, who has access to this data and why even at small companies can have larger impacts down the road, not just in terms of customers. We are way over our time today. But but we did have a lot of conversations to have. And it was a good conversation just to kind of wrap things up for everyone. As we wrap today, a couple of big pushes.

[00:47:24] The full annual interest system survey paper is out, but also with the segments. It's a good time to maybe go and see some data to understand sort of how things might look next year as well. So just be aware of that. The full survey will be going out in another month. So if you are interested in distributing that and you're not on our list already of 40, 50 organizations who have already signed up, please let us know. We'll get you on that list. Also, if you are interested in getting to hear more about what we're doing and learn where

[00:47:52] we're going to be at, please sign up for our newsletter on our website for the updates on all of the things that we're going to be doing in our annual survey. And if you like what we're doing here, please like and share our podcast on Work Defined. Be sure to listen to our sister HR 100 podcast, HR We Have a Problem, every other week, hosted by our CEO, Terry Zipper. And most importantly, to stay upstate with immediate breaking HR tech news and get all the behind the scenes content. You can follow us at Sapien Insights on LinkedIn and Instagram and follow Cliff and I on LinkedIn.

[00:48:22] You'll get reports of all of our roadshows. And thanks everyone for helping produce this, including our brand at the media group who helps us produce our podcast run by amazing founder, Kelly Kelly, our marketing team, Summer Orlano, Cole Harris, and Cindy Maurer. And thanks to our listeners and community. We couldn't do this without you, Cliff. Thank you, as always, for pulling all of this together for us. And that's it for this episode of Spilling the Tea on HR Tech. We hope it's been just the brew you needed to start the engines running this week. A little bit of extra tea this week to go along with it.

[00:48:50] And we'll be back in two weeks with another pot of boiling hot HR tech updates and insights. Bye, everyone.