Spilling the Tea on HR Tech - How ZeroedIn is leveraging innovations in people analytics to help organizations make better use of data for smarter and faster decisions.

[00:00:00] Besides Benioff, I had the conviction that SAS was going to kind of cement on-premise or hybrid software and CyberU rebranded itself as Cornerstone. And all this time, going back to that pivotal moment at the RFP, I stayed in contact with people like that.

[00:00:18] So after the Saba exit, we had a conversation and Adam goes, look, I think SAS will become a pivotal transformation moment just like the internet was. And people will adopt cloud technologies at scale, even governmental organizations.

[00:00:36] I said, I don't know. I'm sure you and Mark are convicted about that. But me being a government guy, it's going to be a lagger indicator.

[00:00:43] So he calls me in 2015, he was like, hey, Jim, we just closed our first software as a service deal at US Department of Treasury.

[00:00:53] I was like, okay, that's a signal. That's... To your point. Yes. You start to watch what's happening, right?

[00:00:59] You start to watch what's happening. You see transformation in industries.

[00:01:03] Welcome to the HR Huddle Podcast presented by Sapient Insights Group, the ultimate resource for all things HR.

[00:01:13] It's time to get in the huddle.

[00:01:16] Hi, everyone. I'm Stacey Harris. I am joining you here at the HR Technology Conference for our special session on Spilling the Tea on HR Tech.

[00:01:30] And joining me today is Jim Gill and he is the CEO of Zeroed In.

[00:01:34] And we're going to have a little powwow on Spilling the Tea about all the things that you guys are doing that are exciting and new right now.

[00:01:42] But also, you and I have known each other a long time. So we're going to talk a little bit about Jim's background and what he's bringing to this new role that he's in.

[00:01:49] So, Jim, can you basically first give the audience a little bit of insight into sort of how you got into the role of CEO of Zeroed In and what your background was to sort of get there?

[00:01:59] First of all, hi to everyone. Second, it is great to be here with somebody I've known a long time who's kind of a major influence in this industry.

[00:02:08] Second, you know, usually it's virtual. This is the first time we've seen each other in a couple of three years.

[00:02:13] So this is awesome to be here in person with you, but broader the industry and kind of look around and see the transformation that's going on.

[00:02:20] So my history kind of short story tell the two careers. I spent 21 years in the Army.

[00:02:26] Huge.

[00:02:27] It gave me a unique opportunity to travel the world, see different cultures, assimilate, kind of learn at the tactical operational level and even the strategic level kind of how the Army operates as an enterprise.

[00:02:40] Served the first tour in Central South America, did some advisory work, Jungle Operations Special Warfare Center, spent three years in 101st Airborne Division.

[00:02:50] Went to Germany. For all you younger viewers and listeners, there used to be like an iron curtain across the divided Germany to East and West Germany.

[00:03:00] So I went to the 11th Airborne Cavalry Regiment and had a unique job, Stacy, where I was the kind of border operations non-commissioned officer.

[00:03:08] So we collected intel, human intel, spatial intel, signet intel of the Russian Eighth Guards Army, who was the opposing force.

[00:03:17] All right, guys, you are getting the detail because I didn't even know all this.

[00:03:20] But it's great. I mean, that's an amazing background and all the things that you've done, right?

[00:03:26] Look, from a small town in southern Georgia, to kind of see that, the aperture, and I've always been a lifelong learner, right?

[00:03:34] So that was kind of a unique learning lab, not only just kind of seeing the world and diversity and diversity of thought and populations, but also kind of leadership, right?

[00:03:43] How small level leadership, unit leadership scales to kind of massive leadership.

[00:03:48] And that experience, particularly in the East-West German border, I had the unique point in time to be someplace in history that a lot of people missed out on.

[00:03:59] So when the wall came down and the Iron Curtain came down in 1989, I was on the East-West German border, and I worked for a guy who was the regiment commander at that time.

[00:04:12] And we took a helicopter, and we saw this massive flow of humanity cross from East Germany to West Germany.

[00:04:21] We landed the helicopter, Stacy.

[00:04:23] You were seeing history in the making there.

[00:04:26] Oh, you see it right in front of me, in full.

[00:04:29] Now I'm geeking out on history, guys.

[00:04:32] Massive amount of humanity freeing to freedom.

[00:04:35] So we landed a helicopter in this town called Rasdorf, which was separated by Iron Curtain for over 40 years.

[00:04:41] We landed, you know, the regiment commander was talking to press and, you know, liaisons between the Russian Army and Eastern Army Border Guards and kind of U.S. intelligence agency.

[00:04:51] And I ran across this woman who was in tears.

[00:04:55] And she was talking to this other lady.

[00:04:57] And, you know, in my fractured German, I asked her kind of, what is this?

[00:05:01] She goes, that's my sister.

[00:05:04] And I haven't seen her in 38 years.

[00:05:07] Wow.

[00:05:07] What a point in time, right?

[00:05:09] It was a point in time that showed me the importance of values and what we brought as a nation to kind of give what right looks like and freedom.

[00:05:19] And I was there, unfortunately, to see that happen.

[00:05:22] I left from there, kind of right in the hot water, you know, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

[00:05:27] I deployed back to Fort Stewart, Georgia, 24th Infantry Division.

[00:05:31] And we were the first boost on the ground, along with the Special Forces Battalion, inside Saudi Arabia when Saddam invaded Kuwait.

[00:05:41] Wow, yeah.

[00:05:41] And President Bush said, you know, this will not stand.

[00:05:43] I won't tell you what grade I was in high school at that point.

[00:05:48] Yes, everyone knows.

[00:05:49] See, we're friends.

[00:05:50] She can say that to me.

[00:05:51] I mean, old.

[00:05:52] She called me old on camera.

[00:05:54] But, you know, that was another unique experience where I saw the operational component, how do we go to war?

[00:05:59] How do we fit American values and what we stand for?

[00:06:01] And I spent a year there and came back, spent another year in Iraq.

[00:06:06] And the last job in the Army, we got to the HR practices.

[00:06:10] I had the unique fortune to kind of go in a detailed assignment to the Army Recruiting Command.

[00:06:15] So each military service has its talent acquisition arm.

[00:06:19] In the Army, it's the Army Recruiting Command, the Navy Recruiting Command, the Marine Corps.

[00:06:24] And at that time, this was mid-90s, late-90s, early 2000s, we were recruiting about 80,000 people a year to command the all-volunteer force.

[00:06:36] Yeah.

[00:06:37] So you had to go through a school, and the school was like 12 weeks.

[00:06:40] A week they teach you, you know, the value of joining the Army, kind of the emotional benefits, what you give young people and their parents.

[00:06:46] Yeah.

[00:06:47] How do you map that to the Army National Advertising Campaign?

[00:06:50] And that gave me kind of a, I tell everybody, a mini MBA course of sales and marketing tied to value emotional intelligence.

[00:06:59] So I did that, you know, did very well as a regional kind of commander, ran a city, went to Miami, South Dade, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, ran that whole region.

[00:07:09] And then I got the unique opportunity to be a practitioner in HR.

[00:07:13] So I got selected to be the Director of Training and Development for the Army Recruiting School.

[00:07:18] The same school I went through.

[00:07:20] The same school we went to, and one of the biggest training programs in the world, right?

[00:07:24] Huge.

[00:07:24] Like just massive, right?

[00:07:25] Huge.

[00:07:25] We put 8,000 to 10,000 students a year.

[00:07:28] Yeah.

[00:07:29] Through either the basic Army Recruiting Course to teach all those disciplines I talked about.

[00:07:34] Or the Officer, Non-Commissioned Officer Development Leadership Course to how to run cities, how to run a nation recruiting campaign.

[00:07:40] A lot of that stuff.

[00:07:41] And we taught them technology of, you know, how to demo the product.

[00:07:45] Yeah.

[00:07:45] It was my first entry into kind of solution consulting demo.

[00:07:49] You demoed the value of the Army, you know, over a laptop.

[00:07:52] Yeah.

[00:07:52] Right?

[00:07:52] So massive learning curve.

[00:07:54] And through this exercise, you know, we were spending millions of dollars of housing, you know, food, you know, secondary tuition reimbursements.

[00:08:06] Travel.

[00:08:07] Travel.

[00:08:08] Travel.

[00:08:08] Travel.

[00:08:08] And we were taking all of these soldiers away from their families for a massive amount of time, which is the bigger impact.

[00:08:14] Yeah.

[00:08:14] So I had a boss at that time, very innovative two-star general who later became the desk for personnel chief of the Army.

[00:08:22] He's like, hey, Jim.

[00:08:24] Actually, he said top.

[00:08:25] Yeah.

[00:08:25] Which is my master sergeant.

[00:08:27] He's like, I hear, this was like 2000, Stacey, and I met you shortly after that.

[00:08:32] And he said, I hear you could take this thing called training over something called the Internet.

[00:08:37] Back in the day.

[00:08:38] Back in the day.

[00:08:39] It was called e-learning, guys.

[00:08:40] It was called e-learning.

[00:08:41] Yeah.

[00:08:41] It was called e-learning.

[00:08:42] But for a brick-and-mortar organization that was kind of utilizing cratic instructor on the stage, cohorts.

[00:08:51] That's all there was back then, yeah.

[00:08:52] That's all there were.

[00:08:52] It was no blended learning.

[00:08:53] It was no horses over the Internet.

[00:08:55] Later came big DVDs and CD-Roms, all that kind of stuff.

[00:08:58] Yeah.

[00:08:58] He said, go explore this.

[00:08:59] I said, okay.

[00:09:00] He said, I'll run an RFP.

[00:09:02] How much money do you need?

[00:09:03] So I told him.

[00:09:04] And he goes, the ROI would be, how do we reduce training costs?

[00:09:08] How do we reduce all these lodging costs?

[00:09:10] How do we maintain the fidelity of the curriculum and the intrinsic value we're giving?

[00:09:15] And how do we give soldiers more time with their family pre-school and post-school?

[00:09:19] Yeah.

[00:09:20] Which is important.

[00:09:20] I have a son who's in the Air Force.

[00:09:22] And thank you for your service.

[00:09:24] But I know how important all of that is to them, right?

[00:09:26] Like that family time is what they need.

[00:09:28] Yeah.

[00:09:28] It's extremely valuable.

[00:09:29] Yeah.

[00:09:30] Because you go to the institutional assignment like this, and then you wrap that up.

[00:09:34] Now you're deployed somewhere.

[00:09:35] Now it's more time away from your family.

[00:09:37] So we want to maximize that with the family and create a culture where we're taking care

[00:09:42] of the soldier first and accomplish the mission.

[00:09:45] So I learned a valuable lesson about that.

[00:09:48] Then the education experience I had through this RFP process.

[00:09:52] And this goes back to kind of old home week here.

[00:09:56] Things we saw transformed.

[00:09:57] I brought all of these providers of learning technologies to the Army Recruiting School.

[00:10:02] Companies like CyberU that used to, you know, became Cornerstone.

[00:10:08] Sava Software.

[00:10:09] Learn.com.

[00:10:11] Think Learning Solutions.

[00:10:13] Yeah.

[00:10:13] Plateau.

[00:10:14] Plateau.

[00:10:15] Now you guys are really getting behind the scenes because these were the biggest companies

[00:10:21] in SaaS at the time.

[00:10:22] That was before there was a real sales force.

[00:10:24] That was before there was even the big guys had ever thought about going cloud.

[00:10:28] These guys were going cloud earlier than anybody else at that point in time.

[00:10:31] They were leaning forward.

[00:10:32] And you talk about transformation.

[00:10:34] Some of those were hybrid cloud.

[00:10:36] Some of those were web-based platforms.

[00:10:38] Other companies like Click2Learn.

[00:10:41] Long story short, we did the selection process.

[00:10:44] And a lot of the founders maybe listened to this.

[00:10:46] But it exposed me to the founders of these companies at an early stage.

[00:10:49] And I was enamored by the transformational power that were kind of changing the market

[00:10:54] of using that web-based platform to deliver training and content at the point of need.

[00:10:58] We selected a company called Click2Learn.

[00:11:01] The CEO of Click2Learn was a guy named Kevin Oaks.

[00:11:04] Hey, Kevin.

[00:11:07] And he was the CEO that Paul Allen founded when he founded Click2Learn,

[00:11:12] which was previously called Asymmetric Learning.

[00:11:14] So we selected Click2Learn, Aspen Learning product, installed it.

[00:11:20] The return of ROI was massive.

[00:11:22] We scaled that.

[00:11:23] We did our whole content development curriculum to make it more blended learning.

[00:11:27] We were the first probably governmental organization that took advantage of internet-based learning.

[00:11:33] And that's how I got exposed to all these founders and HR technology.

[00:11:36] Yeah.

[00:11:36] And then you went in to run many of some of those companies over time.

[00:11:40] And I think, you know, as you guys are sort of listening to this,

[00:11:43] I always love to hear that background story.

[00:11:46] Like, how did you get into this world, right?

[00:11:48] And, Jim, not only, I think, is it fascinating to sort of hear how you got there from sort of history-making moments in your life, right,

[00:11:56] to the point at which you're sort of seeing the return on the investment of that HR technology.

[00:12:00] And that's a lot, I think, from what I've heard you talk about with what you guys are doing at Zeroed In,

[00:12:05] you're bringing all of that with you.

[00:12:06] I think that was the most exciting thing.

[00:12:08] When you first reached out to me and said, hey, I'm doing something new, I was like, let's talk.

[00:12:11] Because not only did you understand the return on investment,

[00:12:15] but you also understood it in a world that can be a little hard, which is government, local, federal,

[00:12:21] all of those areas, high compliance, high risk, right?

[00:12:24] People's lives are on the line.

[00:12:26] And you're taking that now, and I think Zeroed In seems like you're going to sort of build into sort of a tool

[00:12:32] that maybe has a lot of value for that kind of compliance world.

[00:12:35] Talk a little bit about what you guys are trying to achieve at Zeroed In right now.

[00:12:38] I'm going to build up to that because I think you may be more about transformational moments, right?

[00:12:42] So I saw at the advent of that kind of SaaS adopt, right?

[00:12:46] And at that time, you and I were in the industry.

[00:12:48] I got out of the Army.

[00:12:49] I was going to go do some governmental work in politics for the governor of Florida.

[00:12:53] And my wife goes, no, you've been in the Army for 21 years.

[00:12:55] You're going to get a real job.

[00:12:57] Always listen to the wife on that one, Bryce.

[00:12:59] So I did went to work to click learn, and we bought a company called DOSIT,

[00:13:02] and we formed some total systems.

[00:13:04] I stayed there.

[00:13:05] I saw the power that we could have impacted organizations, to your point,

[00:13:09] it got getting a return investment on training, particularly.

[00:13:12] L&D, and even some sort of onboarding.

[00:13:15] And then I went to work for Saba, another great founder, Bobby Isdani,

[00:13:18] who was at a moment in time, Salesforce was just coming to fruition there,

[00:13:25] cloud-based CRM, right?

[00:13:26] It was huge.

[00:13:28] Technology on SaaS.

[00:13:29] And then there was this founder named Adam Miller that, besides Benioff,

[00:13:34] had the conviction that SaaS was going to kind of cement on-premise or hybrid software.

[00:13:41] And Clickto, I mean, and CyberU rebranded itself as Cornerstone.

[00:13:45] Yeah.

[00:13:45] And all this time, going back to that pivotal moment at the RFP,

[00:13:49] I stayed in contact with people like that.

[00:13:51] So after the Saba exit, and we had a conversation, and Adam goes,

[00:13:57] look, I think SaaS will become a pivotal transformation moment, just like the Internet was.

[00:14:04] And people will adopt cloud technologies at scale, even governmental organizations.

[00:14:09] I said, oh, I don't know.

[00:14:10] I'm sure you and Mark are convicted about that.

[00:14:13] But me being a government guy, it's going to be a lagger indicator.

[00:14:16] So he calls me in like 2015.

[00:14:19] He was like, hey, Jim, we just closed our first software-as-a-service deal at U.S. Department of Treasury.

[00:14:26] I was like, okay, that's a signal.

[00:14:28] That's...

[00:14:29] To your point.

[00:14:30] Yes.

[00:14:30] You start to watch what's happening, right?

[00:14:32] You start to watch what's happening.

[00:14:33] You see transformation in industries.

[00:14:35] Yeah.

[00:14:35] So I went to work at Cornerstone.

[00:14:37] Yeah.

[00:14:37] And Adam gave me the opportunity to kind of take, and I'll get to your question in a moment,

[00:14:42] take the conviction I had about solving complex customer problems,

[00:14:46] particularly around recruiting, learning, onboarding, compensation, retention

[00:14:50] with Cornerstone Talent Management integrated product.

[00:14:52] And we took that to state and local organizations, health care organizations, and federal government.

[00:14:57] We invest in security like FedRAMP.

[00:14:59] We were first to market in FedRAMP.

[00:15:01] Yeah.

[00:15:01] In the federal government.

[00:15:02] And we provided extreme value to those verticals delivered in Cornerstone product to them.

[00:15:08] And that taught me another pivotal moment in transformation of how the industry is changing

[00:15:13] how you drive ROI.

[00:15:14] Fast forward.

[00:15:15] You asked me the question.

[00:15:16] Yeah.

[00:15:16] Why am I convicted about Zeroed In?

[00:15:19] So how this circle works is the founder of Zeroed In is a guy named Chris Moore, who worked as a CPO and founder of Training Server,

[00:15:28] who started to think learning systems, which was bought by SADA.

[00:15:31] Yeah.

[00:15:32] See how this circle works.

[00:15:33] That all goes back around.

[00:15:34] It's a very small world.

[00:15:35] It's a very small world.

[00:15:36] So I'd watched Chris build this analytics platform, mainly focused on learning analytics.

[00:15:42] Yeah.

[00:15:43] Right?

[00:15:43] Yeah.

[00:15:44] Because at that time, it was about learning effectiveness, Kilpatrick model, Jack Phillips ROI, return on investment.

[00:15:50] Oh, man.

[00:15:50] I remember those sessions.

[00:15:53] And Kevin Oaks, you know, kind of now kind of kicking off with a colleague of ours, the Institute of Corporate Productivity.

[00:15:59] And I saw then that there was a need for robust data lakes, getting the data in one system.

[00:16:06] Yeah.

[00:16:06] And Chris was doing that, but mainly on learning.

[00:16:09] And my experience of Cornerstone taught me that you had this whole talent intelligence stack that you could really develop a data lake where you can ingest all of these talent modules in there and put the data in the right format and create the right taxonomy.

[00:16:25] Then you had the ability to surface that data and provide powerful insights.

[00:16:30] So getting back to long story short, I left Cornerstone in 2023.

[00:16:37] Yep.

[00:16:37] My last job there was the EVP of Americas.

[00:16:40] So at that time, we went from public to private.

[00:16:43] We got bought by Clear Lake Capital.

[00:16:46] We did a couple of tuck-in acquisitions under the leadership of Field Saunders and then Hamanju.

[00:16:52] Hamanju, yep.

[00:16:53] Just talked to him yesterday.

[00:16:54] And, you know, Edcast, you know, Sava, Sumtotal.

[00:16:57] Talking about full circle, starting my career.

[00:16:59] I had the opportunity to be the general manager of Sumtotal as my role at EVP of Cornerstone.

[00:17:05] And then I had a great run there.

[00:17:07] And then the Opportunity Horizon Aperture kind of kicked in for me, my Gemini.

[00:17:12] So I like to do more than one thing at a time.

[00:17:14] Because I really thought he was going to, like, just do a little, not full retirement, but semi-retirement, take it easy.

[00:17:21] That's what I heard when he said he was taking the next step.

[00:17:23] And we did talk about that.

[00:17:24] We did.

[00:17:25] And then you called me and said, I got something else going on, right?

[00:17:28] So, look, I had your great learning curve.

[00:17:30] I took, you know, I took an advisory role in a couple of AI startups, particularly in the defense sector, Special Operations Command.

[00:17:37] How do you take real-time intelligence and building a decision intelligence platform?

[00:17:41] I formed, you know, a great company I worked for at Crete, where it's job as an advisor, along with General Stan McChrystal, who was the commander of Special Operations Command.

[00:17:49] And it was all about doing knowledge graphs and AI agents to comb the web through Twitter, Telegraph, Facebook, social media applications.

[00:17:57] They kind of didn't backsector where's their original narrative coming from and what's the connection of vectors, which is a real, you know, intrinsic social graph of where bad influences are coming from, right?

[00:18:13] Not to get it to classification.

[00:18:15] It's a tough market there, yeah.

[00:18:17] What it gave me, Stacey, is a grown-up education on knowledge graphs, vector databases, how AI works, meaningful AI, not just transformational AI of automating generative tasks, but how you use the power of AI with knowledge graphs to go through thousands of networks of data.

[00:18:32] Yes.

[00:18:33] Which is where the market, I think, needs to really get to because AI, to automate and do efficiency is great.

[00:18:40] And I think that's a very important first step.

[00:18:41] But as you and I have discussed, AI needs to help surface the things we aren't seeing.

[00:18:47] And that's what you were talking about, right?

[00:18:49] So, I had a friend of mine who had partnered with Chris and came over and ran the go-to-market who worked for me at Cornerstone, Lori Swain.

[00:18:57] And she was like, you know, I think there's something here that if we can meaningfully expose data, surface those insights, create a common structure of, you know, data truth, and get data in the right format, then we could provide organizations those insights to make better decisions quicker, faster, and in a more effective manner.

[00:19:20] I said, okay.

[00:19:21] Okay. So, you know, I did an interview. I was pretty comfortable doing advisory work and taking a mini sabbatical.

[00:19:29] But what intrigued me was the market. There's always room for a different point of view.

[00:19:34] Yes.

[00:19:35] There's always room for a different diversity of thought, of how you solve problems.

[00:19:41] And I've been in this market, like you, for a long time, right? So, 2002 to now is a long time.

[00:19:48] And I've seen all those pivotal transformations. I think we're in another transformational moment.

[00:19:52] And that is, solving the data issue is more than you're building a data lake, you ingest data, and you turn it over to customers, say, hey, Stacy, here's your tool, and you create dashboards, right?

[00:20:04] We've seen that with others.

[00:20:05] We've seen it for a long time, and it doesn't really help the customers because they don't know what questions to ask.

[00:20:10] They don't know how to get that in the hands of people who need it. It's a great first step sometimes, right?

[00:20:15] Great first step.

[00:20:16] Yeah.

[00:20:16] Kind of on a journey of continuing journey of a long journey of analytical reasoning and decision making.

[00:20:21] So, I fully was convicted that there's room in the market for another voice and another point of view and another provider that at this point of transformation could really be pivotal in offering another application to solve some business problems.

[00:20:39] I mean, we just did our session here at the HR Technology Conference where we were sharing all the data on analytic platforms.

[00:20:45] And we're still seeing, even with the ones that we have now out in the market, that there's a lot of dissatisfaction with these applications.

[00:20:51] They're not quite getting it all the time, right?

[00:20:53] And I think everybody's trying, right?

[00:20:55] Like, every vendor is doing as much as they can.

[00:20:57] But I like some of the conversation you have that not only talks about sort of like focusing a little bit on those areas where it really hits home, like compliance.

[00:21:07] And particularly in the industries that we've been talking about that you've got so much experience in.

[00:21:12] Because I know when we talk about compliance with big corporate entities, it's important.

[00:21:16] But when you talk about it with government, it's necessary.

[00:21:20] It matters at a very different level.

[00:21:23] Let me, you know, because I think part of what I've really been intrigued with our conversations about is that you have this vision.

[00:21:32] You've seen where the market's at.

[00:21:33] You know that there's some openings to have something that's a little different that maybe thinks a little bit different.

[00:21:38] Zeroed In, I think, is building a new approach to sort of the services and the technology conversation, right?

[00:21:45] But one of the things we hear over and over again is that customers are just, they're overwhelmed.

[00:21:50] They don't know where to start with this process.

[00:21:51] And you've talked a lot about meeting the customers where they're at.

[00:21:55] Can you talk a little bit about how you think that you guys are going to be able to maybe connect those dots,

[00:22:00] particularly for maybe organizations who are still at the beginning of maybe a compliance-based need or moving into best practices or moving into a strategic HR function?

[00:22:08] How does one system meet all those needs?

[00:22:10] Yeah, I love kind of the journey you laid out because I think that's, in my mind, conception, that's the journey we want to paint and help put a view on.

[00:22:17] And so, first of all, to the competitors out there, you know, who I know very well.

[00:22:22] Yeah.

[00:22:22] They're great friends of mine.

[00:22:23] I think competition is good.

[00:22:25] I think collaboration is good.

[00:22:26] I think there's a spot for everybody in a niche of a market to solve certain problems.

[00:22:30] Yeah.

[00:22:30] I think what we want to be is more relative to your point.

[00:22:34] Yeah.

[00:22:34] So how do you be more relative to your customer and your, you know, your ideal customer?

[00:22:39] Or how do you map to those pain points they're trying to solve?

[00:22:43] Yeah.

[00:22:43] So I have this point of view, and I'm trying to get my team rally around this point of view, that, you know, people say we're going to meet the customer where they are.

[00:22:50] I think first you need to have a point of view on that journey.

[00:22:53] Yeah.

[00:22:53] And I think you articulated it very well, and if I get it wrong, you'll correct me.

[00:22:56] But I think on the people analytics journey, it's a new journey for a lot of people.

[00:23:00] Yeah.

[00:23:01] Not to be an oxymoron there, but some people in some organizations are just trying to build the building blocks of taking 12 data pools or 12 investments they have in HR tech stack or operational data or other data sources and trying to get that data into a format that creates this single source of truth or a common operating framework.

[00:23:23] They struggle with that.

[00:23:24] They don't have a large budget.

[00:23:25] They don't have data scientists.

[00:23:27] Yeah.

[00:23:27] They don't want to build a data scientist team.

[00:23:29] It's hard to go to a board or a deputy secretary of an organization in the federal government and say, hey, I want to invest $3 million to hire all these people.

[00:23:37] You hire all those people, and you're no better off because you can't get your data in a format that you can report on.

[00:23:43] Constant issue, yeah.

[00:23:44] So that is kind of beating customers where they're at, understanding where they are on the journey from people, from resources, from maturity.

[00:23:51] Yeah.

[00:23:51] I think we're doing a lot of work of understanding that in certain customer profiles in certain industries.

[00:23:57] That's one.

[00:23:58] Two is there are certain customers in certain industries, and I think more industries pretty soon if you think about the legislative agenda and what's going to come out of the federal government.

[00:24:06] Yeah.

[00:24:06] Labor data reporting pay equity.

[00:24:08] You see that in Europe already in EMEA.

[00:24:10] Yeah.

[00:24:10] It's going to come here pretty soon.

[00:24:12] And so how can you kind of lean forward in that and say, okay, we can kind of see where the puck's going.

[00:24:18] Yeah.

[00:24:18] We can say, okay, what can we do in our tool set and our services to kind of meet customers where they are on that and kind of get there and help them along.

[00:24:26] Yeah.

[00:24:26] Then once you're there, you kind of install the system and you help them kind of get on that journey.

[00:24:33] And maybe it's basic essentials of reporting.

[00:24:36] Maybe it's dashboards from the line of businesses.

[00:24:38] Or maybe it's for non-governmental organizations.

[00:24:42] It's, hey, my CEO wants this report on this type of use cases present to the board and make better decisions on investments.

[00:24:48] That's one.

[00:24:49] Then we move to the right of that data or that journey model to what you're talking about best in class.

[00:24:55] So you've got customers that I've sold to, that other vendors have sold to, you know, applicant tracking systems, onboarding systems, learning systems, content, performance management, you know, pay systems.

[00:25:07] Yeah.

[00:25:07] How do you get all that data?

[00:25:09] And then best practices report on the effectiveness or the efficiency of those systems.

[00:25:15] And what are you getting for the ROI?

[00:25:17] And that's a really hard thing because most of the best practices is built around companies that don't always look like us.

[00:25:23] And so it's a great starting point.

[00:25:25] But to get the ROI, I've got to really know more about my business, right?

[00:25:28] Right.

[00:25:28] Yeah.

[00:25:29] So that leads to the strategic outcomes.

[00:25:31] Yeah.

[00:25:31] And I'll go back to, you know, relevance.

[00:25:33] Yeah.

[00:25:34] I believe and am convicted there are certain industries that want you to meet them more than where they are.

[00:25:42] Yeah.

[00:25:42] They want your point of view.

[00:25:44] They want data that's rolling through their industry.

[00:25:47] They want best practice and use cases.

[00:25:50] And they want benchmark data.

[00:25:51] Yeah.

[00:25:51] If I'm a healthcare organization and I am XY, how am I doing against ABC company, right?

[00:25:58] Recruiting acute care, post-acute care.

[00:26:00] How am I then pulling operational data?

[00:26:02] How am I serving my clients?

[00:26:04] How am I meeting, you know, my healthcare clients at the point of need?

[00:26:08] Clinician, you know, point of need kit, right?

[00:26:11] Perfect use case.

[00:26:12] How do I hire the right talent at certain, you know, hospitals or certain regions, right?

[00:26:17] So that's one example.

[00:26:18] And you guys are actually bringing the services side of that to help them figure that out.

[00:26:22] So when they come into the system, they're not just going to a blank slate.

[00:26:26] They're coming with a conversation about what are you trying to achieve, right?

[00:26:28] So what we're going to invest in is the benchmarking data, right?

[00:26:31] So, you know, we've got customers that we've pulled in CMS data, HHS data, right?

[00:26:37] So you can start benchmarking and profiling what best in class looks like, right?

[00:26:42] Go to another use case.

[00:26:43] Maybe it's labor data when you talk about payroll, right?

[00:26:46] How do you do that?

[00:26:48] What does pay equity data look like in healthcare versus state and local government versus, you know,

[00:26:53] banking and finance versus other verticals, right?

[00:26:55] And then you get to federal government and state government is, you know, it's compliance driven,

[00:27:00] but it's constituent facing.

[00:27:01] So you're dealing with taxpayer dollars.

[00:27:03] So how do you skill your workforce?

[00:27:05] I think a big use case that we're going to penetrate in the federal government, and we'll talk about our investment there a little bit later,

[00:27:11] is how do you overcome what we've known was coming for a long time with the changes in demographic and age of the federal retiring workforce?

[00:27:22] How do you recruit more people to serve in the federal government?

[00:27:24] How do you then map competencies and skills, you know, skills taxonomy to serve, you know,

[00:27:30] department later versus VA versus the Department of Defense versus, you know, intelligence?

[00:27:35] And to get into that, you guys have to do the FedRAMP work, right?

[00:27:38] Yeah.

[00:27:39] So FedRAMP is managed by the General Service Administration.

[00:27:43] We go back to those transformational pivots in, you know, 2012-13 when government was adopting kind of a risk mitigation framework to say,

[00:27:50] okay, if you're going to deploy cloud in a government organization, we've got to have some sort of building blocks to say what type of access and controls you have on the internet,

[00:28:00] internet protocols, the framework for risk management.

[00:28:02] And it's a pretty lengthy process for about 800 to 1,000 security level controls.

[00:28:08] So you deploy in a FedRAMP environment, you know, we know most of those.

[00:28:12] It's AWS, it's Azure, you know, it's IBM Cloud, you know, those type of things.

[00:28:17] At Cornerstone, gave me a perfect learning experience on how to do that for us in the market.

[00:28:22] We think that, you know, we think investment in FedRAMP to elevate our security is going to be paramount in serving those customers.

[00:28:30] So we're almost finished with a major investment in SOC 2, which is a building block to FedRAMP and those controls.

[00:28:37] We'll be finished with that in a couple months.

[00:28:39] We've hired an assessment organization that is doing our SOC 2 work that will then begin the assessment of our environment in AWS.

[00:28:48] That would say, here's your gaps around FedRAMP readiness.

[00:28:51] We complete that.

[00:28:52] It'll take a couple, a few months, and we'll be in progress.

[00:28:55] We submit that documentation to GSA.

[00:28:57] At the same time, we're having a lot of conversation with federal customers, potential customers.

[00:29:03] Well, it takes a while to get the federal conversation.

[00:29:05] And just to our audience for note that the process he just walked through, very few people know about that.

[00:29:11] And it's really good to understand it and to be able to ask your vendors about it, right?

[00:29:15] Exactly right.

[00:29:16] So, you know, we're elevating that process.

[00:29:19] We've got two substantial customers in the Intel community.

[00:29:23] I can't go and kind of know who those are, but it's a building block for us to branch out.

[00:29:28] And we think we can serve, to answer your question, regulated industries, healthcare, banking, credit unions, state and local government, federal government, and meet those customers where they are.

[00:29:39] And we're going to start with our relative data, understanding their business very deeply and solving those pain points around data analytics.

[00:29:45] Well, Jim, I'm excited about all that.

[00:29:46] I mean, not only is it nice to see someone who's excited about this conversation, right?

[00:29:50] But it's also exciting to sort of get a chance to hear about the plans you guys are putting in place and how you're sort of building up on something that has been, I think, a need in the market for a while.

[00:30:00] So, as we know, we hear a lot of feedback on what people are looking for in their analytics platforms and what they need from a federal perspective or from a state and local, but also from a compliance and a business perspective.

[00:30:09] And we've just got the sort of two-minute sign for interview today, but maybe we could just do a last question where we kind of wrap up and say, I know you're launching the new sort of design for the platform.

[00:30:20] And it's really focused on delivering sort of an intelligent approach, right?

[00:30:25] A design intelligence to help people or decision intelligence, I think, is the actual term, right?

[00:30:29] So, the decision intelligence, I think, is an interesting way to sort of put this idea that you're sort of rolling it together, but you're going to give them more insight into the business outcomes.

[00:30:40] Yeah, totally.

[00:30:41] So, what we've been working on, you hear AI everywhere, right?

[00:30:44] We're putting AI in practice.

[00:30:45] We've built machine learning AI to our data graphs for years now.

[00:30:49] So, what we want to do is surface those now with a conversational layer.

[00:30:52] And what we do is when you get the data sets in there, what you're essentially doing for a customer is inside the boundaries of an environment.

[00:31:00] For us, extremely important.

[00:31:02] You're using the customer data and benchmarking data to build large language models based on the customer data, not outside the vector.

[00:31:09] Which is important.

[00:31:10] Which is important.

[00:31:11] So, what you can do then is the machine will start learning.

[00:31:13] It was uncovering the section of HR, people analytics data with operational data, right?

[00:31:19] Then, what you get is surfable insights to say, you need to take action on these things and zero-demo alert you and say, you've got a problem in this branch or this division around retention.

[00:31:31] Take action.

[00:31:32] Here's a recommended action to do.

[00:31:33] We call that smarter intelligence, faster insights to faster and smarter decisions.

[00:31:42] Which we're all looking for right now on this day.

[00:31:44] It's a huge gap, I think, and HR leaders are particularly focused on this conversation.

[00:31:50] Audience, we really hope that this has been sort of a valuable sort of insight into what's going on, both, I think, from the perspective of HR analytics, but also from the bigger picture of how we bring some of these historical conversations we've been having into a more realistic work for the HR professionals who are doing it every day.

[00:32:07] Jim, just as we're signing off here today, if anybody wants to talk to you or wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way to reach you and have a conversation?

[00:32:15] I think the best way to reach me is I'm on social media, LinkedIn.

[00:32:17] You know, I kind of go through that on a daily basis in my feed.

[00:32:21] You can go to our website, zeroin.com, and you can meet us at our booth here at 4622 if you're on the site.

[00:32:28] And we look forward to having a conversation.

[00:32:30] Yeah, definitely.

[00:32:31] Thanks, everyone, for taking the time to join us.

[00:32:33] Thank you, Jim.

[00:32:34] It was really a pleasure getting a chance to talk to you again and hearing about all this stuff.

[00:32:38] Audience, we'll be back for our next session in just a few days because we're launching a lot of these this week.

[00:32:45] Thanks, everyone. Bye.