Spilling the Tea on HR Tech - The latest AI in HR news, global pay and benefit changes, the DeepSeek disruption, and so much more.

[00:00:00] I mentioned in just the last story, Cindy, that a consideration is where your employees are based. One thing that DeepSeek has drawn some sort of thoughts on is where it is based. Its data centers are all in China.

[00:00:17] And that's caused some consternation, right? Because regardless of the openness, you know, of the model or the openness of the organization, it is still more or less state run there, right?

[00:00:35] So that is causing some consternation among some. But it has met mostly with sort of a weird sort of optimism mixed with the fact that Nvidia stocks plummeted. And so it's like people are afraid of it, you know, and I should say people, I mean, sort of the industry is sort of like, oh no, but also, yes, this is so neat.

[00:01:03] 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. Hello and welcome everyone to Spilling the Tea on HR Tech, where we focus on the hottest HR tech news everyone needs to know to be in the know.

[00:01:31] 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're recording today on January 31st, 2025, bringing you all the news you can use this week. And I am your host, Cliff Stevenson, director of research for Sapient Insights Group, a research and advisory firm. And joining me today for the conversation is a special guest, Cindy Maurer, senior consultant for Sapient Insights Group. Welcome to the show, Cindy.

[00:02:02] Hi Cliff. Hi everyone. Thanks for having me. Wonderful to be here. Now audience, don't worry if your regular listeners, Stacey is just taking a well-deserved vacation. Of course, being Stacey, she's also in constant contact with us. In fact, many of the stories that we'll discuss this week, she sent in with some of her thoughts. So thank you, Stacey, but please do try to enjoy your time away. Not everything is about HR tech or maybe it is.

[00:02:29] I don't know, Cindy. First question. Is HR tech the most important thing in the world? Maybe not. Maybe, maybe. It's like that part in Conan where the old man asked Conan, you know, what is best in life? And he says HR tech. So this is what happens when Stacey's not here. The show has gone off the rails already. All right. But let me run through some notes before we get into the stories. So the research report that's near and dear to my heart, well to everyone's, but it is available.

[00:02:59] Cindy did quite a bit of work on that, wrote sections of that and helped edit. So thank you for that. It is available. All the individual segments are available for purchase on our website now too. If you don't want to read 248 pages, but I don't know why you wouldn't because we've already established very important. The new strategy cohort education series, or I should say the new cohort education series focusing on strategy, HR system strategy, will begin in March. We are running out of space quickly.

[00:03:28] So please jump on that if something you'd be interested in talking about building an HR system strategy. And then a few travel notes. Stacey will be traveling, not on vacation. And you can go see her in Scottsdale, Arizona at two different times. If you're going to be in the area in January, she will be there the last week of January. And then back in February, early February, she'll be there. So drop us a line.

[00:03:56] That's Stacey at Sapient Insights Group, or you can reach out directly to this podcast. Or if you're watching us on YouTube, hello. We are there as well. You can write in the comments. There's lots of ways to get in touch with us. And in fact, if you can't get enough of, so Stacey and I, on February 18th, we'll be doing a webinar for HR Executive Magazine. It's called Where are HR Leaders Spending Their Time and Budgets in 2025. I think the title is pretty self-explanatory.

[00:04:24] So no need to go to what that's all about. And if you notice that I'm kind of going quickly, it's because we've got a lot of news, don't we, this week, Cindy? Oh yeah, a lot happening in this space, for sure. Yeah. So during the sort of winter time, at least for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, it had sort of slowed down. So that is not the case now.

[00:04:48] We've got all sorts of stories involving everything from acquisitions, new partnerships, some personnel moves. And there's just been a lot happening. As we've talked about before, there's really a blending now of, you know, what constitutes also HR news, right? There's just things that are, you know, we're going to talk about DeepSeek. That's probably something that anyone that follows tech at all has been noticing.

[00:05:14] And that obviously has implications for HR, as we always talk about AI. But let's start off with some of the acquisitions, you know, some of the big news. 15.5, who we've discussed before on the show, acquires Kona. Speaking of AI, it's a manager effectiveness coach powered by AI. And this really works into 15.5's whole philosophy, right? And so, you know, we've talked about the role of this, right?

[00:05:41] And I think that's a great idea of, you know, helping organizations succeed by focusing on outcomes. And that's what they saw a lot of with this Kona tool, organization, everything that they have. Especially with the move towards more and more virtual work. They understand that that's going to be not just a remnant of the COVID years, but instead an ongoing issue or just way we do business, right?

[00:06:08] And so, how do you help people navigate that new world? You know, Cindy, you and I both work remotely. So, you get this issue directly. Absolutely. And I think people want this experience, whether you're a frontline employee or a leader or an executive.

[00:06:27] You want to be able to do your learning when you want, whether that's on the subway, in your home office, or in a workspace. So, I think that it just really enables everybody to do that through this acquisition, for sure. Yeah. And then, when we talk about sort of the integrations, the partnerships, we had two over the last two weeks from NAYA.

[00:06:58] One with B-Swift and one with Workday. Now, B-Swift is pretty interesting because I know, Cindy, you've been working a lot with some of these providers in this space, right? And I think that's a great point with the sort of benefits world. You've been pretty deep into that. Yeah. And I should mention, listeners, viewers, that Cindy's job with us really involves directly working sort of on the ground.

[00:07:23] It's often at locations with our clients doing the sort of work. So, I really, when talking to Stacy and I, I was like, this is perfect because Stacy and I will often talk about our backgrounds being in HR tech, right? And taking this news, not just from, oh, here's all this data and we're going to put it together and put it out. But what does that mean? Sort of as we were just talking about with 15.5, you know, you gather data, but then how do you put it into place?

[00:07:51] So, you know, that's one thing that I saw, you know, these news coming out. I was like, this is something that directly, you know, affects people as they're doing their jobs. And I would love to hear your thoughts on how this will work. So, a lot of this integration that NIA is bringing in, I, you know, found that it really affected sort of end users directly, right?

[00:08:16] Some of the stats that they provided were that 72% of NIA users found that with this integration helped them find the right balance of costs and coverage. 88% said it made their benefits decision easier. Anyone who's gone through this sort of benefits selection process can relate to that. Incredible stats, right? And it's one of those things as from an employee experience perspective, right? You, you think about it, you do it, and then you forget about it for a whole entire year until open enrollment.

[00:08:46] And unless you're a savvy purchaser, unless you're probably an actuary, or you're in finance, you're not actually spending a lot of time thinking about your benefit selections, or unless you've had a life event. Right. And so, I really, what I, from a practitioner standpoint, and from being somebody who has led open enrollment, it's, you know, really helping the employees think about it smart, more smartly.

[00:09:12] Instead of just like, yeah, let me get through this, let me get this through this, so I can go back to my day job. Right. And, and really helping them understand that this is, it's tied to their whole, their whole employee experience and their whole total rewards. And it can only help improve employee engagement. I think it's, it's, people are going to see optics in it for sure. Yeah, that's a, that's a wonderful point is that this is part of the employee experience.

[00:09:38] And that's something that we're starting to see really over the last two years is organizations and solution providers, especially thinking about how to take what used to be the sort of, maybe not day to day, because certainly benefit selection isn't a day to day thing, but things that were sort of transactional in HR.

[00:09:58] Right, that sort of things like, here's your payroll check, or here is, you know, do your benefit selection instead, make that part of improving and creating an employee experience. So obviously, that was also part of nice thought press likely thought process likely when also partnering with Workday. And a lot of that is in the same sort of space, right, really helping on some of the Workday existing products with these integrations.

[00:10:28] So things like benefit selection, which choose in Workday, claims, retirement and leave that will all be integrated with Naya. So what if I told you that your boss skydives, Tim in marketing is a magician, and Sam in accounting does sums in his head while standing on his hands, seeing sides of the people you work with, but never see sides that inform and inspire their work, and that can inspire yours is what the talent show is all about.

[00:10:57] Email me Tom Alexander, host of the talent show at talent show at backbone inc.com and show us what you got. I look forward to seeing you on the talent show. Again, trying to just kind of make things easier for the end user and improve the employee experience, you know, not just efficiency, but effectiveness. And having more confidence in those selections, whether you're just early in your career, mid career, just having that confidence, right?

[00:11:26] And I know you and Stacy have chatted a lot about seeing more focus on overall workplace well-being. The more that they can have higher employee satisfaction and confidence in their choices, I think there's going to be a direct impact to retention and overall employee well-being as well, because they made better, smarter, more informed choices for sure. Absolutely. And speaking of Workday and actually employee experience, Workday has rolled out now.

[00:11:56] And it's also a great idea of an AI-powered skills intelligence platform. So this takes TechWolf's sort of in the flow of work type of skills management, you know, not just, you know, building a library, but actually putting them front and center. So you can see suggested skills as you were going, right?

[00:12:19] And you can start thinking about what is needed, where you can grow, finding those gaps and helping adjust those, you know, day to day, maybe hour to hour, minute to minute, you know, really taking that idea of skills and not just here's a library and a taxonomy and, you know, matching those sort of things up and seeing what you have now. But making it part of, you know, to bring up what's becoming a theme, the employee experience. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:12:48] And I'm going to quote you, Cliffy. I know you always generally say, you know, we're legally, we have to talk about HR and AI. I think 2025 is going to be all about HR, talking about skills and managing skills as well. And I think that this is going to be really interesting to watch to see how this has a direct impact to Workday and their employees and helping them improve and manage their skills and their talent management, for sure. Yeah.

[00:13:16] It's also really interesting to me because when we talk about companies like Naya and 15.5, you know, they've been around, but I'd still say they're up and coming. They're growing. They're not as a well-known brand as Workday.

[00:13:32] So it's pretty interesting to me to see Workday continue to sort of push the boundaries and add on and not just stay with what they have, but really still keep thinking about what are the areas we can help improve in people's lives, stay in touch with what's kind of the new things that are coming up, new tech, and putting those into place for people. So that's, I think, good to see. Yeah, really wonderful.

[00:14:00] And believe me, Cindy, we're going to get our legal obligations for AI in this one. We're going to be talking about some big news that probably many of our listeners have heard of. But let's also talk about some of the personnel moves. I really like to see, you know, people moving up, kind of moving around in the industry. So Elaine Orler announced this week that she will be the new chief strategy and product officer at Match 2. So, you know, that's really amazing.

[00:14:29] She has come out of the talent acquisition space, which is also where I had come from. Not directly with her, of course, but, you know, an area I know well. So, you know, spending a long time sort of being sort of that Cindy job of being on the ground and doing the work. That's a wonderful person, I think, to bring into a leadership position as someone who has spent quite a bit of time understanding how these technologies work.

[00:14:58] That's a great, you know, set of skills to tie the last story to. She can bring the pain points in. She can bring the end user experience in and really continuously help the organization create better product, better experiences for their customers. Yeah. I'm excited to see where that, where she'll grow that organization.

[00:15:21] And speaking of leaders and of Workday, Carl Eschenbach, CEO of Workday, mentioned that there's going to be a new agentic AI model dropping in just about two weeks, February 11th. So, it was a little vague on it, you know, put up a flyer and sort of announcing it. We've talked about this agentic AI idea before, right?

[00:15:47] The AI agents, in fact, so much so that people are thinking about classifying them as employees, possibly tongue-in-cheek. Oh, yeah. I really remember that. That chaos. Yep. Exactly.

[00:16:07] How we integrate and use AI because the big challenge AI has had in reaching the sort of ubiquitousness that I think many of the companies, you know, bring out AI project would hope that they had reached. The big challenge has been use cases, right? How is this useful for me? What is this in my day-to-day life besides it's got to be beyond summarizing emails if we're going to spend this much money on it?

[00:16:36] So, this idea of like, okay, it's not just something you turn on and query or ask it to do a task, but instead is a semi-autonomous agent, to use the term, is I think something we're going to be seeing more of. And obviously, it's still news-breaking enough that the CEO is sort of doing some of the promotional work. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:58] And really this mindset shift around, instead of thinking about being replaced, having it run along with you as an HR leader, practitioner in the HR space, right?

[00:17:11] How can it run along with you in your day-to-day and just make a better, whatever it might be, talent, recruiting, total rewards and benefits, and really help you then to focus in on those more strategic things that you probably want to be doing.

[00:17:40] Right. That's exactly it. Exactly. I mean, ideally, right? Yeah. We'll see where that goes. Yeah. One thing that we do know where it's going is this idea of pay equity. We started to see some broad laws in EU. We knew that there was possibly some coming in the U.S. For any of our U.S. listeners, they'll know why, that I'm a little hesitant to say what's going to happen in terms of equity laws in the U.S. in the next four years.

[00:18:09] If you're lucky enough to not follow U.S. news, there's been a pushback against many sort of DEI initiatives from the U.S. government in these first bit of a new administration that we have. So I'm not really sure what's going to happen here. But we do know there's going to be a lot of laws worldwide on pay equity. So this came from a good friend of the show, Heather Bussing, that's great to follow for anything employment news.

[00:18:38] And she's summarizing a report that Ogletree put out, Ogletree being a global employment laws firm, law firm. So a few of them that were great because it actually has some dates here. Italy is going to have new parental leave benefits on January 1st. Singapore also is expanding paternity leave benefits. China is implementing penalties for unequal pay in labor.

[00:19:04] Brazil and EU, we've talked about four, is going to be increasing their sort of oversight on gender pay equity. New reporting that's going to be starting now. The Middle East, including UAE and Saudi Arabia, protecting local nationals. It kind of goes on and on. Shout out to Australia for looking against, for addressing discrimination against families that have suffered domestic violence. I think that's very important.

[00:19:34] And I also like to see Singapore looking at mental condition is a protected characteristic for anti-discrimination as well. So this whole spectrum of legal and governmental oversight and protection of all sorts of classifications that can sometimes run counter to the narrative that we might see in the U.S. where it seems like some of these things are halted or being pulled back. Globally, that's not the case.

[00:20:04] We're seeing across the board more and more protections, more and more understanding, more and more concepts of equity, especially when it comes to pay. That's going to impact a whole lot of people, especially as more and more organizations start hiring globally, right? Something you should be aware of. It's those global works.

[00:20:23] We've already seen so many very high cases organizations be fined really extreme amounts of money for already compliance to already existing roles, especially in Europe.

[00:20:38] And so not surprised that they're even taking further steps to further say, hey, we want to really continue to focus on this double down, make it more transparent, create more opportunity for folks to really have opportunity to, regardless of what's going on.

[00:21:01] And so this is one I'm really interested to keep watching and see where or where the U.S. may or may not shift. Yeah. And I think regardless, it's good to be aware of these things because, as I said, many organizations and smaller than ever before organizations are getting into global hiring or hiring people, at least that are outside of, let's say, the U.S., if you're U.S.-based.

[00:21:29] And that means you do have to comply with those countries. Exactly. A lot of, especially Europe, you have one person here. A lot of those countries can consider you have established a presence and you have a legal entity. So really, and nuances to consider and regulations that these companies will have to figure out. Yeah. So this is, I think, probably the biggest news.

[00:21:58] You know, often, you know, we're sort of in the weeds of a lot of HR stuff. But regardless of how connected you are to HR tech news, you probably at least heard the term DeepSeek. As was posted, you know, someone, Armin, I think, said, you know, DeepSeek was all the rage this weekend. That was from Armin Berkley, the CTO of BetterUp. So, you know, he was kind of doing a summary of it.

[00:22:24] But, you know, I think that the broad points have mostly been covered in the media, right? There was, it's a Chinese run AI. It was trained for massively less money than it costs. You know, I think if I'm trying to find the exact number in the news, but I think it was around 55 million or something like that. But it was 95% cheaper or 45% less to train is what it was.

[00:22:51] 45, yeah, times less training and 95% cheaper to use for customers, right? So, the idea being that, you know, you can get all the functionality of, let's say, an open AI from a much cheaper source. Now, you mentioned in just the last story, Cindy, that, you know, a consideration is where your employees are based. One thing that DeepSeek has drawn some sort of thoughts on is where it is based.

[00:23:19] Its data centers are all in China. And that's caused some consternation, right? Because regardless of the openness, you know, of the model or the openness of the organization, it is still more or less state run there, right? So, that is causing some consternation among some.

[00:23:43] But it has met mostly with sort of a weird sort of optimism mixed with the fact that NVIDIA stocks plummeted. And so, it's like people are afraid of it, you know, and I should say people. I mean, sort of the industry is sort of like, oh, no, but also, yes, this is so neat, which I find fascinating.

[00:24:06] So, I would say the optimistic take is that it'll be a cheaper, less resource intensive way to use AI. I would say that the more realistic take, I would quote some from The Verge, the website, The Verge. They did a pretty good summary as well. Their sort of last sentence in this is the race for artificial general intelligence is largely imaginary.

[00:24:33] That's a lot of what DeepSeek is sort of going for. Money, however, is real enough. DeepSeek has commandingly demonstrated that money alone isn't what puts a company at the top of the field. So, yeah, I think that's a big part of it. It's really shook up how much does it cost and, you know, to be effective. Most of the people I know that have used it have said, yeah, it's doing better at getting you sort of real answers and creating things.

[00:25:02] That's still not great when you need 100% accuracy. But, you know, it is better. Now, I think there's a little smoke and mirrors here because we really don't know how it was developed. We don't know how the data is being used. We don't know how much of this is sort of not just hype but deliberately designed to disrupt American industries. There's a lot going on in this. But I do think it has the implication for HR. We're not just here to talk about tech but HR tech.

[00:25:31] And we know that many of the systems, when we talk about it being AI-powered, a lot of times they are using OpenAI, which runs ChatGPT, their infrastructure, their systems to power their own AI systems. Or even their agent models. So this is something you probably saw outside even of work, Cindy. Did you? Oh, yeah. Everybody was talking about it.

[00:25:53] I feel like you cannot go to a social event or a, you know, a family event. And this was, you know, it was, it was, everybody was talking about it. Every generation was talking about this. Like, what is it? To, oh my gosh, have you downloaded it? To, look what I just asked it. For sure, yeah. Yeah. And you might go to different social events than I do, I guess.

[00:26:21] Very, very intellectual bunch. I think everyone else is talking about football or something at the ones I went to. But no, you're right. It is in all the news. So, you know, it'll be one of those things. I think our sort of take on it, you know, we, and I should say a SAP and Insights group, you know, we just like to look at the data. It'll be interesting to see this year, as always, what is the uptake of using these AI and machine learning models?

[00:26:50] We've seen for the, you know, two years that we've really been tracking it, that it's a very slow uptake. And we're in the 20% range of organizations that are using this in a day-to-day. I'm going to estimate it's not going to be much more than a low 30% now. I don't think we've quite close. We're going to put it in the time capsule, Cliff, in a year. Yeah, that's right. That's right. See how you did. Yeah, we'll see how it goes.

[00:27:18] Me talking about it probably doesn't help, you know, but I don't always have to be right. I'm just saying that, you know, HR in general tends to be a little hesitant to use it. For a lot of the reasons that we mentioned before, there's a lot of regulations around these sort of things. You know, it's not just the data security and privacy, although that matters quite a bit for the IT and finance spaces.

[00:27:44] But also just does this run afoul of, you know, any hiring or discriminatory laws? If you're using any of these sort of models for promotions or, you know, selection or anything like that. There's a lot that is causing people some, you know, pause and sort of let's see. But I think there will be a threshold where we might see more and more people using it. I think it will always be on a sort of use case.

[00:28:08] I don't think it will end up being something like Excel where it's pretty much installed at every single organization. But yeah, and I think culturally, too, it's like how, where is a organization culturally? Are they more risk adverse or are they an early adopter? And so that's going to come into play, too, right? I can't see a financial services or an insurer being like, yeah, let's bring in deep seek right into our organization.

[00:28:36] But maybe you are your startup or you're a really seed organization that wants efficiency and wants to, needs to build very fast and have things produced very fast so that they can get funding might be more open to AI and generative AI and machine learning, right? Absolutely. And I'd like to, you know, wrap up on the last couple here.

[00:29:03] We mentioned earlier that there's been sort of a pause and rollback here in the U.S., especially about DEI. So Stacia, you know, another friend of the show. She had posted some sort of thoughts and some sort of summary of everything from the executive orders that were rolled out in the last two weeks,

[00:29:30] really just the last week on anything that would impact sort of HR and, you know, your work life and sort of summarizing everything that's there because there can be a lot. It can be overwhelming. So if you go over to Stacia Gar and we'll put links in the notes as well and look at that, it might help you summarize. So it can sometimes seem a little overwhelming. But she also puts out some points and I just want to kind of go through those because it might be helpful.

[00:29:58] So, you know, she's kind of looking at some assumptions based on the executive orders. One is from the direct language that was used in the executive orders that there's been, quote, pernicious discrimination that has prioritized how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing. And she points out that the legal protection of EOC have been in place for decades.

[00:30:21] So that assumption seems inaccurate, meaning it's been around for so long that if that were the case, then we probably would see sort of a halting of discrimination or we would see a sort of level of equity that we're not seeing. And in fact, that these regulations were meant to address a separate issue being discrimination. And that was what their primary factor is and that it would be very hard to sort of roll that back because it would, the assumption is just off. Right.

[00:30:51] There's also this idea of, quoting again from the executive orders, illegal private sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities. But again, all these policies were from regulations. So by their very nature, they cannot be illegal, which is a good point. So it's going to be hard to sort of figure out which of those policies are, quote, unquote, illegal if they come from our legal system.

[00:31:19] So what we're saying is that or what she's saying is that it seems to be unenforceable in many cases. So a bit of a scare tactic, possibly. That's my sort of my take on it. So again, I would go through there. There's a lot. It can be overwhelming. So it's nice to kind of have a summary and think about how this is going to affect us, because I think that's been my number one question that I've received is, what does this mean for me?

[00:31:47] If I'm going into work tomorrow, what do I need to do differently? My advice is carry on. You know, don't comply in advance to anything that hasn't actually been mandated and wait to see what your sort of your organization does. You know, you know, as always in HR, defer to legal. Exactly. Exactly. That's where I was going to go. And if you went in doubt, reach out to your legal counsel, whether it's internal or external.

[00:32:15] And I think you're spot on, Cliff, with your point of if, you know, some of this is maybe not enforceable. And while you see some really other big logos saying, yeah, we're not going to change and we're going to keep continuing on as we are and publicly saying that. And so more to come right on that. And yeah, absolutely. Just when in doubt, please reach out to your legal counsel and whoever that might be. Yeah.

[00:32:44] And now this is an interesting timing on this. But this post came from Jenny Sturakovich, who does a woman founder Wednesday. We've mentioned this before on the show, this sort of column that she does on LinkedIn. And this week it was Safra Katz. It was the CEO of Oracle. So amazing story. But also there's going to be some relation to AI here, too. It's going to be relation to AI, women in leadership, everything. It really ties it up. So good job, Jenny.

[00:33:12] I know you weren't specifically thinking of our show, but thank you for doing that. Or maybe you were, in which case, great. But yeah, she was born in Israel to Romanian refugees and then immigrated to the U.S. as a child. So, you know, amazing backstory. Joined Oracle, senior vice president in 1999. 2004, she was president.

[00:33:36] And in 2005, she was the one who led the $10.3 billion acquisition of PeopleSoft. So absolutely amazing story, if you remember that. She became CFO and then co-CEO in 2011 and then finally sole CEO in 2019.

[00:33:54] And then just, you know, last week, probably two weeks ago, by the time you're hearing this, she got funding with and worked with SoftBank and OpenAI and has invested $500 billion, with a B, in AI. Yeah. Yeah. Doing this Stargate partnership with the U.S. federal government that's going to create a bunch of data centers, over 100,000 jobs.

[00:34:22] Basically, it's AI infrastructure, if we want to think about it like that. And the biggest of that sort of realm, which I know is kind of a new area, you know, it's like those Guinness records that are like, you know, largest ball of yarn made of cat hair. And it's like, I didn't know there was one. But yeah, that's the biggest one. But still, this idea of AI infrastructure is pretty wild and something that would have, you know, been just science fiction a few years ago.

[00:34:48] And now is, you know, $500 billion investment, job creation, and just really amazing work. And wanted to highlight her because generally when you think of Oracle, you think of Larry Ellison, who's actually the chairman, not the CEO, and is sort of the more recognizable face. But shout out to her and all the credit. Yeah.

[00:35:09] And as somebody who's graduated from an all-women's business school, I love to hear all of these stories and promote all of the women leaders and shout their names as loud as you can. Because I think we need to just remind folks of them, of these stories, especially when they might be overpowered by other names that are more women or out there. So yeah, very exciting.

[00:35:37] I'm very excited for her and her success. I'm very excited to see where this investment goes and how it can impact this space for the better, too. Yeah. Well said. I think that's a good wrap up. So, Cindy, thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah. It's been really wonderful having you. And I also want to talk about a few other things as we're sort of closing out. As I mentioned earlier, the annual HR system survey report is available.

[00:36:07] It's on our research marketplace. You know, as we said, you can also kind of get the segments if you're just interested in specific areas that you work in. Anything from payroll. It could be as broad a strategy. It could be just rewards and recognition. We, you know, we have that in the talent section. So take a look at that. It was massive this year. It's going to be even bigger this year. You know, yeah, you know, we're talking we had over 200 solution providers. We talked over 6,000 HR practitioners.

[00:36:37] Again, love to hear from those of you doing the work as this survey starts to launch. You listeners, you're going to hear me plead and beg and cajole you into taking the survey because that's where we get all this data. You know, we like to kind of just sort of say what's happening and put out the data that's out there. You know, we do our analysis, but we wouldn't be able to do that if it weren't for the information you provide.

[00:37:00] You can also sign up for our newsletter if you want to get sort of the ongoing updates on what's happening out in the world. And with those, that survey and any of the research launches where we're going to be and stay tuned to that. You can also stay tuned to our sister at HR Huddle podcast. HR We Have a Problem. That's hosted by CEO Terry Zipper. And if you'd like to help support either of the podcasts, please subscribe, leave a rating, leave a review.

[00:37:27] If this is YouTube, you know, click like, subscribe, all that sort of stuff. And you can stay up to date with the media breaking HR tech news and get all the behind the scenes content. You can follow us at Sapien Insights on LinkedIn. And each of us individually have, I don't think we're doing much on Twitter slash X anymore, but I am on Blue Sky. Cindy, where can they reach you? I am on LinkedIn primarily. So please find me on LinkedIn and connect. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:37:55] So Cindy, I think that's a standard spelling. And the last name is M-A-U-R-E-R, if you are trying to find her, because I probably butchered the pronunciation. Oh, that's great. I kind of made a cat noise, I think. The cat had been in the room. So there you go. But yeah, thank you very much, Cindy. And thank you also to Brand Method Media Group, helps us produce our podcast run by their amazing founder, Kelly Kelly. Our marketing team, which is led by this really wonderful person I know named Cindy Maurer.

[00:38:22] And also I love Summer Oreano is there too. Hi, Summer. But biggest thanks. And the heart really goes out to our listeners and community. As I said, we really couldn't do this without you. It's really wonderful. We really enjoy talking about this sort of stuff. I love being able to frame any of the news I have. And, you know, you were talking to me about being in these sort of social settings.

[00:38:48] It's really great to me, because when I hear news, instead of just kind of going, oh, yeah, that's happening. I immediately start thinking, like, what does this mean? You know, how will this affect others? And it's really nice, because it lets me sort of pause and reflect on these sort of things. So thank you, listeners and community. And we love getting all the comments that we have. So please send those in, questions, comments. You can reach us anytime. And that's it for this episode of Spilling the Tea on HR Tech. We hope it's been just the brew you need to start your engines running this week.

[00:39:17] And we'll be back in another two weeks with another pot of boiling hot HR tech updates and insights. Bye, everyone.