Spilling the Tea on HR Tech - Why AI pricing unpredictability is the real threat to your HR tech budget and what vendors are doing about it.

[00:00:00] I'm going to lose my job to AI. But now it's like the more cost structure of it, not just getting it and figuring out what to do with it and that whole governance side of it. Now it's the, hey, this actually costs me each time I use it, which is, I'm sure, not ideal. And I'm sure there will be more stories about that in the coming months with AI. But that's been the new topic around AI that I've been hearing over and over.

[00:00:27] Yeah. It's something that, you know, it's one of the reasons why we wanted to sort of expand out and not just look at HR tech, but there's sort of the tech underlying it with that anthropic story, because some of those stories that are coming out through the usage of, you know, ChatGPT and for GitHub Copilot, which is, you know, coding with AI and things like that, they've started releasing, here's actually how many tokens you're using, right? So it's basically saying for like every dollar that you're paying, you're getting something like five to $12 in token usage.

[00:00:57] Sort of preparing people for, just so you know, it's more or less being subsidized, right? Welcome to the HR Huddle Podcast presented by Sapient Insights Group, the ultimate resource for all things HR. It's time to get in the huddle.

[00:01:22] Hello, everybody, and welcome 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. We break down the news of the week and hope you make sense of what it means for our industry and how it can impact your organization. We are recording today on May 22nd, 2026, bringing you all the news you can use this week. And by now, you have probably figured out that I am not Stacey Harris.

[00:01:50] I am, in fact, Cliff Stevenson, Director of Research and Principal Analyst at Sapient Insights Group, a research and advisory firm. If this is your very first episode, awesome. Thanks for joining. But normally, this seat would be occupied by Stacey Harris, but I believe she's getting an award for being best person on the planet. So that'll probably be a common occurrence.

[00:02:12] So hopefully we get to see more of my guest co-host in future episodes, Alison Williams, Director of Research Programs, and the newest contestant into the reality TV show, So You Want to Be an HR Analyst. Actually, I think I was going to call it the Thunderdome at first, but that's for our older listeners. Either one works. Yeah. So welcome. Welcome to the show, Alison. Thank you for having me, Cliff. I am so excited to be here.

[00:02:39] This is my first podcast recording ever, so really looking forward to maybe doing some future episodes. So y'all take it easy on me a little bit, but really looking forward to digging into the HR tech news we have for everyone today. Yeah. And your name has come up a few times on the show, too, so you won't be a complete stranger. We had mentioned that you are at, was it Unleash or Transform? Yes. I went to Unleash and Stacey went to Transform. Yeah. Which was probably a bit of a sort of Thunderdome.

[00:03:09] We were actually, I was just at Cornerstone. We'll get into that later. And a few of the people that were there at Cornerstone Connect as they're doing sort of the road show up. And you had mentioned meeting you there and were amazed that you, I know you came from the consulting world though. So that right. I did. Yes, I did. So it wasn't like you had no idea of like how to interact and stuff. I thought you'd been doing this for years and years. And I was like, not that specifically. I think it's just, it's like learning a different language. You just had to know the words. Yes, for sure.

[00:03:36] I will say my consulting background helped because I can just talk to, you know, anyone and everyone. But yes, no, it was a lot of people. I kind of got that compliment at the end. I was like, oh really? Because I was flying by the seat of my pants. Although, yeah, you had the best description of it though. If we're truly spilling the tea on our own industry. I think you said, I was surprised to find that it was a lot more like high school. And I was like, yeah, actually for anyone that's thinking about getting into the HR analyst space.

[00:04:03] Yes, it's important to know the tech, but those are the experiences you'll really need to know. Good and bad. So with that being said, we are going to be talking about some of the big stories and everything going on. But before we do, I do want to remind everyone that, you know, this is all for these hypothetical brand new listeners. I mean, we do our gaining listeners all the time. So, and you know, this is a podcast. We are also on YouTube. We're actually on the HR channel.

[00:04:30] We'll talk to you how to find that if you want to watch us on your television set. And I don't know why not. I mean, look at all these bright colors. We are, at CP Insights Group, very well known for our data and a survey. And that survey is out right now. And we would love to get your feedback. That launched back on the 15th through our distribution network. Publicly launched at the very end of last month on April 29th. You can go to our website. You can find the links. Big button. Take it. Even if you're at a small company, I think Lexi Martin just mentioned she took it as a company of one.

[00:05:00] We will not be deleting yours, Lexi. Thank you very much. We will keep that. That is still useful data. We would love to know. And in fact, it's not just HR tech. This year, we are also doing a finance survey. So if that's the area you're in, you go jump into that and you'll be able to just skip to the areas just you know about. We try to make it easy as possible. Now, and then a few other things and we'll get into it. We have a few webinars as well if you'd rather have us talk directly in that format.

[00:05:26] Stacey just recorded one with ADP was the Wim Network, which I believe will be live or that one's already out. I believe. That one. Yeah, we already did that one. That was maybe a couple of weeks ago. And then the HR and IT webinar is what is coming up. Yeah. And that one would be pretty interesting. Both of those huge topics, right? I will be doing one in Australia with HiBob. If you're in the United States, that will be live on June 2nd.

[00:05:55] But it will be live 11 a.m. Australian Eastern Standard Time on June 3rd due to the time space continues. And I will also mention that I was at Cornerstone. We're going to have some stories later on regarding Cornerstone. And I mentioned that I was just at that and got a chance to see all their brand new workforce AI platform, sort of intelligence layer. We've been seeing this more and more, of course, with Workday and SANA.

[00:06:23] And we'll talk about a few other companies' paychecks that are doing this. But the idea being, and this was something that I want you to really point out, that learning itself, and I have a feeling, Allison, this is one of your first ones on here. But one of the things I found is that certain topics just seem to keep coming up. There's just something in the air, zeitgeist, if you will. And I think one of those is going to be this idea of changing how we're learning or changing how we're sort of approaching work.

[00:06:50] And, you know, someone had made the comment that with AI, does that mean that that's the end of the LMS? And Hamanshu Pesol, their CEO at Cornerstone, said, no, you know, learning's never going away. Learning's been happening since we're humans. It's more of the things that makes us human, right? But the way we learn may change, right? Or the way you consume it. Like the way you access it. Yeah. Consume it in that way. That's exactly it. And so they're betting on, so how do we make that happen?

[00:07:16] We need to be able to create a layer, this workforce AI, that is able to pull from all these different aspects, whether that be the content or the delivery method, you know, as you mentioned, the consumption, how it's broken down. He gave you the example of just right-clicking on a PDF and go make this into a series of 12, five-minute micro-learnings that can be delivered via like a podcast while I'm on break or something like that. And then that's able to be done.

[00:07:45] But that's only able to be done because they have the infrastructure that allows the AI agents to see how that would be done based on all that past experience and benchmarking. So pretty interesting stuff. We'll talk a little more about that in just a bit. But the first one, starting out with some of the M&A activity, and I will say, too, for regular listeners, there's been a lot of really heavy, really, you know, just dense and long episodes, if we're being honest. That will not be the case today. Depending, though, who knows?

[00:08:15] Maybe we'll just go off on a tangent. But that pretty much coincided with why we were out on the road so much because everyone sort of were doing their releases. And as that slowed down somewhat, that also is reflected in the activity we're seeing in the market. But one that was pretty interesting that may not at first glance seem to be related to HR tech was a fairly big story, at least in general tech, which was Anthropic, the makers of Claude, acquired Stainless.

[00:08:39] That's just the end of the company, Stainless, that's the name of it, which makes SDKs, software development kits, and MCP server tooling. So basically, they're the infrastructure to allow all this agentic work that I just mentioned, like with Workday. So pretty interesting, right, because the MCP, the protocol of that, right, which if you recall from earlier episodes, is basically a way for agents to talk to other agents even though they're – and I'm really generalizing here, speaking another language.

[00:09:06] I think it's often referred to as like the USB-C connector, right? It's a sort of universal connector across it. But that still means you need a way to connect those to the MCP, right? You have your APIs and CLI, which is command line interfaces. We've been hearing more and more about that. So, you know, the code libraries, as I mentioned, the command line tools and the connectors that allow the API to gather all that information so you can then use it.

[00:09:34] That kind of puts everything into one bucket, right? So now only do you have the protocol, you've got the connections to that. And we're already seeing that Anthropoc says we're going to honor existing contracts, but from now on, we're keeping it on house. So that was pretty wild. What did you think about that? I know that's kind of outside of our normal scope.

[00:09:53] Yeah, but I mean, I think from an analyst, and I won't even say HR tech, but just technology vendors, I think a little bit of it is, you know, you have to think you're putting all your eggs in one basket, so to speak, of your connector tools there, the, you know, the Anthropoc piece of who you're getting the AI from. So kind of everything you're doing with AI is in one company now, which I think for some could be, hey, that's easy.

[00:10:20] That's, you know, that's, it's one, one stop shop I can go to. But for others, it may be that you need to think through that for a vendor risk, kind of like having that, all of that in one company and what happens if something goes wrong, you know, that sort of thing. So it's just something to think about if you're sort of moving to, to the Anthropoc side of things.

[00:10:41] Yeah, that's really interesting, because I think something that's come up in the last few episodes, and it's been a truism in hardware for a long time. And, you know, the technology we use, which is that you got to consider how, and I apologize for being a bit of a broken record for regular listeners, like, you have to consider what, what does it look like when the system works exactly as it should? What are all the capabilities, but also, what does it look like when the system fails?

[00:11:05] What happens when, and you know what, this is going to be a good segue into, and everyone really get the tea out now, because we're going to be sipping right here. What happens when a company, let's make up a fake company, we'll call them minked in, a sort of job place where you just talk about minks all the time. What happens when a company like that somehow deletes an account, and your entire business is based on having those connections, right?

[00:11:34] And they don't have the service, they don't have the ability to get things done, right? So you've got to think about it. No phone number you can call, they don't have a phone number, and their chat is less than ideal. Yeah.

[00:11:46] So just to be perfectly frank, what we're talking about here is that Stacey Harris is dealing with this right now, in that her account, one of the, you know, very well-known accounts, many, many, you know, followers and people she's connected to, and that is, you know, at the heart of what we do, had been compromised or deleted or whatever is going on with that. But we're, she's unable to just kind of get this quickly resolved, and we're still worried about what might happen, though. It's actually a post. We'll see.

[00:12:14] By the time you hear this, we'll have some sort of resolution. Yep. Hopefully. But you'll have seen a post thing. You know, if you get, you know, if this is two weeks later and you've received, you know, cryptocurrency requests from Stacey, sorry about that. But if you've sent it, I will take it. But yeah, so that's what I mean. You know, when something you rely on, you know, like all of your, in this case, you know, all of Stacey's sort of business connections and social media in terms of work is just through LinkedIn.

[00:12:43] I'm done pretending it's anyone else. Then when it fails, it's fairly catastrophic. So having all your eggs in one basket means. Well, and that's like, you know, for, to give people understanding, you know, it's 10 plus years of building that network. And that's the whole, I think, you know, point behind LinkedIn. They want you to build the network. But then, you know, when your profile gets compromised and then it's trying to get to someone. And I think this probably goes back.

[00:13:12] I'm sure it's either been covered on this podcast or it's been talked about in many places of when you're trying to talk to a human and you can't actually even get to the human. And it's surprising for such a large company that has such a market share in that space. And it's a very niche space. You know, I truthfully, I know there's other, I would say, like recruitment, you know, hiring. There are other companies that do that.

[00:13:40] But I do feel like in a certain way, LinkedIn is like social media and recruiting combined. And it's really hard to, they have a niche in the market. But of, and so it is really hard when you've spent time putting all your eggs in one basket for a really long time and then the system fails. Yeah, absolutely. So that is, you know, a bit of, we're all kind of a little angry with it right now, sorting that out.

[00:14:04] But it is a good example or bad example, trying to look at it, of why it's important to sort of somewhat diversify. I mean, there's a lot of value, of course, in having everything together, right? It makes a lot of sense, especially from security and privacy, ease of use and all of that. But it's important to think about what does it look like if one of these goes down?

[00:14:27] I think I'll bring it back to AI, especially when there's a lot of vulnerability to sort of the overreaching AI systems. There's a lot of, you know, the bottlenecks in terms of there's only basically four hyperscalers. There's really only two companies that do most of the inference work, right, between Anthropic and OpenAI. We'll have some stories on OpenAI later. We're not going to do the Elon Musk, Sam Altman case that's already been resolved. Nothing to see here. Please disperse.

[00:14:56] But let's move down globally south and talk about some other acquisition work. This is HR Path acquired Tech360. That's T-E-C-360. This was kind of interesting because, you know, as we're kind of talking about services, that's what HR Path does, right? They do, you know, your basically human resource services in terms of, you know, your advisory, but also implementation and operations, right? Yep. Kind of some HRO work there.

[00:15:24] And then Tech360 does your licensing and implementation, right? A critical part. Hang on just a moment as the dogs go absolutely nuts. See, that's how you know this is being made by AI. There you go. Now, this is pretty interesting because HR Path, we mentioned before when they acquired PayHuman in Mexico. So this is really just setting more of a footprint in Latin America, which is pretty interesting, right?

[00:15:50] Because we talk about with acquisitions, they're usually driven by wanting to get technology, the people, or an expansion into a global. Lately, we've also been seeing people acquiring just for data. But this is one of those classic look. We want to be more into Latin America. I do believe that's an underserved market. We see that in our own data. I was about to say, we are thirsty for some Latin America data. I'm not trying to push the survey again because we've already talked about it. But like Latin American people, please go take our survey.

[00:16:20] Please. Por favor. Muchas gracias. So then I mentioned Cornerstone as we're talking about kind of expansion. So that was pretty interesting. It was a great conference. Since before, there would be a very large, and this isn't just Cornerstone. A few other HR tech organizations have done this, but they started going to a regional model. We've seen this through iSolved and a few others that have said, you know, why don't we, instead of doing one big event that could be disrupted by any sort of major thing going on, I think post-COVID, a lot of people are like, hmm.

[00:16:51] Why don't we do a few regional events, but still make some major announcements during those. So at Cornerstone Connect in New York, in the beautiful Soho, Tribeca area, went to that this last week. And the big announcement there, although there were a few things as well that were pretty interesting, was this launch of the Cornerstone Workforce AI, which is that intelligence platform I mentioned, right?

[00:17:14] So the idea of being able to connect your learning data, your skills data, and be able to do things like sort of pick out the agents that you're looking for, the pack, the agent packs you're looking for. One of the ones that looked at was pretty fascinating to me was one, I believe, and I'm not sure if you're listening, feel free to write and correct me, only he can do it.

[00:17:36] But it was this one called Workforce Value, which looked at which of these areas, you know, which of these parts of my workforce are generating the most profit for the organization or customer retention or however you measure those things. And by taking all this data, that can also help you determine where it is you want to invest in terms of hiring or skills or any of those other things. So pretty fascinating.

[00:18:00] I also thought it was pretty interesting talking to Sudeep from Product Marketing, Paris, their CMO, and I'm on to about the pricing model. And they were very direct and adamant that they are not moving towards a usage model. You know, we have seen a lot of that, meaning, you know, how much are you using AI determines what your cost is going to be. Yeah. But they heard from their customers loud and clear.

[00:18:24] Another good thing about doing these sort of regional ones where you connect to customers, at least for Cornerstone's customers, they don't like the unpredictability that that brings. It's not even really the cost. It's not being able to budget for that cost, right? Exactly. If you just said, oh, it's going to be, you know, 30 more on your pep boom, they might balk at that. But at least they would be like, okay, I get it because I'm getting these functionalities. But going, it could be anything is not really helpful to that side of corporate budgets are made. So they said, no, we're not doing that.

[00:18:52] We still want to show the value of it. We still want to tie it, you know, what we're doing to business outcomes. That's important to us. But we are not looking to do a usage model. And I thought that was interesting because that was the first time I think I've seen an organization be very direct on what they weren't going to do in terms of it. Mm-hmm. That's the usage, AI usage in general. I feel like I'm sure you've probably seen it a little bit, Cliff. But for me, it's been the new thing of now people, that's what people are worried about with AI.

[00:19:22] Besides, like, you know, the age old, oh, I'm going to lose my job to AI. But, like, now it's, like, the more cost structure of it, not just getting it and figuring out what to do with it and that whole governance side of it. Now it's the, hey, this actually costs me each time I use it, which is, that's, I'm sure. Not ideal. And I'm sure there will be more stories about that in the coming months with AI. But that's just, that's been the new topic around AI that I've been hearing over and over. Yeah.

[00:19:52] It's something that, you know, it's one of the reasons why we wanted to sort of expand out and not just look at HR tech, but just sort of the tech underlying it with that anthropic story. Because some of those stories that are coming out through the usage of, you know, ChatGPT and for GitHub Copilot, which is, you know, coding with AI and things like that, they've started releasing. Here's actually how many tokens you're using, right?

[00:20:15] So it's basically saying for, like, every dollar that you're paying, you're getting something like $5 to $12 in token usage, sort of preparing people for. Just so you know, it's more or less being subsidized, right? Right. And Zitron says quite a bit. So, you know, the old subscription models just won't work if we're going into that methodology, right? Yep. Somewhere or another, we have to recoup these losses.

[00:20:38] And so we can either kind of figure out, you know, that you pay correctly or if you want to think about it like that, at least what you pay is tied to what you're being charged, right? It should make a good lineup. But again, that brings up that unpredictability because you don't always know. It's not so simple as if I type this, that is 10 tokens. You know, there's no way of knowing that. There's no clear, there's not a table that they give you when you purchase it, of course.

[00:21:03] There's not like, hey, this many keystrokes is a token that, you know, that's, I think we at Sapient may have figured out how to hit our tokens once. But, you know, that's, but I mean, that's kind of the thing is when you get to that, you're, you're usually in a flow by then. And then it's like, oh, wait, I already pay you this much money. And now it's, there's more, we need more from you to be able to continue to use the product. And so, yeah, I think it's an interesting dynamic that is happening.

[00:21:32] And, you know, I mean, if I'm going to put on my analyst, big analyst hat, I think in future of that's going to be a customer sticking point of tell me, give me transparency of what, you know, what my keystrokes, how many tokens is what equals what that, that sort of thing. Yeah, I think that's a good point. And I do also think that analysts do have big hats because we have some big heads, in my case, quite literally.

[00:21:56] So then Paychex this week on the 19th announced the WISE AI platform. This is very similar, W-I-S-E, just like it is all caps. So this is the intelligence layer that goes across Paychex Flex, including Paycore as well, I should mention, that goes across everything so that that does the same idea, right? So that you're able to have that WISE layer to give you sort of more in-depth answers to your questions.

[00:22:22] It's not, you're trying to move past the idea of the chatbot, querying like how much time off do I have left? But instead going, you know, if we were to provide this sort of payment option, how would that affect, you know, our business outcomes, right? The idea is, again, trying to look at these very large tasks of like, where can we automate? What makes the most sense in terms of increasing what matters the most to our business rather than just pulling data, right?

[00:22:52] Because that doesn't need these giant orchestration levels. But to answer complex business problems, you do need to have an intelligence layer. Very excited. I know we've worked with Paychex, you know, and thank you for the team for giving us some of this information. But I'm interested really to see how this helps small business because of Paychex market target.

[00:23:17] They target more of the smaller to mid, you know, I don't know that SMBs have really gotten this, you know, experience with an agentic. I mean, I know some of the technology vendors, but coming out with this strong of a stance of helping. So I'm interested to see and, you know, we can brief with them anytime. We'll get... Yes. Well, we'll have to ask Chelsea if we can kind of see it in real time.

[00:23:46] But I'm very excited to see how this just works for their customers and how people start using it. I love it. Yeah. And a shout out to Chelsea Wernick. And just for anyone, I know there's quite a few people that come from the HR sort of analyst relations side that listen to this. And we really do check every email that comes in. So thanks for flagging me, sending along. And that would probably just sound like, you know, coming in. So I really appreciate that because that's how we find out some of these stories. There's only so much that Google Alerts can do. It's funny too, right? This is just a little bit of an aside.

[00:24:14] But, you know, you set up Google Alerts and I get so many of them that are for just random laws because they're house resolutions before they become anything else. So it's like, oh, then you want to know about a big HR news? And I'm like, that's not what I meant, but thanks. No. Or I get stuff about, you know, I don't know, like British stuff because it's like per royal. So, all right.

[00:24:35] So Deal, interesting enough, last episode we talked about, maybe the episode before, we talked about how Deal, this is the company, Deal, D-E-E-L, had launched a new technology that allowed you to monitor AI usage within your organization with an eye towards are you ready for a usage model, right? So to help you kind of understand that. So kind of on the cutting edge. This one, I don't know.

[00:25:00] This one, I think Allison, your comment was, who is this for when we were talking about this? Who's actually asking for this? Yeah. So they launched stablecoin salary payouts this week. So you can get paid in your, you now, if you have Deal, your team could get paid in just, you know, with the currency of your area, right? USD, Comedian D, Euros. Or you could get paid in stablecoins. These are cryptocurrencies that are tied to a fiat currency, meaning a country's currency, right?

[00:25:29] So there's one called USD that is shockingly tied to the US dollar, meaning one dollar sign USD. I don't know the correct way to say cryptocurrencies. It's always worth whatever the dollar is worth, the United States dollar is worth. So for people that would like to get paid in that way. I mean, if I could pay my mortgage with cryptocurrency, that would be cool. But I actually don't know. That's my thing is like, okay, what?

[00:25:55] And now I could see, and I'm sure this may be, you know, part of it is like you put a portion, like not your whole salary, but maybe like you, like a savings account, like where you, you know, where you get your deposit, it goes right back out. You could just automatically get, you know, crypto and it goes in and you don't have to do it. I mean, that, that I can, I can see. Okay. But like your entire salary, I don't know. I don't know who's asking for it. And they do allow you to do both and you mix it. Yeah.

[00:26:22] I mean, but like I said, if I could pay bills in cryptocurrency, that'd be a whole different ballgame. And deal does apparently have a history in processing crypto payouts. I was reading. Yeah. 250 million last year. So, and I guess it kind of makes sense too, right? When you think about, you know, I actually, your question is pretty prescient. Who's asking for this probably that some of the customers that deal with serve, they do work a lot.

[00:26:46] You know, sort of, you think of the, the, the fintech and startup tech companies that probably have more of an appetite for that type of thing. And me as an old person is just going, why? So I'm, I'm on the same page. Yeah. If you can get paid in very bad monkey pictures, that's a shout out to my NFT nerds. Then, then come talk to me. So this next story, sticking with this sort of, I guess this has really been the theme, right? We talked about anthropic and there's a chat GPT, open AI.

[00:27:15] We've been building up to this. We've been building up to this story. So, yeah. So Sam Altman said that open AI, chat GPT supports a micropayment model for AI agents to compensate publishers. So this has been something that's one of the major criticisms of any LLM in that they are more or less plagiarism machines, right? They have been, anything they pulled comes from existing stuff. Anthropics got a, well, I guess it's been resolved now, right? They had what it was called a class action suit.

[00:27:44] Basically sending you owe any publisher that's on there. I actually checked to see if Stacey's book was, but it's over here. Stacey's book was one of the ones that pulled. It wasn't. So, but, you know, basically saying you pulled all this information and the answers you're giving back comes from them, right? And as you mentioned, Allison, you know, with any other system, right, you'd be getting paid if someone used all or portion of your work. I mean, it's just like copyrights.

[00:28:08] Like, for example, I mean, and this is going to be a different form of media per se, but like in most schools, you can't show certain movies because you have to pay for the copy. Like that's, you have to pay somebody for what the information you get in. And that's what this, you know, isn't necessarily always doing for us because it's scraping across, you know, all the places and pulling information. And then it's that publishing is not getting what they deserve out of it. Yeah. And it should be, no, this is just, this was something he said on a podcast.

[00:28:37] This is not official documentation, but pretty interesting. And definitely one will be keeping an eye on as that goes on. So we had not as much people news. I think it was like the week before that, sorry, the episode before this one, it was wild. We had people all over up and down and moving all about the place. Not as much this time, but it's a pretty interesting one. David Wilkins is taking over as CEO at Talent Neuron.

[00:29:02] You know, I know Talent Neuron, of course, but I didn't, wasn't as well, wasn't as aware of David Wilkins. Wow, Stacey, I realized how much difficult your job is. Having to remember all the people the way she does. It's like, she just comes out and you're like. Do I know David? She's like, oh yeah, I knew him from back, you know, this and that. But Allison, you looked in and you said Oracle's, that right?

[00:29:27] Yeah, so he was at Oracle, Taleo, some big HCM places. But yeah, and I think from what I looked up, he was also, before becoming CEO, he was chief of product and strategy. So that's kind of the shift into the CEO space. Yeah, I like that.

[00:29:46] You know, we were talking on this and just in hallway conversations too about Opal Waniak, now over at Darwin Box and her path going from product and then marketing and product marketing, right? And just understanding both sides of it, right? What's really going on. It's like the old days at Boeing or Ford where it's like, you know, we wanted people to be in engineering and in sales. They could understand the kind of two sides, right? Yes.

[00:30:12] And so having that sort of background, I think, is always really important, especially now is that all of these systems are becoming, you really have to know some of the tech around it. I think, you know, earlier I was, you know, when doing these stories, I was like, oh my goodness, this is a new acronym I have to know. I did not know. I'm just going to admit it. I'm admitting it to everybody that listens. I didn't know what a CLI is. I was like, oh, it deals with CLIs, you know, stainless, what we talked about before. I was like, oh, CLIs. What? Command line interfaces. Okay. All right.

[00:30:39] I mean, that is completely cleared up, but at least I understand what's going on there. We have the history of being the most acronyms, and that's what I tell every new person I either bring into analyst relations or talk to, you know, even in our own company of like, it'll be okay. It's just, it'll be real tough at first. So I think my future, when I actually have spare time, is to make a acronym library. Sometime.

[00:31:05] But again, that was kind of some of the stuff where I still have people asking like, what's that acronym y'all keep using? I think it's like something on Urban Dictionary that immediately cleared my browser history and delete my eyeballs. All right. So we're going to move on now with that one to some of the stories that came through. And I should mention, too, that Stacey being out had flagged some of these. And I found them, but they're very fascinating. But I'm glad she did because I hadn't seen some of these. This one was from The Atlantic.

[00:31:34] And it was an article called What Economists Get Wrong About Young People. And it kind of relates a little bit to something I think you had mentioned before, Allison, which is that the way sort of work is getting done, right? And we talked about how learning is getting done. But in this case, how hiring is getting done, you know, as you kind of talked about LinkedIn. That is a space that is changing, I would almost say, every day of how people are getting hired. And it's hard to keep up sometimes.

[00:32:04] Yeah. You know, we talk a lot on this show about, you know, these technologies that, you know, they're helping you do interviews. But then there's also ones that are helping you create, you know, the right resume and get found and then also helping you navigate this. And it just seems like AI talking to AI. And a lot of this sort of I'd call like sort of breathless or almost fear mongering stories. Like, you know, these things we see new workforce entrance at a 37 year high of unemployment.

[00:32:30] And but it also isn't really understanding that the way we sort of think about these things or the way people go into the workforce has changed. You know, it's not just here's my resumes. I'll apply to 60 jobs and we'll see what happens. How we even quantify these things and how we understand the data around it is what we have to, I think, adjust for ourselves. It's not that people are they've changed. Humans are humans, right?

[00:32:58] They're still like they need to work. Some of them want to work. I'll never understand those people. I know, you know, there's there are companies are looking for people to work there and there are people who like to work there. But that mechanism has changed. And that makes it seem like does it just that no one wants to work or people not interested in this anymore? No, of course there. But but those systems have changed so much that it may be maybe framing it the wrong way. I guess what I'm trying to say. Yeah, I'm trying to say in that article.

[00:33:27] And I mean, I would think it's the age old, you know, a little bit of if you aren't updating your criteria into your systems that match what is happening in the market today. And I think we may have another story a little bit like that, too. But you're going to you're going to miss people, you know, and that's I mean, even when I came into the workforce, you know, that was the ATS will just it'll read it and then spit it back out, even though you fit 98 percent of it.

[00:33:55] It could still you know, so I kind of feel like there's it's an age old a little bit in here. But then I think the market we're in currently right now, I think, is also not helping being able to get young people into the jobs. Because I will say everyone wants experience, even when you're fresh out of college. It's like two years experience is a must. And it's like I'm trying to apply for your entry level job. So I think there's, you know, lots of things to go with this story.

[00:34:23] But it was very interesting. The focus on the data, I think, was really cool in this article of, you know, that sort of viewpoint of it. I don't think is always kind of in the hiring, recruiting. And even I think the point is that our federal chair reserve, he acknowledged that this is a problem. I think that kind of speaks volumes to it's not just HR talking about this. It's not just companies talking about this. This is at a high government level.

[00:34:51] Yeah, absolutely. And, yeah, I could see why Stacey was so interested. Because some of the things they're pointing out is that, you know, we're in this no hire, no fire economy with the low hiring rate of 3.2%. I'm running alongside a low firing rate. So basically it's if you're in the job, it seems a little, it doesn't seem, it seems a little counter to what we see in the news, right? We just saw it in a lot of people off. But I suppose overall that's what we're seeing.

[00:35:19] We're seeing a lot of these sort of mass layoffs, but not so much in the sort of regular churn. Basically people are like, we've got people, we need people. We also know it's going to be hard to find the people we need. So unless we're doing a mass layoff, it seems to be, you know, it's okay for the incumbents, but very tough for anyone new coming in. Yep. And that's especially true if you're, you know, young women, minorities of any kind. Those rates are way even more extreme.

[00:35:46] So definitely I think we're looking at a fundamental shift just as we talked about with learning, right? With how hiring is done too. And we're going to need to come to grips with how that's going to happen. So we talked about this a little bit earlier. This was a post by Jeroen von Houtz over at TechWolf, which was an analysis on how CTOs are sort of monitoring and measuring AI costs and the return on investment. This is becoming critical, right?

[00:36:13] This is right back to what we talked about here and we've been talking about for months now. If we're moving towards a usage economy or at least a usage-based model for SaaS and especially for the major HR tech players, they're going to have to prove their value, right? We're seeing some outcomes-based pricing. We've seen this from WorkHuman, from Workday and many other works. But it's pretty interesting, right?

[00:36:39] So they found that what was one of the stats, you know, going to the data, 8 in 10 IT leaders reported unexpected charges from consumption-based AI pricing. I should say there are minor differences between consumption-based and usage-based. But for the point being, we'll just say the more you're using AI, you'll be charged more is the theoretical thing that's going on here. Whereas an outcomes-based is, did you get the result you're looking for? Let's say you were using it for hiring.

[00:37:08] Did you get, you know, these 20 hires that you were going to do? In that case, that saved you this much money based on your time and blah, blah, blah. But for these usage-based models, it's again, it's the cost is one thing, but it's the unexpectedness that is really giving people the stress. The heartburn. I mean, I think part of the story, the Uber example surprised me, truthfully, of they've already burned through their entire AI budget for the year. Because you instruct people to use it aggressively.

[00:37:38] And because of the usage consumption, you know, for this example, if you do that, you will run up to it. You will run up to that border. But it's meant to, I think, if you use it aggressively, you will hit the wall. But I think more so it's meant, you're not meant to hit the wall. But they don't really share that with you either. So I think there's a little bit of, you know, for me, I'll put a little bit on my consulting hat on that one. Yeah. Business objectives, you know, the tools, like, you have to give guardrails to AI.

[00:38:08] And I think it even goes back to, and this is, I wouldn't say old news in AI, but it's the governance of AI. I still feel like people are struggling with that, and they don't necessarily know how to put guardrails on it. And so they just say, free for all, go for it. And a company, your employees will find the wall if you don't tell them where the wall is at. I'm just so happy. I didn't tell you that this was one of the requisites, but you said governance, like, five times.

[00:38:36] And that's normally my role is to just say governance over and over again until it means something. I love it. He told me what role. Just say governance. We'll be so happy. Listeners are rolling their eyes. So this one I think you touched on a little bit, Allison, which is the Department of Education, United States Department of Education, created a role to give opening up the Pell Grant, which is one of the ones that usually were grants that went towards people entering, I'd call them traditional education, right? Usually almost always a four-year college.

[00:39:06] One of the most well-known, if not the most, most utilized ways to get money to people for this. But now it's going to go towards not just traditional degree ones, but to short-term trades, certification programs. It could be as brief as eight weeks. So pretty fascinating. This is the idea here is to help with that. As you mentioned Jerome Powell earlier, he pointed us out, saying, what do we do? We need people in the workforce.

[00:39:35] And these are kind of oftentimes invisible. So, you know, these are your IAT workers. They specifically point out health care and trades, something we've seen a huge uptick within our own survey data. So pretty amazing. They're hoping that within, you know, next few years, next 10 years, or actually last next eight years, that they're hoping to get additional 100,000 students on this sort of new Pell Grant.

[00:40:01] I mean, I think this is awesome, just not only for, you know, the trades. I'm a big advocate of is a four-year degree college right for you or is going to a trade school. I mean, trades are needed. They will always in some way, shape, or form be needed. And typically you can get off the ground a little faster than how going to a four-year degree and then, you know, doing that path. But I will say for this, making sure, yes, we want to get more people in,

[00:40:30] but making sure the market and the organizations are ready to change their criteria to include something that may not be if they, I would say, don't have a four-year degree. Let's, you know, and is that your requirement for this job? But if someone did a fast track, does your system look for that?

[00:40:51] So that would be my caution for organizations as this starts rolling out more and more is making sure what your criteria is or if it can include something different. Yeah. Shout out here to Keith Sunderling, who has been a bit of a bright spot in this cabinet administration, whatever you want to call it, for pushing this through and explaining this on LinkedIn. And also to my own wee nephew, who is actually starting a program like this as he's finishing up high school. Yeah.

[00:41:18] They've created these programs where he will get his general contractor's license and the associated certifications while he's in his senior year, along with his AA for non-American. That's a two-year degree. That's kind of that way. I mean, like that's actually really, really big, especially to get a GC license. Sorry, I will shorthand that. I'm in the blue-collar trade space in my personal life. So I say GC a lot for general contractor.

[00:41:47] But no, that's awesome. I mean, that's really cool for seniors coming up, you know, being able to get that off the ground because a lot of that is the entry level. Like I have to go pay for all that. Like, you know, that kind of steers some people away from it. Yeah, and as someone who's – I've also worked in that world doing exteriors. And it's like you work there for a while. You know, the money's not bad, of course, but it is physically demanding labor, right?

[00:42:15] Then you really start to see the importance of like OSHA and things like that, right? But, you know, you do that for a while. And then, you know, when you have time, you try and get some of your licensing and certification and hopefully sort of one day work your way up, right? And it's sort of take an apprenticeship. So being able to say, look, let's get you started right off when you have the spare time. You're not, you know, doing this because it's the only thing you can do but there's a choice. Right, exactly.

[00:42:38] And understanding, just as we were talking about before, understand both the sort of – I don't know, the doing it side of the job and the sort of higher level, the management side. Yes, absolutely. So, you know, we've had a few different international ones. This one is sort of following up on what we've seen from the EU AI Act, right? They've really led the way in the first sort of governmental regulation of AI or understanding of AI.

[00:43:05] There was an omnibus agreement signed just earlier this week. There is basically what is going on here is they're just trying to explain what's going on, right? There's a lot of different rules. There'll be some extension of deadlines. I believe that as it stands now, it's something like the agreement has gone out. The deadline – the guidelines were May 8th, which was the document of that, and the high-risk classification guidelines, May 19th. So it just happened.

[00:43:33] So basically for, you know, if you're operating in Europe for AI, this was going to be – originally due August 2nd, 2026 has now been deferred in terms of getting the sort of compliance regulations wherever they may be for AI in place has been deferred, but it's also tried to provide some clarification. I would say having been out in New York and working, talking to a few of the customers there on the European side and actually at the ISIMS.

[00:44:01] They also had a lot of France-based companies that were there. And there was some grumbling, but there was also – although, you know, everyone hates having to deal with new regulations, there's also a feeling of fine, good. I just want to know the rules. It's like that, you know, I guess this has really been the theme, this idea of what the corporate world abhors is not knowing, right? It's better to just give me the bad info and we can – They don't want to be stuck shaking in their boots about what's coming.

[00:44:30] Unpredictability is death, right? That's a vacuum. So even if it isn't everyone's liking, at least getting some dates and some clarification and understanding, I think, has been met while, you know, with sort of the European shrug, but also with a little bit of happiness to know that at least there's something. And it will probably end up providing the framework for whatever we end up doing in the United States. Right. And then this is – you know, normally I try and finish with a feel-good story.

[00:44:57] This is kind of a feel-bad story, but I just – it was like making the rounds on LinkedIn and stuff just today. This is a company called Bolt. It's a fintech company that wasn't doing that great anyway, I should point out. But their CEO fired their entire HR team. And his – I'm going to be quoting him here. So this is not my thing. He said, we had an HR team and that HR team was creating problems that didn't exist. And then he said, those problems disappeared when I let them go, which I just find hilarious. Typically, I – he's a very young white male CEO. Make it out what you will. Just saying.

[00:45:27] I'm just saying. And it's just like one of those things like, yeah, when I stop going to the doctor, I don't get diagnosed with diseases anymore. Like, wow, amazing. You're a genius. I don't even know what to say about that. But – Yeah. And he's made some comments before about HR. So no one – no one should really be surprised by this, in my opinion, about how he – But I do find interesting – he – they don't have HR now, but we have people operations. Yeah. Yeah. To me, that's a synonym. Yeah.

[00:45:56] I think you just watch too much of the office or something. Now, I get it. I come from HR. Yeah. A lot of the – and I'm saying this to all my HR friends that are out there as practitioners. Some of the heat that we take is possibly deserved because we are sort of, you know, doing an un – it's a thankful job. We're doing our best to protect our people, the workers, but we do work for the company. We're there, right? We're this intermediary that's never a job that everyone loves, you know. But, you know, some of it is undeserved, you know.

[00:46:26] Again, you cannot – you obviously cannot function without – But we love our HR people. We love our HR people here. Exactly. You know, that – but yeah, it's interesting to see, you know, because I think it's the age-old about HR. HR is not your friend. But I see that everywhere when people – when non-corpor – I wouldn't even say non-corporate. I would say people who don't truly understand the function of HR will say that. They're not your friend. They're not there for – you know.

[00:46:54] But those, I think, who do understand what HR is actually doing see it in a different light for sure. I would not say that this is that CEO. I don't think he's that person. I don't think you just rename it. Yeah. So – and I should also be pointing out that cut out 30% of his workforce. It wasn't just HR. That was before he fired the HR team. So just for our listeners. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't – I'm – I don't know. I can imagine that wasn't well-received, and it may have been the problems, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Who knows?

[00:47:23] Now he doesn't even have to hear the problems, you know. No. It's all fine and dandy. Cut your phone line. You'll never get spam calls. Amazing. File that one. So anyway, we'll check in, see how that company's doing. Yeah. Well, yeah. We'll have to keep times on that one. Yeah. So thank you so much, Allison. Amazing. I know that you are at Unleash. Are you – I've got a few events coming up as does Stacey. I'll run through those. Do you have any others coming up? I currently don't have any events coming up. I am – HR tech. Well, HR tech.

[00:47:49] I mean, that's our, you know, our big one we always go to in the fall. But for the summer season, you know, summer always slows down just a tiny bit in our world. But no, I'm sticking more closer to home but working with our clients directly. So you'll – people will see me out and about in that regard. All right. Great. And if you want to see me live June 4th, I will be in San Francisco, just north of the Golden Gate for SAP.

[00:48:17] And then later that month, June 14th to 17th, I'll be at Prism HR Live in Denver. Really looking forward to that. That has been an event. I mean, venture has – you know, we're talking M&A activity. They lead the pack there. And I'm always interested to see what's going on because, Allison, you said, you know, sometimes the SMB market isn't served as well as some of this newer innovation. But I think between, you know, what we saw with Paychex and what we've seen with Prism and some of the others in there, they're really trying.

[00:48:45] They're saying, look, we don't have to just be – just they get the cool stuff. We get the time. Right. So I'm interested to see what's going on there. June 24th, Stacey will be down in southern Florida in Sunrise for UKG's event. And then a couple months later, I'll be at Osi Tanner's event in Black Desert, Utah. Osi Tanner, another one that's always very interested to see what's happening. It's always a good event.

[00:49:10] You know, they are one of those ones like WorkHuman that are really getting at what is the meaning of work? You know, how has work changed and how are we thinking about our people? You know, that really good side of HR. So, you know, a couple of things I just want to point out that the survey again, you know, Alice, you can never push enough. So feel free. You can never. Please, please, please take it. Yeah. We would love your data. Yeah, we have, you know, we broke all the records last year.

[00:49:39] We'd love to see it happen again. We made it – keep streamlining it. Even though it's bigger than ever, we find that people are spending less time to get us the data. We're getting less sort of incomplete and spam stuff because we're really trying to make it easy as possible on you. No matter what you do at your company, even if you think, well, I don't really do HR, there's a good chance you should take a look and you may find it. You've got some valuable insights to share with us. So please do that. Also, go to our website.

[00:50:07] You can sign up for our newsletter and that will give you any of the ongoing updates on new research we've gone out. It's not just the paper and where we're out. We've got all sorts of specialty work that we're going. We can help you in any way. As Allison mentioned, she'd come from the consulting side. We have a lot of advisory services. Yes. You know it better than I do, Allison. Yes. No. We have our advisory team. Like I said, reach out to us. We have our newsletter. Go to our website.

[00:50:35] We want to figure out how we can help you and how we can let our data help you. So, you know, just reach out to us and, you know, we can start chatting and see how we can help. And make sure to also listen to our other sister HR huddle podcast. HR, we have a problem. Also hosted by me. That's sort of interview format. That's good ones coming up. But we also have a new one called the pivot effect.

[00:50:59] It's a new podcast hosted by our CEO and COO, Terry Zipper and Susan Richards, focusing on the sort of practitioner side. What is it like to actually do this work? I think that is super cool. If you want to help any of these podcasts, please subscribe. Leave a rating. Leave a review. Give us five stars or six or however many. But definitely less. And you can stay up to date with all that stuff. We also have all the social medias. You know, your LinkedIn. Well, Blue Sky X Instagram. You name it.

[00:51:29] Thank you so much, Allison. And also thank you to Brain Method Media Group who helps us produce our podcast run by their amazing founder, Kelly Kelly. You can also get really great information from some of the biggest voices in the HR industry on the HR channel, which you can find on YouTube, Fire TV, Roku, or the HR channel TV. If you want to see us up on the big screen, go check that out. We are also part of the wonderful Work Defined podcast network where Work HR and talent acquisition meet thought-provoking insights.

[00:51:59] Now, I didn't just read their ad copy. Okay, I did just read their ad copy. That's right. And I also want to thank our marketing team, Summer Riano, Caitlin Diamond, Kelly Kuhn, Linda Galloway. And most of all, thank you to you, our listeners, viewers, our community. I know it is a cliched statement, but we could not do this without you. I often do not get together with Allison and just make podcasts. This is specifically because we believe this is something you'd like to hear. And so thank you. That has been it for this episode of Swilling Tea on HR Tech.

[00:52:29] We really hope it's been just the brew you needed to start the engines running this week. And we'll be back in two weeks with another pot of boiling hot HR tech updates and insights. Bye, everyone.