Spilling the Tea on HR Tech - Global HR Tech Trends You Can't Miss

Speaker A: Welcome to the HR Huddles podcast presented by Sapient Insights Group, the ultimate resource for all things hr. It's time to get in the huddle. 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. We break down the news of the week and help you make sense of what it means, history and how it can impact your organization. And we're recording today on June 21st. Yes, that is a weekend and yes, that is Father's Day for many people. But Cliff and I had a lot of stuff going on this week, both with family and friends. And so we carved out a little bit of time over the weekend to try and get our recording done today. Uh, and so we'll be bringing you some news about this week and next week. I'm your host, Stacey Harris, Chief research officer and managing partner for Sapient Insights Group, a research advisory firm. And joining me today for the conversation is our co host, uh, Cliff Stevenson, Director of research and principal analyst for Sapient Insights Group. Cliff, welcome on this beautiful, sunny, very hot and warm day. I don't know about, for you in, in Florida, but here in.

Speaker B: Well, you've got the fire going.

Speaker A: We do.

Speaker B: You got the fire going in your hobbit hole.

Speaker A: I got my hobbit hole.

Speaker B: I'm up in the high rise, Mary.

Speaker A: You know, it's a weekend. We. I'm just getting off a vacation because me and my family did a big long trip with four generations, including my dad, through the Smoky Mountains, uh, through the Blue Ridge Mountains and uh. Sorry. Through the Blue Ridge Mountains. And that's been fun. And we spend a lot of time in Airbnbs that didn't quite look like this, but we tried to get as close to this and you know, I'm dressed in my, my weekend gear of T shirts. No one fights. And you I think are at family's house watching soccer this weekend. Right?

Speaker B: That's right. We got the World cup, we got Father's Day, we've uh, got a Sunday. But uh, doesn't mean that the HR Tech stop or HR World's Tech. HR Tech world stops for us. It keeps going and we at all.

Speaker A: But it's, it's going to be. I've got tea in m. My. In my. In my, uh, drinking, uh, but it's going to be. I think we're going to be getting through today.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's not, it's not a big long one this. So I, we may have mentioned on the show before but the reason that there's so much travel in uh, the basically in the spring and then again in the fall is because that's generally when product announcements are made.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So that is just the life cycle of a lot of product global tech. There are two major sort of release windows, two major update spaces. It's also when a lot of the M and A activity takes place. And so the reason why the travel has slowed down and is because uh, kind of people are going back, they've made big releases. Most of those have come out now. So that will also be reflected and you'll see there's not as much, it's not as hectic. I think, you know, we had that two hour episode not too long ago because it was just so much.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: But we still have some big moves.

Speaker A: Yeah. Some things going on and, and I think, you know, this is the time when a lot of people take vacations. This is the time we kind of start to slow down with the holidays right through the summer, particularly as you get into July. But probably the most important news, Cliff, before we get into any other update news, is you have maybe two days when this comes out before the entire survey closes this year for the annual HR system survey. So if you don't want to pay the eighteen hundred dollars to get access to that full report that gets launched in October, which is over 300 pages and if you are interested at all in understanding things like how to build nature, system strategy and what's going on in the AI and HR tech space and what vendors are actually being utilized by your peers and cohorts, you want a little mini benchmarking environment and you want to do a track of your own HR tech, uh, ecosystem because that's what that survey does for you because it asks about all your areas to get a little bit of historical data. Know some people who have shown me their responses back for 20 years, Cliff. I used to have someone who had 20 years of responses in a folder and he said this is how I track what HR tech I use. He was amazing. Um, I loved him. But what we do know is that by the time this comes out there will only be a little bit of time left to take it. If you get it started before a certain date, you have a few more days that, that um, because I know it's going to say it's going to be closed on um, June 24th. If you can get yourself in there and get it started, you'll get a few more extra days to close it because we do give you Some time to finish things off. So please, please spend some time. Um, we know it is a lot of work. We promise you that it is well worth it. And I. We will make sure that there's a link with the posting when the first posting comes out. Right?

Speaker B: Yep, absolutely. And there's also, I want to point out, we've mentioned before, but there's a big finance section, too. So you might say, well, I don't really work in hr. My company's small. None of that matters coming out. And also, I know we said summer, but we also have a lot of APAC friends, a lot of Latin American friends. It's winter for you. We understand that. Still, you know, uh, if you watch the video feed of this, which you can see on YouTube or on the HR channel. Com, you know, we've got the cozy fire. Uh, that stays.

Speaker A: Yes. For those of you who have a little bit colder weather right now.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Yeah, we are. Uh, yeah, it is interesting because we. Not only do we have finance, and I was surprised. I did not think we would have as many responses, but I went in and looked. There's a lot of finance responses. So we're going to have some good finance data. And the finance data goes hand in hand with the HR data. We're talking about AI. What big enterprise applications are you using and how is that impacting the finance space and then how it connects to hr? So those two worlds are, we know, are doing a lot of overlapping right now. We also added Compliance this year. So there's a lot of data and insights on compliance and a compliance vendor section, which is sort of interesting. We're talking a little bit about one of the compliance vendors today, Bright Mind, because they have some upcoming news. But we have a lot of other organizations like Metric, as well as the Large Equifax and Experian, uh, who are all kind of in that compliance space right now. And we know people are using them at different levels. And so we are very interested in seeing which ones are you using, what's your user experience and vendor satisfaction on them? Us is a good point to do that. I think the other thing that we added a little bit more of is we added more questions about the outcomes you're receiving from, um, hr, tech and AI, both of them. We've always had a series of business outcomes that we've tracked in the research that we always go back to, but this time we're asking you some pointed questions about the things you feel you are getting, the kind of metrics you're tracking that you're actually using for individual HR tech areas then on the one I'm excited about, Cliff, because we've always done it sort of on the back end. This time we're also getting the front end to see if they match based off what of what we're seeing. Right.

Speaker B: Yeah, I, I do really like that. And I think that the outcome discussion, it's, you know, we're, it's always interesting, right, because you know, we try not to go too overboard about uh, I was about to say we don't go too overboard about how we sort of use this data to predict the future. But actually we do make a big deal out of it.

Speaker A: We make. Well, we actually, we did pretty good predictions last year that like big predictions like hiring and, and, and total labor market numbers, they actually were almost on track. Right?

Speaker B: Yeah. But some stuff that there's no way we could have predicted this. But it is interesting that that outcomes discussion, something we've talked about forever, has become so much a part of just general HR business speak now because of the AI thing. Right. Especially as we're seeing things that have just started to come into the market like outcome based pricing. If you're, you'll sometimes hear this also as value based pricing. Uh, we might have touched on an episode before, but idea here, and you'll probably hear more of this is companies saying, okay, we understand that there's too much unpredictability around usage based pricing for AI, right? So what if we do a system where we say, okay, last year you using the same sort of resource and same timeframe, you had 10 hires. And by using our system powered by AI, you now have 20 hires. That's a savings of, you know, let's say according to Your own metrics, 50 grand, you, we will get 10% or whatever the case might be, it would be based on the outcomes that you receive. So this idea of outcomes based valuations has become just part, you know, it's just something you're going to hear lots about if you're not already hearing that. And it is funny that that is how our report has been framed for decades.

Speaker A: So it's been framed for decades and there's been industries too. Like I, my uh, my late husband for many years used to run a manufacturing, um, technology that he used to work at that would go into the company and figure out what pieces and parts you needed to keep in stock to keep your manufacturing running. And what they would find is oftentimes they had like years and years of turns and pistons or whatever that Never went bad. And they were able to either sell those or figure out that you don't need to reorder that. And they would figure out sort of the optimal amount of stock you need to have in place and they would base all the cost of that off of the percentage they would save from that. Right. So instead of charging you up front, they would go in and do the analysis and they'd say, if you do this, you're going to save X amount over these next five years as well as you're going to sell this much and save this amount. And they would get a percentage of that. So this is not a new concept. That was 15 years ago when he was doing that. I think, you know what's coming out is this is the first time we've started to say we can actually have those kind of calculations on the people front as well. Right. Moving away from the per employee and the pepm, um, it is a bit harder when we're talking about AI with outcomes of uh. Is it the dashboard? Is it the actual performance you're looking for? Is it the reduction in time? Because every time you're on a dashboard you might be charged. So we're going to get into that a little bit with pricing and conversations today. That is one of the things I think the market's really struggling with, which is if I'm doing outcome based pricing, which is where I think everybody wants to land because it feels more comfortable and we could show some value from it, what is the outcome that we are basing that off of? Right. So that's the big conversation right now.

Speaker B: Yeah, that might actually be a good segue. If I could talk about something that I saw this last week at the Prism HR live event. So if you don't know Prism hr, you know, that also includes, they bought namely a while back that, you know, venture as the sort of parent company, but also as their direct sales, they're the most acquisitive. We've definitely mentioned them before because I think they had something like 105 acquisitions in the last 365 days. I made a joke when I was there. I was like, so did you guys buy anyone in the last couple days while I was here? I need to know about. And they, they laugh, they go, not this week. So. And I don't think they were joking about that. But you know, their model has largely been, uh, they work with PEOs, right. Professional employer organization and other versions of that where they go to them and they give them the software they need. Now they Are not as. I always forget which one is bullish, the one where it's, you're positive towards it. Uh, they're not as bullish on AI that we've seen from a lot of other organizations because they already, because of their unique situation in terms of going directly to pos, they've always kind of been like it needs to be, needs to prove its value first. Right. Because they're selling to someone who's selling to someone.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: In a sense. Right. So they're like, yeah, the AI, uh, capabilities are interesting. Their president, no, their CEO Alex Campos said he's like, I'm not that impressed by AI capabilities. I am very impressed by the way people are using those AI capabilities, coming up with new interesting uses. So we're not looking at a usage based model, but the outcome based model is interesting, but it's kind of the space we've already been in.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Um, so we've got to figure out very much the voice of the customer. They've always liked our model of going directly to that because that's how they see it too. It's a lot of small businesses too.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: But the big news there, speaking of that, is that through one of those acquisitions, primarily the list of, they have become a global player. They used to be United States only, or at least US and Canada. And their big announcement, they kind of had two like it started off with this Prism Intelligence, which is the data layer that connects everything because of all the different systems that they have, everything from, you know, executive pay to performance management. Bringing that all together requires a data layer, something we've seen with Sauna from Workday and uh, a few others. Right. That is what they're calling PI for Prism Intelligence. And, and they sort of almost like Shadow dropped that they're going global. But it was, it was just as important if not more important I think because that allows small businesses through icps. In this case we mean ICP is an in country presence.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Not an ideal customer profile. Detroit rap group, which, uh, is another icp, uh, we don't talk about them as much here, but yeah. So to that they have 80 to 90 countries that they can serve now even for the smallest of organizations.

Speaker A: So when you say serving, make sure I understand because that's actually pretty big news because it's, it's really tough to go international when you've been US only. But they picked up Callisto, which is, which is an international. Is it, is it HRMS payroll? Is it. Or is it just the kind of the, the, the Serving of what is not eors internationally but probably more uh, or not peos international, but eos.

Speaker B: That's correct. Employer record. Yeah, that's exactly it. So they were able to use their systems, you know, which would primarily probably be payroll, although they do have their software. But in order to comply with all the local regulations, whether that be from the physical software side or any of the regulatory nature of data movement and of course through payment, that's probably the biggest key and any of that sort of work that has to be done, they have an in country presence meaning that they automatically, you know, would work through them to comply with any of the regulatory nature. So it would be as far as the user side, um, they probably wouldn't notice much but there would be that sort of extra layer through those in country presences they have now now to make sure that they're compliant. Uh, the example that I use and we talked through was like I have a friend who is in Mauritius and he works for a French company as an American citizen who is in Mauritius. Right. And there's French rules about any payment has to come through a French bank. So the way it used to work is the money would have to be wired to the French bank which would then have to be sent to him. You can only imagine delay that caused him as an employee of receiving his pay. If instead of you're working through an in country presence, that presence already is compliant, the money can now just go directly to them and they can get paid immediately.

Speaker A: Which makes a huge difference for people when you're trying to make that decision about where payroll. We've got a small client that we're working with right now who's working on those kind of decisions. And you know, we still think probably one of the most biggest complex things that we hear in our dataset over and over again is global payroll issues. Right?

Speaker B: Absolutely. And that's pretty wild for you know, they're serving very small businesses in some cases. So to give them those capabilities I think is pretty neat. And I. Yeah, ah, it was nice to be able to see it too and nice to be chat with a uh, few of our friends at Poster Elite was there and I think Equifax and a few others that you know really served those small businesses with some capabilities that would be kind of almost unthinkable 10 years ago, you know, in terms of what was out there in terms of benefit offerings and global offerings and, and all that sort of stuff. So really neat to see.

Speaker A: Well and then uh, so you went to the. I Think it was the only event that we went to. Uh, I know I had talked about Day Force in our last one. You had talked about the SAP event. Both of us work sort of just off those in our last, uh, thing. But we do have a couple of webinars coming up as well. Right. You're going to be doing a webinar for the Australia audience with hi Bob. Coming up. Correct.

Speaker B: Yep. That one has been recorded. You can now watch that, uh, as a recording. So if you take a look, uh, that although it is for a APAC audience and was recorded when we did live in Australian time, you no longer have to be, you know, up at, you know, 9:00pm on a Tuesday, you know, which you would have had done to get alive. You can go over to hibob and check that recording. Very interesting stuff. And although again, the breakdown is for the Asia Pacific, I often reference what that looks like against the overall numbers. So you can kind of see is there some differences. And it might just be interesting either way. You had a couple really interesting ADP1. So I love one of the topics is the women at work.

Speaker A: Yeah, that one's out there and it's been recorded. But I think it's always great to go in and see that that was their women at work. And it was not just me. It was, uh. But they did a whole day's worth of content and information, which is still very valid, I think, for everybody. And it's not about women at work. It is about the works being done and how women are interacting with it. I think that's probably the most important thing there is that it's a conversation about the experiences that we're having and the things that are not going well right now. Right. And how to address that. The one other one that we just got done that should be in there, that is going to be on the ADP site and on our website. Well, I think we'll have in our next newsletter is we did HR and it talking about how those functions, working together. Steve McDonald was in there with me. He co hosted it with me, uh, along with the, uh, chief product, um, and IT Director for, uh, adp. We were really excited to have a conversation about some real things like how do you deal with onboarding and making sure people have the right technology as well as the right processes and tools they needed for onboarding. Right. We definitely spent some, some time talking about when you offboard the compliance around that and how you ensure that, that IT, HR technology kind of work together and then how these two worlds are working together in the AI space. Right. And how they need each other. And I know we've talked a lot about that. That isn't the first time we've had that conversation. What I really liked about this session was we were talking about it from the context of, uh, a lot of times, very small businesses. Cause I think that's a big business conversation a lot of times. Right. And I think when we talk about it in small business terms, we're kind of like, well, do they even have an IT director? Well, they do. Generally. They have someone that they're doing it with and someone who's handling that. And then they also have someone who is handling the HR decisions. And oftentimes those two, because they're so small, don't get connected as well as they should. And so there was a really good conversation about just how to. How to marry those two worlds up a little bit better. The other thing that's coming up here, uh, which will be just at about the time we wrap, is that we will be doing a webinar with Workday. I'll be with Christina Galt, who is their head of product, uh, general manager over there for payroll and workforce management. She's been longtime friend of mine over at Workday because she has just been through a lot of the areas on product leadership and product ownership in the workday space. She really gets HR and what HR is trying to accomplish and a lot of the risks and challenges with hr. She's been a driving force behind some of the m things that, uh, Workday's tool can do at the very, uh, complex level of configuration, because she knows what organizations need at that level. We're going to be talking about workforce management and particularly workforce management and how that is becoming sort of the new business technology. One of the things I tell people all the time, and I've said this, I think, Cliff, since you've known me, because my background comes from working on a practitioner side with retail and frontline workers. People do not often give the respect to workforce management or time management, depending on where you know how big or small you are. Technology that they probably should because it's oftentimes an operation system or it's kind of a side note to all the other HR practice and technology tools that we have. But when we're talking about AI and we're looking at the actual performance, the actual work on the ground, all that data is sitting inside your workforce management system. And so we're going to be talking about how we think, how we think about not Just workforce management, but absence and labor scheduling, what that means for organizations, time and attendance. And we're talking about optimization of their workforce in a positive way, which I think oftentimes it gets kind of negatively. And then what the difference is with labor budgeting, because that's a whole other conversation that connects with the finance team. So it's going to be a great conversation. Christine and I are going to get into some depth there. We will highlight some of the things that Workday has done, because I think that's an important conversation to have for each of the vendors you should be looking at, what have they done differently, uniquely in this space. And then, uh, the other thing we should probably highlight is that although you and I didn't go to shrm, we did have one of our members, Susan Richards, who is one of our founders. She went to SHRM this week. So you might have seen her there, dropped in, I think she said she talked to a couple of our customers and she talked to a couple practitioners. And we do know that's probably the biggest news this week that's coming out. There's been a lot of commentary on shrm. We'll get some updates from her and maybe get some comments on that in the next podcast.

Speaker B: So, yeah, looking forward to that. We'll shine some light on that. Which is my clumsy segue into the first story, which is about a new company, a new platform, I should say, and I guess company as well. SOL S O L is in the Spanish word for sun. That will be a new AI native, hrs, completely developed, uh, with AI both at its core and in its usage. What's interesting about this, and which I think makes it worthy of us being talked about, is who exactly created this? Who is the, uh, people behind it? This is, uh, Pete Schlamp, Aaron Yang, Jim Stratton, John Ruggiero. All former, I believe, Workday, almost all former workday.

Speaker A: There's a couple of other roles in there, but most of that is from Workday. And I, you know, most of them I know fairly well from my, uh, early days of working with Workday. As one of the early analysts who were, who were kind of covering that space even before people were, you know, the big workday bandwagon on some sense for a lot of the buyers, it was before they had a lot of customers. Pete Schlamp had been around long time, really strong in analytics and planning. He was one of the founding members of some of the tools that they acquired in that space and really had, I think, a good sort of product and knowledge of how data functioned inside organizations. Jim Stratton, who's one of my favorites, I will have to say, and I only say this because he was just. He's an IT infrastructure guy, right? Like, he was the guy who understood the, uh, technology at the base of how things ran, right. Servers, connections, those kind of things, you know, uh, APIs. But he asked the best customer questions when I was in the room with him and Aneel and the rest of the executive board. Like, he always would stop and say, let's listen to what Stacey's saying about what we're challenged with and what our customers are struggling with. Because he realized, I think at a lot of levels that a lot of the customer challenges weren't oftentimes about the product processes. It wasn't as much about sort of what the front end looked like. It was oftentimes something that had to do with sort of how the back end worked and how things were connected. So I'm very excited. Eric Yang, uh, has been in there a long time, also worked, uh, under Jim Stratton's team. A lot of good people with, I think, some. Some strong technical background. Now their focus, it sounds like with sol, is that they are going to create an AI first HRMS environment. We're hearing this a lot, and the whole market I'm very interested in seeing. We haven't got a briefing yet, but we will definitely get a briefing from them. They just came out of, uh, stealth, uh, mode. Yeah, stealth mode, as they call it. Right. What I do think is that they're not the only, I could say working day kind of. How do you best put this group of people who have spun things off? Right is a good way to put it. There's another one out there, I don't have the name of it, where I'm actually trying to get some. Some details on that one as well. We do know that we talked about the new one from. That's being built on the ServiceNow platform, Noralex. Right. Which is really exciting. We're kind of seeing where that's going this whole space. I think everybody is trying to reimagine what the HRMS is, and they're trying to reimagine it from different views and different perspectives. I'm excited to see this because I think it gives competition to what is the traditional HRMS standard. Now, we've talked for quite some time that it isn't re. The HRMS is the system of record on a lot of systems and that data is needed and all the Security and all of the policies and all the things that go around is important. But a lot of that can be held in other systems too. Right. This is why ServiceNow has become such a big front end technology for a lot of organizations. This is why we're seeing organizations like Cornerstone create what we consider like a light hms because their talent management covers a lot of that profile information. Right. And for big European countries who oftentimes have uh, companies who oftentimes have lots of different payrolls, they just need that layer above and the payroll holds a lot of that data. Right. So I think everybody's trying to figure their way through this. You know, the HRMS was something that was created by to some extent and the system of uh, record by the HR technologist who said I need some place to hold all this information right now will AI make that a little less valuable? To hold it all in one place doesn't make the data any less valuable. But the question is where it's held. That becomes the big conversation. Right?

Speaker B: Yeah. For a certain age listener. I know that obviously when I started as a practitioner, as soon as you did, we were in the computer age, but there was still, we still had regulations about where all files had to be kept and you know, in a fireproof file cabinet. And that was, you know, everything from your i9 to any of your, you know, personal information, emergency contact, all that. That's really the digital version of that is when HMS is that old fireproof file cabinet. So anything sort of compliance, regulated, regulatory, related, any of the info that you need. But you're right and the necessity of that system has gone beyond like, okay, I just need to have all that in record to. I specifically can use this in a positive way to help create broader insights into our data and use that to help our workers and our company ultimately.

Speaker A: Yeah. And as we've got. One of the things I'm going to talk about in the work, in the workday webinar that I'm doing is this path we've seen happen, which in on premise we were managing our processes, we were really trying to figure out how to get processes into a technology with all that data that you just talked about. We went to the cloud. It was really trying to kind of do best practices, kind of all the things that were the same that were important. When we did big data, it was about understanding all the data that we had and making that accessible. Right. There was all these stages that we've gone through in technology that's very, that's summarizing at A very high level. But the difference with AI that we are seeing right now is it is about how we manage the work. And I think that's what makes it a very different conversation, which is it has to have access to where the work is being done, to the data about the work, not just all the information about who's doing the work and what their skills are and their capabilities, which is what we've been spending a lot of time on. And the flow of getting that information to where it needs to be. When you start talking about how the work gets done, those systems become more operations and less data keeping. And this is why you're starting to see all these organizations rethink the idea of it. So very exciting to see where it heads.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So you mentioned too that SHRM was going on at the same time that I was at PrismHR live. There was actually another event, not as big in terms of people, but there's always some major announcement that comes out and that's Isolt's partner connect was, uh, happening. Uh, definitely that was FOMO for me because, you know, I was there last year and spoke there last year and just so much of so many different things are happening at the same time. I was like, I really considered can I make the flight out there and then to Orlando. And luckily, like I said, Susan was there, but kind of a bummer, but there was some big news that came out of that that they were kind enough to pass on. And that was two kind of main things, you know, their, their workforce capital management platform. But I'd say the bigger one, or at least the, you know, one that they sort of highlight is that they have a Claude connector.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So anthropic the company makes Claude. I know that this is definitely one, I guess I would call it the practitioner side. What I really see the value because we here at Safe and Insight have found from reviewing all of these connections and all these AI agents type, you know, work that we found Claude to be useful when it has that direct connection, when we can have it directly in an Excel sheet, for instance, and say based on the calculation we have here, can you create the formulas? Can you populate, you know, these cells? Given the example we've shown, strange enough, Microsoft Copilot, at least at the levels that we were using it at, didn't have those connections, even though they're like products, but whatever. So be able to have that embedded into your work. So that's what this cloud connector is. It's within the ISO platform. So you could say, hey, Search through any of these fields and see if I'm missing some information. If we're going to use this sort of HR system of record example, continuing through and say, oh, wow, I don't have the i9 information for six, uh, employees that's now been flagged. Rather than having to do that manually, you can use natural language to run those queries. So I find that in the space of the war, Cloud Connector to be worthy of a big announcement. And that's pretty cool.

Speaker A: Well, and they also, I think, released some agents as well. Right? I think they had a number of agents that came up payroll, some clients, a couple of other ones. And again, the one thing that's interesting about Isolved because, you know, we show a chart every year about the, the, the organizations who say they are aware of and using AI inside of your HR applications, which is different than if I'm an, an HR organization who's using any form of AI and I'm also using your. We kind of look at it both ways. We look at, you know, am I using standalone AI and other things and am I not using your AI? Because that's a, uh, an indicator too that what you have isn't quite what I need. Right. And then we also ask, are you using the embedded AI applications? And last year obviously we saw like hibob hit the top on that. We saw Workday's always been kind of in the top of that. For the last couple of years we've looked at it. Oracle started to increase in adoption, um, although they had a lot more people who were implementing. So you saw a lot of different players in the space. ADP Cornerstone hit the top five and then it won. ISALT was at the bottom and it wasn't a bad thing. What we had talked to them about, and they were very aware of this, is that the SMB market wasn't quite ready yet to sort of take full advantage. And they were also very concerned about they didn't have compliance on site, they didn't have a lot of capabilities on site. So what I really love about ISALT is they're very focused on listening to what their customers need and when they need it. And right now we know that SMBs are now saying, okay, I've played a little bit with the AIs that are standalone. Right, I know, Claude, we know already about 80% of the market shifted over to cloud in the last year and a half from ChatGPT because it became a much more safe and structured way to use AI with a business model because they were able to make those connections more carefully depending on who you're talking to. And so, you know, Isol first went for. Let's connect that. So that makes it easy for the small businesses. And then they came up with some um, AI agents they felt were really focused on what their customers wanted. And when we talked to them about pricing and we didn't get all the details, I think we're still kind of getting some of that involved. But their big focus here was that we're not going to just, just do this consumer based con consumption sort of pricing models. We're going to kind of build this into the Pepa model that small businesses are comfortable with so they can budget because they really need to budget. There will be an increase in price because you have to have an increase in price when you're doing some new things. But they're going to build it into a model that works for them. The other thing that I really liked when we got our briefing on this was that their new head of product and their new, uh, well actually no, it's their new CEO I should say, uh, because Pragya who was their coo and uh, Kristen Rishi, who's been there, had a product now for Kelly Rico. Sorry, Kelly.

Speaker B: Yes, no worries. She knows.

Speaker A: Yeah. Kelly, who's been there, longtime product leader. They've really, I think done a good job of really understanding what the customers are looking for and how they're connecting to that. The new CEO has a background coming. Yep. Ah, uh, from working with a lot of other HRMS environments, big AI background. And so he's bringing his experience and they're bringing their experience. And what I like is that they're both listening to each other when you hear them talk about it. And both of them have really clear on the fact that they want to make sure that when they're talking about AI, they're not just talking about how it's being managed and how it's being talked about as a tool within the organization, but that you're also thinking about it as how it's being trained and how the policies and compliance are being managed and set and how it's being audited and reviewed and that HR has a big role in that space. Make sure that it's managed. I really liked where they were heading with that and I think we'll hear a lot more.

Speaker B: Yeah, I also like, uh, you, you mentioned this and it's for once again kind of the theme here. But you mentioned there's agents, there's six of them that they've released right now in general availability. And they're each accountable for an outcome. You mentioned the outcome based. And so here it goes again. So to give you. There's six of them. We won't go through all of them. They all have pretty cute names. But for instance, there's one called the Helper, and that is to do sort of the HR help desk. Right. And so they're looking at, rather than just routing the tickets and figuring out, you know, if you put in your question, we figure out the right person, they literally try to answer the questions. They can see time save, they can see ticket resolving numbers. And you can get that specific outcome or one called the Advisor, which helps you with benefits enrollment. So you can look at enrollment completion and total number of employees served. Right. And get a very specific outcome that you can actually see the value that these type of agents bring in rather than just sort of a vague, hey, we got these cool new agents could do cool new stuff. Yes, that's nice. But like, what specifically is this value to me especially as we start thinking more and more about the cost of token usage.

Speaker A: So I always liked about Kelly, when we talked to Kelly, who's their product officer, Chief product officer, is that she always, in every conversation, she always asks us about what are they trying to achieve. Right. And that comes through in the, in the AI conversations they're having right now. So, yeah, all good stuff. You know, like I said, this is not. Nobody can put their head in the sand and say AI is not here. Right. What they, what we can do is have a real good conversation about what is it achieving and what do we want to give it access to. Right.

Speaker B: That's a great point. It's kind of a compliance question. Right. And when we talk about compliance, we want to talk about brightmine, one of the big companies. Bright mind you mentioned, uh, that Susan was at shrm. They made a big announcement when they were there. And that's definitely a company that we know well. We've been working with them as they're trying to become a little more well known in the space and doing some of the work. And one of the big ones they did was about, you know, they're another one to, you know, understand the kind of, I guess the right questions to ask. And they really understand this age of AI. You really need to trust in the data that you have. And they're really trying to figure out a way to go beyond just. Yeah, that's a nice saying, but what does that actually mean in the practical world? How do we create trust and a lot of that is in transparency and in clarity and openness of what's going on. Specifically here I think we're talking about compensation information. Right? So making sure to have that layer of data coming from a number of different sources and seeing where that information comes from. That was a big announcement at shrm. Any other insight? I know like you said, we, neither of us were there but uh, we both work closely with Bright Mind. Anything that you saw?

Speaker A: Yeah, we've worked with this group for a while and I think what's really interesting about this one is that um, what Bright Mind does is they are compliance content. And the most important thing about compliance content zone space is being impacted heavily by AI right now as we all know. Because I think it feels like if I type in a chatgpt and I say what's this next new compliance thing for this city or this state or this local region like? It's giving you the right answer. But what a lot of people don't realize is that it might be reading the front headline of a, of a policy or of a regulation and not realize that it hasn't been passed or it has different components to it. So one of the things that's really important when you're dealing with compliance stages, that you are digging deep enough to understand what's really happening at the regulatory level and that you're connecting it to all the different ways that that regulation has an impact on other things inside the organization. So um, Brightman, many of them might know the brand Expert hr, that was kind of where they were they originally were baked from. They were acquired by RELX, which is the parent company for LexisNexis. Many people know LexisNexis, which is a huge brand in legal compliance data. So they're just a huge data company that understands the power of correct data. It's the best way I can put it of trusted data. Right. And so what's really exciting is that they have uh, created a partnership and uh, really rolled out at Ah, the SHRM 2026 relationship with one of the large uh, background checking firms, ah, with the focus on taking sort of their highly structured look at variations of different roles inside organizations and some of the compliance around that with some of the payroll and background checking data that some of those, the background organization has, combining that and giving you a much more m granular look at compensation data, pay equity which is really big. They are much of, they have, they have a big um, location out in the European market and uk. They're dealing with a lot of the challenges that those markets are dealing with on a pay equity conversation right now, even though that is being delayed by a lot of regulations who are still being held accountable to it from over time. Here in the United States, they are heavily focused on sort of pay as it relates to compliance and regulations and your pay benchmarking and salary ranges. Those are really tightly connected to what you could do by state and local region and taxes. And so I do think that this is a space where what we can see is the value of the data is in how well it is curated. And that is something we, I think we'll hear more and more about as we start to look at where AI is getting its data from and the, and the impact of being able to trust that data. You know, over time, uh, A.I. is going to have less open Internet to just pull information from. Even though there are government locations and sites where all that data is oftentimes held in public environments. It's not always updated very well. It's not always kept as neat as it should be, it's not always easy to access. And so as good as AI is, if it doesn't understand the nuances, doesn't understand how to really check things, it could oftentimes give you the wrong answer because of the way someone worded it or the way someone put it into a site or what's banners in front of it. And so we really have to think about sort of trusted and validated data. Same thing we talk about in our survey all the time, Cliff. Right. Like it makes a difference if you know who double checked this and you know where they got the data from and you know how they got the data. Right?

Speaker B: Yeah. And I would say actually there's, I don't know, another perspective that I've seen a lot too, which is that, uh, with the AI sort of world, they're generating answers based on, and if they do start to, if they find some incorrect data and they put an answer out there, that's now part of the broader data set in a lot of cases that now the next generation of AI is looking at. Right. So it's perpetuating bad info. So it's, you know, some people say, yeah, I looked and I saw there was a source, but then you look at that source and you've got to track it back. It's not much different than research has always been done, right? Find a primary source, find that primary info. And like you said, sometimes even that primary info can be wrong. But the whole idea is Open up that space, put some clarity, shine some light on there.

Speaker A: Yeah. And it's not always wrong, just that it didn't read it right. Right. It does that all the time for our research. Right. Like. Like AI is just as fallible as human beings. Maybe do a little faster, but it can also get the wrong answer faster too. Right.

Speaker B: Very perceptive. Uh, Perceptics. Oh. As long as we're talking about Perceptics, Mary Popp, someone you've known for a very long time. I don't know if I've ever had a chance to m. Meet her, but she has moved over to be the chief customer officer. She says she's going back to her roots as the chief customer officer now. Ah. At Perceptics.

Speaker A: Yeah. Mary Poppin. One. Uh, of all, I just loved her name. Right. I used to laugh. It's like one of those names that you just can't forget. Right. But I met her when she was. She's come Oscar over at SAP, SuccessFactors. And she was just one of those people that really, you know, there's a lot of times, uh, I meet tons of people in our industry, you and I both, right. And we're like, hey, we know we met him. We don't know where we met him. We all, we, we try our best. We really do. But, you know, there's a lot of. Just like anybody else, a lot of names and a lot of people. Mary stuck with me because she just had an energy about her and how much she cared about the customers and her sort of. When she was. That was early days. SuccessFactors was acquired by SAP. There was a lot of customer challenges because of the big company, little company challenges. Right. Moving in that, in that space. And she really think had her. Her arms. Pulse of what was happening in that organization. So I'm very excited to see her move into Perceptics. We know Perceptics has been sort of over the last couple of years, kind of figuring out what its next step is in this market. Right. It's a, it's a tough space. Like we said, getting data and information on where people are at and what their feelings are and what they're doing. And so I'm excited. This is a great place for her. I think she stepped out a little bit. She was doing maybe sales, customers, technology, those kind of things. And now she's back in this space. We have a lot of other friends like Lisa Sterling who are over there at Perceptics and other friends. So we know, know, um, they're continuing to invest in their leadership here, and I'm excited to see what she can do here, so I'm hoping we get a chance to get it caught up with her soon, so.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Another leader that we've seen and has also been mentioned on the show a few times, Rachel Barger, most recently at ukg, definitely made a big impact there and. But she is now over at Epicor as their Chief Revenue Officer. Pretty interesting. I mean, her pedigree as well, or her, you know, her experience, I should say, whatever you want to think of it, you know, between UKG with the, uh, aforementioned SAP and Cisco, you know, really in there on the tech side now, you know, at Epicor as their Chief Revenue officer. Just really interesting. This is a person who's definitely someone we've met and had a chance to talk to directly. Another, you know, what tricks me about her, at least on our sort of personal ones, is that she is kind of gets into the data probably from having, you know, such a strong, you know, sort of tech background, when we would say things like, you know, 16% of people are using the embedded AI platform. So let me see, you know, break down who specifically at the company is using it that way. You know, are we seeing differences between, you know, executives using IT people on the ground? I don't know. Let me check. You know, are we seeing that? Is that a regional thing? What is it that's appealing to some and not to others? You know, like, not just saying, okay, 60%, whatever that means, you know, like, I've always been impressed with her sort of insights and the. Right. The questions she asks, sometimes that's just as important as the answers you give.

Speaker A: Yeah, I always liked Rachel. I had not met her until she was at ukg, so it was my first opportunity to get a chance to meet her. What I'm interested, intrigued by this is one it shows. Epicor is starting to increase, uh, its leadership role. Now most people think Epicor is just kind of an SMB, basically a, an erp, right, Like a finance and some supply chain and, and, and, uh, you know, systems record, those kinds of things. It does have a, has a pretty stable HRMs. They did do a lot of partnerships with UKG back in the day as well. So I'm waiting to see certain of what that looks like. We still see a lot of people on Epicor in our data set. Right. It's very small businesses, but it is interesting to see them start to stretch a little bit. And we have heard a lot about sort of their finance Components, you know, the finance space. One of the reasons we're capturing data on this is we think there's going to be a lot of shift here. Right. We know Zoho is coming on strong with what they're doing kind of in their sales and going into finance and payroll. We are definitely seeing in our data set, you know, organizations like Netsuite sort of shift its makeup and mix in a lot of the spaces. Right. Um, we're definitely seeing some new players come into this space. So I think this will be a space to wash, as we often say. Right. Which is how does the HR world connect up with these sort of mid market SMB, uh, finance organizations? Right. Yeah.

Speaker B: It's also interesting because when I'm looking at Rachel's sort of trajectory and something we're seeing, another one we're seeing is really a shift towards understanding the frontline workers. Of course, during COVID it became. That's probably a term many of us hadn't used before. We probably just said, you know, I don't know, blue collar or you know, like line workers or something like that. But frontline workers became not like being

Speaker A: retail in the middle of Christmas, you know, exactly what it's like, uh, or in the middle of COVID health care. Right. The frontline is frontline. You are dealing with the public every day.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And that's Epicor is one of Epicor's space. Right. Manufacturing, distribution centers, supply chain sort of stuff. So that is something that UKG has heavily focused on, especially during Rachel's tenure. So she's kind of continuing that like space. And that's another area it's become quite hot.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Is making sure you're serving, servicing those frontline workers. I don't have a cute segue for this one, but another fun one.

Speaker A: Alex will forgive you.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So Alexandros, who, you know, in World cup sort of, you know, with the theme of the World cup going on, it mostly goes by just his first name, I guess to try and save us pronouncing a longer Greek name. But uh, it's Alexandros Stratos. But even though on his LinkedIn, Alexandros S has left workday and is now going to be at Fosway. I'll admit that I did not know Fosway as well, but you know, continues in the analyst role. Did you know Fosway?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we know Fosway very well. Yeah, David over there, who, uh, Fosbay is probably the, the largest European independent analyst firm outside of, you know, and you You've known them. You probably.

Speaker B: Oh, I probably know the people without knowing the.

Speaker A: Yeah, you know, you definitely know David. You definitely know, uh, Sven, the guys who are over there. Right.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: What. I. What, what's. They work internationally, but they also work in the United States. They do some great sort of charts on sort of where people play in the market to like many of the other analyst firms in the space. I know Alex as well. So Alex, uh, was our analyst relations at workday for, uh, many years. Particularly he dealt with the CIO office. And he also was kind of headed up if we were doing the European workday event. So he would basically help me out with hotels and make sure we were able to get to the locations. He made sure we had good reservations for meals. Alex. And one that. We used to laugh with Alex all the time because Alex was Greek. So he would make sure everything was taken care of. Like, it was very much important to him that we were feeling like we were guests in his house whenever we went to the Barcelona or Stockholm or to Amsterdam. Uh, we've been to all of those for the workday European conferences. What I'm. He came from idc, though, so he was an analyst who then went from. To being an analyst relations. And he's going back to being an analyst for the Fosway team. Team. We love David. We love the Fosway team. I'm very excited for Alex and for the Fosway team. So we're just uh, a, uh, shout out and a congratulations to see someone that we were not. You know, because a lot of times when people leave in their analyst relations roles, they go someplace else. We don't get to see him very often. So this means we'll get to see him on the road again still. So, uh, just shout out and, uh, uh, we're looking forward to seeing him on the road again. So.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, we've been talking a lot about people kind of leaving companies and going to new ones. A little something called flight risk. Well, wouldn't you just know it? PayScale just released a, uh, new report, the flight risk report. And this is an interesting. Because we were just talking about analysts. Right. So you and I took a look at this. You know, we've got the full report. And I would say this is one of those ones where you start to say, you know, we all have a data set, right? We have a data set in front of us. What do we take from that? And that's why that's part of the analyst role. I sort of interpreted. And I think you did too, right. Some of the numbers and some of the data that came out of this report different than at least as far as the sort of official press release from PayScale. But it's still great research. It was so interesting to read. But what they were looking at specifically here is there are jobs wherein after a number of years, the pay discrepancy between tenured employees, people have been there for a little while and new employees, when that discrepancy is really high, then people are more likely to leave the organization.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: But when you. And that's interesting, right.

Speaker A: And I think that, and that's not surprising, right. If you. Someone new comes in, they're making more money than you. Right. Like there's, there's real issues and vice versa. If you're new and someone's making a lot of money. Right. Like that's not surprising. But we, uh, always like to be validated on that. Right?

Speaker B: Yeah. So they, they call it job hugging. Right. Staying onto your job because you know you'll go more so you know, the sort of analysis side though that I kind of took a little differently than they might have is that Ruth Thomas, who's the chief compensation strategist at PayScale, said when uh, I'm not doing the exact quote, said, you know, when employees can see where those gaps are, they can, can take steps to keep people from leaving by adjusting the compensation. They're even. I don't know if that's exactly how most organizations would see it. They might just say, okay, when they leave, we'll just get new ones in for cheaper. I like to be brutal about it. But also the jobs that have that tenure gap, I think that there's kind of reasons there. And you, you identified it right away, Stacy, when I was, when we were walking through it. So like for instance, you know, pulling up the number one gap where you know there's a difference between a tenured employee and a new employee who's massage therapist, 29% chance pay different or 29% pay difference between a tenured massage therapist and a non tenured massage therapist, a brand new one. Then there's also respiratory technician, radiology technician, events manager. So massage therapist. You of I both hit on this, right? What's the difference there? They have an existing customer base after a few years who are going to fill that. And then you pointed out one that I didn't think of for those other ones, like a respiratory technician, radiology technician is that requires specialized knowledge of the equipment. Right. So yeah.

Speaker A: Nobby Hospital has some slightly different equipment in those spaces. Right. So yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: It's not so simple. It's not easily transferable. And when you look at the, the ones that don't have that sort of 10 year gap, there are things that I would believe are very transferable. Marketing analysis being marketing analyst, analysts being the number one where there's not that much of a pay difference. But yeah, that's something that sort of job hopping makes more sense in. Right. It's almost better that way to bring in those knowledges and those connections you already have.

Speaker A: Yeah. And we've seen some of this before. I know. I think Josh Burson had done the same. Like you know, if you stayed in the same business unit or same company for a while, we saw, you know, you, you, you reach the top faster for HR or some of those kind of data sets. Right. What I would say is I think there's two ways to look at this. So job hopping does, I know for many of the younger um, you know, kind of loyalty to the company is not really a thing that we have anymore. Right. You might have loyal to people, to, to managers, to people who you feel have, have watched out for your career, but you oftentimes loyal to a company is just a really hard thing to build into anything right now. But you are looking at benefits you are looking at. For many young people, job hopping gives them an opportunity to get a much higher raise much more quickly than staying in, in, in uh, space. I think what Ruth, um, and the team are really focusing on here is that don't devalue that pay equity conversation and definitely look at it because you could be losing really good both new employees or existing employees because you did not think about how either new or existing employees kind of matched up from a skill set perspective because it's really easy to not think about someone who's been here for 10 years and they, they really haven't gotten a big raise. Every couple years you get these new people coming in with much higher price points because they're requiring it. Right. And vice versa. I've been here for 10 years, I've gotten quite a bit, you know, I've grown with, you know, every year because we put some standard models in place. But we the new people, people just don't feel like they can get there at a pace at which they want to. Those are really, really hard I think to kind of, I think it's easy for a lot of companies who aren't looking at compensation on a more strategic level to Forget that pay is the starting conversation. Benefits, whether you like your manager, all those things. You've got to get a baseline pay to make sure you even start to have thinking about the other stuff. Right.

Speaker B: Yeah. That is core concept work. Right? Yeah, yeah. Uh, as much as we say we would do this if we won the lottery, I don't know how many of us would be. I don't know how many of us

Speaker A: would be running phases.

Speaker B: Pour out someone else in a multinational. I would be hanging out with you. But it would actually be in a hobbit hole. A real one.

Speaker A: Yes. We would figure out a way to do this in a much more fun environment than in our. In, ah, our zoom. And I'll tell you because someone the other day said, well, I can either get this role or I could just win a million dollars. You get bored if you didn't have to do this. Right. And now granted, we could be doing it a lot more fun places. So that's, I think the real goal.

Speaker B: Yeah. One fun place might be at one of the World cup matches. I've been really enjoying that. And in the spirit of competition and you know, uh, our hated rivals over at Red Dead site. Not really. We love them. Um, they've launched a new podcast, new HR tech podcast. Not enough of those called, uh, workplace Stories. That's going to be looking at, I think they call it 600 seconds in HR tech. Right. Which will be, you know, getting into these stories. Especially when there's something sort of transformational happening at an organization. Some new tech coming in, a new product. Product. A big M and a, uh, thing. You can imagine what a great story the ultimate in Kronos merger would have been to cover in sort of a little more depth. And of course, this is red thread is Stacia Gar. If you don't know her, she is just great. And I think we've talked about it before. I think we did a whole podcast. You can probably find it where we talked about the sort of inside baseball, as they say, plays out in the analyst world and that all of us kind of do different things. So. So we're not really competitive in that sense. I mean, certainly all of us want to provide the best value we can and, um, you know, you know, and get all the work we can. But most of us focus on sort of different aspects. We all try and elevate each other up. So although I sort of jokingly said it's a big rivalry, it's really not. I have the ultimate respect for Stacia and I Think she's.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stacia texted me this week. She wanted me to take a look at something and I said, oh, I'm on vacation. She goes, oh, nothing is worth taking off your vacation. And so. Right. So we, you know, I think we're all good friends and it's. And I'm actually excited to see her do this because I think, you know, there's, there's been this conversation about the, the value, the impact of podcast and I, I don't know anybody else, but I'm still listening to them every day. Uh, that's what I, When I go to clean, when I go to drive, when I've got anything where I want to multitask my podcast come out without any, any challenge. And I know it's this place where a lot of people get their information. I think the other thing that's really important, no one we should probably mention it isn't just Asia, it's Dani Johnson too. Danny is her, uh, co founder with her. Uh, and Danny does a lot more in the learning space. And so I'm sure this is going to be interesting because you're going to see entire, um, HR talent and she has a lot. They do one of probably the largest reports on BI and analytics. The other thing that's coming up is they do an event that they're running. I think they're just getting, I think they're starting to get signups for it. It's coming up very soon. It's a really great sort of in depth conference. I think they're calling it Elevate. I could be wrong.

Speaker B: Well, it's up in the mountains, so I'm ah.

Speaker A: And I just think one, if you're looking for something where you can have some real conversation about, about how things are working, actually do a little brainstorming with other CIOs, CFOs, and more importantly Chros. This might be a place and some of the product people inside of these organizations, from a vendor perspective, this might be the place to get a chance to do that. So, you know, there's all kinds of events, all kinds of conferences. We support all of it and we love to see people sort of bring out more information because I think that's the real challenge we're seeing in the market right now. Right. Is that as much as we are all talking about it, getting the real depth you need to make your decisions is really hard. So my last comment will be. All right, on that note, make sure you take the survey right. Yeah.

Speaker B: No, well, actually you uh, were setting me up. I thought you were going to do the segue because you mentioned there are a lot of events and you should go take the survey. I agree. But if you want to get the live version of this podcast where you just discuss tech news with us or just anything really, you can find us at a few events. By the time you hear this, you may have missed Stacy, I'm not sure if there's still going to be time for you to.

Speaker A: I don't know that I'm going to be in Sunrise, Florida anymore. I think that we're going to be in, uh, Massachusetts, up at the UKG headquarters location. So that's one thing. So that. That will be June 24th. I'll be doing a payroll, um, sort of brainstorming session with the team. So I'm very excited about that. And then you're going to be out in Minneapolis, right, on June, July 14th through the 17th.

Speaker B: Yeah, that'll be for the Learn event. That's. I don't know. I'll just say it. L, E, H, R, N. It's like learn both hr. Ah, in the middle. Uh, yeah, I'll be there. It's actually July 12th is when I'll actually get out there. That's Sunday. That will be in Minneapolis, as you said. We'll be doing some work there, I believe with Paylocity presenting some information, then we've got a little bit of a break, at least. Unless there's anything I'm forgetting about. Probably the next time I'll be on the road will be in late September, the 21st to 24th, for Octanner's conference. Another one that's almost always in the mountains. This time will be in Black Desert, Utah, Still a very beautiful area. And of course, as we get closer to HR Tech season, we're going to be. It'll be like it just wasn't.

Speaker A: We'll be in a lot of other places. Yeah, probably the biggest one is that, um, if you are looking at trying to catch up with us, I will be keynoting the Cornerstone Connection event in, uh, Chicago on October 6th. Very excited about that. We're going to be talking a lot about what they're doing with their new workforce intelligence layer and how that's sort of fitting into the bigger picture of both learning and. And taking care of your A.I. agents. Uh, we'll probably also be at the Workday Rising event, which will be right before the HR Tech conference. I think we're going to be at the Dayforce event, which is like, right after the HR Tech conference, I'm pretty sure UKG's got something going on and I know SAP Successfight has got something going and I think Oracle. So we're going to have all of them at some point in that whole mix and there will be a lot of others, uh, I think that will be there too.

Speaker B: We'll get an apartment in Vegas and I'll be fully miserable. But we dance around it. But I'm pretty sure, you know, we'll be at HR Tech. Of course, that is always the premier event. That's when we'll debut all of the information that you put into this survey. Go check the survey. And that will be the big keynote, the mega event Stacey will be doing.

Speaker A: We do have our mega session out now. So that will be on um, Wednesday, which is the first day of the actual conference. Although Tuesday is when they're going to have Women Nature Tech. And we will be doing a session there for there, uh, in intensives where we'll be training some new HR technology sessions. It'll be more like workshops. But our actual keynote session that we've been doing for quite some time is definitely going to be on Wednesday. It's going to be the afternoon mega session keynote. So be sure to sign up for that if you want to make sure you're there. I do think that there's limited space as always in those rooms and because we're in the middle of the first day, um, that will give you an opportunity to go the next day to see all the vendors who are mentioned.

Speaker B: So yeah, so that will be exciting. We can't wait to see you, uh, in person. It's always a big treat to get to see and meet all of you and really looking forward to it. Well Stacy, that wasn't like I said, it wasn't as crazy as some of these are. We had a lot of cool people moves, a lot of focusing on outcomes which we love to see. Anything else you want to leave the people with besides one last, one last.

Speaker A: Uh, please take the survey. Yeah, no, we, we will say that uh, if you are looking for to go to the HR Tech conference, I think we're going to have a QR code where we'll have a link link with our name on it, uh, at the bottom and we'll add it to this sessions summary page. I think it's like 20 or 30% off or something like that. So it's well worth sort of taking advantage of that. And I also want to note that uh, if you do participate in the survey you will get the full report the week of, um, October 31st or the week after that. I think we're kind of. Kind of balancing where all that's going to fall because of all the other events. So we're very excited about our dates around that. But that's it. Cliff. I, uh, think we have spent our. Our summer day here with everyone. I hope all of you are out enjoying yourselves, and by the time you're listening to this, you are enjoying planning some vacation for yourself. If you do want to get some details on what is in this year's annual HR system survey, one of the things we'll also be starting probably in the next couple of weeks is a buy one, get one. So if you buy this year, you'll get next year. So if you do miss participating in it and you still want to have access to it, that will probably come out the first of July, July. Um, and so you'll have access to both of them at the same time. And that is it for this week. Cliff, anything else before we wrap?

Speaker B: Yeah, I just realized when this comes out, the day this comes out will be Thursday. That is the. You'll hear this. And then that night, 10pm M. Eastern Time, will be the last U.S. game for this stage of the World Cup. So go USA Yeah. Probably the only time you hear me say that.

Speaker A: Let's cross our fingers for everyone there. Right? Right. Yeah. All right. Well, as we wrap today, just a reminder for everyone that if you do want to get more details like this and get all the updates on where we'll be at, please go to our website and sign up for our newsletter to get ongoing updates on our research launches, where we'll be speaking or visiting, and when you can participate in the annual survey. That is the best way to get that information. If you don't want to wait to the very end of our podcast, be sure to listen to all of our other podcasts, HR Huddle Podcasts, our Pivot Effect, as well as tr. We have a problem. And Cliff, you're going to be getting, I think, some updated podcasts from on the ground at events, right? Yeah.

Speaker B: Yes, I have. Uh, still. We're still. You know what? I'm. I put out a call out to you listeners, to our audience there. Thinking of trying to think of a cool name. So what we really want to do is, you know, we have our voice of the customer research. We've mentioned a few times where all of you put in your information, and we've had these other ones where we're conversing with executives. But I was thinking it would be fun to. When I'm at these events and we're meeting you guys live, let's have you on the podcast. Let's do a Voice of the Customer live. So might call it Voice of the Customer, might call it Face of the Customer, since it's going to be a video podcast, something like that. Tell us what you think would be a good name for it. But that's what we want to do. Let's hear it from those frontliners. Let's hear it from the people doing this work. You tell us in the survey what you think of the systems, how many different systems you have. Are you having integration issues? We don't talk about implementation a lot, but that's a huge issue. When I was at the Prism event, one of the biggest cheers that went up is when they said, now you'll be able to see all the anomalies from payroll all in one place, rather than going through each one individually. And the crowd went nuts as if they had just announced that, you know, you know, Beyonce was coming out to sing. I was like, wow, okay. That's what they really care about. Like, this is really what matters. All this cool global stuff. They're like, wow, okay. Because those are the issues that really matter to you. And I want to be able to capture that. So when I'm at these events, we're on the road anyway. We love talking to people. So that will be the next one.

Speaker A: Yep. So, so if you, if you want to get, uh, a little bit of a in opportunity to be on camera, look up Cliff. He'll be doing man on the street kind of stuff anyways. To stay up to date with immediate breaking HR tech news and get all behind the scenes content. You can also follow us at Sapien on LinkedIn and Instagram and then also as unusual. Cliff, thanks for doing this on the weekend. I do appreciate it giving me an opportunity to spend some time with my kids, uh, this week. And thank you to all of our people who help us put this into production. Brand Method Media Group, who helps us produce it podcast with our, their amazing founder, Kelly Kelly. Our marketing team, Summer Alano, Caitlin Diamond, Cole Harris, Linda Galloway, Kelly Coon. We got a whole team now behind all of this because we do really appreciate all your hard work and doing this. Uh, thanks to our listeners and community. We couldn't do this without you. And Cliff, that is it for this episode of Spilling the Tea on HR Tech. We hope it's been just the brew you needed to start the engines running this week. We'll be back in just two weeks with another pot of boiling hot HR tech updates. Thanks, everyone.