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

Episode notes

In this episode of Spilling the Tea on HR Tech, Cliff Stevenson and Allison Williams, Director of Research Programs at Sapient Insights Group, Anthropic's acquisition of Stainless, the SDK and MCP server tooling company, and what that consolidation means for organizations building on agentic AI. They also dig into the growing tension around AI cost structures, particularly the unpredictability of usage-based pricing and what that pressure is producing across vendors from Cornerstone to Paychex. The hosts also cover workforce entry challenges for young workers, a significant expansion of Pell Grant eligibility to short-term trade certifications, and a fintech CEO who fired his entire HR team and then claimed the problems disappeared. Key points covered include: ↪️ AI usage-based pricing is creating real budget stress for organizations, with data showing eight in ten IT leaders reported unexpected charges from consumption-based models. The unpredictability of costs, not the costs themselves, is the core problem.

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