Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning, everyone. Today I'm broadcasting from the HR technology conference in Las Vegas.
[00:00:06] I would say there were well over 5000 people here this week, probably 100 to 150 vendors showing all different shapes and sizes of HR technology. And we launched the HR technology AI trailblazers.
[00:00:23] I gave a 70 minutes keynote on all the things going on in HR technology. For those of you that are clients, we will be happy to take you through this if you'd like to get the slides. You do have to become a client and we'll help you understand your technology and your strategy and show you what all these different guys do. But let me walk you through the highlights and then step you through the AI trailblazers. What we decided to do was publish a short report of the 30 companies that we believe are the most innovative real world solutions in AI. In HR. By no means is this everybody, but these are companies that exemplify what's been going on in agentic AI, in generative AI, in talent, intelligence, in skills, intelligence, and all these things that have been happening in the last two or three years driven by the AIH technology under the covers. And as you know, the AI world is changing very, very fast. In fact, the funniest thing of all was the announcement the day before yesterday that Microsoft is essentially purchasing the three Mile island nuclear plant, or they're buying all the power from it to get it up and running again so that they can consume enough electricity, which is in the gigawatts, by the way, which is a massive number to power. All of us clicking around on the copilot and doing our work. Honestly, as an american citizen, I'm not exactly thrilled about all this, but we're going to have to hope that the curve of consumption by AI comes down. And I did share some data for the audience here from Google, which shows that the cpu consumption of these AI systems is dropping very, very rapidly. I don't know if OpenAI is going down that curve, by the way, and Microsoft is dependent on OpenAI. And it may be that Microsoft's chosen technology platform is going to be a cost disadvantage for them, but we'll find out because these are expensive systems to operate. And by the way, just along those lines, I had a long talk last night at a conference dinner here, that these are not just snazzy, fun, exciting tools to buy because you like playing with them. You're going to have to get a return on investment on these things. They're not going to be free. They're not going to be inexpensive in some cases. I mean, the copilot is $30 a month per employee, which is actually a very large amount of money when you add it up in a large company. SAP charges AI credits which you have to buy to use their AI. Workday hasn't really announced how they're going to price it. Salesforce announced you're going to have to pay $2 per query to use all the agents that they've created.
[00:03:18] By the way, we're going to be launching a new version of Galileo for you as individuals in two weeks and it's going to be almost free but very low cost. So there's real money to be spent here. And even though we're all enamored with these things, you're going to have to have a return on investment.
[00:03:33] And just to get you thinking about that, generally speaking, the return on investment in most of the AI systems in HR is one of the three things. First of all, it will reduce the amount of time it takes and improve the employee experience through the conversational interface. So you will probably not need as many human beings doing call center operations employee services support as you did in the past. One of the banks I met with about a month ago told me they expect to lay off 20, well, or redeploy I guess is the word, 20% to 25% of their employee service call center agents. So that's number one. And that's definitely a cost savings and you can move those people to other roles. They don't have to be laid off necessarily. And so there's going to be a lot of that, including, by the way, in recruiting and L and D. In recruiting there's lots of inefficiencies that can be eliminated. There's lots of inefficiencies in L and D and so forth. And so that's a cost reduction ROI, moving the costs essentially from humans to machines so that the humans can do high value work. The second ROi is time saving just by itself. We know from the Galileo customers we've talked to that most of the people that use Galileo tell us that they're saving almost a day a week on their HR activities because they can get information so fast. That doesn't mean that they're getting laid off. It means they're doing other things. They're working on higher value work and superpowering their jobs, as I talked about in the, in the speech. So that's number two. And then the number three is reducing the number of systems and complexity in your IT infrastructure. You know, the most complicated problem we have in HR tech, which I talked to Domino's pizza about this. I talked to O'Reilly auto parts about it. I talked to McDonald's about it. I talked to Harvard publishing about it. I talked to a whole bunch of companies about it, is we have too many tools, we have too many systems. And even though the integrated suites claim to do everything, you tend to have a lot of specialized tools, especially in recruiting, especially in l and D, even in employee experience. You know, if you have hourly workforce versus white collar workers, those tend to be different platforms. And the conversational tools sitting on top of these things absolutely simplify the stack so you'll be able to turn off some of the fancy tools you've been paying for with the new AI platforms, too. So those are the beginnings. And by the way, in that third category, integrated data is a big benefit of AI. If you look at what visio does, if you look at what Galileo does, you can get access to information in a well selected, well implemented AI system that was almost impossible to find or took a whole team of people to clean up and aggregate and analyze in minutes or seconds. That took months, literally, to make better decisions. And Microsoft would obviously claim that, let's spend all this money on AI, and you'll become a better company. I don't think it's quite that simple. You're going to have to put a business case around this, because these things are not free. Okay. So the trailblazers let me run through them really quick, and why I selected these companies, and they're in alphabetical order, by the way. So the first one is ADP. ADP introduced a platform called Lyric Hcm. This was originally called Lithium on. I wrote a pretty long article on it if you want to read up on it. They now have more than 100 clients running it. It is the future of ADP's HR technology stack. It's exceptionally flexible. It can handle employees dealing with multiple managers, multiple job types, different types of work. It's got AI under the covers. They use a technology they call ADP assist, which is an assistant. And so take a look at it. If you're a medium sized company and you're talking to ADP, I think it's worth looking at just as a tech person, just to see what they've done. It's really, really a highly flexible, next generation architecture. The second one is Arist. Arist is not a big company, but they're very creative, very innovative company. They're an L and D tool. They introduced this product they called teammate. I described it at the speech. It's essentially an end to end training manager. It can do performance consulting, it can do needs analysis. It can collect information from subject matter experts, generate courses, go through the process of having them reviewed, of having them checked, publishing the courses, launching the courses, communicating with employees about the courses, analyzing the courses, and giving you feedback for iteration. Literally all done by AI. Now, in every one of those steps, humans can be involved. But you really should talk to these guys. We use them in our academy. Their courses are published in a microlearning or mobile format. But just because it's microlearning doesn't mean it's really high rigor stuff. A lot of their customers use it for very rigorous pharmaceutical sales training, operations training. We use it for a lot of our AI training in our academy. It's very, very cool. It's called Arist. Number three is Cornerstone, Cornerstone Galaxy. Now, Cornerstone is one of the biggest HR technology companies in the world. They have ten or 12,000 or more customers between the Saba customer base, the sum total customer base, the cornerstone customer base, the Lumes customer base. They are a PE owned company that has acquired quite a few other vendors over the years. I've been advising them for a long, long time. They recently acquired skyhive to get a talent intelligence technology into the system. They have skills from end to end, top to bottom, and they call this integrated system Galaxy. And you really need to look at it. If you're a Cornerstone LMS customer or you're using one of these other lms, you should really talk to them. And we're going to be doing some work with them to put together some advisory services for those of you that are cornerstone customers to figure out where it fits. They also own one of the leading lxps, which used to be called edcast. They do virtual reality. They have a big content library. Really, really amazing technology story from these guys. AI is all over this thing. And let's talk more about them, maybe in another podcast. The fourth is a company called Disperse. D I S P E R Z, I believe is the way it's spelled, although I may have gotten it wrong. Relatively small company, but they have 400 customers currently located in India, but really incredibly state of the art, end to end, AI driven learning platform, similar to Arist, but focus more on e learning and video based learning, character based learning, very, very automated. And they're coming to the United States. I suggest you take a look at them if you're in L and D, and they have some very large clients. The next one is drop D R a U P this is a really fascinating company. You probably have never heard of them. They are a data provider. The founders of Drop were the founders of Talent Neuron. Talent Neuron was the first talent intelligence platform ever created that was a data big data system. And what they do, because they've been doing this a long time, was they aggregate similar to litecast skills data and job change data from hundreds of countries all over the world. But they go way beyond that. And they use the data on jobs and skills coupled with business data about companies. What companies are doing in their businesses to understand and infer what they call workloads. A workload is not a skill. A workload is a real capability that you use the skill to do something. They can tell you whether the Java skills in company a are being used for the same thing as the Java skills in company B. This is really the missing link in the whole skills infrastructure. We're doing a lot of things with these guys. I talked with one of our clients at Pepsi who was telling me they're using them. You probably don't know about them, but if you're looking for skills data, you should really talk to them. And I'm sure you're going to hear more of them, about them in the future. The next one is deal D e e l. Deal is one of the most aggressive, probably tied with rippling HR technology companies I've ever run across. And what happens with HR tech companies is, as most of you know, this is a massive, massive market. You know, there's hundreds of thousands of customers for everything in Hrtaine. And sometimes you get a company with just the right management team, the right investors, the right platform, that they just grow at a scorched earth pace, and they buy everybody they can buy, and they just decide to do everything. And that's what deal has done. Deal is in the market called EOR. Employment of record. It's a terrible name, but what it basically refers to is global hiring, global staffing. So if you're a company like us, and you have an employee or a part time person in Greece, or an employee in Canada, or an employee in another part of Asia or Europe, you don't want to set up a business entity there and figure out how to pay taxes and understand what the legal issues are in that country. They do all that for you. By the way, the other company that we work with in this space is called Oyster, which is similar in this way, but deal does a lot more than this. They're not just in EOR, by the way. The pioneering company of this is a company called GP Globalization Partners, but they changed their name to GP. GP is really the one that started this space. So GP, deal and Oyster are all in similar markets, focused on different kinds of customers. And deal purchased a payroll global payroll company that they're adapting to do payroll. They purchased a talent management company. They purchased an ATS. They have all sorts of really almost HCM platform related capabilities. They have an AI agent that allows you to help with this. If you're a good sized company or even a small company, you're looking at globalization of your workforce, which, I mean, who isn't? You should talk to one of these three companies and deal is really one of the fastest growing, one of the biggest. Their market cap is exceptionally high and it's really well run group, very aggressive from a bunch of guys. The next one is Dochebo. Dochebo to me is becoming the next standard global lms. They're the only publicly traded corporate learning management technology platform left. They are very well run company. Docebo is a business focused learning platform company.
[00:14:25] They've been working on AI for a long time.
[00:14:29] They acquired a company that does AI content development. And over the last twelve to 18 months, they built a pretty much end to end AI system for content generation, content distribution, building characters, generating content from documents and so forth. If you're looking for a good, well designed, easy to use LMS that has AI content development features, I think you got to look at Dochebo. For a real AI centric system, you should be looking at Sana, which I'll talk about in a few minutes. But Dochebo is doing great. You can look at their public offering and how they're doing their financials. They're growing really well run company. We know the management team quite well, but we would always recommend to look at them. The next one is Eightfold.
[00:15:14] Eightfold, as most of you know, and we've been talking to them for a long time, is really the pioneer of talent intelligence. They really, with a lot of analyst support for us, really did pioneer and create this idea market of talent intelligence. I know the founders very well, but they didn't really intend to build this kind of a platform in the beginning, but they pretty much figured out how the market works. Eightfold is not only a sourcing and recruiting platform, and they are building out an ATS and other features in it. It can do job architecture, intelligence, it can do resource management. So if you're a professional services or consulting firm, it can show you what skills are available for what projects. Our HR career Navigator is built on Eightfold. You can see how the career analysis program works. You can go into the HR career navigator and you can basically upload your LinkedIn resume and it will show you exactly what you need to do, what skills you need, and what courses you need to take to get to the next level of career path in HR. And that's really rip working with Eightfold and they've had a lot of success in other areas. They work with Heydrich and struggles on leadership. They have the only talent intelligence platform that can handle succession management and leadership in partnership with Heidrick. Heidrick is doing an incredibly good job in this area. We spent some time with them here and they're working on a lot of other things. They're well funded, have great management team, and they basically created the space that encouraged cornerstone to acquire a sky hive that encouraged in some sense workday to acquire hired score and encouraged SAP to build its talent intelligence hub because Eightfold was so successful. So you really have to take a look at them. If you're looking at skills based talent intelligence systems, the next one is Galileo.
[00:17:03] I'm only going to take a minute here because we're going to have a lot of more stuff coming. Galileo. We are now partnering with workday. We will have a single sign on integration to workday by the end of this year. That means that if you're running workday, you'll be able to click a button, get to Galileo. All of your personal user information will be in Galileo. Galileo will know what your job is and Galileo will be able to answer any question about HR management leadership recruiting that you ever wanted to know. Galileo now has the Leicast skills library embedded in it. It has global employment practices in more than 130 countries. It has benchmarks and all sorts of different turnover and retention areas. It has leadership models in it and we're adding a whole bunch of more stuff. Our customers are very happy. At this point in time, you have to be a corporate member to buy to get Galileo. So there's close to 10,000 people who have it. But as of two weeks from today, around October 8, we're going to announce a professional edition of Galileo. And every one of you are going to be able to get access to every piece of research we have ever written through Galileo in the generative, conversational experience and load your own data into Galileo to create your own AI HR expert. So stay tuned for that. We're going to be really talking about that a lot. Gloat is next. Gloat along with a company called fuel 50. But Gloat really was in some sense, the breakaway company in this area really pioneered the talent marketplace in a big way. The talent marketplace space is very important, very successful. It is part of becoming a dynamic organization, which we talk about in our dynamic organization. Research the globe guys are very shrewd, very smart software engineers. Their systems very easy to use. They have customers like Mastercard, Novartis, Nestle, Schneider Electric.
[00:18:57] And what they do, what their platform does using AI, is it allows an employee to go into the platform and look at opportunities and jobs and projects and gigs and decide what their developmental experiences should be. So it's a developmental platform, it's a job placement platform, and it's a platform for creating a more dynamic organization. And I think where they're going, and we've talked about that with them a lot, is they're going to become a part of your agility strategy to flatten your organization and improve the productivity of your people, because the most productive companies in the world don't lock people into jobs. And we're going to talk much more about this. In AI in general, they allow people to work on multiple things. You can surface experts in the organization, and a lot of the companies that implement gloat originally for career management and for career opportunities find out that actually they're saving a ton of money because the company is now doing gig work inside the company with experts supporting other people on different projects and not hiring contractors and saving the cost of gloat in one year. So you really need to look at what this thing does. It's not for everybody, but it is really, really a powerful technology.
[00:20:10] The next one is a company you probably don't know of, but a very, very cool company that I'm a big fan of called growthspace. Growthspace is a mid sized company that has actually done something that's exceptionally powerful. They took the skills taxonomies that were out there and they did something I've been talking about for a long time, is they built a functional skills library based on real business capabilities.
[00:20:38] Lead generation in enterprise sales is a capability that is a skill in the growth space platform. So their skills taxonomy, if you read it, is a highly refined, more capability driven taxonomy that will make perfect sense to your line leaders. And your line leaders can look and you can work with them on this with growth space and find the capabilities that they feel are missing on their teams or in their individuals and using growth space. They find experts in your industry that have been trained to develop and deliver short or mid sized learning experiences for people on those topics. And what's cool about it is the experts. There's more than 2000 experts that have been pulled into this environment. The experts only focus on one or two skills. So these are people that work in your industry that know this area, whatever it may be, extremely well, and the customers love it. It's the human in the sense AI expertise system organized in a very methodical way to deliver high value training for leadership development, management, functional skills, technical skills and so forth. You got to check these guys out.
[00:21:59] The next is Heydrich and struggles. Now, we started working with Heidricks and struggles almost two years ago. And earlier in my career I used to think that the executive search firms really were never going to make it into HR tech. They just never could figure out how to get into the technology area. These guys are very smart, they have a lot of research and they have been placing senior executives for 70 years. And the difference between Heidrick and struggles and a leadership development content company is that they are highly accountable for the work that they do. So their leadership model, which is built and refined on the data and the science and the assessments they use with senior leaders, which we have in Galileo by the way, is an exceptionally simple but profound leadership model. And the reason I'm really excited about it is they know it works because they've used it in the placement of very, very important executives in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of companies, maybe, I think it's a thousand companies they've placed people in. They have taken this IP along with their entire succession process because they do a lot of work with companies on succession in their consulting business and they've loaded it into an AI platform. So you have a platform for end to end, top to bottom leadership identification and succession management. We're going to do a big study of succession management in 2025 and it is a mess. Nobody's really kind of redefined it. We're going to try to figure it out for you guys. So if you're trying to rethink and strategize in your leadership development and leadership succession process, give them a call. I guarantee you, even if you don't end up buying their services and product, you're going to learn a lot from them. The next is Hibob. Highbob is what we like to call the Instagram of HR. We happen to use Highbob in our company. It's one of the most absolutely integrated, easy to use, end to end HR technology. They basically do payroll now. Also platforms for small to mid sized companies. It was designed by an unbelievable engineering team in Israel. The founder of the company is a very successful technology entrepreneur. I've known him for a long time. They are. Their product is just exceptionally easy to use. We happen to know how easy it to use it is because we use it and it scales up to pretty good sized companies. It really goes up into the mid market and competes with workday. They have a few customers that have replaced workday to use it, and they have an AI agent and more and more AI features and high bob all the time. If you've sort of outgrown your payroll system and you're sort of medium sized, and maybe you don't want to deal with the complexities of a system like SAP or workday, just give them a call and take a look. The next is lattice. Lattice is positioned similar to Highbob, but a different kind of company. Lattice started in performance management and built out the HCM later. So you could argue that theoretically, and this is certainly what Ronnie says at Highbob, you would want to have the HR platform first and the talent stuff later. Well, Lattice kind of did it the other way. They did a really good job of building talent applications, performance management, coaching, recruiting, learning. And then they decided to build the HRms, which is about, I don't know, six months, nine months into the market. But what's interesting about lattice to me, I know the CEO, she's actually a neighbor of mine. She's very senior executive, used to be the head of marketing at Salesforce, is lattice. They get the AI thing, and about six months ago, they did something that was way ahead of their time. They announced a toolset to manage multiple AI agents, and they mispositioned it a little bit. They called it AI as an employee, and everybody got cranky about it, didn't like the idea of it, so they pulled it down.
[00:25:58] But they figured this out. What they're building is an AI governance platform, so you can manage all these chatbots. They're going to introduce their own agent in a couple weeks. And if you're a medium sized company and you really need an integrated talent experience, you know, you ought to check them out. Great company, really successful, great culture. People love their product. They also want to compete with. They also want to compete with workday. Of course, everybody wants to compete with workday and, you know, very, very good company, great quality people. The next one is LinkedIn. Now, you know, we do a lot of work with LinkedIn. I'm going to be going to their conference in a couple of weeks. You know, they're so embedded now with Microsoft that they're using AI technology from Microsoft all over LinkedIn. You can go into LinkedIn learning, you can type A question and you can get answers without having to go through the videos and the courses. Most of LinkedIn recruiter is filled with AI based recommendations. They're harmonizing the skills model between LinkedIn and Viva skills. I don't know how far along they are on that, but they're planning on doing that. Microsoft HR, which is a big organization, is going through what is a lot of people call it the dog fooding process of using their own products. They're building an end to end solution within Microsoft for skills based hiring, skills based training, skills based career that uses a whole variety of technologies, including Eightfold, including the copilot, including success factors, by the way. And LinkedIn is part of that. And there'll be a whole bunch of new announcements coming from LinkedIn at their conference, which is coming up in about a month.
[00:27:33] The next is Lightcast. We love lightcast. Litecast is the merger of MZ and Burning Glass, but that's kind of ancient history now. They are also a PE owned company investing very heavily in aggregating and analyzing skills and salary data. They have core skills as well as differentiating skills. So you can look at job titles and job descriptions, and you can look at what the core skills are versus the differentiating skills. We know them very well because we've been working with them in Galileo and we're doing a part, we're actually partnering with them. And Galileo is probably going to become maybe the preferred front end for Litecast because you can go into Galileo and you can ask it a question like I'm looking for a chemical engineer in Cincinnati, Ohio. What should the salary be? What are the key skills I should look for? Would you please write me a job description? Would you please create a behavioral interview guide? Would you give me a development guide for the people that are in that role now? What I can do to get them from here to there? Can you give me some examples of case studies of some companies that have done this? And it uses the corpus of Galileo with Lightcast to do these kinds of things. And they're globalizing all of their data and really advancing their API strategy. So most of the big talent intelligence vendors are now using data from Lightcast. Lightcast is so cool. If you look at the API pages of Litecast every day, you can see how the system is changing skills from new job postings made around the world. It's a very, very well run company and a great partner for talent acquisition, for workforce planning, for location planning, many, many applications for these talent intelligence kinds of systems. The next is Medallia. Medallia, of course, is a very well known customer experience company. They have an employee experience platform which is using the same technology as their customer experience platform. Great company, great survey technology, lots of AI, automatic findings from some of the capabilities in medallia. You've got to look at them in the survey platform space. By the way, the survey platform space has collapsed. The major vendors now are Glint from Microsoft, which is now embedded into Viva perceptics, which is doing some really cool things. Medallia pecan from workday and what's left of qualtrics. Qualtrics doesn't seem as focused on the HCM employee space as they used to be, but those are the major players. We'll talk more a little bit about perceptics in a few minutes. Oracle is next. I won't spend a lot of time on Oracle. Oracle is the sort of end to end HCM platform for the Oracle customer base. We don't get a lot of call from Oracle customers, frankly, because I think Oracle customers are just sort of Oracle accounts. But they have announced 50 new agents within the Oracle HCM suite and, you know, they understand this stuff and so Oracle customers are going to get access to lots of cool AI features for them. They also have a talent intelligence suite now on skills models. They aggregate skills from multiple sources. Really highly competitive with workday and SAP for large organizations. The next is oyster. Now, Oyster is a little bit of a smaller company, focused on slightly smaller organizations than deal and GPD, but we love them. We've had a really great experience with them. They're very hands on customer service centric eor company. We have looked at all their employment practices, data exceptionally well researched. And because of the integration between Oyster and Galileo, Galileo was constantly being updated with new employment practices from more than 100 countries around the world. So I would again talk to them. If you're doing a lot of global hiring and you want to simplify the process, really well run company. They're growing, they're very highly valued in the market and I think you'll have a great experience with them. The next one is Paradox. Paradox is an amazing company. I mean, you guys have heard me talk about them. They really pioneered the use of AI in recruiting long ago, originally building the Olivia chatbot, but that chatbot has turned into a whole end to end recruiting platform, including an ats a CRM. It can do assessment and it just reduces the time to hire and improves the candidate experience, the manager experience and the recruiter experience in just orders of magnitude ways. They're very successful, privately held, but growing like crazy. I think they're going to be one of the along with Fountain by the way, who also competes in the high volume hiring. But Paradox does a lot more than high volume hiring. General Motors and other big companies use it for white collar hiring too. If you're looking at simplifying your recruiting stack, you got to look at these guys. I won't be able to do it justice in five minutes here, but it's really, really cool. The next one is a really kind of breakthrough idea from rippling. Rippling is a really interesting new company run by Parker Conrad, the guy who started zenefits. They're a little bit of a scorched earth build everything as fast as possible company. There was an article about them and the information about how hard they work and how much software they're trying to build at the same time. I mean they're really trying to do everything at once. They're trying to build an HCM platform. They built an ATS. They want to. They're building an expense management system, a travel system, an it service delivery system, an item provisioning system and lms. And so you could argue maybe they're stretched a little thin, but their customers are happy. They're growing like crazy. And you know, it's really a people centric platform for all this business stuff that tends to waste people's time. That's kind of their positioning. But the thing that I highlighted in the trailblazers, excuse me, is talent signal. Talent signal is, I'm writing an article on it will come out next week. Is essentially AI driven performance management system that takes engineers and looks at their code and their code in GitHub, salespeople and looks at their gong histories and their data in Salesforce or customer service people and the data in Zendesk and it looks at the real data about the real work theyre doing, scores them against their peers and gives you developmental feedback as a manager or as an individual.
[00:33:36] Its a little controversial idea but this is where the world is going. And just from the standpoint of understanding what AI is capable of doing you should take a look at this thing. I think its just a really cool innovation and I know they're going to be successful with it.
[00:33:50] The next is our friends at Sanaa. Sana is not as well known. They're a really successful learning and knowledge management AI company located in Stockholm. They are our partners on Galileo. We're very high on them. They're used internally at workday. They're used by more and more bigger companies for learning and knowledge management applications. This is what it looks. This is what a system looks like. If you started from scratch and built a learning and knowledge management system on AI, I won't do it justice by talking about it too much. But they're starting to come to more conferences. They're starting to hire a us sales organization. We're starting to do more things with them. I'm going to do a, you know, sort of a big roundtable with them in New York in November. If you're in the New York area, you can see them. They're not in every state of the United States yet, but they're getting there. And I think you need to check them out if you're, you know, we're going to be going through a lot of work on simplifying the l and D technology stack in the next year or two, and they're a big key part of that to take a look at and see what they're doing. And we are working on a big study of this. It'll come out in Q one or Q two. So stay tuned for more on what's going on in L and D. Next one is SAP. SAP success factors. These guys really pioneered the idea of an AI agent on top of an ERP. Joule has been out for quite a while now. You know, some of the customers I talked to are using it, some of them are using ServiceNow, but it's really ahead of the curve. They have AI infused all over the platform. I showed people the use cases on the speech. These guys have really gotten their act together, and it's a really exceptional platform. Customers love it. If you're a big company and you're trying to figure out how to get off Peoplesoft or migrate off something, a bunch of stuff that you don't want to take care of anymore, you have to talk to success factors. The new head of engineering in there came from workday. They're really getting it together, and I won't go through all the features, but I think their AI is very competitive with everybody else in that space. And I'll talk about workday in a couple of minutes. And we're doing work to integrate Galileo with Joule also. Seek out. Seek out is a younger company with very, very advanced AI talent, intelligence, search talent, mobility, sourcing technology. We actually use seek out for some of our research to go find people, it's sort of like Eightfold with more use cases in some industries than Eightfold. They've branched into other areas of talent management, internal mobility, very successful in defense and aerospace industry and other industries where there's a lot of rigor needed in recruiting based on certifications and very explicit experiences. Healthcare, they're really big in that area. They're growing. I think they're going to be a really successful company. They're going to be a big player run by a team of ex Microsoft executives. And they're really ahead of the curve on AI. Similar to Eightfold where we have PhD guys running these companies that really understand how this stuff works and see code has a very, very cool new AI capability coming out that I won't tell you about yet. That's really going to blow your mind. Service now. Well, here's the big behemoth of these guys have the market captain. I think they're two or three times the market cap of workday now. And thanks to their engineering team and their ability to partner with customers, they've really built out, I mean, almost everything in employee experience and employee case management you could imagine. They've spent a lot of money and time on their development tools to build career paths and development experiences for people to build journeys. And all of their agent technology is in a technology called Nowassist. And I think nowassist is probably more likely to be the integrated agent in a large company than the Microsoft copilot at this point in time. Although they work with Microsoft, if you're a Microsoft shop, and of course, because they know the IT service delivery market really well, they're really good at figuring out what service delivery issues are like building new journeys. Just an exceptionally well run company.
[00:38:01] A bit of an expensive software tool. A lot of people tell me it's expensive and hard to justify, but usually, you know, the reason somebody buys a system like this is to clean up the back office and improve employee experience and reduce the chaos behind the scenes in the call centers and all the other service delivery parts of HR. And that saves money. So you have to look at them and a very, very strong engineering team. We're also looking at Galileo integration to the now assist platform. Also. SHL is next. SHL is a company that has been around a long time the largest and most advanced provider of assessment technology and assessment tools and assessment data. They have taken all the data they have on, I don't know, millions of assessments they've done by job role. They put it into a big AI engine, so you can benchmark your professionals or your candidates against other companies in your industry and see where they fit on different capabilities. So, you know, they're trying to kind of figure out how to position themselves. They call themselves a talent intelligence company, but the word talent intelligence has kind of changed. Meaning, but assessment's a big part of HR. It's not going away. And you should talk to them and get an update from them on what they've done and how they've integrated all this data together. The next one is UKG.
[00:39:20] UKG is on a tear. They have built an end to end AI platform on top of the Kronos ultimate product base underneath it. That is called Bright Bryte, and it is an agent oriented, generative AI system with hundreds of use cases, very strategically developed. I think they're going to be very successful with this. It's going to take them into a new market as a technology pioneer. They have a new CEO, Jen Morgan, who's very senior, very successful technology executive. She's worked at a lot of other HR technology and other companies. I think they're going to be a really big player. They tend to sell in the hourly market. Of course, they have tens of thousands of customers. They acquired great places to work, so they have a really great. As well as Kanjoya, they have great solution on employee listening and employee experience. A really great company for certainly hourly labor companies, mid sized organizations, healthcare, certain industries where they focused, and they are going to be a pioneer in AI and you're going to see some really cool stuff coming out of them. And then a couple more vizier, who I was with last night, who is really the end to end solution for people, analytics for data integration, for reporting really amazing technology. I know a lot about the technology because I used to work in data warehousing long ago, and they created a product called V, which is a conversational interface to your data. You can ask V a question like, what's the turnover rate of our salespeople? What's the turnover rate of our salespeople with three years of tenure, etcetera, and you'll get the answer, and it'll be the right answer. I won't go through how complicated that is behind the scenes. It's really cool. We've already done an integration with Galileo here, so you could sort of ask Galileo, what do I need to know about turnover and how do I deal with turnover? And then V will start telling you what the specific data is in turnover in your company. They save companies a lot of money in reporting and analytics, they empower the people analytics team, they empower line managers. Really well run company. They've been around for probably 1012 years. They do a lot of OEM business. You'll see visir within other products and they really get the whole AI thing. So definitely check them out for the people analytics space. Workday I talked a lot about in the last couple of podcasts I wrote a big article about illuminate. Workday has really done an exceptionally well thought out job of infusing AI into the core platform, bringing it into all sorts of use cases within the workday platform, and accessing data across the whole workday system, not just HCM. So you can ask Workday illuminate things like why are we behind budget? Show me areas of the business that we may be behind in our metrics or our profit metrics. Oh, here's there's too much overtime in this team and let's dive into workday and figure out how to fix the overtime problem. And the workday AI assistant is now smarter and more and more like the Microsoft copilot than ever before. We're going to integrate Galileo into that thing once we get a little further along. And they're just really ahead of the curve here. And I think their customers last week, the week before, were really, really excited about this. So they have gotten the AI thing and they've really built a very scalable infrastructure using their own technology. By the way, you're not using a third party LLM, so they have probably a cost advantage to some degree. One more called workera. Workera is a really fascinating company that is using AI technology to understand real time skills verification, not skills taxonomies, but they have their own taxonomy to help you verify and assess real skills of people in your organization. I think they're going to be a successful part of a lot of different companies skills strategies over time. The way they do it is really, really interesting. You can have to talk to them to get the details. I won't spend a lot of time right now. It can assess power skills and it can assess technical skills, and it will probably become sort of a benchmarking platform for skills as well. Okay, we're, you know, this is what we do. This is one of the things we do for a living. I'm really excited about all these companies, but all the really players in HR tech. This has been a really exceptionally exciting year for the tech market. Everybody's innovating faster and faster and faster. Lots of startups. I talked a lot about AI coaching systems. I talked about employee listening systems systems, new forms of assessment, more integrated chatbots. I won't spend a lot more time on this podcast, but take a look at the report. And then along with that report, we also published a report that I call the HR Tech Outlook for 2025. And what that report really is is our opinions on where this stuff is going so you can get sort of a high level picture of what to think about, and then a series of questions for you to ask in your company about AI to get you to the point where you can make some good decisions about which of these tools to assess and evaluate and possibly integrate. Have a great weekend. There will be more to come, and I will try to keep you guys informed as much as possible. Talk to you all next week.
