We’re living through one of the most consequential shifts in how work gets done. AI is everywhere in headlines and vendor pitches, but the reality inside organisations is far more nuanced than the noise suggests. Personal adoption is running well ahead of how companies are embedding the technology into actual workflows. Demographic changes continue to tighten labour supply, and the HR tech vendor landscape is consolidating and expanding all at once, leaving buyers uncertain about where to invest.
So how should HR leaders be thinking about technology, workforce design, and the role they need to play in shaping what work actually becomes?
Recorded live at HR Tech Europe, my guest this week is Stacey Harris, Chief Research Officer at Sapient Insights Group. Stacey runs the longest-running HR systems survey in the market, and we discuss what her data shows about where things are heading.
In the interview, we discuss:
• How AI differs from past tech shifts
• Layoffs and the cost of AI investment
• The gap between personal and corporate AI use
• Why bring your own AI matters
• Making sense of the vendor landscape
• The Platform Cluster Model
• Demographics and labour supply pressures
• From workforce planning to workforce architecting
• How HR’s role needs to change
• What does the future look like
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00:00
Matt Alder
HR has a real chance to rethink what work actually is with AI, making it possible to redesign jobs in ways that weren’t practical before. Meanwhile, the vendor landscape has never been more confusing to navigate, with consolidation and overlapping products everywhere. So where should leaders even begin? Keep listening to find out.
00:25
Matt Alder
Support for this podcast comes from CoderPad. Here’s a question that should keep you up at night when your next engineering hire sits down at their computer on day one, are they the person you interviewed? Or are they someone who just knew how to perform for an interview? Meta discovered a dangerous gap between interview performance and actual job performance. So did LinkedIn. So did Yahoo. They all found the same culprit. Their hiring process was testing for skills that no longer reflect how the best engineers actually work. AI hasn’t just changed how software gets built, it’s changed what it means to be good at building software. And the companies who are winning the war for technical talent? They’ve already rewritten their interview playbook. CoderPad is the platform powering that shift from AI enabled live interviews to realistic project based screens customers.
01:27
Matt Alder
CoderPad helps you see candidates in action, not just on paper. Meta scaled to 16,000 interviews using it, Yahoo cut recruiter screening time by over 50%. MNTN is onboarding new hires in days instead of weeks this April. If you’re still banning AI interviews, you’re not just behind, you’re screening out your best Future hires. Visit CoderPad.io/podcast to talk to the team that’s CoderPad.io/podcast.
02:23
Matt Alder
Hi there. Welcome to episode 790 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. We’re living through one of the most consequential shifts in how work gets done. AI is everywhere in headlines and vendor pitches, but the reality inside organizations is far more nuanced than the noise suggests. Personal adoption is running well ahead of how companies are embedding the technology into actual workflows. Demographic changes continue to tighten labour supply, and the HR tech vendor landscape is consolidating and expanding all at once, leaving buyers uncertain about where to invest. So how should HR leaders be thinking about technology, workforce design, and the role they need to play in shaping what work will actually become? Recorded live at HR Tech Europe. My guest this week is Stacey Harris, Chief Research Officer at Sapient Insights Group.
03:23
Matt Alder
Stacey runs the longest running HR systems survey in the market and we discuss what her data shows about where Things are heading.
03:32
Matt Alder
Hi Stacey, welcome to the podcast.
03:34
Stacey Harris
Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
03:36
Matt Alder
An absolute pleasure to be talking to you. For the few people who are listening who might not have come across your work, I know it’s difficult to think that there would be people, but could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
03:48
Stacey Harris
Sure. I’m the Chief Research Officer at Sapient Insights Group. We are a research and advisory firm focused on doing research in the HR technology and workforce systems and practices space. We’ve been running the longest running HR system survey in the market. It is now on its 29th year. We just launched it recently for this year. And every year we give a sense of what’s happening around technology adoption, where organizations are spending their time from a process perspective and what kind of resources it takes to implement those technologies. We are vendor agnostic, so we do a lot of user experience and vendor satisfaction ratings too. So you might our name are attached to a few badges from time to time. But everything really starts with the survey for us.
04:32
Matt Alder
You’ve been looking at HR technology for a very long time.
04:35
Stacey Harris
Yes.
04:36
Matt Alder
In a very kind of disruptive state at the moment. With everything that’s going on with AI and technology. How does this phase compare to previous technology disruptions that we’ve seen in this space?
04:51
Stacey Harris
Yeah, so I started to work up a little bit of a conversation these days about the fact that went through phases of where were focused on process mapping, which was a lot of the cloud work. We went through the idea of understanding our data, which was the big data conversation. I think this conversation about understanding our work. And so to me, that’s the biggest change. AI in itself is like any other tool. It’s a technology, it’s rapidly evolving and changing. But we’ve seen similar sort of bubbles, as you would say, come out in the market.
05:23
Stacey Harris
I mean, I think it’s hard to probably understand this, but for a lot of us, I will say slightly older folks, there was a day when we used to have to do actual internal mail offices with an envelope where you signed your name on the back instead of email. And that Internet and email changed the world dramatically for us. It really redid our work environments. This is definitely going to be just as big of an impact, but I think we’ve always looked at technology as a way to just make the current work better or make the current work easier or process optimization. I think what this new technology does is it allows us to rethink the idea of what work is.
06:02
Matt Alder
I think companies are Fully appreciating the impact.
06:07
Matt Alder
And what I mean by that is.
06:09
Matt Alder
We’re certainly seeing a lot of layoffs in the tech sector that are being blamed on AI and productivity. But when you kind of dig below it just seems that is potentially an excuse for something else. Do you think organizations really understand what the impact on jobs is going to be? No.
06:28
Stacey Harris
Nor are they taking into consideration the current state of just available labor in the market, which I think here in Europe you guys are facing a little bit faster than we are in the United States. But we know that by 2045 in the United States we will get to less than three working employees for every non working employer. You guys are already there in certain areas of Germany and Italy, those areas. And so we know that the challenge I think right now with all the layoffs and the. We know when you look at all the financials, it’s not that they’re getting the outcomes from AI yet. What they are banking on is that they will eventually get those outcomes and they have to pay for the investment in AI somehow.
07:13
Stacey Harris
And the biggest line item on most organizations budget is the human resources line item, the people that are working for you. And so that is a lot of what the boards now are basically saying. We no longer are just going to write an open check, we’re going to expect you to figure out how to pay for this. And they’re paying for it with unfortunately laying people off now in my sense. And that’s a very short sighted way of looking at it. We think that workforce planning of the future is really going to be tied to understanding what work will be shifting to. But more importantly, what value can you create with AI?
07:48
Stacey Harris
So my favorite story in all of this, I’m sure your listeners probably know it already, is the IKEA story where they turned an AI assistant into their company customer advisory or to handling customer questions, took the 8,500 employees who were doing that work and turned them into a $1.3 billion business of doing design work and didn’t lose a single person in that process. Right. And that’s I think what the real future looks like if they’re doing it right.
08:15
Matt Alder
I completely agree. And it’s such an interesting story and it doesn’t seem to have had as much exposure as some of the more negative stories, which again is interesting.
08:23
Stacey Harris
Yes, right.
08:24
Matt Alder
Talking about adoption for a second. So in your most recent survey you sort of identified that. I think it’s something like 56% of people are using some kind of LM personally, but corporate Adoption is kind of a lot lower. Why is that and what’s actually happening?
08:41
Stacey Harris
So it’s actually higher than that. 81% Of people are using. At least HR professionals have told us that they are using AI on a personal level, but when we look at the adoption at the workforce level. So in other words, I’ve embedded into a workflow from HR perspective, that number is really only still hovering around 36% right now. Now, if I’m an enterprise organization, over 5,000 employees, that jumps to 45%, but it’s still fairly low across the market. Right. And what we have found is that. And this is why I always tell people always say, well, HR’s afraid of AI. And I’m like, that’s ridiculous. No, they’re not. They’re very much already connected to AI and they’re leveraging it already to get a lot of personal outcomes. But. And I always tell people HR knows their compliance better than anyone else.
09:27
Stacey Harris
So they’re not out there putting personal information on those tools, but they are leveraging it to redo their emails, to rethink their approach to their strategies, to build out business plans, to do a lot of the stuff that we never got to sometimes because of all of the additional work that’s on our plate. HR is one of the most overworked areas in the market. We know that. We live it every day. And so what we’re seeing is that on a personal front, they know already that the value of AI can add to helping them adjust the workloads.
10:01
Stacey Harris
On the process front, embedding it into your employee workforce processes requires a lot more strategic thinking about the impact on the employees themselves, about how personal information and data gets used, compliance and regulations at both a regional and a governance level, as well as a corporate. And so there’s just a lot more things you have to work through on that level. And I think that people are handling it very carefully, and I think they should be handling it carefully. I am fine with those numbers. I would not want to see them go any faster than that. We’re expecting another 10 to 15% uptick in that sort of process flow this year based off of what people told us they were doing last year. And right now we’ve got about 200 people in the survey already, and that’s really where it’s hovering at.
10:47
Stacey Harris
So I expect it to stay there. But I do think that on the personal front, we bring your own. AI is a bigger conversation that we aren’t talking about in the market, which is, if I’m already getting a lot of wins and opportunity teaching an AI how I want to work, and you’re forcing me to use the corporate version of that. How much productivity do you lose? Because that tool does not really know me and I’ve already trained my own AI. Plus you’re also paying for something that could be dispersed a little bit more. So I think the real winner will be whoever figures out how to do the bring your own AI into the market.
11:22
Matt Alder
Let’s talk about the vendor space, because we’re recording this at HR Tech Europe and the show floor is as ever, full of vendors talking about AI and different sort of use cases. And really, over the last couple of years, we’ve seen that space become really confusing because companies are expanding what they do, they’re expanding their offers. There’s also consolidation and acquisitions and launches and all kinds of things going on from a buyer perspective, you know, lots of people listening to the podcast are trying to make sense of this and trying to work out where to make investments. What advice would you give people to make sense of just all the noise that’s out there?
11:59
Stacey Harris
Well, my first advice would be take my survey. We’ll have a link for Matt. Because I’m a big proponent of know yourself first before you go buying a tech, right? And I cannot tell you how many times people are like, oh, well, we’re going to need this new tech. And you talk to them and you find out the tech they have will do what they’re thinking about trying to do, right? And so we’re a big proponent of sort of understanding your entire landscape first. That will help you understand the landscape that’s out there better. There are over 5,000 plus vendors in the market that are tracked on a regular basis. Our data set has multiple versions of every one of the 52 categories that we track in the HR Technology Practices space of systems.
12:45
Stacey Harris
What I will say is that the best way to make sense of it is to start with what you’re trying to achieve from an outcome perspective. Know your data management model inside your company, because the minute you get excited about a technology that does not match your data management model, you’re going to have some challenges and know your culture. Do you. Is your, is your organization more, Is cost more important to them? Do they need spreadsheets to get decisions made? Do they like to have relationships? So do they want to be a small fish in a big pond? Do they want to be a big fish in a small pond? Those kind of things will, are all of that information will help you Sort of navigate, I think, these very big landscapes very quickly.
13:26
Stacey Harris
Because the one thing we found in our data is the vendor doesn’t matter. Vendors would pay me a lot of money to tell you. Any one vendor will get you the exact best thing that you’re trying to do. It matters how much you connect with them and how much it matches with what you’re trying to do in your organization.
13:42
Matt Alder
And let’s just talk about the future, although dealing with the present is difficult enough at the moment. But let’s talk about the future.
13:49
Matt Alder
So from two perspectives, really.
13:50
Matt Alder
Sort of firstly, in the short term, what are you kind of seeing early in the next survey that sort of shows the path we’re going on for the next 12 months or so?
13:59
Stacey Harris
A couple of things that we’re investing more time in on the survey and I think is really bubbling up pretty heavily. One is the role of compliance. Compliance has always been a space that HR has spent a lot of time in, but it’s shifting right now with AI. And I think a lot of people are leveraging AI to get a start on compliance. And that is having an impact on compliance technology and how it’s. That’s being utilized inside of organizations. And so we’re seeing that market change pretty rapidly. So whatever tech you would use to get your compliance or to access information about compliance is changing. And so we’re seeing that, we’re asking more questions about that.
14:33
Stacey Harris
The other area that, to me that is really interesting that we’re spending a lot of time in is the shift from workforce planning to workforce architecting, that redesigning of work itself that reshift around where HR is basically now. The not just talking about managing the people who do the work, but actually helping architect the idea of what is work, what belongs with a human in the loop, what is agentic possibilities, what is the work that we need to go down to a task level to understand. I’m looking a lot of project management tools in that space, which is oftentimes not thought of as an HR solution, but is one of the biggest tools for tracking that information, as well as workforce management technology, time management technology.
15:17
Stacey Harris
We’re looking at a lot of those as well as those are probably the biggest areas that are big changes. We added to the survey this year some finance questions as well, finance systems, because we do think that world’s always been connected. But we’re getting a lot more questions about expense management, we’re getting a lot more questions about financial planning. We’re getting a lot more questions about just the Finance system and its relationship with the HR system. I think partially AI doesn’t work without the plumbing part of and so people are trying to figure out the plumbing. And so it doesn’t mean all in one. We don’t think point solutions buyers are very tired of hearing that it has to be all in one or that it is a best of breed. They don’t want to because it doesn’t work.
16:01
Stacey Harris
Neither of those models have worked. We have a model that we’ve seen come up over the last couple of years actually I think Sanofi is going to talk about it this week. Here is a platform cluster model which is basically nodes of anchor systems where you identify big things that are important to your culture and then you look at the ecosystems or marketplaces they’ve created around them. And so you’re sending data from one sort of cluster to another. But that ecosystem partnership model becomes really important there and that seems to be working pretty well for large companies and.
16:30
Matt Alder
Mid market and finally looking out a little bit further into the future. So where are we going with this? If were having this conversation again in a couple of years time, what do you think we’d be talking about?
16:41
Stacey Harris
You know, I’m a big believer in change happening at the pace at which it needs to for the both the business that we’re trying to achieve in organizations and the workers that are doing the work right. You can’t move any faster than either of those two things are ready to move. Right. As much as we would like to say that AI is going to take over the world, I think there are pricing model issues, there are challenges with security, there are challenges with data sovereignty that we’ve got to handle around all that. I think over the next five to 10 years what we’re going to see is HR will be asked to be more of a work design conversation.
17:23
Stacey Harris
And I think the HR is going to have to get really good at understanding the metrics behind work and how it happens inside of our organization, which we have not been really held accountable to. Performance management up to this point has been a way to get a compensation raise and we’re going to have to really think about it as a actual performance process. I think on the talent acquisition side, because I know that’s a big part of your audience, the conversation will be do we have enough labor to do the job? I don’t think anybody is really thinking through. We know in the United States I just talked to an organization downstairs who is doing healthcare housing. So not in the healthcare space, but they are doing sort of land and apartments and stuff for healthcare workers. Right.
18:07
Stacey Harris
And they’re just talking about the growth of that space because you have to move healthcare workers to get them to the locations they’re at pretty rapidly now in the United States, we’re expecting that within the next few years we’re gonna have 15% of our workforce in just the healthcare space alone. So when you think about those kind of changes happening both with our demographics and with our demand for work, trade based work is gonna come back in vogue, if it hasn’t already. Right. There is a lot of different things I think that we’re going to be focusing on because we have the ability to actually focus on them. And that’s going to be good.
18:43
Stacey Harris
But it will be jarring, I think, for a lot of people who have built their careers on mapping processes or analyzing data, like me, you, I always sit in a room and go, hate to tell you guys this, but this time the shift’s gonna be here. Right?
19:00
Matt Alder
On that note, Stacey, thank you very much for talking to me.
19:03
Stacey Harris
Love it. Let me know if you have any questions afterwards. I’m happy to connect with people on.
19:06
Matt Alder
LinkedIn, so my thanks to Stacey. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feasts, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
