Name: The State of HR Technology and the AI Imperative for Global HR Leaders
Uploaded: 2025-09-10T15:17:56.106Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min 28 s
Description: The State of HR Technology and the AI Imperative for Global HR Leaders

Transcript for "The State of HR Technology and the AI Imperative for Global HR Leaders": Good afternoon, everyone, for a part in the world, and welcome. Thanks for joining us for today's webinar, the state of HR technology and the AI imperative for global HR leaders. My name is Sean. I'm part of the sales team here at Betterworks. I have over ten years experience in the HR technology space, but it almost feels like I'm starting again with how disruptive AI is is is being and will continue to be. But I'm really, really excited to get things kicking off today. So, we're just gonna wait for a few more people to join, but I would love to know where you're calling in from. So there's a chat on the right right hand side, so please say hello, and I'd love to know where you're from. So I'm personally joining from a town called Chipping Norton. I had a quick Google to see what interesting facts there are, and, apparently, it's the highest town in Oxfordshire. So if anyone has any equally boring facts about where they live, then please pop them in the chat. It'd be, it'd be funny to know. So before we dive in, I'd love to get you all I'd love to get to know you a little bit better. So what we're gonna do is open up a quick poll. You should be seeing a pop up directing you to the tab right next to the chat. And the question is, what's your biggest priority for HR tech over the next Okay. So just as we take a moment for you to answer, I just wanted to share a few quick housekeeping items. Today's session will be recorded, and you will receive the on demand link tomorrow. If you have any questions at any time, just drop them in the q and a tab next to the chat, and we'll save some time at the end and get to as many as we can. Keep those chat messages coming. We always love to see where you're joining from. And, yes, if you do wanna share a a GIF or or Giphy, they they are encouraged, however you say it. And finally, check out the documents tab. We've shared some helpful resources there, including the state of performance enable remote report, insights on how AI is shaping HR, and, of course, today's slides. So this webinar is part of our ongoing people's fundamental series, where we are bringing together leading voices from researchers to practitioners to explore the biggest trends shaping the world of work. Now I am thrilled to introduce today's speakers. We have Stacey Harris, who is a chief research officer and managing partner at Sapient Insights Group. Stacey has been a leading figure in HR practices and technology research since 02/2007, producing groundbreaking work on high impact HR organizations, enterprise HR systems, and talent management best practices. Stacey will be joined by Cliff Stevenson, who's the director of research at Sapient Insights Group. Cliff is one of the primary authors of the HR system survey white paper. He brings extensive experience as an analyst with Brandon Hall Group and the Institute of Corporate Productivity with expertise spanning talent acquisition, HR tech, analytics, and employee retention. So we are extremely excited to have both of them with us today. And with that, I'll hand things over to I believe you are taking it from here. That's exactly right. Thank you so much. I'm loving to see all of the varied places people are from. We have talked about this before. We did a more US centric, version, of this webinar. I but, now I'm really getting to see some for us, I guess, a little more exotic places. We we're talking backstage. I saw, Paris, represented, but we will give bonus points, for anyone from Mauritius. So, if you're from there, please say hi. But we love you all. So this is the state of HR technology and the AI imperative for global HR leaders. As it says, you know, this is really focused on, you know, everything that's going on in HR tech. You are one of the very, very first people to have seen some of this data. A lot of this will be pulled from our twenty seventh annual survey as you can see there. But, because of the timing of this, you're very lucky. We're also going to have some data from this year's survey that just came out and hasn't even been released to anyone else. A lot of this will be formally released at HR Tech in Las Vegas, in, oh my goodness, just a week. So, pretty wild. I'm really looking forward to that. We're gonna be going through all of that with you. We'll be talking, of course, a lot about AI as well. So with that being said, the normal sort of caveats, are in place. Right? Please don't exchange to any of this information. This is special for you all, but especially because we are going to be giving you a little bit of info that is completely, special just to this particular webinar. And because we're talking about AI, you now have to expand this to say, you know, if you get this somehow you know, if this is being transcribed or somehow you're getting this information, please do not put this into any sort of AI program. Right? Because then it'll be uploaded or be trained upon and that information sort of breaks containment. So don't let that happen. Please, we ask you, you know, we're all humans here. We're gonna be talking about some of the sort of ethics and, you know, concerns about AI in terms of security and privacy. So there we go. It's it's in action right here. But, as I said, this will all come from, the last few years of our research, including, what we've just completed. If you don't know Sapient Insights Group, well, hello. Here we are. You'll be meeting Stacey in just a moment. But we are a research and advisory group focusing, of course, on HR technology, but also strategy and transformation, leadership, building culture. I saw, Deanna Forstin, who's in the chat. She's gone through one of our cohort programs and other things, groups that we do and working, groups like that, to solve basically business issues. That's what you will see focused on throughout this entire webinar where we always try and tie everything into what are the business outcomes that this actually affects. All of these stats, all this survey information. What does it mean? And you'll see that laser focused on by everything that we talk about today. So with all of that being said, I'm going to be bringing up Stacey to talk about the data, but just so you know, this is where the data is from. As we said, this is from a massive survey. It's even bigger this year, if you can imagine. And when you see okay. Well, there's not that many people from EMEA. It actually is a large number, right, because we have such a huge dataset. So even having 5% of something, you know, ends up being hundreds of different organizations. And when it gets to the global, aspect, you see so many different countries, so many different workers represented because, you know, we know the size of these organizations. If you've ever taken a survey, first, thank you. And second, you will know that this is a massive and comprehensive survey touching on every single aspect of HR technology. And, you know, when it comes to AI, it's something that Stacey and I are very, very deliberate about is saying, okay. Well, it's one thing to say, are you using AI? Of course, that's important. But we wanna ask, what are you using it for? This is just an example. You know? But we would say, what are you using it for? If you're not using it, why not? And then going further than that of even saying, you know, what sort of guidelines do you have around the use of AI? All of this sort of information, we always dig a little deeper, in these questions. I know for the people taking the survey, they're like, okay. Get on with it. But you'll find that it ends up giving a overview, this sort of depth and breadth that you just wouldn't see. But that's enough talking about how great we are. Stacey can prove that herself. And I think everyone here, I'm gonna be in chat. That will be popping back on as well, during some of the discussion. But we'll continue the discussion, and I really appreciate how lively everyone's being already. Stacey, you wanna talk us through what's been happening in the world out there? Sure. It's all positive. Right? And, as we've worked in technology, I can also go through this, somewhat too. I thank you so much. We are what we're really looking at is sort of the state of where things are. Right? Sorry about that. I've yeah. I didn't have the button for moving to the stage. So it's it's technology's all do. Yeah. Later. Yes. Hi, everyone. Thanks, Cliff, for the the, updates and the insights. We're really excited to get a chance, as Cliff said, to, chat a little bit about not just the data, but how that data, plays out on a global market and a global front. And as Cliff said, you know, I've been in the research industry for a very long time doing research, but I also came from practitioner background. And so the other side of what we try and do is when we're looking at the outcomes, we're trying to look at the outcomes that are gonna be important to you and the business decisions you're helping your organizations make. Also, your own personal decisions you're making about how you do your work and how you change the work that you're doing. The one thing that we we really have focused on in the research, over the last couple of years is understanding, not just the change that's happening, but why things are changing the way they are and how we play a role in that. Sometimes it feels very much when you're talking to HR, audiences that we're speaking to the choir or it's a good way to put it, that a lot of the stuff that we're saying, we need others in the organization to understand better to be able to help us elevate, to be able to help us sort of move forward. And so the other thing that we really work on is understanding what's happening in the business so you can speak more specifically to the business conversations. One of the things that we've done a lot of research on is how is the market changing. And we really think that to get into what's happening in AI, you have to think not just about what's happening today and what we're doing in HR today, but where we've come from and particularly for the business leaders that we're working with today. Right now, the market is to, considerably overwhelmed particularly if I am in a business leader of a mid market or an SMB. And for us, SMB is kinda 500 and below and mid market is 500 to 5,000 employees and enterprises above 5,000 employees. That mid market organizations, those 500 to 5,000 employees organizations are really, really stressed with what's happening, not just on a business level, but on a global front, on a regulatory front, on a, focus on sort of changing business models, from not just AI being part of it to AI doing some of the work and what does that mean for us as organizations. Climate is not just a conversation anymore about that we do have climate change, that climate change is happening. It is. We know that. Now that the conversation is what is our risk analysis? How much are we willing to risk and where are we willing to have that risk at? And how do we prepare and support our employees throughout the market? We know, almost every business leader in the market right now is dealing with labor issues. As much as we're talking a lot about layoffs and the market sort of slowing down a little bit and from an economic perspective, a lot of it due to global and security and, changes happening at government levels and, the world just sort of shifting around a little bit as to sort of, regulatory matters. What is driving a lot of that change though is that there is actually a a very big labor shortage in the market, particularly in the European market. We'll talk a little bit about that. You know that better than those of us who are sitting in The United States oftentimes. We lie with the data on a regular basis, and I try and remind the market that, this little bit of, what I'd say is a bump in the road where it feels like there's a lot of, opportunity for businesses to reset things from what was the great resignation of, 2022 and to reset, salaries and to reset through their relationship with the employee because of AI is a very short term to blip. We know from our data that within the next five to ten years, there will not be enough people to do the work even if we add AI, doing a lot of the, extraneous work into the mix. And so we're gonna talk a lot about all of that. My biggest conversation here though and takeaway from this particular slide is when you're talking to your business leaders, the first thing you wanna ask them about is what are they struggling with? What are the numbers they're paying attention to? What are the challenges they are having? And I know that's a little counterintuitive for us in HR oftentimes because for us, oftentimes, we're like, what can we do? How can we help you? What is our what can we do to sort of get you over the hump? So oftentimes, what they want and what they need might be two different things. And that's what we're gonna talk a lot about in the research today because we oftentimes have to ask those questions to be able to help them understand how to maybe address it differently. Yes. That's they might be dealing with cost cutting, and it might feel like the best way to deal with cost cutting is automatically going through reduction of workforce because it's a clear, quick, easy way to deal that when it's your largest percentage of expense inside of an organization. Our data shows right now and, there's some, data that that back this up, from another serving. If you're interested, Cliff and I talk about it on our, podcast that we do every other week called filling the t n h r tech. Where it was very clear that those organizations who had done a lot of layoffs versus those who had not were actually about four or 5% below average on revenue per employee numbers, performance, the kind of things that we track on a financial level compared to those organizations who had not done that. Now granted correlation and causation, as we all know, it could be that those organizations were in different places. But just statistically, we're starting to see that through just making quick decisions to cut costs are not always the things that are gonna get you to where you need to be as an organization. One of the reasons for this, and the World Economic Forum is where this data comes from, it's from their most recent 2025 future of jobs report. They just put out another one on HR leadership, which I'm I'm reading into, over the weekend here in prep for some of us gonna be doing the big conference here in The United States at the HR tech conference. What we do know is that from their numbers and their analysis that that we are looking at displacing about 92,000,000 jobs. The next few years will be very difficult no matter who you are and what role you're in, but particularly if you were in a management or knowledge based role. Us many of us who are sitting here at the at the conversation today. But we also know that there will be a 170,000,000 new jobs created, which is gonna leave us around 78,000,000 jobs in the whole. And when we look at this at an at a sort of global level, certain regions have more capacity to handle this than others in the short term versus long term. We know for a fact that Europe at this point is at a point where on average, they have, at this point, three three point o or a little less than three, depending on which numbers you're looking at, of working adults for nonworking people within their, economies. That is a really low number. Just to kinda give you some some metrics on that, in 02/2011, it was four point o in Europe. In 2000 and February, it was five in The US. In The US, we're at, expected to be by twenty forty two point seven. We're right now at a little over three, and the numbers come up just a little bit just because of our unemployment, but the expectation is that's gonna go back down again. And the really big issue here is that it's not just that it's happening in our markets, European markets, US markets, the, the markets where we tend to do a lot of trading and balancing. It's also happening in the markets where we generally would have, brought in skill sets for, professionals to help us get over the hump of having a lack of skills in organizations. So markets like, Africa and India and, Asia Pacific areas, where normally there would have been a much more excess oftentimes, outside of some of the islands in Japan of sort of workforce in general. Those markets are also seeing their per, working population versus nonworking population dramatically shift. I have a stat not here, but it's in my other big presentation that basically shows that in India alone, you know, that number used to run around 15 to 20, somewhere in that range. That number is dropping to about 10, and they have a much faster growing older population in that market, which is having an impact on them needing to build their own infrastructure, their own they're both service industries in that market that they have not had to have previously. That causes a lot of opportunity, within the Indian market, but it does cause some challenges where that means we're not going to be moving people around the globe as much as we have in the past. That's a reality. And there's just, you know, whatever you're feeling about sort of movements and tariffs and and tracking things in the market, there is a reality of just the number of people to do the work needed. And that's the conversation that we talk a lot about in the market. The other dataset that we have, this comes from our bureau label statistic data also from the, the prior to some recent changes in that market. Also, some some great work done on, population surveys, by another organization. They were tracking the number of, organizations that hired professionals with, secondary, education. So those who had gone through college or gone through university at some level. And that number has continuously dropped, but particularly dropped after COVID. And now we're feeling that much of that drop could be because of AI. That's the big conversation in the market. This is mirrored slightly, not as heavily in European data as it in The US data. This is a US chart. It's a little bit, more dramatic, I think, in The US data here, but we have seen the similar mirrors outside The US as well. But here's what's really happening when you look at the data at more depth. This is not just an AI conversation. It's been dropping considerably since the early two thousands. Where we really see these numbers, starting to have an impact is that a lot of the trade roles and Europe's been on top of this much faster than we and APAC is starting to work in this considerably heavier, than we have in The United States, is that the trade roles are ramping up clearly. And the skill sets needed for those trade roles because they now are a mix of both hands on plus this technical because now AI is handling a lot of the sort of in between work that would have happened. So now I've got engineers doing trade work hand on hand directly on the job. So that frontward, what you would see sometimes called the frontward engineer or something like that. In average, we're looking at least in The US, which means we're gonna need this globally as well, about 1,700,000 skilled labor trade workers, and that's of the top 10 positions. That's just seven roles that we're gonna need that out of. Right? Like, it's really, really a huge number of professionals. The number of home health personal care, that's gonna be needed by 2033 will be 1.7 times higher than AI software developers. I I state that clearly because we all know how much skill and capability and empathy and work it takes to just be a home health care aid or to work in any kind of health care industry, and that number is rising considerably in our market. So as much as we think the conversation is gonna be very AI led in the market going forward, what's really is gonna be leading it is the skills we need and how we take care of the people around us. And what that leads us to as HR professionals is oftentimes thinking a little bit differently about our work. One of the things that we've tracked for the last, five to six years is this well, actually, we've had the survey question for over fifteen years. But particularly, we started looking at it in the last ten years to see what was happening. And for a while, we are on this nice trajectory where we were moving upward in the percentage of organizations that felt their HR function was a strategic partner inside their organization. And remember, we're asking this question of both HR professionals, heads, CEOs, executives, finance leaders, other leaders in that market. And what we found is that on average, we had sort of stalled at about 50% of the market feeling that HR was seen as a strategic partner, actually slightly below that about 48, 49. Our goal about five years ago was to get to 55, percent of the market seeing HR as a strategic HR business partner. And part of how we got there and part of how part of how we expect to get there was to really think differently, not just about our functions as compliance versus best practices HR versus outcome driven HR, but we think about our overarching roles in HR function. One of the things that we have found is that a lot of organizations get stuck thinking about just compliance based HR. All the things you have to get done to make sure that people are hired, onboarded, moved throughout the organization, and even off board in the organization. There was a big push in the two thousands to be best practice, to have a lot of focus on what big companies were doing or enterprise companies were doing and how that worked into talent strategies. And just recently, we've really started to ask, it's great to do best practices. It's important to do compliance. But we as HR professionals also have to be thinking very clearly about what's the outcomes our company is trying to do. And those best practices might not fit us because we're trying to achieve something different from everyone else. And what we're finding is that organizations have to kind of this isn't a maturity scale. This is much more like a train track. And basically, organizations are focused in different areas depending on where the needs are in their organization. They might have to go back to compliance when they're talking about AI. They might have to cut new practices in place when we're talking about what's happening in the market, maybe when it comes to performance management. But ultimately, you should make sure that you're spending a lot of time on that outcome focused HR. Know your business goals, know your business principles, know the culture of your organization and how you achieve work, that's gonna drive the best outcome. Sadly, this year, I will tell you we didn't get to 55%. We are just slightly below it. And part of it we think is because of what's happened with the AI market and what's happened in the market or globally. We're gonna talk a little bit about what's driving that. So one of the things we did in our research, and this is this year's research. This is data fresh off the off the dataset that we just asked, basically a month and a half ago. We asked organizations, what are the top business initiatives driving the goals that we have in our organization right now? Not just HR, but in general, what's our biggest business initiative? And the top four were the same by region, by industry, by size. They did not change much. Right? It basically was increasing revenue, improving efficiency, reducing costs, and optimizing processes. Those four. A little bit of off as to which were the top things, but generally increasing revenue and improving efficiency came in at number two. And I just wanna really talk about that because that's actually different from where it was at about five years ago. Five years ago, you'd see a lot of increasing revenue and changing market share or increasing revenue and think about digital transformation. But when you start trying to do increasing revenue and improving efficiency and optimization, what you end up with two dynamics coming together inside of organizations that's really causing us a lot of challenge. What that means is that organizations are trying to increase their revenue while they're cost cutting. And those two things don't always go hand in hand. They're always not handled very effectively inside of organizations. Now what you'll see in the data is that while they're trying to do this for mid market and SMB organizations, the number fifth priority then starts to shift to improving employee engagement. Compared to enterprise organizations that are focused more on that digital transformation, I cannot emphasize enough that as we move towards more digital, more AI conversations, our data shows over and over again that you start to lose employee engagement. Especially, if you're not thinking about the processes, the way that work happens. Employees love to get things done faster. They love to have the information that they're being tipped. They love to be able to rework their work in a way that they don't have to do as much what we would consider sort of detailed or administrative or support work inside of it. Right? What they hate is when all of that technology and all those processes don't work together and actually causes them more work. And it also feels very frustrating when those things become a bigger priority than the actual employee themselves. And that's what's really happening in a lot of the conversations. In the EMEA market, and I think this is really, really important, is that basically what we see is that in EMEA, the same data is coming up, but the top five, and seven are focusing much more on increasing market share and, scaling operations. So I think the difference there of what we're from what we're seeing in our data is that in the EMEA market, that scaling, that ability to transform, there was already a lot of emphasis on the human component in the EMEA market. Talent management's been at a much higher level. Their skills management's been at a much higher level. Part of that because regulations, part of that because of the the fact that there was just a lack of skilled workers in the market. I think right now the conversation is how can we scale fast enough to meet the demand that's happening because of all the changes globally and in the market. And so the scaling conversation becomes really important, which becomes a skill conversation. In the Asia Pacific market, very much matching the top two, but their number three is digital transformation. Asia Pacific market still has particularly when you look across the entire market, not just one or two pieces, but across the entire market, very much, run at a human level. A lot of, individuals getting a lot of work done. They have not done as much digital transformation even though that that site, market has a lot of digital capabilities. And so we are seeing that market sort of leapfrog over some of the things that we've done and the rest of them, the global, we've seen this quite some time in the HR tech space, but it's happening elsewhere now where they're moving right into digitizing the work and then trying to figure out how they move a workforce around that digitization. So different things for different markets. At HR, we have to be looking at different metrics because of what this is showing us. We have to start talking to our executives about revenue per employee. What does that mean and how do we look at that not from a sheer number, but from a perspective about how we pull those pieces together to make that valuable to us. We need to be looking at process and work efficiencies. We need to be looking at compensation and talent gaps, and we definitely need to be looking at changing our approach to how we think about engagement metrics through change and metrics for meaning measuring change and what that change impacts. Because what we're gonna see is a lot of frustration in the market from the customers and the employees, the people that we work with on a day to day basis around how change is impacting not just them personally, but the work they're at being asked to do. One of the ways that we are able to sort of get ahead of this conversation as an HR professional, really think more globally and think more, about what the market is saying, is that we really start to think about who are our partners inside the the organization. Who are you looking to help us manage change at a strategic level, not just at a, oh, it's coming at us. Do as much as we can to do training. Do as much as we can do communications. But strategically, how do we manage the amount of change in a way because it's gonna happen, but how do we manage it in a way that makes the most sense for our organization? One of those ways is to partner with your other functions inside the organization, particularly support functions like finance and IT and operations. One of the things that we're finding though in our dataset when we when we broke out our dataset about what organizations felt that HR was as strategic or not, what we found was that owners, CFOs, CEOs, that market definitely already sees the value in HR. There is not the conversation there as much as I think many of us feel like we have to have to get the CEO on board. They get it. Well, the challenge is is that our partners in business, IT, and particularly finance do not feel the same way. And this is where we have some work to do as HR leaders to be able to be viewed as strategic across the organization, not just at the executive level. We need to create better partnerships with our finance audience. Just 23% of finance organize of finance professionals told us that they felt that their HR functions were strategic. These are finance professionals who own some of our payroll, own some of our HR systems, have a say over the HR technology that we are purchasing. This isn't just SMB. This goes we looked at this across enterprise, mid market and and SMB. The numbers say about the same. Actually, you see, IT go up a little bit when you're a larger organization. It's a little bit smaller when you're in a smaller organization. Right? But that's kind of the biggest difference that you see. The other thing that we see happening here is that for EMEA, HR is even more likely to feel that they are not viewed as a strategic partner. There's a lot of self confidence issue in EMEA market. APAC's kind of their numbers are a little bit wonky. The, the APAC market, we're definitely seeing that they have higher perception of the HR function, but the CEOs and executives don't have as high a a perception there. So I think there's there's opportunity there and work that is done in APAC market. Again, a much more, a market that has not had as much investment in HR. And so there are still best practices and technology that's being worked on in there. In the European market though, I think what we're really seeing is that HR has to be just as sure of what it's doing and where that as the rest of their CEOs and their executives. Your executives definitely felt that this their partnership was with HR. And now we all have to be focusing on how we talk to finance and how we talk to our, leadership across the line in IT to be able to handle what's coming down the road. The executives are basically saying, look. AI is coming. Now I need the three of you, particularly finance, IT, and HR to work together to figure out are we looking at as a workforce? Are we looking at the technology? Are we looking at the market that needs to be addressed? So to understand why there's value in this and, again, we've done this research for over twenty eight years now going on our twenty ninth. And, the last ten years, I just looked back and said, okay. Look. If I'm viewed as a strategic HR function, does that make a difference in business outcomes, HR outcomes, talent outcomes, the things that we track, the financial metrics that we track in our dataset? And the answer was pretty clear. As you went up to from no credibility, like and there are about 4% of our dataset that always tells us that HR has no credibility within our organization. I when I first put that survey question on the, the, in our dataset, the CEO who I had at that point in time, when I was with another organization for the survey who's managing it, said, oh, no one's gonna tell us that HR does not have any strategic or it's no credibility inside the organization. And he's wrong. Every year, we get three to 4%. It never changes much. But what we found is that whether you were at an organization that felt you had no credibility, then you move the compliance based HR function, some value in the HR, which means you're moving your way up to strategic versus seen as a strategic HR partner. Every step you made made a difference in the outcomes on a year over year basis. And on a five year year over year basis on a compound level, we were looking at about a 42% higher levels of improvement in that HR talent and business outcomes that we track year over year. That's a huge number. And if you're just looking at business outcomes alone with that same analysis, that number is about 34% higher. So just think a little bit at over a five year period. If you were able to get 34% higher innovation numbers, market share, profitability, customer satisfaction, competitive analysis, and this was just last year's data and we're gonna look at it again this year, between strategic and HR compliance functions. What kind of a difference that would make in your organization? This is an executive of finance and IT conversation all day, which is you wanna know how your organization sees better outcomes. Part of it is making HR part of that conversation. We're having these conversations at the finance and IT level. Everyone needs to be having these conversations because they already know that the goal is to increase revenue. The question is, how do I do that? Well, you could cut cost, but that's a short term answer to a long term question. Now the bigger challenges for HR, this is something that Cliff and I talk a lot about, is that ultimately what we see in the market is that as we've been driving up this need and creating this environment where we need to have more strategic HR conversations, we've also been adding a lot of work on the person who handles not just HR technology, but HR processes and systems as an overall market. We've been having a huge increase in the number of technologies that we're asking that them to manage, processes that are automated. Right now, Cliff and I track around 600 different solutions in our current HR technology, survey that we do, that has about three percent or more adoption. So to get 3% or more adoption in a global market is pretty you have to have usually depending on the the sort of category, but usually some of the range of a thousand to 1,500 individual customers, right, at at a mid market level. When we look at the total number of vendors that we track in the market, there's 2,750. We know that lead reaches way up to the six to 7,000 numbers when we talk to a lot of organizations who track every vendor from every background reference check to the people who help you order, you know, services for your, laptops being decommissioned inside of the organization. Those are all HR systems and technologies on some level. What we do know from our data though is that the person who handles this HR technology strategy inside the organization has to manage the inflow of all those vendors, all those organizations talking to them about what they could do or might be within the organization. They have to manage their existing vendors, updates and and, maintenance and contracts and negotiations. They have to manage their, employee's access and, within these systems and the level of security inside of these systems. They're also, thinking about change management and rollouts and then all of the adoption levels. Are they being utilized at the level? And they're talking about things like, if I implementing on average, most organizations are implementing two to three new technologies a year in the HR tech ecosystem. It becomes massive when we start talking about the amount of work. And one of the things we know that's really important in this conversation is that, all this technology is meant to improve our lives, help both administer HR better but also create engagement with our employees. And what we find on average is that we have a pretty low ranking on a scale of one to five and that one being sort of it's very unusable, not happy at all with my relationship with them to the five being it's extremely useful, used on a regular basis, and my relationship is wonderful with the vendors. Right? What we find on average that some of the tools that we are supposed to be using most or that we're supposed to be investing in the most generally is our HRMS, our payroll systems, our analyst systems. They're getting the lowest average user experiences of all technology. Things that oftentimes get higher averages, not surprisingly, ends up being our engagement tools, our onboarding tools, our rewards and recognition tools. That doesn't surprise us. Those are tools that are meant to create that kind of excitement, meant to create that kind of engagement in the organization. But what we do know is organizations have to think about how these things work together. Cliff, I know one of the conversations that you and I have been having a lot about is how do we keep keep ownership of the HR technology space and the HR technology market? One, we know that, not only are we seeing this this shift towards basically, the technology is kind of disparate. There's always a lot of disengagement. There's a lot of organizations struggling with it. But we also know that, it's important for HR to keep connected to that technology to be able to tie that to the goals and and areas. Can you talk a little bit about the shift we're seeing in, IT ownership and the the relationship around who owns that budget? Yeah. As we've been tracking this, and I think you were probably the first to start noticing this, as you call it, like, this battle brewing. Right? This ongoing, which I'd say is fully engaged at this point. Because what's happening is in the profession of HR, as you talked about, becoming more business aligned and, you know, that is the goal. There's nothing wrong with that. But as that happens, another thing has been happening. Right? And the business are becoming, you know it used to be sort of aspirational. Right? We need to be more data driven, but now that's just the way it is. That's not an aspiration. That's just a fact of life. Businesses are data driven. And anything going forward is we're gonna start talking about AI or any sort of advanced technology. Just even predictive analytics has to be strongly databased. And anytime that means that if you're gonna be making huge business decisions, right, life and death in terms of your business, and your data has to be perfect. Right? So that's all data governance. That's where it's stored, who has access to it, security, privacy, all of those sort of rules around it. You know, and you're working with people data, you can see why HR needs to have a sort of stake in this. Right? Because this is the future. It's the present and the future. So both groups are looking and saying, no. No. No. This is for what I do. This is so important for anything I'm going forward, both HR and IT. And so, you know, having the sort of being able to set those rules around the data becomes imperative for anything moving forward. And so you can see why it's become a bit of an issue in determining where this data is stored and, again, who sets the rules around it so that, you know, when it comes down to even purchasing or, you know, evaluating some of this technology, it really it does end up having to be a group effort because you're not just looking at, you know, what it can do in terms of, as you said, Stacey, sort of engaging employees or helping them get their job done. It's also in helping the business decide on what is the most effective use of their resources in the organization and where things could go in the future, whether that just be it could be anything from a geographical switch, right, pulling all of this data together, figuring out where people, can best fit, down to just creating efficiencies in a single location. All of the different ways that we think of sort of maybe traditional HR metrics, maybe not, all comes down to the data, that you have both, currently in your organization and where you'll be able to go to next with that. Yeah. And and I think the reason why we call this out so much is not because we want people to battle and say, no. It's my budget. You have to have it or and IT is there. What we're saying is be aware of the nuances that change based off of who owns the budget. In EMEA, you're much more likely for enterprise organizations that 45% of them are to see that that IT owns the HR technology budget outright. That doesn't mean you can't have all these conversations Cliff is talking about. It means you have to be aware of that and take some steps to may to address it. Because we do know if you have if you have ownership of your budget, you're much more likely to see the strategic. And that number goes up dramatically this year, up much higher from 38%. The other thing is that we are seeing that IT, is that number is gonna also increase. That little triangle they're showing that. What we're gonna see this year is that that number is gonna jump right now from where it's at in the thirties to much higher in the forties in aggregate, and EMEA is just gonna go even higher. So it is it's just happening. Right? So the question is, how do I deal with it? How do I manage it? The other thing that EMEA is seeing is that, if you are an organization that is in the mid market level, you're much more likely to be increasing an HRIS role, which I think is really important and powerful. Because HRIS roles, which not all their functions have them, but in HR, it's it's generally either dotted line to HR or dotted line to IT and sitting in between. Those roles have that com that role that manage all that complexity that we talked about earlier, And they're the ones that are being impacted to the most by the AI conversation because they're helping organizations manage it at a technical level, at the global level. So it's a really important and critical role, and definitely EMEA is growing that role across the market. I did put a little question out in the in the, chat window about what your, which, organization you feel right now is owning your HR technology budget at the places that you're in today. I think the other conversation that we oftentimes have to have with the organization is how do I, how do I show the company that I'm working for that I understand that I don't just have to manage the HR technology not in a way that what happened so it's a better way to put this is what's happened over the last couple of years is that we have been very good in HR at saying, great. We wanna make sure our technology meets the processes, meets individual business unit needs, is very responsive to every business need we have in the organization. And in doing that and being very responsive to business needs, we have created oftentimes an environment that is very disparate because we've got a lot of individual elements together that we that we've tried to connect, but we're not IT. And so oftentimes, we are like, we're focusing on the user experience. That's the most important conversation we have to have, and that's what they do because we need to get adoption of these systems. And we gotta make sure they're getting outcomes for us. Right? What we'll have to shift to, I think, to be able to sort of solve this this sort of, capture that's happening of the the technology budget right now in the market is we have to start shifting to a thinking that is not all in one or best of breed. We actually got the done conversation. People are tired of hearing about it. What we have to think about is what we call what the the larger organizations, the marketing global organizations are starting to do is what we call, cluster based building platform clusters. What that means is I have two or three systems that I decide as the HR leader in the organization are absolutely critical to our approach to running our business through human beings. That means it might be a learning platform. It might be, an HRS plan, or it might be our performance management platform. It might be our analytics tool. Any system we think that's critical to us getting the outcomes we need at the organization. And then what I end up doing is I end up looking at all the systems I have and can I pick two or three of them and create clusters of partnerships around them where the data flows seamlessly? Where I think about my contracts in order with those systems. Where I think about my, relationships and partnerships they have so those organizations talk better together. They have process level integrations, not just, oh, we're on the same paper. That kind of strategic thinking in your technology environment is one of the fastest ways that we see HR leaders halt that, oh, we're gonna take great your technology budget. Because guess what? We, as HR professionals, have a better opportunity to negotiate with the vendors on this kind of a setup. IT is a much has a much harder time at this because they oftentimes don't understand the nuances or which of those systems might be the most critical for the platform that we're trying to create. So that's one of the things that we see organizations oftentimes doing. One of the other things that we see is that we see them taking ownership of the AI conversation. So I'm gonna put a poll out there. I'd love to see what your organization's current stance on AI and HR is. Where are you actively adopting and expanding AI? Are you experimenting with AI? Or are you taking a wait and see approach? Or you have a strict limit or policies? Again, a reminder, you go to that poll, thing just to the right of your chat window to answer this. I'd really like to see kinda where everybody's at on this. Part of the reason that it is imperative we think in our dataset that HR becomes a leader in the AI conversation is because not just because it's a technology conversation, it's gonna be able to help us manage our budget, it's gonna be able to help us think differently about workforces, but because it is a very human conversation in the market. What we mean by that is that how AI is implemented in the organization will impact every person in our organization and the work they do. We are at the center of this conversation as what we're seeing in that in the poll here, it looks like, is that there was a there's still a lot of, unsure about this. So I'm gonna move on to the next conversation and show you what we're seeing in our data. And what we're seeing oh, there we go. What we're seeing in our data is that it really is pretty still early days for adoption of AI as a solution as part of our HR and business, processes. Not for our personal use, but for HR and business processes. Just about 45% of enterprise organizations, 34% of, mid market organizations, and 27% of, enter or SMB organizations across aggregate have adopted, AI this year. Now you'll see it's a little bit higher than where it was at last year. The numbers went up. That's so that little cloud is what you're gonna see us launching next week. Is that that date is what's happening this year. And it went up almost two times in mid market and twice in SMB. And as you noticed, enterprise organizations didn't go up much. They either had early adopted of AI or they haven't. They're holding for the moment. EMEA is slightly higher than the rest of the market. What we found last year, which is held through this year, is that EMEA is much more likely in their mid market and their SMBs to use AI. And we think part of this is because and this is always gonna this people always push back a little bit on this in The US on this, but I think it's very true, is that your regulations are clear. Your country by country regulations are much more aligned than our state by state regulations in The United States. APAC is doing a lot of leapfrogging and so they're doing a lot country by country. And so their regulations are actually more limited and they're they're also moving ahead a little bit more faster. And here's what happens. There's more mid market, more SMBs in the market across the board. When they start adopting things is when the market starts to really change. And that is what's happening in the EMEA market already is that they were adopting much more quickly. They're also having a lot more conversations about skills. I love Madeline's had a really good conversation about AI and upskilling and training. All of that, how important it is. That's a critical conversation here. They're moving faster than that than what we are seeing in The United States, and that's showing out in our data over and over again. The other conversation I'd love to know, and this we're gonna do one more poll and then we're gonna gonna because I know we're running out of time a little bit. I wanna get to the last couple of slides. So we're gonna do one more poll, which is what, role is HR currently playing in your organization's adoption of AI. I'd love to see where everybody's at on that real quickly. We'll give just about a minute or two to get you guys, to answer that. So we've got one right now who says that they're consulting, but not a major influencer. We have we have an influential voice. Is anybody leading AI and adopting across the workforce? We got what we got another vote for that. K. So oh, the votes are coming in pretty early here. We'll give them just another minute here. This is a big conversation and there's not a right or wrong answer in this, just so you know. What we're saying is you need to be somewhere on that plate. You've gotta be on the chessboard because we are definitely playing chess and not checkers when it comes to AI. If you ever wanna hear that analogy, listen to our podcast. But basically, what I'm saying is checkers is about getting as much data as you could in many systems as you could. What we're seeing in AI is that you have to move towards, getting as much oop. Can we show back up my presentation? Thank you. You have to actually be moving towards thinking about what's the right dataset. And so we're gonna skip this one and we're gonna move on to the next conversation because what's happening is the reason we're not implementing AI inside of our organizations for an HRM business process level, not personal HRM business process level, is we don't have enough knowledge. And this is the number one issue for EMEA, but, closely connected to cost as well and that lack of skills that someone that Maximilian mentioned. Right? So we are really seeing this as a big challenge as skills and cost and knowledge from an AI perspective. Now one of the things to note is agentic AI will be growing. Not used as much as we think today, but we are expecting a 150% growth of that in our service delivery models. Next year, you're gonna see a lot more of it than you have previously. If you don't know what Agenta guy is, we have some great definitions in our research, but really it is that technology that is a mix of different hybrid AI models, but it actually does the work versus just giving you guidance or insight. And when we think about why organizations are doing this and why they're investing in AI from an HR perspective, one of the number one things we see that HR technologist and HR leaders have to be thinking about is what their workforce and their business models will look like five to ten years down the road. Netflix is always a good example because we can change HR services. We can hire and and lay off people and change the number of people we have. We can change almost anything in our organization quickly except for technology. Technology takes time. And what we know is that in the technology front that it, you have to be thinking down the road much more longer. This Netflix conversation here that we had, I talked to someone who who really was they're like, look, we knew we're gonna be streaming. That was no problem. But who had the idea that we were gonna do a three d studio, which they ended up doing? And the type of talent needed for a three d studio was much differently managed than the type of talent needed to manage a big box streaming model. They had to have a set a solution that would stretch to that three d studio if they wanted to have data across the entire organization, which meant they had to be thinking much farther out than anyone else in the organization when they were thinking about technology, and they did in many cases. The last thing I'm gonna add to this conversation about AI and the value proposition that we're putting forth in the in the HR side and why we have to be in the conversation is that AI, although it is being kind of right now about making you more efficient and making you more, remodeling how we run our businesses and rethinking how we think about, our knowledge transfers inside of organization. What it's really good at, what it really does is hyper personalization. It allows you to think more deeply about skills and job definition, about our data management models, about our ethics models, about employee trust, about constant calibration, willingness to evolve and change leadership. You have to have all of that in place to do AI effectively inside your organization for employees, which means you have to really think about how the value of this is gonna be tied to you hyper personalizing HR, talent, learning, and work and skills. The value proposition is very clear when you start thinking about it that way because now individual employees can buy into why you're investing in it and how it's gonna help them and their work because of the way that you're tailoring it for them. Now one of the things about hyper personalization is it's very tied to skills conversation. And we know that organizations who invest in doing skills management see about 11% and uptake in those outcomes that we talked about earlier, even higher than what we're seeing with AI right now, just FYI. Right? More investment in skills is better off than more investment in AI at the moment. And one of the things that we're seeing is you're thinking about how you deliver services inside your organization is that skills and talent and conversations about, our role within the organization must tie to how we are being serviced from an HR front. So all that compliance, all the things that we have in the organization that have to get done from HR versus all the things that we have to do to sort of run the business more effectively have to work hand in hand. Because if I'm a critical talent and a critical skill in the organization and my compliance experience is terrible, I'm not as excited about moving forward on other things with the organization. Those things go hand in hand when it comes to service delivery. What we do know is organizations have different service delivery experiences. You have a high touch, high collaborative, low touch experiences with a lot of self-service, depending on how many of a different role you have in the organization, where they're located, what their roles in the organization. One thing that's happening on the AI front is that we're seeing that there are four areas where we're seeing AI being invested in. One is what's our database that we're aggregating it all in? Very critical conversation. The other one is which areas do I need to think about intelligent AI guidance? The second one is AI, tactical chat box, but we're calling AI assistance. Where do I just have to have assistance and that's much more self-service. Right? And where do I have an agent who could actually do the work for me? Those are the three decisions we're seeing HR leaders have to decide about how AI fits into their HR service delivery model. But the last one that I'm just gonna put up point out on here is bring your own AI. Research this, understand this. 92% of EMEA HR professionals are already using AI on a personal work level. That's about 80% in The United States. 14% of them in The US, about 20% in EMEA are paying for it on their own. They're doing something for their work that includes AI that is not tied into our environment already. That's a risk that we have across the board for every employee that's working. AI is a very personal conversation for people. It is helping them personally become more effective and that is where it's been getting the most outcome. We have to think about how we gauge that, manage it, trust it, and tap into it. Alright. As we're wrapping up here in our last five minutes, I'm gonna do two or three quick more slides. One is how is AI being used? There's no doubt that AI app for mid market organizations and enterprise organizations is really much the same thing right now. It's job descriptions, HR help questions, updating documentation, top three things, flips a little bit depending on the size. What are, the challenges with managing as ethically? Well, a lot of organizations have no ethical process or they don't know if they have one. My challenge to you is get in front of it. Know what your AI guidelines are. The European market is much more ahead of this in our dataset, but it is still a challenge that there are a lot of more people who say, I don't know what our process is or our a our ethics management model is in HR. That's not acceptable. I'm just gonna say that. You have to know and you have to be in front of it. Alright. Last couple things on on our slide, and then we'll sort of open up for a few questions here in the last five minutes if you have some questions is, how do I make sure I stay on top of this? We've talked a lot of about this day about how you have the conversation with your business leaders so they understand your role as a strategic partner. How do I show them the value of being strategic? How do I partner with my, finance and IT, partners to make sure that I am, this is a conversation not just with me and the executives or me and the employees, but with me and my functional leaders as well. We've talked a lot about how AI is being used and what percentage are adopting it and that it's being used being thought very thoughtfully in a lot of organizations and that's an important component about it. The last thing I wanna talk to you about is how do you make sure you're spending time and investment on it. We've seen this model. It can be any number depending on where you're at in your organization, but you want to make sure that as you're sort of putting your budget together, that you really are thinking about and your resources in the organization that you have about 60% for that technology is just running the business. I have to do it. It's it's not just compliance. It's just how do I get work done inside my organization. You also have about 30% of your budget tied towards growing the business. These are really important systems, solutions, processes that we know are gonna be focused on that revenue generation conversation. Right? This is where you want to focus some attention. And there should always be some of your budget and some of your resources in your process no matter how busy you are that is focused on innovation. What are we doing that could take us to that next level? That's the new things that no one has thought about. And I always tell people, no matter how busy you are in the day, you wanna think about your day, your week in this way. What am I doing at every week to make sure I'm doing something in each of these categories? Because if you're not, you will get to the end of the year or into next year, and your executives and your partners will look at you and go, well, you don't have anything here. You're not involved in this. You haven't talked to us about this. We're just gonna move forward and make the decision for you. That is not the place you wanna be in. Alright. As we're wrapping up, I don't know if there's any additional questions, Cliff, that we can that we have in the audience. Was there any that are in maybe the chat window that we can, bring everyone into? Or if maybe we can just point them towards the documents that we have that sort of support a lot of this research. Yeah. Actually, we did have a question. I think, Sean, you had one set in? Yeah. I have one one question. You you mentioned that in EMEA, 45% of enterprises have IT as a budget owner. Yeah. If I were somebody in HR, can you share with me some insight as to what the most important metrics should be that I should be presenting to IT to to base my business case around? I think there's a couple of metrics that we find are really, really critical for HR to be talking to and and focusing with their IT partners on. One is, the not just the adoption, but the use of the technology. How often are your employees going in and accessing that technology? Because IT doesn't really pay a lot of attention to that. And and so if they're not paying attention to it and they own the budget and you're like, look, I've got I've heard that there's some some real leveraging of this technology. The second adoption is how can I take the things I know that that technology is doing? So whether that is engagement, performance, learning, and time that to a big enterprise goal. So whether that is if we have a revenue number of increasing by 5% or we have a, a goal of increasing innovation through an new AI models in our organization. How can I take something I know that is matters in that technology or in that outcome that ties to that goal? And make sure you have that connection already made before you have the conversation, and those are metrics that you're monitoring on a pretty regular basis. It's easy to forget once we implement and we've done our business case that we have to keep proving every day why the technology is due is is important to our organization because it's really easy to go through a consolidation and say, this this enterprise system does, like, 20% of this. It's good enough. Right? And that is unfortunately part of our role in HR because if our job is to make sure the employees are getting what they need, we've gotta make sure the technology is doing it right. Right? Amazing. Thank you very much. Yeah. Cliff, I don't know if you have anything to add to that one at all. Oh, no. I think yeah. It ties into your, whole concept of this bring your own AI. Right? That people are using these systems, and it isn't as simple as just saying, okay. Look. This is what we are gonna need to track or at least what we need to sort of have the budget for. We know people are already using it. So we need to figure out ways to, like you said, increase that usage or monitor that usage or direct that usage into ways that are aligned with the business. I also wanted to point out, something, just as a quick follow-up that I pretty I found pretty fascinating. Maximilian, who had mentioned before that they were using quite a bit of AI, was following up a bit about the types of tools that they're using to sort of monitor the use of that AI. Speaking of that usage, it seemed pretty press in. So using tools of the embedded tools, Stacey, which you talk about a lot, through, for instance, Workday and, Google Suites. They may have certain rules around those, right, that are sort of intrinsic to these tools. But what is other ones that are all being used throughout the house, there is gonna have to be third party software then that's used to monitor that. I know that that's something very near and dear to UCC. So it's not really We're seeing that. I I do think our our talent tools have some opportunity to do some work here. So, just calling out to all of our friends here on the line that there is opportunities for them to actually, do a little bit of tracking in this space to understand what the talent needs around AI and what they need around their engagement in that because that is it's a critical conversation we have to have in the market. But we do see some other technologies that a very a point solution, specific to this conversation. There's a a a technology called Lanai that I really like. They're out there, helping organizations understand where where they might have AI being leveraged that people are not aware of in their market. We also see the ethics tools like FairNow and those that are governing, data access. That's also, a data governance. So those are also tools that we would serve at least take a look at in this conversation. Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you very much. We we're just over on time there, so we'll wrap things up. Stacey, Cliff, thank you so much for your time. And if anyone would be interested in learning more about Betterworks, the QR code was on your screen. It's now gone. But thanks everyone so much for joining. Thanks everyone.