Recently I went to my first HR Tech conference in Vegas. I spent most of my time walking the exhibit hall, talking to vendors and watching as many product demos as I could. Spending a few hours absorbing the industry as a whole beats visiting 100 HR software company websites all day long. Most companies have limited booth space so they have to be very specific about what messaging they use to grab your attention. For all those that didn’t have a chance to go, here’s a summary of where I see the HR tech industry today.
AI is not just coming, it’s here
Almost every single booth was about AI. If you didn’t know you were at an HR tech conference you’d think you’d stumbled into an AI one. There was already some counterprogramming with talks like “The future of HR other than AI.”
We are in the phase where AI is the feature, not the enabler (and this will change)
While everyone was talking about AI, very few folks were saying what it would do for your team. It feels like a bunch of companies are trying to scoop up buyers who feel pressure from their leaders to “do some stuff with AI”. I suspect 2025 will be the year everyone gets serious about AI and puts organized evaluations of AI projects in place with measured results.
Business analysts are in the cross hairs
We’ve already seen customer support and outbound sales jobs get gobbled by AI software, but after seeing a few analytics-centric AI demos I’m convinced low-level business analysts are next. If your job is primarily to receive a request for HR data, use a BI tool to extract it from your systems and send it back, you are in the cross hairs. Conversational analytics tools are going to be very valuable and very impactful to the workforce.
The HR industry has 20 players for every product
I’ve been in a lot of industries over the years including marketing tech and ad tech. Never have I seen so many companies in every category like there is in HR. There are probably 20 AI-powered ATS solutions. How companies can rise above the noise in HR tech is going to be interesting to watch.
Top of the funnel recruiting is big business
I had no idea how developed (and large) the top of the funnel ad spend was for job recruitment. Diversity in these marketing channels is happening – I even saw an influencer marketing platform focused on pitching jobs.
A vision of the future
We’ll write more on this soon but one of the things we believe about the future is that it will become commonplace for AI assistants to be present on many employee zoom calls. This could be between HR and employee, manager and employee, during onboarding, offboarding, etc.. A company doing really interesting things in this space is Dialpad.
Influencers have entered the conversation
It’s clear that HR influencers have a huge sway on people’s attention in the industry. While they have not replaced traditional analysts like Gartner yet, I saw more quoted attestations from Josh Bersin during demos than I did from all analyst firms combined.
HR is still Microsoft-centric
Coming from a tech company background, it’s always wild to me to operate in an industry where Microsoft is so prevalent. The workhorses of HR are still Outlook and SharePoint. Google (nor Atlassian or Notion) had any presence at the conference.
HR teams have to start thinking about their knowledge bases
AI needs curated, quality data to be useful. Policies need to be cleaned up, organized, and categorized by who they apply to. Procedures need to be documented and refreshed. Managing the HR knowledge base is going to become a critical task for HR teams in 2025.
The task of employee AI adoption is a long and daunting road
HR teams are being asked to drive employee adoption of HR but they themselves are still figuring out where AI gets the most leverage. HR teams are going to have to make some investments in their own projects to get experience with AI technology to become credible AI transformation leaders.
Overall it feels very clear that there is a sea change coming in HR. Not only will HR use different tools but they will be responsible for overseeing a workforce’s transition to a whole new set of tools as well. Exciting times.