Member-only webinar:

Get ready for an exclusive glimpse into the future! Our highly anticipated 2024 Trends & HR Strategies Webinar is just around the corner. After closely monitoring the shifts in business and HR landscapes throughout 2023, we're excited to share our insights and predictions for what's in store for 2024.

As the year 2023 draws to a close, we'll also reflect on the challenges and successes that defined the past year. Then, we'll gaze into our crystal ball and reveal the upcoming business trends for 2024, shedding light on how HR organizations are likely to respond to these changes. It's your opportunity to get ahead of the curve and proactively prepare yourself and your organization for the challenges and priorities that lie ahead.

Mark your calendars and reserve your spot for a front-row seat to the future of business and HR. Together, we'll stay one step ahead of the curve in 2024!

In just a year, AI has turbocharged change, triggering a massive work revolution. Many organizations are already experimenting with it in a range of areas, but how can we, as business leaders, ensure that we’re not just riding the hype wave?

During this virtual though leadership debate, we will discuss research-backed insights and real-life examples with industry leaders from RedThread Research and Deloitte as we learn:

• Market insight into the applications through which AI is being used
• How being intentional in your approach makes all the difference to the gains you can achieve from AI
• Why it’s essential to approach AI through an understanding of the work and skills needed to achieve each business unit’s goals
• Why you should approach AI adoption in waves and sprints of continuous evolution, as you learn from doing and as opportunities present themselves

Register now to discover how other organizations are approaching and benefitting from AI, and get expert recommendations on the best steps to success with workforce transformation.

Stacia Garr and I attended the UKG Aspire conference in Las Vegas from November 6-8, 2023. It was the biggest conference the company has ever hosted, with over 4,000 customers and 1,500 partners and analysts in attendance.

CEO Chris Todd opened with impressive growth figures: $4.3 billion in total revenue, $881 million in bookings, and 1,000+ new employees in Q4 2023. The two-day event was filled with insightful updates from the executive team, offering a valuable glimpse into the company's vision for the upcoming year. Below is the TL;DR for this event. You can also check out our road reports from the company’s analyst sessions in Spring 2023 and Fall 2022.

1. A strong commitment to making companies great places to work. UKG acquired the Great Place To Work (GPTW) Institute in 2021 and has been working to integrate the capabilities into its technology and service offerings. This year, the company announced the availability of the GPTW Hub – a single unified place for UKG and GPTW data – in all of their products.
2. Doubling down on user experience and community. The company highlighted its continued investments in simplifying its products, improving the user experience, and driving user experience by providing a single unified mobile application for its users, launching a benefits hub for employees, and providing connectors for users to build custom codes.
3. Entering and expanding into new and adjacent markets. The company has moved up on the SMB front and is providing UKG Ready suite to companies with up to 500 employees. It also announced a new product, UKG One View for Global Pay, and a new partnership with Eightfold.ai.

A strong commitment to making companies great places to work

The keynote sessions and analyst sessions focused heavily on UKG’s purpose of helping organizations become great places to work for all through people-centric HR technology (Figure 1). There are 2 main ways UKG is trying to do that.

• GPTW Hub: The company announced the availability of the UKG Great Place to Work (GPTW) Hub to all UKG Pro customers. The Hub is GenAI-powered, and leverages UKG and GPTW data, including Trust Index benchmarks, best practices, and insights. It is able to offer insights into a company’s culture as well as identify areas that need to be improved and recommend specific actions and behaviors based on GPTW leadership model. The company plans to launch GPTW Hub for Ready in H1 2024.

Figure 1: A snapshot of UKG Great Place to Work Hub | Source: UKG 2023

• UKG Bryte: The company announced the launch of its AI assistant, called Bryte, as part of its UKG Pro suite. Bryte provides a unified solution for access to UKG Flex People Fabric, which is the underlying AI and machine learning that pull together insights and provides recommendations and nudges based on UKG and GPTW data, which itself is layered on top of Google’s Vertex large language model, which allows the technology to scale easily. The company envisions the technology being used for both task automation and operational improvement and overall talent and leadership development (Figure 2). Bryte will be available for UKG Ready customers in H1 2024.

Figure 2: A snapshot of UKG Bryte AI | Source: UKG 2023

Our take

The investment in GPTW hub area strongly aligns with UKG’s goal to develop better leaders and is the most comprehensive and clear messaging we have seen so far. While the company has been leveraging its GPTW product as a differentiator ever since its acquisition, the integration of the hub into UKG Pro and the brand is firmly established now.

It’s interesting to see how this has led to a slight shift in UKG’s messaging. While in 2022, the company identified its people-first suite as its leading differentiator, it now sees the one-of-a-kind data from its GPTW hub as the leading differentiator. Although their human-centric approach continues to be a value driver, the company is right in leading with something that truly sets them apart from other HCM providers. The integration of the GPTW hub into UKG Pro solidifies this position, emphasizing its unique data as a leading differentiator.

The description of how UKG plans to enable their customers to use AI technology represents some of the clearest thinking around usage that we have seen so far. The idea of using it not just for job descriptions and interview guides (which comprise most use cases currently) but also for leadership behavior nudges, career pathing, and frontline worker insights reflects that UKG is thinking more broadly about how to use AI to transform practices, not just make them more efficient. The challenge will be in not just getting companies to adopt the technology for these high business value and impact cases at scale but also in the right manner. A good way to do this would be for UKG to share their own learnings as they test and build these capabilities. Chris Todd shared that internally, the leadership is already encouraging UKG employees to use these capabilities to help them manage their workload, and as a result, avoid burnout.

Doubling down on user experience and community

The company has invested over $2 billion in customer experience over the last 3 years. There were several announcements that underscored the company’s commitment to unification, simplification, and an improved user experience:

• Unified mobile application: UKG announced a new mobile application for the Pro suite, which allows users to access all the information from the Workforce Management product and Pro HCM in one unified place. The application will provide a consistent experience to all users, regardless of whether they need to run payroll, manage schedules, or take any other HR action (Figure 3).

Figure 3: A snapshot of UKG's new mobile app | Source: UKG 2023

• Low-code/no-code premium connectors and templates. These are provided for mutual UKG Pro and Microsoft Power Platform customers. These connectors will make it easy and simple for users to create their own custom applications and configure workflows as per their needs.
• UKG Pro Benefits Hub. A new product that makes it easy for employees to access all the information regarding their benefits in one place (Figure 4). The product includes a comparison tool for employees and a feature that shows the impact of selected benefits on their income.

Figure 4: A snapshot of UKG Pro Benefits Hub | Source: UKG 2023

• Continued investment in the community portal. Launched in 2023, the community portal was an important addition for the company, especially since its biggest competitors (Workday and Ceridian) already had established community portals as part of their platforms. This year we saw that the community has grown into an active and valuable place used by over 2000 customers and partners to ask questions, share knowledge, and access classes and courses for free (Figure 5).

Figure 5: A snapshot of UKG's Community Portal | Source: UKG 2023

Our take

UKG has been on the simplification and unification journey for a while. It is the persistent focus that made the Ultimate and Kronos merger a success and turned UKG into its own brand. With the continued development of new products and acquisitions, the investments made in simplifying the experience for the user will be crucial in long-term adoption. The low-code/no-code connectors, in particular, can help expand usage among power users.

The unified mobile application will ensure accessibility and consistency for customers while low-code/no-code connectors will empower customization, and the Benefits Hub will simplify benefits management, collectively contributing to more efficient and user-friendly HR practices.

Entering and expanding into new and adjacent markets

A couple of announcements highlighted this.

• Expansion of UKG Ready into smaller markets. During the Spring event, UKG announced the official availability of UKG Ready product for clients of up to 500 employees (it used to target customers with only 250 employees). The product is now directly sold to companies with 75-500 employees. For companies with less than 75 employees, the product is available via resellers and partners (Figure 6). To push further into the small-sized market (SMB), the company has changed its marketing strategy for the product to go directly after the market and has hired over 100 sales representatives to drive its efforts.

Figure 6: An overview of UKG suites | Source: UKG 2023

• Multinational payroll via UKG One View. The company announced the launch of a new product, UKG One View for Global Pay. The product is the outcome of the Immedis acquisition earlier this year and provides a unified view of a company’s payroll across the globe. Through UKG One View, HR can run payroll anywhere in the world in any currency and continue working with their preferred payroll provider through the product, thus helping the company expand its customer base across the globe. The product is currently available to UKG Pro customers and will be made available to UKG Ready customers in mid-2024.

Figure 7: A snapshot of UKG One View | Source: UKG 2023

• Partnerships. The company announced the integration of UKG Pro suite with Eightfold.ai, a skills-based talent acquisition vendor (Figure 8). The partnership will allow data from UKG Pro to flow into Eightfold.ai and allow customers to hire high-performing talent from a wider talent pool based on their needs. UKG also announced a partnership with PayPal which will allow customers to create PayPal account from within UKG HCM and receive their anticipated salary two days in advance.

Figure 8: A snapshot of UKG's partnership with Eightfold | Source: UKG 2023

Our take 

The fall conference season firmly established the trend that we had long seen coming – multiple partnerships between HR tech vendors. UKG’s partnership with Eightfold.ai will be useful for customers interested in skills-based hiring.

The UKG One View product is also a smart move as it will help massively ease the multi-country payroll experience for HR leaders. We think it will be particularly beneficial for smaller companies with lean HR teams and global offices dealing with different payroll providers.

Overall, these developments collectively position UKG as a vendor focused on expanding its market reach by simplifying global payroll processes and forming strategic partnerships to enhance talent acquisition and financial services for its clients. They should lead to a more comprehensive and globally accessible suite of HR and workforce management solutions for a diverse range of businesses.

Final Thoughts

Overall, it was a very informative and well-designed conference. We greatly appreciated the opportunity to spend 2 days with UKG’s leadership and ask them questions about their challenges, vision, and product future. UKG has made significant investments in its HCM suites over the last few years. We are excited to see the company continue to innovate and look forward to particularly hearing more about how it will leverage GenAI for the benefit of its customers in the new year.

Join us for an insightful session with Dani Johnson from RedThread Research and Mike Bollinger, Global VP of Strategic Initiatives at Cornerstone, as we delve into the current landscape of learning analytics. Understand its significance in shaping workforce development and get equipped with practical knowledge to leverage it effectively.

Key Takeaways:

1. An overview of the 7 key areas L&D functions should prioritize in analytics.
2. A clear understanding of benchmarks in learning analytics: what “OK”, “Good”, and “Great” entail.
3. A glimpse into how upcoming AI technologies might influence our measurement parameters.
4. Learnings from organizations that have successfully integrated advanced learning analytics.

Who Should Attend?

Professionals looking to enhance their L&D strategies, harness actionable insights from data, and drive tangible business impact.

Empower your Learning & Development Initiatives.

Sign Up Today.

The promise of skills is enticing. The actuality of skills is complex, messy, and confusing. In a landscape filled with potential and pitfalls, navigating the path from a visionary skills strategy to tangible results requires not just intention, but an actual plan.

Join Dani Johnson from RedThread Research, and Workera's own Kian Katanforoosh to discuss:

1. The Skills Landscape: Grasp the realities of the skills world, acknowledging its messiness while appreciating its potential.

2. A Skills Strategy Framework: Deep dive a model that includes key elements for any strong skills strategy, regardless of company size or industry.

3. Leading Practices: Dani and Kian will share best practices from organizations that have already started down the skills path and how they use AI-powered tools to bring their skills strategy to life.

4. Your Questions: Bring your own burning questions that are keeping you from implementing the skills strategy you want.

Don’t miss this opportunity to turn skills complexity into skills mastery. Register now and take the first step towards building a comprehensive skills strategy that works.

Member-only webinar:

Like many buzzwords that have come before it, the term Employee Experience (EX) has expanded to reflect a multitude of definitions and layers. But this expansion has also created a number of myths that can cloud our understanding of the real daily experiences of our workers – whether they are actually “employees” or not.

Join our RedThread webinar, where Stacia Garr will

1. Bust the 4 biggest myths of EX,
2. Unveil our new Worker Experience Framework.
3. Share a new “4 M Model” for both measuring and managing the workforce

Member-only webinar:

Get ready for an exclusive glimpse into the future! Our highly anticipated 2024 Trends & HR Strategies Webinar is just around the corner. After closely monitoring the shifts in business and HR landscapes throughout 2023, we're excited to share our insights and predictions for what's in store for 2024.

As the year 2023 draws to a close, we'll also reflect on the challenges and successes that defined the past year. Then, we'll gaze into our crystal ball and reveal the upcoming business trends for 2024, shedding light on how HR organizations are likely to respond to these changes. It's your opportunity to get ahead of the curve and proactively prepare yourself and your organization for the challenges and priorities that lie ahead.

Mark your calendars and reserve your spot for a front-row seat to the future of business and HR. Together, we'll stay one step ahead of the curve in 2024!

Last week thousands of people—including the 4 of us—descended upon the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for the annual HR Tech conference. It was a full event: schedules were packed, energy was high, and food was plentiful. We had an absolute blast!

Here are our high-level takeaways from the event:

• Fresh air. Seriously—this was one of our biggest takeaways: If you’re in Vegas, don’t let yourself spend the whole time indoors. We had lunch with RedThread members outside, and it was game-changing.
• Energy & community. Face-to-face meetings are still rare enough that people were super jazzed to meet old friends and make new acquaintances in person.
• Skills & AI absolutely dominated hallway conversations, session content, and provider messaging on the show floor, as expected.
• Manager effectiveness also showed up as a running theme as providers aim to better support managers with tech and AI.
• Vendor partnerships. Many providers said they were using the conference as an opportunity to explore or solidify partnerships with other vendors.
• Surprises. There were more providers from unlikely places offering skills tech and more earned wage access providers than we expected, but fewer frontline tech providers.
• Keynotes. Skills is an ongoing care-and-feeding process; companies need to help people fall in love with their work; and although HR tech spending will go down overall in 2024 it’s likely to rise for learning and people analytics tech.
• Next year. We think the vendor booths in the expo hall may be different next year as some vendors cut marketing spend and new AI vendors enter the market.

Now for the details…

Fresh air, energy & community

If you’ve ever been to a conference in Vegas, you’re probably familiar with this phenomenon: You land at the airport, get into a taxi, go to one of the hotels on the Strip, stay inside for 2-4 days straight, get back in a taxi, head back to the airport. Ugh.

We broke that streak with an outdoor lunch with RedThread community members and wow, did it make a difference! Join us next year because we’re sure to do it again.

Figure 1: RedThread community members at lunch at HR Tech | RedThread Research, 2023

We also got tons of energy and a feeling of community from the Tech Consortium members we talked to during the Moveable Feast of Insights interviews. We asked leaders about what they were seeing at the conference, what surprised them…and, yes, their views on skills and AI. You can check out the recordings here:

• Betterworks
• Claro Analytics
• Cornerstone
• Crunchr
• Degreed
• Eightfold
• Lightcast
• Microsoft
• Seekout
• Skillable
• Techwolf
• UKG
• Visier
• Workday

Skills are still hot

Everyone’s still talking about skills. It came up over and over (and over) again in our conversations with leaders and vendors—and not just because both of our team’s sessions were about skills. Vendor booths, session topics, and ad hoc conversations covered skills nearly as much as they did AI. For example, a few sessions in addition to ours were:

• Madeline Laurano of Aptitude Research and Xabier Ormazabal of Eightfold spoke about skills-based talent intelligence
• Caroline Ford, formerly of Novartis, Mike Howells from Pearson, and Mallory Martino from BIC shared how to strengthen a skill strategy
• Antony Shields from EY and Conor Volpe from Eightfold talked about AI and skills

But the most visible skills presence at the conference came from the vendors. There were loads of vendor-led sessions, demos, presentations, and case studies on skills from Cornerstone, Degreed, Eightfold, Lightcast, Neobrain, Phenom, Seekout, ServiceNow, Skyhive, Visier, and Workday. And we saw the word “skills” (along with AI, below) on many, many booths.

So it was interesting to note that, despite the chatter, many organizations are still in the early stages of developing their skills strategies. This was evident during Dani and Stacia’s skills session, where the audience was asked where they were in their skills journeys. Nearly half of folks raised their hands, saying they were thinking about it but didn't have a strategy yet. That aligned with the survey results that Dani and Stacia shared during the session: 58% of HR leaders surveyed said their organizations have no skills strategy (Figure 1).

Figure 2: Survey results on skills strategy | RedThread Research, 2023.

RedThread research hub members can access the above image and the full slide deck from Dani and Stacia’s skills presentation in the member portal here.

AI: Features, demoware, ethics

AI was the other hot topic at HR Tech. We saw a lot of AI-focused features being demoed at vendor booths, especially features using generative AI. We heard about how AI can enable skills-based approaches, improve hiring, increase productivity, transform the employee experience, and more. There were sessions on the potential of generative AI and pretty much every session in the conference touched on AI in one way or another.

Based on our understanding of the tech, much of what was being touted at the show was demoware. Demoware is designed to show the potential of AI / Gen AI, but it’s not actual code integrated into the products. (Or at least not code that could do much more than what was being shown in the demo environment.)

This is ok, because so much of the capability of AI is new, and most vendors are unlikely to invest heavily into integrating Gen AI until they are certain it is something their customers want, have clear use cases for, and know it will work. However, it is important for buyers to beware: Just because a vendor showed Gen AI capabilities at HR Tech does not necessarily mean it has those capabilities ready to roll out at an enterprise-grade level. If you are buying HR tech software right now, ask questions about the actual extent to which AI or Gen AI capabilities exist within the product—and ask for the opportunity to test those capabilities.

Ethical AI came up as a concern in many of our Moveable Feast conversations, including with Cornerstone, Degreed, Eightfold, Lightcast, Seekout, Techwolf, and Workday. Vendors and organizations seem to be experiencing both pressure to move fast on AI and the need to minimize any adverse effects of the AI they use—and there’s a tension between those two things. The people we talked to were thinking about how to ensure that:

• Organizations make good decisions about when and how to use AI
• Any AI is trained on clean and debiased data to the largest extent possible
• Decisions based on AI recommendations are explainable
• Personal data remains secure and private

A prediction: AI will increasingly be a commodity, the way that mobile capabilities are now a commodity. This commoditization is already occurring, as evidenced by the fact that nearly every vendor advertised that they have AI. A specific example of this is the proliferation of conversational chatbots, which were everywhere at HR Tech. Next year, we expect to see text summarization, suggested language prompts, and natural language inputs everywhere, all of which leverage generative AI.

Managers still need more help

One recurring theme was the ongoing challenge of manager burnout. Managers are often tasked with balancing the human and operational aspects of work, and they have more on their plates than ever.

In response, many HR technology providers are prioritizing support for managers. This support enables managers to be more efficient and agile in their roles, reducing their burden and enhancing their ability to lead effectively. The HR tech landscape is responding to the pressing need for tools that empower managers. A number of sessions at the conference focused on helping managers get the support they need, improving their effectiveness, and helping them drive employee engagement.

Some of the vendors we spoke with are focusing on managers by using AI to automate administrative tasks and redesign work, allowing managers to spend more time on meaningful activities and avoiding burnout. Others are using AI to help with performance management.

For example, one of the vendors we spoke with, beqom, is using AI to help employees with goal-setting and suggest questions that employees and managers should discuss in their check-ins so that they are able to better use their time together. Another vendor we spoke to, Beamible, is focusing on jobs and work design to help address manager burnout. A session by the people analytics technology vendor Visier highlighted the metrics that can help companies measure manager effectiveness and the insights that can help managers make better decisions. Another session by the workforce management vendor Legion showed how automation can reduce the administrative burden on managers and focus on what matters most (Figure 4).

Figure 3: Top 3 things managers say will make their lives easier | Source: Legion, 2023

Vendors are emphasizing partnerships

Notably, compared to previous years, more vendors at HR Tech emphasized their partnerships with other vendors. This reflects a trend we’re seeing more broadly: More and deeper vendor partnerships.

For years, anyone would say, “Of course we integrate!” when asked, but they weren’t necessarily promoting their integration capabilities and the quality of those integrations was often uncertain. Sometimes “integration” meant the ability to ingest a .csv file.

This year, we noticed the extent to which providers were actively advertising their integrations, promoting the depth and breadth of their partnerships with other providers as a benefit or differentiator of their solution. More and more people—from vendors and organizations alike—seem to have converted to the idea that no solution can provide all the needed tech. Even the biggest platforms can’t offer everything. This is why so many folks mentioned they have an “open and extensible ecosystem.” This is a good thing.

For example, Nag Chandrashekar from Degreed, Karthik Suri from Cornerstone, and Mikael Warnoo from Techwolf all emphasized during their Moveable Feast interviews that skills require an ecosystem approach (Figure 5). Many different platforms—human capital management systems, applicant tracking systems, learning systems, talent intelligence and management systems, and so on—generate and use skills data. Successful skills-based approaches will depend, at least to some degree, on providers’ ability to make different tech systems work well together.

A few surprises

We were surprised to see 3 things:

• Skills tech vendors from unlikely places. We’re used to hearing of skills tech vendors hailing from talent acquisition, learning, and people analytics categories. But from compensation, traditional assessment, or org design vendors? No, we didn’t expect that, necessarily. But that is what we saw. Across many of our briefings, vendors shared with us unexpected ways they play in the skills story, and that will show up in our skills tech update, which we will be publishing within the next quarter.
• More earned wage access vendors than expected. Earned wage access (EWA, also known as on-demand pay) is one way for organizations to support workers’ financial wellbeing without actually paying them more. As such, it’s been growing in popularity over the last few years. We expected to see some EWA vendors at HR Tech this year, but we were surprised at just how many there were. We noted at least 8 specialized EWA vendors—Clair, DailyPay, EarnIn, Immediate, Instant, Payactiv, and Tapcheck—not to mention the larger payroll/HCM vendors who also play in this space, like Ceridian and UKG. The vendors we talked to expect to see significant growth in 2024, so we should see even more of them at the conference next year.
• Fewer frontline offerings than expected. We’ve been researching frontline workers a lot this year. We know organizations continue to struggle with frontline talent shortages, and they’re looking to tech for solutions. We also know that frontline tech vendors are doing all right financially—for example, many expect to grow in the next 12 months and/or close funding rounds, as we’ll report in our upcoming frontline tech study. Given that there’s high demand and supply, we expected to see more frontline-focused vendors. That’s not to say there weren’t any frontline tech vendors—UKG and Workday’s Moveable Feast interviews highlighted their frontline offerings, the EWA vendors mentioned above primarily serve frontline workers, and there were a few frontline-focused vendors like Denim, Escalate USA, and Workbuzz. But there were a lot fewer than we thought there’d be. We hope there’s more next year.

It'll be interesting to see how these 3 surprises shape up next year.

Highlights from the keynotes

We missed Geena Davis’ keynote opening the conference, bummer! But we were glad to catch the other 3:

• Josh Bersin, HR analyst and author, opened the festivities on Wednesday with some framing thoughts on skills and AI. We appreciated his emphasis on skills as an ongoing, adaptive journey rather than a one-and-done exercise. He said skills are “an ongoing care-and-feeding process for your company” and gave the example of a large defense contractor that annually identifies upcoming critical skills, then hires and trains its workers accordingly. He also predicted the 4-day workweek is coming.
• Marcus Buckingham, author and motivational speaker, kicked off Thursday. He spoke about the declining trust among people in institutions that surround us, including government and media, and the rise in burnout among the younger generations joining the workforce. He called out the need among companies to help their people fall in love with what they do. The key to doing that, according to him, is to identify the outliers – those that are extremely engaged, performing to a very great extent, excited to go to work everyday – and figure out what their characteristics are and why they love working for the company. Understanding and further developing that can help companies establish trust and help others love what they do as well.
• Stacey Harris, industry analyst and Chief Research Officer at Sapient Insights Group, closed the conference on Friday morning. She presented some results from Sapient’s annual survey of over 2000 HR leaders, which framed some of the macro trends facing HR. Notably, she highlighted the fact that HR tech investments will likely go down overall in 2024, not just because of the economy but because many companies spent heavily on HR tech in recent years and buyers are looking to understand impact/ROI before they invest more. However, investments in people analytics and learning tech will likely go up—with more organizations planning to replace their learning tech systems than any other HR tech system.

We thought these keynotes framed the conference and each day nicely.

Vendors’ presence may be very different next year

Looking ahead to next year, we guess the expo hall floor may look different than it did this year—some of this year’s vendors might be missing; we might see some fresh new logos; and the booths may be somewhat less grandiose.

Here's what the floor looked like this year:

Figure 5: HR Tech show floor in 2023 | RedThread Research, 2023

Yes, there were live animals on the expo floor (kittens). We hope that'll change next year.

More broadly, we think vendors' presence and the view on the floor may look different next year for 3 reasons:

• Consolidation. Right now, many relatively small HR tech vendors who secured investment funding back in 2021-2022 are starting to run out of those funds, and it’s much harder to raise a new round right now. At HR Tech, we heard a lot of chatter that some vendors are looking to be bought, while others are looking for good deals on companies to buy. We expect to see some market consolidation in the next year—and those deals will be reflected in the logos on the show floor next year.
• Smaller marketing budgets. In her keynote, Stacey Harris reported that HR tech spending will likely decrease by 11% next year. And when we talked to vendors on the show floor, many of them said the booth traffic this year was light compared to 2022. Neither of those data points bodes well for vendors’ revenue in 2024. Although some vendors said they’re hoping for strong H1 2024 sales, we expect many will be more conservative in their marketing spending next year, and that’ll mean many may opt for less costly booths (read: smaller, less design, less construction).
• New AI vendors? This year, generative AI mostly showed up as features that had been added to existing offerings. We wonder if in the next year, we’ll start to see new vendors who started from scratch and developed completely new products and completely new ways of leveraging AI for work. We don’t know, but we can hope!

Wrapping up

We were thrilled at the thoughtful conversations, warm greetings, and helpful insights we found at this year’s HR Tech conference. We can’t wait until next year!

Like many buzzwords that have come before it, the term Employee Experience has expanded to reflect a multitude of definitions and layers, prompted by new workplace power dynamics, ongoing labor and skill deficits, and our shifting post-pandemic relationship with work.

But this expansion has also created a number of myths that can cloud our understanding of the real daily experiences of our workers – whether they are actually “employees” or not.

On October 26th, we're partnering up with Perceptyx to deliver a webinar busting the 4 myths of employee experience. Listen as Stacia Garr, Co-founder and CEO of RedThread Research, unveils our new Worker Experience Framework. During this live session, Stacia will share a new “4 M Model” for both measuring and managing the workforce and discuss:

• The critical flaws in the CX-EX analogy
• Why a human-first approach, guided by the individual and not HR processes, is critical for improving the worker experience
• The mandate to design for both the “when” and the “where” of the worker experience, including both physical and digital environments, and
• Why all of the people involved in our workplace experience must have a role in driving change, supported by clear, data-driven actions and recommendations.

Webinar registrants will also receive an exclusive executive summary of RedThread’s new research report, “Busting the 4 Myths of EX: An Introduction to the Worker Experience Framework.”

We are partnering with our Tech Consortium members to bring valuable insights to conference attendees. A RedThread analyst will be visiting with a Tech Consortium member in their booth for a conversation with one of their executives. We’ll interview the leader, field questions, and broadcast the entire conversation on LinkedIn Live.

Check out the exciting conversations that we have scheduled with TC members.

Here is Thursday's lineup:

• Ligthcast: 9:45-10:05 AM PT- Link to watch live
• Claro: 9:45-10:05 AM PT- Link to watch live
• Visier: 10:10-10:30 AM PT- Link to watch live
• Crunchr: 10:35-10:55 AM PT- Link to watch live
• Microsoft: 2:30-2:50 AM PT- Link to watch live