The term "generative AI" is everywhere right now, and it is being cast as both the devil and the darling of the HR Tech industry. But what is it, really? And how can we expect to use it in our space, both in the short-term and the longer-term? Finally, what are the potential risks and pitfalls we need to be aware of, and how might we mitigate them?

In this interactive panel session, RedThread Cofounders, Stacia Garr and Dani Johnson, will be joined by 3 guests from RedThread Tech Consortium members:

1. Josh Lannin, VP of Productivity Technologies, Workday
2. John Tippet, Co-founder and Head of Product, SeekOut
3. Nag Chandrashekar, Chief Product Officer, Degreed

All of these guests are intimately involved in the integration of generative AI technologies into their HR technology offerings. During the session, they will cover the questions outlined above and will also take questions from audience members. Come with an open mind, lots of questions, and prepared to hear an enlightening discussion!

Last week, I attended the first day of Perceptyx’s Insights conference in Carlsbad, California (just north of San Diego). If you want the play-by-play, the Twitter hashtag was #Insights2023. You can see last year’s blog on their event here.

My key takeaways include:

• The world has changed – so, too, must your people strategies
• Perceptyx has a clear and modern vision of how its core product and acquisitions fit together
• The new People Insights Platform gives customers a way to access all of those capabilities in one place

Note: This blog was publicly available for 48 hours, after which point it became available only to RedThread members. Sign up to become a member at https://members.redthreadresearch.com.

#TC #Perceptyx #EmployeeEngagement #EmployeeExperience #HRTech #WorkTech #LearningTech #RoadReport

Last week I attended Phenom’s fourth customer conference, IAMPhenom, from March 29 – 30^th in Philadelphia, PA. Phenom is a talent acquisition and management solution provider and refers to its suite of products as the Intelligence Talent Experience platform. Below is the TL: DR from the event.

• Consistent focus on innovation: A steady theme throughout the conference sessions was the company’s focus on innovation. The company unveiled over 17 new products and features as part of its continued drive to innovate. The biggest announcements included the launch of a generative AI capability, Phenom X+, and Succession Planning, Interview Intelligence, and Workforce Intelligence tools.
• Improvements in customer care: The company updated its customer delivery model in 2022 by creating a centralized governance and planning structure with a core service layer. It also added 3 sub-teams focused on product advisory, governance, and transformation advisory. The company also updated its service model and launched a new support portal, a user community, global office hours, an online learning academy, and a 24/7 hub services hub for administration-focused requests.
• Continued growth: The company proudly boasted that it had maxed out one of the biggest hotels in the city with over 1,400 people in attendance, compared to 800 attendees in 2020. The company grew its number of employees as well. It has over 1400 employees, compared to about 500 in 2020, with offices in 6 locations and over 500 customers.

Figure 1: Phenom’s opening Keynote by CEO and co-founder, Mahe Bayireddi | Source: Phenom 2023

Innovation

The company leadership emphasized its focus on consistently reinvesting in product innovation and developing new features and capabilities. The company made over 17 new product announcements during the conference. I’ve covered some of the major announcements below.

• Phenom X+
• Succession Planning
• Interview Intelligence
• Workforce Intelligence

Phenom X+

The biggest announcement was the launch of Phenom X+, a new generative AI capability embedded across the entire platform that can help surface insights, create content, and automate tasks for all users, including managers, employees, candidates, recruiters, and HR teams. Mahe Bayireddi, Phenom CEO and co-founder, pointed out in his keynote that automation and personalization will define how work is done moving forward.

Phenom X+ is designed to help customers automate time-consuming tasks while providing greater context and a personalized experience for users. For example, instead of sifting through applications, a recruitment manager will be able to search for top candidates matched for a role within the platform simply by asking a chatbot powered by Phenom X+. Similarly, an employee will be able to ask the chatbot to show them all relevant opportunities within the organization based on their skills and experience.

Figure 2: Phenom X+ | Source: Phenom 2023

Succession planning

This new feature is designed to allow hiring managers and talent management teams to identify suitable employees for specific roles based on tenure, performance, skills, and competencies. According to Phenom, it will allow users to plan movement within the organization by adding new employees to the succession plan and charting their progression.

Interview Intelligence

According to Phenom, this new capability, powered by AI, will allow recruiters to receive transcripts, recordings, and key takeaways from video interviews, thus, enabling them to move quickly. It will also be able to provide insights such as interview sentiment, talk-to-listen ratio, topics covered, and main topics discussed during interviews.

Figure 3: Phenom’s Interview Intelligence | Source: Phenom 2023

Workforce Intelligence

A new dashboard, Workforce Intelligence, is created to provide HR and talent management teams with metrics such as churn rate, flight risk, and high performers. According to Phenom, it will allow users to drill down and see which roles are in danger of the highest retention risk, which employees are a good fit for those roles, the most common skills within the company for specific roles, and where the gaps are. It will also allow users to review employee profiles for insights on tenure, current skills, and growth trajectory.

My take

The launch of Phenom X+ is extremely timely. With new use cases for applying generative AI popping up daily, Phenom rolled out a tool that will:

1. Cater to all platform users, not just HR
2. Allow users to take action by quickly surfacing relevant information

• Allow automation of workflows, which can significantly reduce the time to output

Talent acquisition leaders should benefit from automation when creating job descriptions, career website content, interview questions, personalized candidate emails, and messages, and scheduling interviews. Talent management leaders will be able to identify succession planning opportunities, skills gaps, and employees with a high risk of leaving the organization.

The area I am most excited about is the potential ways employees can use the capability. From giving them information on their current skills gaps and identifying relevant roles for career progression to helping them gain the necessary skills, the tool can significantly impact employee learning, performance, and experience. It can be particularly useful for frontline and gig workers, who might not always be fully aware of the potential career paths they can explore.

The Succession Planning and Workforce Intelligence tools are smart additions to the existing capabilities in helping customers find the right talent quickly. It also makes sense for the company to provide these capabilities since the platform already collects skills data from employees and other systems and can use the data to help with internal mobility.

The Interview Intelligence capabilities should allow recruiters to receive much richer insights into the interview process and help them make better decisions. It can help them design better interview questions, improve candidate and recruiter experience and fasten the process as well.

Overall, I was quite impressed with the level of innovation that was presented and the thoughtfulness that was clearly put into creating features that would improve the experience for all the users of the platforms.

Figure 4: Phenom’s Intelligent Talent Experience Platform | Source: Phenom 2023

Customers

During the analyst day, the company leadership spent a significant time talking about the changes and upgrades it has made to its customer delivery and care model.

Global Delivery Model

Based on customer feedback, the company rebuilt its delivery model in the past year. It created a centralized governance and planning structure with a core service layer and 3 sub-teams:

• Product advisory that takes customers through the product journey
• Governance that focuses on training, enablement, planning, and allocation of resources
• Transformation advisory that focuses on compliance regulations and comprises domain experts

According to the leaders, the new model has enabled consistency and predictability and reduced friction during delivery and deployment. One of the ways it did this is by changing how the core services are delivered. Prior to the changes, a project manager would be assigned to manage the delivery. Instead, it now appoints a technical program manager who has a depth of knowledge across the product, domain, and technology and can respond to customer’s questions quickly.

The company also launched the Falcon Model, an accelerated delivery model that delivers the product to customers, along with the integration setup, and moves them over to the customer team within 4 weeks of buying it. At the time of the conference, it had completed delivery to 7 customers successfully.

Figure 5: Phenom’s One Global Delivery Model | Source: Phenom 2023

Customer Care Model

The company deployed a new service model to 40 customers in 2022. As part of the model, the company introduced the following new features:

• Support Portal. A 24/7 portal for customers with connections to other Phenom resources such as the Phenom User Community, Service Hub, and Managed Services Requests and status tracking capabilities
• User Community. An on-demand online user community that contains articles on product and platform functionality and allows users to connect with other customers to ask questions
• Global Office Hours. Online office hours 3 times a week to meet the needs of their international customers
• An online learning academy that is available to all customers 24/7 on-demand with over 100 different online role and scenario-based courses and micro certifications to help with end-user training
• Service Hub. An on-demand 24/7 services hub for administration-focused requests that do not require Managed Services Requests that involve configuration changes

The initial results from the new care model look promising. For the 40 companies it was launched for, the model reduced case duration by 20%, improved customer Health Index Score by 10%, and a 100% service-level agreement (SLA) compliance.

Figure 6: Phenom Explorer | Source: Phenom 2023

My take

The amount of work that the company has done to improve its customer delivery and care model is impressive. According to the leaders, the developments have allowed the company to reduce a lot of noise in the customer journey. It’s great to see the company offer a user community, as many of its competitors and other providers in this space already do this.

This growing focus on customer care and delivery is also likely to be a differentiator for the company compared to other providers as they give up some of the support services or push them off to their partners to reduce costs and adjust their pricing in the current economy.

Continued Growth

Although the company did not share revenue or growth numbers, it did talk about the customer growth it experienced over the past few years. The company's last conference was before the pandemic, in 2020, with over 800 attendees. This time the company proudly boasted that they had maxed out one of the biggest hotels in the city with over 1,400 people in attendance. The company also grew its number of employees. It now has more than 1400 workers with offices in 6 locations and over 500 customers. The company did not raise any funding in 2022; its last round of financing was in 2021, when it raised $100 million in Series D.

My take

While it would have been interesting to learn how much the company grew in revenue, the customer and employee increase reflect steady and consistent growth. The company will likely go public at some point in the near future, although the current uncertain economic considerations might push the timeline further than planned by the company. Given that the company has a good financial standing, it’s also likely to make acquisitions of its own as other solution providers find themselves running out of funding and lacking capital.

Final thoughts

Overall, it was a great conference for Phenom customers and analysts. The focus on automation, personalization, and context providing was front and center through all the sessions and announcements.

The customers I spoke to enjoyed their training day and were excited to start using the newly launched capabilities. Some customers also mentioned that they were happy about the improved customer support. I am curious to see where the company goes next and how it will work on further elevating the employee experience.

It’s been a busy first quarter for the RedThread Tech Consortium! Since our kick-off in January, we have been excited to welcome eight new member companies: Claro Analytics, Cornerstone, Crunchr, Lightcast, Medallia, NovoEd, Quantum Workplace, and Torch.

This brings our current RedThread Tech Consortium membership to twenty-two, including founding members: Augmentir, Axonify, Betterworks, Degreed, Eightfold, Perceptyx, Reejig, SeekOut, Skillable, SplashBI, TechWolf, Top Employers Institute, Visier, and Workday. 

The Tech Consortium is already having a measurable impact. Our first TC-sponsored research, a Learning Technology Trends virtual event, is scheduled for April 19. The Consortium will also be a co-sponsor of RedThread’s People Analytics Technology (PAT) research. PAT is an influential annual report which — thanks to the Consortium — will now be available in two parts, starting on April 20.  

Our new and founding members are equally excited about their opportunities to connect with one another and support this ground-breaking, high-quality research. 

“We are proud and grateful to be a founding member of this Consortium. We think this is a very pivotal time to step up and be counted,” said Carin Taylor, Chief Diversity Officer at Workday. “Tech can help us to proactively imbue inclusion and well-being in very foundational and structural ways. We’re proud to be helping to bring these conversations and this analysis into the workplace and will continue to look for ways to support this important work in the future — in the Consortium and beyond." 

“By providing independent and invaluable research, RedThread has become a leading voice in people analytics and the broader HR industry.” said Ralf Bovers, Head of Marketing at Crunchr, “As the world of work changes due to new ideas and innovative technologies, organizations can rely on RedThread to navigate this complex landscape. Moreover, their insights help us to develop great products for our customers. And for all these reasons, Crunchr is proud to support RedThread as a member of the Tech Consortium.”  

At RedThread, we have also been energized and encouraged by the interest the Tech Consortium has generated. As Dani Johnson has observed: “The response to the launch of the Tech Consortium has been overwhelmingly positive. As the Consortium grows, it reaffirms our shared commitment to unbiased Learning and HR technology research. We are grateful to these vendors who are leading the industry forward with integrity, and helping us to make these insights available to everyone.”

We have many more Consortium-sponsored projects on the docket for 2023, including analyzing the tech marketplace for Learning, Performance Management, and DEIB vendor solutions. 

You can read the press release on these updates here, and stay tuned for more announcements!

If you are interested in learning more about joining the RedThread Tech Consortium, please reach out to [email protected].

In early March, I attended Workday’s annual Innovation Summit, rebranded to be the AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) Innovation Summit, at Cavallo Point Lodge in Sausalito, CA (Twitter hashtag: #WDAYSUMMIT). Between the event and Workday’s recent announcements of FY23 results and executive changes, here is the TL;DR of this event:

• Delivering strong growth: At last year’s summit, Workday stated they would attain 20% YOY growth until they hit $10 billion in revenue. True to its word, Workday hit total 2023 revenue of $6.22 billion, representing 21% YOY growth, with subscription revenues up 22.5%. As part of this, Workday surpassed the 10,000-customer mark and added new HCM customers such as Allstate, Mercedes Benz, and Cracker Barrel. Workday also focused more on the retail industry (and thus frontline workers), with more than 50% of retail organizations in the Fortune 500 selecting Workday.
• Doubling down on AI and ML: Beginning in 2014, Workday began investing in its AI and ML capabilities, and those investments are increasingly coming to fruition. Throughout the last few years, Workday has woven those capabilities throughout its platform, so AI and ML are used naturally throughout its applications (as opposed to being layered on top). This shows up notably in Workday’s Skills Cloud, as well as many of its other solutions, such as Recruiting, Workforce Optimization and Scheduling, VNDLY, and other applications. This focus on innovation will undoubtedly continue, as Sayan Chakraborty, who is an expert in AI and also leads the Product and Technology Organization, was recently announced as co-president.
• Changing leadership and evolving approaches: An unspoken theme of the Summit was the changing leadership and approach at Workday. Right before Christmas 2022, Workday announced the appointment of Carl Eschenbach to Co-CEO. Eschenbach, a 5-year member of Workday’s Board, was a partner at VC-firm Sequoia Capital and an operator at VMWare. Workday has also brought on other external executives in the last ~6 months, such as Angelique de Vries as President of EMEA (from Salesforce) and Rani Johnson as CIO (from Cloud Software Group). Executive changes always make you ask, “why?”. Our hypothesis is that these changes reflect a belief that Workday’s leadership and approach need to change to achieve its audacious growth goals.

Note: This blog was publicly available for 48 hours, after which point it became available only to RedThread members. Sign up to become a member at https://members.redthreadresearch.com.

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend Qualtrics’ X4 conference (check out #qualtricsx4 on Twitter for the play-by-play). While the conference was excellent (more on it below), for me much of it was overshadowed by the whispered-about (but not directly addressed) news that Qualtrics is being taken private by Silver Lake and CPP Investments, for $12.5 billion.

For those of you who haven’t followed along, SAP bought Qualtrics in 2019 for $8 billion in cash only to then raise $27.3 billion of Class A stock in an IPO in 2021. The cool thing about that transaction was that SAP maintained financial control by owning all of Qualtrics’ Class B stock, which had 10 votes for every stock, compared to Class A stock, which had only 1 vote. This new Silver Lake / CPP deal, which sells all of Qualtrics’ stock, puts a further $12.5 billion in SAP’s pockets. Talk about a sweet arrangement for SAP.

What this also means is that Qualtrics is no longer owned by SAP. The press release states, “Qualtrics and SAP intend to maintain a go-to-market and technology partnership to both service existing joint customers and target new customer opportunities.” And I’m sure they will, given the incredible customer growth Qualtrics experienced during SAP’s ownership (from ~10,000 customers to ~19,000 customers).

But what this also means is that Qualtrics is now far freer to partner with other large HRIS / ERP / other business-critical firms than it was before (I’m looking at you, Oracle and ServiceNow (Workday already has Peakon, so that’s likely less of an option)). Combining this fact with some of the technology updates announced at the show, you can see how Qualtrics will increasingly be a force to be reckoned with.

With that background, let’s turn to what was discussed at the show…

Held for the first time in 4 years, X4 brought together approximately 10,000 people, around a conference theme of “Let’s Make Work More Human.” This year’s version of X4 included keynoters who are household names, with this year’s line-up including folks like Malala Yousafzi, Mark Rober, Chip & Joanna Gaines, Martha Stewart, and Shaun White.

Some of the major announcements from the conference included:

• Customer growth: Qualtrics now counts more than 19,000 brands as customers, compared to 7,000 in 2017 (when it launched the concept of “XM”, Experience Management)
• Clearer customer types and product suites: Qualtrics is now offering purpose-built suites for three customer segments. These suites are designed to be easy to use, easy to deploy, and provide quick time to value. This allows Qualtrics to have a much cleaner go-to-market motion, with a single price for each suite. The primary customer segments and XM products are: :
  • Research strategists | Products: Brand, UX, Research
  • People teams | Products: Engage, Analytics, Lifecycle
  • Customer-facing frontline leaders | Products: Digital, Care, Locations
• Cross product-suites: In addition, these suites allow Qualtrics to introduce the concept of Cross XM, which is the combination of the employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) suites. The power of this combination is the ability to connect better EX to improved CX, which tends to result in better business outcomes.

Throughout the event, the Qualtrics teams shared a variety of case studies that illustrated the connection between EX and CX (see Figure 1 and Figure 2). In addition, on the main stage, they shared a case study from Adidas, where they found that, in their stores, when employees indicated they had good training, regular feedback, and clear expectations, the store experienced 2x the revenue per transaction.

Figure 1: Qualtrics’ Customer Case Studies, page 1 | Source: Qualtrics, 2023.

Figure 2: Qualtrics’ Customer Case Studies, page 2 | Source: Qualtrics, 2023.

One of the most interesting presentations for the analysts and press was on how Qualtrics is approaching AI, which was led by Ellen Loeshelle, Director of Product Management. When discussing AI at Qualtrics, she mentioned that what she and her team are attempting to do is to bring together data, domain expertise, and data science pragmatism.

That last phrase – data science pragmatism – is the one that jumped out at me. We are hearing a lot about AI as a bright and shiny object, but she was very clear on what they want AI to do:

• “To streamline development: Tools which make it easier to develop new capabilities.
• To understand deeper: Tools which help to understand data more humanly
• To accelerate insights: Tools which decrease time to insights.
• To strengthen decision-making: Tools which give more confidence in making the right decision
• To monetize data assets: Tools which help us create value from our overall data assets”

Anyone can take these principles and use them to help guide their own AI product development.

In our analyst session, Brad Anderson, President of Product and Engineering, spent a fair amount of time talking about the implications of the 2021 acquisition of the conversational analytics company Clarabridge, which specialized in “indirect sources such as social media, emails, support calls, chats and product reviews.” Specifically, he called out that this capability is being built into the entire XM suite of products, which obviously includes XM for people leaders. Between that discussion and the announcement of “A new feature within Manager Assist gives managers weekly insights to improve employees’ experiences, without having to rely on annual or quarterly engagement surveys alone,” it is clear that Qualtrics will be going much deeper into “continuous” listening in the future.

Finally, to wrap us up… for those of you who read this blog in the hope of some reflection on all those household name keynoters, I thought I’d do a quick lightning round of questions (a la our podcast):

• Biggest surprise: A toss-up between Martha Stewart (that woman knows a thing or two about brand! And is waaaay funnier than you’d expect!) and Mark Rober (who knew he wasn’t just a bro pranking Amazon package stealers?!)
• Biggest takeaway for my own development: “Lean into who you are,” as said by Olympian Shaun White, when talking about his hair and style
• Most inspirational: Malala (no explanation needed)
• Most fun moment: Dancing with Mr. Dance or sitting in a new Fisker Ocean
• Best quote: Malala: "Always take a pause and think about how you are influencing and impacting the world around you. Make sure to make every decision with full responsibility and ensure it benefits and serves everyone fairly and equally. Do not take the role you have for granted. Take the opportunity you have to bring fairness and equity into the world."

Across the last few years, companies have increasingly relied on people analytics tech (PAT) to help them make better decisions around where, how, and when to work. In response to this increased demand, the PAT vendor market has changed quickly, creating confusion for practitioners needing this technology.

This member-only webinar will unveil the biggest changes we've seen in this market in the last year, and compare it to our data and insights from the previous 3 years of this study. The specific areas Stacia Garr and Priyanka Mehrotra will cover in this session  include:

1. Market and customer growth trends
2. Vendors' approaches to data ethics, privacy, and bias
3. Talent and business areas impacted by technology

There will also be time for your questions, so please send them in advance (directly via chat to either Stacia or Priyanka) or share them live during the session.

 

There's a lot of talk about how hard it is to manage today, but what can organizations actually do to make managers' lives easier? We covered this topic — and so many more — in our 8th season of our podcast Workplace Stories.

In this end-of-season webinar, we will summarize key themes, share critical insights and anecdotes, and identify the questions we have on how we can all make managing more manageable.

Specific questions we will cover in this webinar include:

1. What are the new expectations of managers? And why are managers struggling to meet them effectively?
2. What systems are being re-engineered to allow managers the support they need from their organizations?
3. How are managers being supported in areas such as connection, community, and accountability?

What if, instead of trying to replicate old ways of employee development you used technology to learn in completely different ways? We’re seeing hints of this. With return-to-office plans and permanent adoption of hybrid work arrangements, technological advances are accelerating . . .  and minds are opening.

In this webinar, Dani Johnson will provide an overview of this dynamic learning technology market, highlight some of the major trends being seen and spotlight those companies you should watch in the employee development space.

Frontline workers are critical to most organizations' success. But many HR systems and processes aren't designed with frontline workers in mind—leaving them under-supported, unempowered, and not fully enabled to do their best work.

In this roundtable, we'll discuss how to address some of the specific challenges associated with enabling frontline workers, such as:

1. Finding time for development, feedback, etc.
2. Equipping managers to better support frontline workers
3. Supporting an increasingly digital frontline workforce

Join us for an interactive, participatory, solutions-oriented discussion to identify specific strategies that organizations are using. We'll gather a group of people leaders to connect, dive deep, and share ideas.