Today, after in-depth meetings with Workday, SAP, UKG, Dayforce, Hibob, Gloat, and others, I’m ready to say “the SaaSPocalypse is over.” HCM is poised for massive growth ahead. And there’s more – I describe the five new “redefining” features of Agentic HCM (Human Capital Management) platforms and why this may unlock a $10 Billion new revenue market for major HCM players. You as a buyer or consumer of these systems have to start to think about these systems differently. Rather than see them as Payroll and HR “boat anchors” which you have to buy, they’re now “growth enablement platforms.” This is all discussed in detail in our HR 2030 research and advisory services, and I’ll be talking publicly about this at Unleash and other conferences this Fall and next year. Stay tuned for more to come. Additional Information HR 2030: Dynamic Enablement for Growth Our new book “Superpowered” – how...

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Overview The past few years have been among the most economically disruptive for frontline workers. During the pandemic, nurses, cleaners, drivers, and retail, warehouse, and restaurant workers became newly visible as essential workers who kept the country running when crisis struck. Yet that recognition faded soon after the crisis passed and has not translated into broad-based, lasting wage growth. What has not faded—and in fact has only intensified—are inflation, surging housing costs, and relentlessly rising childcare costs. For over 100 million frontline workers in the United States,1 economic pressures have continued to mount alongside a growing demand for their skills. Massive investments in industrial infrastructure to support the AI boom are further straining an already tight labor supply.2 Frontline employees today face more economic pressure, have greater leverage and more employment options, and hold higher expectations than before the pandemic. The workplaces they depend on have largely failed to keep...

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Workday Rising Announcements: Sana as core interface, 17 major new Superagents including “autopilots” (that we call “monitoring agents”), Sana Concierge for self-service, Sana Coach for performance coaching, massive improvements to talent acquisition suite, Workday “work intelligence” to break down jobs into tasks and help build capacity and workforce planning, a direct interface to Claude, and the acquisition of C1.ai to identify and secure all agents in your company. I also discuss the challenge all major software companies have selling “usage-based” or “token-based” pricing, and why you, as a buyer, should start prioritizing your agent investments. I also explain why “Forward Deployed Engineering” or professional services is now highly strategic to corporate AI software providers. I also discuss our partnership with Workday which you can read about here. We are now working closely with Workday to bring you the realities of HR 2030 with tools, education, and advisory services. And most...

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This week at Workday Rising we introduce our new partnership with Workday around HR 2030. Together we will be launching a series of whitepapers, tools, education programs, and advisory services to help companies of all sizes move to the new, growth-oriented agentic model of HR 2030. This work will help Workday customers and others plan, implement, and optimize their HR tools and operations in the new HR 2030 “system of agents.” You can read more about our partnership in my blog on Workday.com here and download our first guidebook developed with Workday, “HR 2030: A Playbook for Agentic HR.” Our history with Workday brought us to this point. Workday, founded in 2005, pioneered the market for enterprise HR solutions on the cloud. Since then the company has helped more than 11,500 companies build and automate their HR practices around the world and remains the recognized leader in many areas of...

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Now that corporate AI tools from Workday, SAP, Oracle, Databricks, ServiceNow and many others have hit the market, it’s time to think about how we apply AI strategically. In this podcast I introduce the idea of Business 2030, a framework built from our HR 2030 architecture. The simple story is as follows. While it’s easy to think of gen AI as an “automation” technology, its real value is in this ability to integrate vast amounts of data and predict, act, and learn from this stream. Well our companies are set up to operate as functional hierarchies, as we talk about in our research on the post-industrial age. What if you rethink or redesign your company around end-to-end customer experiences, and the functional areas of research, engineering, product design, manufacturing, marketing, and sales were “branches” of this core? It’s a big idea, but to me it’s the future we all want....

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Today I’m excited to share a new additions to our HR 2030™ research: The HR Leader’s Guide to Multi-Agent AI Architecture. Getting a multiagent HR architecture right is like conducting an orchestra. The instruments are powerful, the musicians are skilled—but without a score and a conductor, what you get isn’t music. It’s noise. Our newest report tackles one of the most urgent questions facing HR leaders today: not whether to deploy agentic HR, but how to govern it—deliberately, and before the agents go live. The message is clear: the organizations pulling ahead are not just adding AI tools—they are making six deliberate business decisions. And those decisions belong to HR leadership, not IT. The report includes our HR 2030 Multiagent HR Technology Stack, which maps how 8 superagents and more than 150 AI agents connect to power the entire HR function. Against that backdrop, the report walks through six decisions...

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