Recent Research:
Research Agenda: Bridging Leadership and Labor – 3Sixty Insights’ 2026 Combined Workforce Agenda
This Combined Workforce Agenda outlines the key research priorities for 2026 from 3Sixty Insights, focusing on how organizations can bridge leadership strategy and employee experience in the modern workplace. The agenda integrates perspectives from two analysts — Nicole Roberts and Dylan Teggart — each with complementary emphases on organizational leadership capability, workforce strategy, labor market dynamics, and technology-enabled work execution.
Analyst Insight: California Labor Laws and Compliance: Burden, Benchmark, or Competitive Advantage?
This Analyst Insight examines the widely held perception that California’s labor laws make the state unusually difficult for businesses to operate in. While the analysis finds that California does impose more complex compliance requirements than most U.S. states, particularly around wages, worker classification, and labor protections, it also shows that these policies provide stronger worker safeguards and help level the playing field for compliant employers. Evidence suggests that the economic impact of these regulations is often smaller than critics claim, with California maintaining the largest state economy in the country and strong long term productivity growth. Ultimately, the piece argues that the real challenge is not the existence of stricter labor standards, but whether organizations have the HR systems, expertise, and partners needed to manage compliance effectively and turn it into a strategic advantage.
isolved has evolved from a compliance-focused provider rooted in COBRA-era benefits administration into a partner-led HCM ecosystem serving over 200,000 employers and 9 million workers. Its growth has been driven by a disciplined focus on SMB and lower mid-market organizations, combining an intuitive platform with embedded services, community, and a strong partner network spanning PEOs, brokers, and advisors. Rather than competing on feature breadth alone, isolved differentiates through usability, time-to-value, and a pragmatic approach to frontline workforce needs, while reinforcing HR’s credibility with tools that translate people operations into measurable business outcomes. As it scales AI across its platform, its ability to deliver governance, transparency, and measurable ROI will determine how effectively it moves upmarket without diluting its core value proposition.
Market Alert: Inside Conga’s Purple Pivot – A B2B Rebrand Done Right
At Conga Connect 2026, Conga executed a rare B2B brand reveal live to customers, showcasing a refreshed identity that reflects its post-PROS acquisition strategy. The update, anchored in a new purple color palette blending Conga red and PROS blue, modernizes the visual system and messaging while maintaining brand continuity. CEO Dave Osborne and CMO Celia Fleischaker emphasized the strategic intent behind the redesign: to illustrate the “commerce chain” by aligning pricing, quoting, contracts, and revenue operations into a connected workflow. The live rollout, coordinated across the keynote, venue, and digital presence, exemplifies how a brand can evolve thoughtfully—signaling transformation without losing the equity built with customers over time.
Infographic: How One Company Rebuilt a Fragile SDR Engine with Apollo.io
This 3Sixty Insights infographic examines how one organization rebuilt a fragile SDR engine after realizing that its outbound motion had become overly dependent on email and weighed down by a costly “Franken-stack” of tools such as ZoomInfo, Groove, and Gong. What began as an attempt to fix declining email deliverability quickly evolved into a broader transformation, as the company consolidated data, engagement, and automation into a single sales operating environment with Apollo.io. The shift eliminated tool-hopping and manual list management, allowing SDRs to spend significantly more time on calls and active selling. The result was a step-function improvement in performance, including an 80 percent reduction in technology spend, a 95 percent increase in daily activities, and a threefold increase in pipeline generation.
Infographic: 3x Pipeline, 80% Lower Costs – Rethinking the Modern Sales Stack
This infographic, based on analysis from Kyle James, examines the hidden cost of the typical “Franken-stack” sales environment where multiple disconnected tools handle data, engagement, calling, and analytics. This fragmentation creates a significant productivity drain as teams spend hours each week shuffling data and managing integrations rather than building customer relationships. The analysis highlights how a unified platform approach, exemplified by Apollo, can eliminate these seams by consolidating workflows and applying AI to handle the mechanical aspects of outreach while sellers focus on judgment and personalization. The result is a leaner revenue engine capable of generating up to 3x more pipeline, reducing overlapping technology costs by nearly 80%, and dramatically improving productivity.
Recent Articles:
Why AI Governance Requires Narrative Alignment
This article argues that the primary barrier to effective AI adoption in revenue workflows is not technological capability, but organizational alignment. Using the common example of NDAs, it highlights how AI can reliably handle routine tasks, yet progress stalls because teams like sales, legal, and finance lack a shared definition of what is acceptable and when AI can be trusted to act autonomously. The piece introduces the concept of narrative alignment as the foundation for AI governance, where organizations establish clear boundaries, decision rules, and escalation points across functions. Without this alignment, AI-driven processes either become bottlenecked by excessive oversight or introduce risk through inconsistent use, ultimately limiting the speed and value AI is meant to deliver.
Three Signals About the Future of Revenue Execution from Conga Connect 2026
At Conga Connect 2026, discussions with operators and revenue leaders revealed that the central challenge facing modern revenue organizations is friction inside the deal process. Data shared by Celia Fleischaker highlighted the scale of the issue, including low confidence in pricing decisions, deal losses caused by slow quote approvals, and operational risk created by delayed contracting. Three signals emerged from the event: the rise of the Commerce Chain concept promoted by Conga, which treats revenue execution as an integrated workflow system; the movement of pricing intelligence earlier in the sales cycle so sellers can structure viable deals sooner; and the embedding of AI directly into operational workflows to accelerate analysis, approvals, and decision-making. Together, these trends point to a broader shift in revenue organizations toward optimizing for decision speed by connecting systems, surfacing pricing insight earlier, and using AI to reduce friction across the commercial process.
In “The Web Is Forking Again,” Kyle James argues that the internet is evolving into two parallel layers: one designed for human users and another optimized for AI agents that consume structured data programmatically. This shift mirrors past transitions, like mobile, but emphasizes machine-readable access as a core design consideration. Enterprises and SaaS providers must now balance user-friendly interfaces with robust APIs and structured data models, positioning themselves to serve both humans and autonomous agents while maintaining governance, security, and workflow efficiency.
SaaS Isn’t Dead. It’s Growing Up.
In “SaaS Isn’t Dead. It’s Growing Up”, Kyle James of 3Sixty Insights argues that the SaaS market is not slowing down but entering a more mature phase. Buyers are increasingly demanding software that delivers measurable outcomes, integrates seamlessly across platforms, and supports AI-enabled workflows. The era of rapid growth and loosely connected tools is giving way to disciplined, outcome-focused platforms. This shift is reshaping how vendors design products and how enterprises evaluate technology investments, signaling that SaaS is evolving rather than disappearing.
Recent Podcast:
#HRTechChat: David Edwards on the “Last Mile” from Data to Decisions
In this episode of #HRTechChat, Nicole Roberts (Senior Analyst & Advisor, 3Sixty Insights) is joined by David Edwards—strategic workforce planning practitioner, advisor, and author of The Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook—for a candid conversation about the gap between SWP theory and the messy reality of execution.
#HRTechChat: Aman Kaur-Shaik on Why AI Adoption in HR Starts with Knowledge, Data, and Culture
In this episode of #HRTechChat, Dylan Teggart speaks with Aman Kaur-Shaikh—HR Director at Nutrien, member of the 3SixtyInsights Global Executive Advisory Council, and a 2024 Global Top 100 HR Executive—about what it really takes for organizations to adopt AI successfully.