#HRTechChat: Rick Torrence on Treating AI Like Electricity

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In this episode of #HRTechChat, Dylan Teggart (Principal Analyst, 3Sixty Insights) is joined by Rick Torrence—Chief Sales Officer at PrismHR with over 35 years of experience across the payroll and HCM industry for a conversation about what happens once AI stops being a novelty and starts being infrastructure.

Rick argues AI is headed toward the same fate as electricity: something nobody thinks about until it’s not there. But he pushes back on treating that inevitability as a reason to stop asking hard questions—namely, whether a given AI feature is driving a meaningful outcome or just making something look a little shinier. That question gets more urgent as AI consumption starts carrying a real, variable price tag, and Rick and Dylan dig into what that could do to an industry built on the predictability of per-employee-per-month pricing, and why any shift toward usage-based costs has to be introduced carefully enough that PEOs and regional payroll providers can pass it down without getting squeezed on margin themselves.

They also work through where people fit into all of this. Rick is blunt that AI won’t replace headcount in a business built on getting people paid correctly—it frees up capacity that gets redirected toward client outreach and strategic work, not eliminated. From there, the conversation opens outward: how reseller and partner communities can use AI to build real differentiation without getting careless with the sensitive data running through their systems, and how AI is already making it faster for PrismHR’s clients to navigate the compliance maze that comes with hiring across borders as the talent pool—and the business—goes global.

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