After three days and 15 briefings at #HRTech, I’m writing this from the gate before my red-eye home. I came to Vegas listening for the gap between what organizations buy and what they’re actually able to put to work, and I heard some version of it in nearly every room. Here’s what I’m taking home with me.
We spent a good part of this week telling vendors that buyers aren’t leading with MCP connections and agents. HR leaders want help with the missed time punch and with getting value from the platform they already pay for. Those conversations aren’t happening at the protocol level yet. The companies I’ll be recommending to my HCI students and consulting clients, and the ones whose customer stories I want to tell in my 3Sixty Insights research, are the ones willing to start with that operational headache and work backward to the AI.
The AI literacy gap belongs to all of us. In our State of HR Compliance 2026 benchmark research, only 15% of HR respondents described themselves as advanced AI users, while just 2% said they weren’t using AI or looking into it. Nearly everyone is somewhere in the middle, piloting or trying to scale, and vendor innovation is moving faster than most HR teams can absorb. Several of the companies I met with are investing in plain-language education about what an agent actually does in someone’s workday, and I think that’s some of the smartest marketing money being spent in this industry right now.
The best pitches kept people in charge. The ones that landed with me paired AI recommendations with human expertise and left the final call with the customer. Vendor after vendor also talked about keeping real people available for support. In HR, that’s a trust issue and a compliance issue at the same time.
Connected is winning over closed. I heard much less “rip and replace” this year and much more about meeting customers where they already are, whether that meant integrations built once and reused across many customers or compliance delivered through the HCM platform a company already uses. Most HR teams can’t wait out a contract before they get help.
Skills are moving from guessed to proven. There was less talk about inferring skills from a resume and more about validating them through real work, then connecting that data to how people perform and grow once they’re hired.
Clean data has to come before smart agents. One line has stuck with me since Wednesday: before you automate a process, ask whether that process should exist at all. An agent running on messy, disconnected data only helps you make bad decisions faster.
Swifties will understand this one. By Wednesday afternoon, I was living “I think I’ve seen this film before…” where every vendor conversation felt like a rerun, and everyone had the same line: outcomes. Outcome-driven AI, and now outcome-based pricing. I found myself giving the same advice in room after room. Stop saying “outcomes” and start saying “results.” An outcome is what you hope happens. A result is what a customer can show their CFO.
That difference matters even more once pricing gets involved, because someone has to decide what counts as an outcome, and the vendor and the buyer will rarely agree. A payroll error fixed without an admin touching it is easy to count. A better hire or lower turnover depends on managers, pay, and the labor market, and most HR teams don’t have the baseline data to win that argument. If a vendor pitches you outcome-based pricing, ask who measures it, against what baseline, and what happens when you disagree.
So I’m officially sending “outcomes” into exile. Show me results!
It truly took a village to get us here! Thank you to our sponsors, Insperity, Tavio, Paylocity, and LYTIQS, for sponsoring the 3Sixty Insights team at HR Tech this year. We couldn’t have done it without you!
I’m also grateful to everyone who made time to brief me and the 3Sixty Insights team this week, including the teams at ADP, Alight, BambooHR, Guild, HiBob, Keka, Paychex, Phenom, PosterElite, SAP, PrismHR / Vensure, ZoomInfo, WorkTango, Darwinbox, Insperity, Tavio, Cornerstone, Multiplier, Strada, Lightcast, Paylocity, Lytiqs, Vetty, Vervoe, and so many others we bumped into or met at their booths. Thank you for the candor. I have a notebook full of ideas and a long list of follow-ups!