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For a long time, the only way to keep growing your career was to manage people, so plenty of great individual contributors took a job they never wanted and got almost no help doing it. Rising Team founder and CEO Jennifer Dulski thinks companies can now fix both problems, and end up with fewer managers who chose the role. She also talks about why cohort-based manager training only lands for about a third of the room, and how “super managers” are leading 10 or 20 direct reports with AI handling the administrative work.

JD Peterson thinks survey fatigue is a myth, and that employees will keep answering every employee engagement survey you send as long as they see something happen afterward. The Chief Marketing Officer at Perceptyx explains why his company shifted from running surveys to helping companies act on the results, and what happened when Perceptyx tested how well AI understands employee comments. He also talks about why everyone slapping AI on their marketing has him toning down his own, and where AI sales outreach tools go wrong when nobody checks what they’re sending.

Ben Brooks will bet you that no mid-market executive would call their manager bench “pretty strong.” The founder and CEO of PILOT joins Steve Smith to explain why leadership only multiplies the management underneath it, and why AI is turning decision making into the biggest bottleneck middle managers face.

When a candidate asks to have their data deleted, Somen Mondal says the typical company has no idea what to do. The Co-Founder and CEO of Amp explains why compliance separates the AI hiring tools that hold up from the ones that only look good in a demo. He also gets into how AI regulation now varies by state and country, and why bias testing has to change for LLMs.

Heidi Barnett builds tools that cut time to hire. She still wants employers to wait 24 hours before sending an automated rejection. The President of isolved Talent Acquisition and founder of ApplicantPro explains why quality of hire deserves the same attention as speed, and where AI should and shouldn’t speed up recruiting. She also shares how she kept ApplicantPro on the Inc. 5000 for 11 straight years while raising four kids.

An international payroll payment can lose 5 to 7% of its value and days of time as it hops from bank to bank on its way to a remote worker, according to Albert Owusu-Asare. The co-founder and CEO of Cadana explains why calculating pay is only half the job, and how local payment rails get workers paid on time and in full. He also makes the case that stablecoins are on track to become a requirement for global payroll providers.

David Wilson has tracked the HR tech market for almost 30 years. He calls the SaaSpocalypse "overblown significantly," but he thinks it's already changing who gets to win. David is the founder and CEO of Fosway Group, a UK-based HR technology analyst firm. He explains why AI can rebuild features faster than it can rebuild the process data inside HR systems, and why some of the biggest platforms may come to treat HR as a disposable part of the business. For vendors, profitability has stopped being a dirty word. The conversation covers how buyers are deciding which vendors anchor their AI strategy, and why the new capability keeps coming from specialists. On AI hype, David points to a market where "every vendor is now an AI-first vendor. But the reality, of course, is this is just not true." He also shares what Fosway's research shows about how much AI capability is actually live, and how far behind customers are in using it.

James Lord has spent more than a decade in reference checking. Increasingly, he says, the person giving the reference is sometimes the candidate. James leads expansion in the Americas for Refapp, a Swedish reference checking platform. He explains what a reference check tells you that a background check never will, and why the answers often end up shaping onboarding more than the hiring decision. He also pushes back on talent leaders chasing every shiny new HR tech tool. The conversation covers candidates posing as their own references and why a hiring team needs an audit trail it can defend. On AI, James draws the line at the decision. "We are the science, we're not the art." He also takes on the workforce of 2030, when reference checking may extend to AI agents.

HubSpot wants AI agents running your whole go-to-market workflow, and Alec Cherrin came back from UNBOUND with a short list of features he'd turn on tomorrow and plenty he wouldn't. In a live AMA, Steve Smith and Rep Cap's resident HubSpot specialist take audience questions on Agent Hub, AI credit costs, and the new loop framework. They also get into whether HubSpot is becoming a work tech company.

Kevin Andrews has spent three decades watching HR tech vendors promise to serve small business and then drift upmarket. Now Board Advisor and Chief AI and Transformation Officer at PrismHR and Vensure Employer Solutions, he argues PEO software has held its ground because PEOs sell service plus expertise, with the technology there to back it up. AI has made it cheap for customers to build their own tools around HR systems, which Kevin welcomes at the edges and worries about anywhere near payroll or benefits. He also looks at where small business HR tech goes next, with benefits guidance that runs year-round instead of "this 30-minute kind of panic every November."

Neil Costa started his career in e-commerce in 1996, well before "candidate experience" was a phrase anyone in HR used. Decades later, running HireClix, he's convinced almost none of them treat their career site like the storefront it's always been. Neil argues recruitment marketing dollars are being wasted at the exact moment they should pay off. The ad gets a candidate to click, and the career site underneath it decides whether that click ever turns into an application. He points to his own informal test, asking a room of about a hundred TA leaders to raise their hand if they were proud of their career site. One hand went up. Neil ties that mostly to rebuild cycles that used to run six to 12 months, long enough that trying to fix it stopped feeling worth it. He also lays out what a career site should actually do, recognizing a returning visitor and letting someone pick up a search where they left off, all the way through to actually applying: "Why would they, in their day-to-day lives, tolerate something that's not visually appealing?"

Bjorn Reynolds started Safeguard Global in 2008, running what looked like a global employer of record business years before anyone had a name for the category. Almost two decades later, he's convinced the AI era doesn't lower the bar for what his company needs to get right, it raises it. Bjorn argues AI can absorb the busywork of global hiring, but it can't be trusted with the calls that actually matter, because being an employer of record means Safeguard is the legal employer of its clients' workers in every country it operates, not a vendor advising from the sidelines. He points to Safeguard's own internal test, 250 employment law questions run through the LLMs everyone's using, that came back 86 percent accurate, and the plain math behind why that's not good enough: "that 14 is what loses you your job." He also explains why Safeguard split its payroll and EOR businesses apart, selling payroll to Deel to focus on the harder problem AI can't solve alone.

Scott Maguire spent a decade at RGP before joining Korn Ferry, where he now leads the firm's interim and project consulting practice. A year in, he's convinced the job comes down to trust, not the resume that got someone hired. Scott argues emotional intelligence, more than technical skill, decides whether interim engagements succeed or fail, because an interim executive gets zero shared history and a fraction of the time a permanent leader has to earn trust. He points to an ERP implementation on the brink of missing go-live, saved by an all-interim team, where the client's own executive later said the fallout would have been "wildly material" without them. He also explains why private equity firms now specifically seek out interim leaders for the highest-stakes transformation work.

One of Josh Millet's customers watched their applicant volume nearly double in a year, even while posting fewer jobs, because candidates are now sending AI agents to apply on their behalf, sometimes to roles they don't remember seeing. Josh, founder and CEO of Criteria Corp, breaks down why a resume functions like the least trustworthy source in historical research (a first person account where the subject makes themself the hero), and why AI screening built on top of a resume just scales a bad signal faster instead of fixing it. The real shift underway isn't better filtering. It's asking candidates to show their work instead of describing it.

For years, Dean Carter turned down every opportunity to become a CEO, watching the job chew up leaders he respected. He spent that time reinventing the Chief People Officer role instead, and eventually the CEO seat came to him anyway. Now CEO of Instill after 25 years as a Chief People Officer, including a long run at Patagonia, Dean argues that AI is absorbing the technical core of every senior role, and what's left is the one thing annual reviews and 360 feedback were never built to catch: judgment. He gets specific about where that shows up in his own leadership, including a meeting where he only called on the loudest voices in the room. He didn't see the blind spot until it was named, and it changed who he called on the next time he ran that meeting. He also draws a hard line on what separates a real AI tool from a relabeled dashboard, and why most of what gets marketed as "AI for HR" doesn't clear that bar.