Work Tech Weekly

Deb Muller founded HR Acuity to solve a problem that didn't have a name yet. Misconduct and retaliation claims just hit an all-time high, and AI is showing up in employee relations before anyone's agreed on how to use it responsibly.

The founder and CEO breaks down why ER has never had a shared language for measuring workforce health, what a decade of benchmark research reveals about the gap between the organizations doing this well and everyone else, and where AI actually helps versus where it becomes a liability in a deposition.

Conrad Shaw has been making the case for universal basic income for a decade. AI layoffs are making it impossible to ignore. The filmmaker and UBI advocate breaks down why this automation wave is different from every previous one, what the data actually shows about whether people stop working when you give them money, and why the funding mechanism for UBI may already be obvious.

Anthony Klotz says the pre-quit signal isn't a table flip or an angry exit; it's the employee who stopped talking in meetings. The UCL professor and author of Jolted breaks down the six types of jolts that trigger departures, why Year One is the most dangerous window for retention, and why AI may be building toward the next mass wave of workplace re-evaluation.

Every vendor at Transform 2026 was leading with AI. Every product had been rebuilt, relaunched, and rebranded. And nobody on that expo floor — not even the investors — could give you a clean answer to what actually made anyone different.

In this episode of Work Tech Weekly, Steve Smith sits down with Mike Wood, analyst at HR.com and host of The Totally Talent Podcast, recorded live at Transform 2026 in Las Vegas. Mike has been watching this market long enough to see this pattern before — in employee recognition, in talent acquisition, and now across the entire HR tech stack — and his read on where it’s heading is worth hearing.

They get into why the technology has reached parity faster than anyone expected, what the funding clock running out means for buyers who can’t tell vendors apart, and why the next real differentiator in work tech might have nothing to do with the product at all.

📌 Topics covered:

• Why HR tech differentiation has collapsed and what’s driving it

• What smart buyers should actually evaluate when the demo looks great

• The funding crunch pushing vendors toward acquisition or shutdown

• Why service is becoming the differentiator nobody wanted to talk about

• The fracturing social contract and what it means for the workforce

• Why buying paralysis is rational — and what breaks it

Not all AI in performance management is the same. There’s a real difference between AI layered onto a broken process and AI built into the foundation — and after 25 years in this market, Lana Peters can tell them apart on sight.

Lana is chief revenue and customer experience officer at Klaar, a predictive performance management platform built from the ground up for AI. She joined Work Tech Weekly host Steve Smith live at Transform 2026 to make the case that the latest wave of HR tech is genuinely different — not a rebrand, not a feature update, not perfume on a pig.

They get into what predictive performance management actually looks like in practice, why managers are the linchpin of whether any of this works, how HR is shifting from cost center to profit center, and what the HR buyer is focused on right now.

Thirty years of broken promises. This conversation is about what’s finally different.

The HCM market is one of the noisiest spaces in enterprise software right now, and most buyers can’t tell who’s actually AI-native and who’s just saying so. Opal Wagnac, global head of market positioning and strategy at Darwinbox, has been in this market long enough to spot the cycle. She and Steve get into how buyers can cut through AI washing in HCM, why most global platforms fail when they enter the US market, what buyers keep getting wrong in evaluations and why the technology has finally caught up to the ambition.

The quality of advice you get from any AI tool is only as good as the context you feed it — and most organizations are missing the most important context of all. Matt Poepsel, VP and Godfather of Talent Optimization at Predictive Index, asked a room full of HR leaders at Transform 2026 to estimate how much of their AI deployment energy goes toward people versus technology. The audience said 80 to 90 percent technology. That number explains almost everything going wrong with AI at work right now.

Certified payroll has been a manual nightmare for decades. Coray Grove, founder of WagePath, is the one finally fixing it — with a platform that automates prevailing wage calculations and certified payroll reporting for contractors who've been keying data into PDF forms by hand.

In this episode of Work Tech Weekly, Steve Smith and Coray dig into why contractors are leaving real money on the table with fringe benefit offsets, why some companies are three months behind on payments just because they can't file the reports, and what it means when a compliance product becomes the thing that lets you go after business you couldn't bid on before.

AI coaching has been a promise for years. Aaron Ward, co-founder and CEO of Huckleberry, is the one actually delivering on it — with a voice-based coaching platform you can put in the hands of every employee for $20 a month.

In this live conversation from Transform 2026, Work Tech Weekly host Steve Smith and Aaron dig into why privacy is the whole product, why people are more honest with AI than with other humans, and what changes when the coaching conversation that used to happen at 10pm with your spouse happens with a coach who actually knows your situation.

AI in talent acquisition has a narrative problem. Everyone in work tech is talking about agentic AI. The practitioners doing the actual hiring? They're still figuring out Gen AI and automation. That gap between the market narrative and the market reality is bigger than most vendors want to admit.

Trent Cotton has seen it from both sides. He spent nearly two decades as a talent acquisition practitioner before joining ICIMS as head of talent insights and analyst relations.

This conversation was recorded live at Transform 2026 in Las Vegas. Host Steve Smith and Trent dig into the real state of AI in talent acquisition, what the data shows, where the friction is, and what it actually takes to earn trust from candidates, recruiters, and the C-suite.

What you'll hear:

- Why most TA orgs are using AI but far fewer are ready for agentic

- The governance-first argument and why retrofitting it never works

- What candidates actually distrust about AI in hiring and how to fix it

- Why enterprise AI has shifted from piloting to operationalizing

- The question every TA leader should be asking before they automate anything