Introduction

• Erika introduces Jason Cerrato, Vice President of Talent-centered Transformation at Eightfold AI, and Victor J. Reyes, Managing Director of Human Capital, at Deloitte Consulting.
• Jason Cerrato thanks Erika and expresses his excitement about partnering with HCI and Deloitte.
• Jason introduces himself and explains his role in helping organizations understand the impact of AI on workforce transformation.
• Jason mentions his collaboration with Deloitte thought leaders on the Human Capital Trends report and introduces Victor Reyes.

Overview of Deloitte Human Capital Trends report

• Victor Reyes introduces himself and explains his role in Deloitte’s Human Capital practice.
• Victor provides an overview of the Deloitte Human Capital Trends report, which is a flagship piece of thought leadership, now in its 15th year.
• The report focuses on the combination of human outcomes (engagement, well-being, productivity) and business outcomes (bottom line).
• Victor highlights the global scope of the study, with data from 93 countries and over 13,000 respondents, segmented by senior executives and the broader workforce.

Key tensions in workforce strategy

• Victor discusses the tensions in workforce strategy, such as the balance between technology augmenting human performance and automating processes.
• He mentions the tension between standardization and personalization, and between stability and agility.
• Victor emphasizes the importance of balance and the need for organizations to navigate these tensions.
• Jason questions the feasibility of achieving balance and the value of visualizing and quantifying these tensions to make better decisions.

Role of leaders in technology investments

• Victor discusses the role of leaders in making data-driven decisions and engaging a broad set of stakeholders.
• He emphasizes the importance of looking at the right data and making decisions at the right levels in the organization.
• Jason asks about the duration of decisions and the need for leaders to adapt to the pace of change.
• Victor agrees and mentions the concept of one-way door decisions versus two-way door decisions, and the importance of rigor in decision-making.

Polling question on technology investment outcomes

• Victor asks participants to submit their most important outcome from their next technology investment.
• Jason and Victor discuss the responses, highlighting efficiency, productivity, and collaboration as key outcomes.
• Victor mentions the importance of balancing human and business outcomes and the need for leaders to make data-driven decisions.
• Jason and Victor discuss the challenges of measuring qualitative outcomes and the importance of quantifying innovation.

Impact of AI on workforce experience

• Victor discusses the impact of AI on workforce experience and the need to update the employee value proposition.
• He highlights the tension between control and empowerment, and the importance of how AI tools are introduced and used.
• Victor shares data from the report, showing that 70% of managers and workers are excited about AI, but more than half are worried about its impact on their jobs.
• Jason emphasizes the need for a cultural and organizational shift to fully leverage AI and other technologies.

Examples of AI in practice

• Jason shares an example from Eightfold, where AI tools provide personalized guidance for career pathing and skills development.
• He explains how the system creates a dynamic process that updates profiles and gathers data over time.
• Jason highlights the benefits of this approach, including increased training completion rates and higher employee engagement.
• Victor adds that organizations need to think about the broader impact of AI on workforce experience and the need for a balanced set of measures.

Building business cases for technology investments

• Victor discusses the challenges of building business cases for technology investments, including unclear ROI and competing priorities.
• He suggests reframing the business case to include a blend of human and business outcomes and to think about research and development investments.
• Victor emphasizes the importance of engaging a broad set of stakeholders and making decisions at the right levels in the organization.
• Jason adds that organizations need to identify the problem they are solving for and design projects around measurable outcomes.

Final polling question and Q&A

• Victor asks participants about the biggest challenge their organization faces when building a business case for new technology.
• Jason and Victor discuss the responses, highlighting unclear ROI and too many competing priorities as common challenges.
• Victor emphasizes the need for leaders to help manage priorities and make apples-to-apples comparisons of different investments.
• Jason and Victor open the floor for Q&A, addressing questions about the impact of AI on workforce experience and the importance of measuring both human and business outcomes.

Jason Cerrato 03:03
I really appreciate everyone who’s joined us, and as always, it’s wonderful to partner with HCI, and Eightfold takes the opportunity to partner with Deloitte, as mentioned. My name is Jason Cerrato. I’m the Vice President of Talent-centered Transformation, at Eightfold AI. I’ve been with the organization for four years, and I help organizations understand what AI enables and unlocks in organizations as they try to go through workforce transformation as tech, technology and talent come together for the future. So I’m working with organizations on a daily basis as they’re evaluating technology, as they’re looking to transform processes and design new ways of addressing problems going forward in this world of work, I’ve been lucky enough to do a series of these conversations with some of the thought leaders from Deloitte as part of expanding into deeper dives into Deloitte Human Capital Trends report. And I’ve been joined by many of their thought leaders, such as Sue Cantrell and Nate Painter and Dave Molly. And today we’re supported by Sam Amanzo, who’s also been involved in several of these conversations, but today, I appreciate the opportunity to be joined by Victor Reyes for the first time as we take a special dive into some of the value cases related to technology and trends and what organizations need to do to Really re evaluate their business case. Victor Reyes is from Deloitte, as mentioned, and he has a particular focus on supporting areas in energy resources and industrial clients. But without further ado, Victor, thank you so much for joining me today. I’m really excited to take a deeper dive in this specific area. I really enjoy these conversations to learn more about what Deloitte is doing with the organizations that you’re partnering with, as well as kind of what’s deeper in the research, as I look forward to reading this report every year. Thank you for joining us.

Victor Reyes 05:13
Yeah, thank you, Jason. Really, really appreciate it, and really appreciate the opportunity to come together you know, as part of our ongoing partnership. So thanks for the introduction again, as Jason said, I’m a managing director in our human capital practice. My day job is to be out in the marketplace, working with organizations, with HR and other business leaders around their workforce strategy, their talent strategies, and how to enable that with technology. But you know, off the side of the desk, I also happen to be one of the lead authors on the 2025 human capital trends, which was a really wonderful thing to be a part of, and so near and dear to my heart, and happy to share some of the research with you today, and to do that in conversation with Jason and sort of make it real and answer some of your questions. So let me tell you just a little bit about the overall Deloitte Human Capital Trends report. It is a sort of a flagship piece of thought leadership for us. Next year will be our 15th year publishing the report. We really leaned into this theme of of human performance being driven by a combination of human outcomes and business outcomes, and we’ll talk more about that you’ll see as we go along, but human outcomes being things like engagement and well being and productivity and all sorts of things that we’re all familiar with, along with the hard business outcomes that are Important to the bottom line, and really, how do you how do you produce those things in combination? And so we’ve taken that theme forward, but we sort of dug into what some of the implicit tensions are if you’re trying, as a leader, to make that happen in your organization, in today’s environment, what choices do you have to make? How do you think about that? So it is a global study. You see 93 countries we go out to, we have over 13,000 respondents. We’re able to segment by senior executives and sort of the broader workforce, which provides some interesting cuts of data and perspectives. And, you know, we’re, there’s, there’s a lot of material in the overall report that we encourage you to kind of look at, and it’s very modular, and unpack it bit by bit, and take it and use it, hopefully, in your own conversations with your teams and with your customers and clients, and, you know, use the data points. So want to just orient you to another sort of overarching theme from this year’s report that you’ll see if you do take a chance and look at the chapters or the infographics or the videos woven throughout, and we’ll talk about a couple of these today, which is this idea of tensions and and navigating tensions that arise as you’re Talking about talent and workforce and the introduction of new technologies, or trying to achieve different outcomes. And so you see a couple of them here, like the tension between, you know, technology being a way of augmenting human performance and human abilities and skills, versus being a way of, kind of, straight away automating processes and tasks. The tension between standardization of processes and experience and personalization, or the tension between the stability that the workforce often craves from their employer and organization and the agility that senior business leaders want to foster to be able to respond to market conditions, for instance. And so what we’re suggesting is not that these are binary choices. There’s or that there’s a right or a wrong answer. The answer is probably going to be about balance, and it’s probably going to change at different moments in time. But what we have found to be useful as we’ve taken this out and had conversations, is it? It gives you another way of thinking about some of the challenges and a little bit different vocabulary around it. So Victor, I was gonna be there.

Jason Cerrato 09:47
I was gonna question, yeah, is there? I know this kind of thing, you think, like work life balance, but is there such thing as balance, or is it just the acknowledgement and awareness that these tensions are dynamic, and are we getting to the point where some of the value comes from the ability to visualize and quantify where you are between these tensions, to be able to make better decisions?

Victor Reyes 10:13
Absolutely? And I think that that’s a great example, because I think we all increasingly find that the very concept of work life balance means such vastly different things to everybody in your workforce, I mean. And what, what is balance or integration, to me, is very different from what it is to some of my colleagues. And so the organizational implication for that is, and we talk a little bit about this in one of the trends is, how do you tap into that? Like, how do you actually tap into what motivates each individual worker, rather than sort of paint with a broad brush or make assumptions that that you know aren’t really true about what people want, what support to them? So how do you leverage, you know, data and tools to do that?

Jason Cerrato 10:57
One of the ones that’s very near and dear to my heart is your first one there – augmentation versus automation with a title like transformation, leading a transformation team. There’s always this kind of balance between, are we optimizing and automating, or are we truly transforming? And what does that conversation look like, and what does that work look like, and how big do we think, versus how much can we get done and accomplish and how do we break that up into achievable pieces? And you know, you’re out, you’re always trying to balance not boiling the ocean while still trying to do things the right way, in a way that has some, you know, long term sustainable benefits, but this balance between, how do I get my job done in the near term, versus how do I do it in a way that’s going to truly drive transformation? Is this incredible, incredible tension that probably a lot of people on the call today are living through.

Victor Reyes 11:50
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, for sure. So maybe one last you know, kind of call out before we sort of ask, actually ask you a question, so get ready for a quick polling question. But another sort of broad theme in this year’s research was was kind of the role of leaders across all of the different issues that we brought up, whether it’s some of the AI issues that we’re going to talk about in a minute, or making investment decisions or motivating your people, or thinking about early career talent, all of those things you know feature in the report. So what’s the role of leaders, and what can they do differently, and how can they show up? Because we firmly believe that leadership is as important, or more important than ever. And a couple of things that we, we sort of talk about, one is make sure you’re looking at not just, we talk about making data driven decisions or using data to inform decisions, make sure you’re looking at the right data, not just the data that’s handy and so and sometimes that’s the case, and that can introduce, you know, friction, but it’s important. The second is, you know, think broadly about who you’re engaging, which doesn’t mean everybody has to agree on everything, as I like to tell my clients, you know, alignment is not the same as agreement or consensus, but it is important to have a broad set of stakeholders, and we’ll talk quite a bit about that when we get to The business case discussion, and then make sure that the decisions are happening at the right places in your organization, and challenge where decisions are happening today versus where maybe they should happen and different kinds of decisions at different points in time, because that could be also very empowering. It can unlock a lot of agility if you sort of challenge some of those orthodoxies.

Jason Cerrato 13:40
Is there, is there something built into the conversations or engagements you’re having around changing the thinking or coaching these organizations on the life cycle or the duration of these decisions, because with the with the pace of change, or the speed of business, the kind of the length for which these decisions, these decisions are going to last or endure, is getting shorter and shorter, absolutely. So the amount, the amount of time we spend, kind of weighing and deciding, it’s almost as if sometimes you spend, we spend more time deciding, then the decision will be in place.

Victor Reyes 14:22
That’s right, that’s right. We’re seeing that show up in lots of different ways, right? I mean, I think that that, that, to me, speaks to a couple things. One is what can be rigid around your decision making process so that you’re not applying the right level of scrutiny and criteria to the right types of decisions. Not all decisions are created alike. You know, everybody likes to talk about Jeff Bezos, his concept of, you know, one way door decisions versus two way door decisions. I think that’s one good way to think about it. Also, we’ll talk in our business case discussion about, you know, probabilistic decisions, you know, realizing that in some cases, you’re going to play some bets, not everything’s going to work out. That’s okay, as long as we have some rigor around that. So I totally agree with you, I think, really questioning even, how is your organization making decisions, and is it fit for purpose? So maybe with that, just to keep us moving and get some feedback from you all, we’ll, we’ll turn to a polling question, so in one word or short phrase, what’s the most important outcome you want from your next technology investment? Because we’ll be talking about that.

Jason Cerrato 15:36
So this is a word cloud, so we’ll give you a chance to look at, look at the QR code here and provide some answers, and we’ll see what we get in. How are you seeing this possibly change or or shift in some of the conversations you’re having with Deloitte clients?

Victor Reyes 15:54
Victor, yeah, you know it’s changing in a lot of different ways. It’s changing in the sense that you mentioned also, which is time horizons, in some cases where the very types of investments are changing because the technology is changing, the expectations of what those investments are expected to provide is changing. And so you may have to lengthen your time horizons, which your CFO isn’t always going to like. So we’ll talk a little bit about that. I also think that, you know, we’ll talk a lot about this blend of human and business outcomes that you’re expecting from making, you know, really great investments in technology, and who gets to make those choices? Again, back to the decision question, who’s who’s engaged in those decisions, regardless of, quote, unquote, whose budget it’s coming from, right? Which is often what, what sort of seems to drive the process. But that’s not always the entire answer. So we’re getting some good feedback here.

Jason Cerrato 17:02
Efficiency, yeah, when you say human and business, are you also alluding to quantitative versus qualitative?

Victor Reyes 17:07
Yeah, there’s, there is a bit of that. I’d say there’s a, there’s a there’s qualitative outcomes and benefits that are always really important. There’s always also the challenge of saying, are there things that we’ve we’ve previously treated as qualitative outcomes that we could actually quantify if we thought about it differently, or if we applied ourselves a little differently, the data might not be as readily available, but is there some way? You know, I’ll give you an example. I had conversations with clients around innovation, you know, and innovation feels like this, this wonderful, big, qualitative, conceptual thing. But how do you measure it? And there are elements of it that you can’t measure, I would concede, but, but there are organizations I’ve worked with that have looked at some different things. Like, you know, what percentage of our revenue is coming from new products every year? Products every year. You know what our product development cycle looks like? And are we moving the needle on how quickly we’re able to get things out to market and iterate? And those are very measurable, quantitative things that also, by the way, have some powerful linkages back to talent, because talent is what drives innovation much more than anything else, right?

Jason Cerrato 18:26
I think there are a lot of predictable answers here, but we’ll see how this is also changing as we go through the content here today. Don’t you think it is?

Victor Reyes 18:33
Yeah, absolutely. So ROI, for sure, efficiency is, is really big. So I know that’s top of mind for a lot of my clients as well. But then all of these important things that surround it, which is, you know, something that’s that’s practical, something that’s, you know, delivering business value, productivity, I love that collaboration. That’s a great example of a human outcome that also has profound business implications. Great well, thank you for that. And so maybe we’ll, we’ll sort of dig into, we’re going to take you into the two of our trends here, which we think are really closely coupled. You know, before we start to talk about the nits and nats of the business case, since a lot of that really does relate to the introduction of AI and AI related tools and capabilities into the work and the workforce. What are we seeing? What’s that doing in terms of workforce experience, and what are its implications? Because that’s also going to tie to how I think about the investments that I’m making. So the question, the kind of the core question we tried to answer in this particular trend this chapter, is, do I need to update our employee value proposition for an AI powered world? What does that look like and and it really speaks to some of the tensions that I mentioned earlier between, you know, Jason, one of your favorites, automation versus augmentation, but also control versus empowerment. You know, as I introduce these tools, AI agentic, AI like, who’s making decisions, who’s making choices about the work on a day to day basis, and how do I feel about that organizationally, and what does it mean to my people when maybe there are agents that are making decisions that previously they did, or I’ve got to be the recipient of some of that work product, as opposed to the producer of some of that work product, as an example in a variety of different business processes, whether they’re talent related or otherwise. And so what we saw from our research was a couple of things. You see the data points here that you know both of a good and a bad news story right, on the one hand, really exciting and interesting is that we heard 70% of managers and workers are actually really excited about an organization that’s leaning into AI and helps them be successful in an AI powered world like employees of workforce is valuing that is what we’re hearing like. I want to be a part of this, if I’m part of an organization that’s going to help me. On the other hand, more than half of the workforce is really worried about, how’s this all going to play out, and what’s it going to mean for me, and what’s it going to mean for my job and my day to day, right?

Jason Cerrato 21:21
Yeah, and I like your slide there, because your title there said revolutionizing work because, you know, we’ve gone through digital transformation, and then that led to everyone focusing on talent transformation. And now, with those two things, working together, we’re really going through work transformation, right? We’ve enabled new ways of getting your job done. We’ve enabled new ways of working together, and now, as a result of that, we’re enabling a whole new way of designing work, building organizations, designing teams, even thinking of the construct of companies, right? The size of companies, the size of teams, how you manage, how you lead, how you organize departments, how you make decisions. So this really is looking at things in a new way. At Eightfold, we have a podcast called The New Talent Code, where we talk to leaders that are going through these transformations, and we talk about how you need to think, manage and measure differently. Because this is more than just a technology transformation. And you know, there’s technology involved, there’s rethinking workflows, there’s also leadership communications, there’s culture, there’s organizations. We talked to a lot of organizations that are going through this journey, and in some cases, they say when they’ve tried this in the past, the technology wasn’t ready, and people were trying to achieve some of these things, and the technology was holding them back. Now, the technology has almost leapfrogged the conversation, and the technology is unlocking a lot of this capability, and the people aren’t ready, the people are the bottleneck. So there’s a cultural component, there’s a leadership component, there’s an organizational component, and it needs all of these pieces coming together to really real, create this compounding effect that also why to get back to, you know today, as you’re putting together these business cases and these value cases, how you’re measuring the return and measuring the value really needs to kind of be be thought of a little differently. We had a leader at one of our organizations say, when you start doing this, some of the benefits become so broad that if you’re not very specific and focused on what you’re measuring, they can actually become diluted, because they start to affect so many things and dissipate across the organization. So these things can become so powerful, they also become harder to measure.

Victor Reyes 24:00
Yep, yep, absolutely, absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. So maybe what I thought maybe we could do is just share with you a couple of nuggets from this particular chapter around what we mean by what does this mean? What does AI mean for the workforce and for the value proposition and what we call, sort of the potential silent impacts of AI, right? So, and these are, we’re not coming down on one side or the other that, you know, the genie is out of the bottle, right? This is going to transform, as you said, Jason, not just the way we work, but the work itself, the roles, everything else. I think everybody needs to acknowledge that every organization is going to have a different approach to how they introduce AI into their organization and when and how and in what ways. But what we’re seeing is there is very much a narrative that says this stuff is great. It’s going to just transform everything. It’s going to give us new tools. It’s going to augment the work. I got a new digital team made, and it’s going to unlock capacity in my day and all of these other things. And all of that can be true, right? But what we’re also seeing is that, particularly at the outset, it can be more work, right? Because you’re like any introduction of any new technology into the flow of work, there will be some fits and starts that you have to train it you may feel. Then other impacts around me? Am I losing a certain degree of autonomy and agency in my job? If, if I’m now paired with AI, what’s the impact going to be on my skill development and growth? We talk a lot about the impact on early career talent, where AI may be sort of eroding some of the tasks and jobs that typically is where you cut your teeth early in your career in a variety of different professions, right? And what does this mean for data, for privacy, for ownership of IP, if I train an AI agent like am I going to derive value from that and be recognized for it a whole host of different things? And again, it’s not to have, you know, lots of dark clouds, but it is to raise some of these things in the hope that organizationally, you can face them sort of head on and and think through a variety of different workforce impacts to get to really great outcomes, right?

Jason Cerrato 26:27
And I think right now, as people are trying to learn what these tools can do and trying to adopt them and proliferate them across the organization, they’re also potentially thinking of where the goal is, and setting objectives and measures for where the goal is versus what that ramp looks like. So for example, there’s always this, we’re going to give time back, or we’re going to find additional hours for productivity, where some of the early studies and returns are saying, well, actually when people get additional time, they don’t produce more right away, because they’re actually using that time to help others adopt these new technologies right as part of this is in order to you know you have people that are more advanced or experts with this technology, and people necessarily aren’t, you need to create collaboration to get people up to speed so they’re using that additional time to help bring others along, versus, you know, just selfishly or independently, using it to produce more in their role. But if you’re not accounting for that or building that into your measures, you may miss the benefit that that’s providing to your organization.

Victor Reyes 27:39
Yeah, that’s right, and are you even having that conversation? Right? It is really important. So last thing on this particular trend that maybe I’ll just share a little bit about what some of the things are that we’re suggesting as actions, as things to think about in dealing with this. And you’ll see peppered throughout the research, lots of examples of different organizations, different industries, stories that we thought were sort of relevant to how people are dealing with this. And so we really do talk about this idea of mindset, which is, you know, as you, as you release these tools into the wild, like, how are people actually using it? How are we talking about what it means for them? What’s our plan for that? How are we going to check and adjust and and then, how do we then feed that into a new version of our EVP? And I mentioned some of this earlier, in terms of who captures value and who gets rewarded? What’s the impact on work life balance, and what should it be? Because if I’m going to create capacity for you, and all I’m going to do is give you more is give you more work, I’m not sure how I’m going to feel about that, right and and so there’s some interesting examples I’ll pick on one which I really love waste management, which is a you know, organization I’ve had the privilege of working with in the past, where they’ve done some really interesting things in terms of how they introduced some AI models and tools to optimize the way their their drivers get routed to pick up trash, but they’ve done it in a way that gives their drivers some measure of autonomy. To say, here’s what the AI thinks you should do. We think it’s a good idea, but we’re going to give you some degrees of freedom, because you know your territory, you know your route, you’re actually out there, but we’re going to incent you to make sure that we achieve the business outcome that we’re trying to get to, whether it’s through a combination of your decisions, of the AI’s decisions, which is very different than sort of just pushing something out to them that feels makes them feel disempowered, right? Yeah, very different. So I think one last thing you know, you had an example, maybe that you wanted to share here.

Jason Cerrato 29:49
Yeah, so this is a visual from Eightfold where it talks about how people are using technology like talent intelligence to provide personalized guidance, especially around career pathing, you know, leveraging skills intelligence for where people can go in the organization. But when you think about what is the value or the return to an organization, it’s really emphasizing the what’s in it for them, but also changing the conversation. And you said a lot of the issues we’ve had in the past is around the data that creates a user layer and a data layer, but it also allows this to become a dynamic process. So as the user interacts with the system and the technology, they’re updating their profile, they’re adding additional experiences, they’re incorporating different pieces of learning to their profile. At the same time, the data layer underneath is continuing to learn and gather information about the market, various skills, other peers, the organization. And these two things are working in concert as this dynamic relationship continues to gather context. And what happens here is this creates, almost like a living, breathing experience, whereas people are growing in their career, this isn’t just creating a static, linear career path or career ladder. This is what enables movement in organizations, whereas skills are changing, as roles are changing, it’s allowing for movement in new ways. So when you think about, how do we change measures, how do we look at value differently? There’s a couple of things that organizations are doing as a result of this. They’re looking at things like, what new skills are we uncovering in our organization that we weren’t tracking before as a result of looking at our people through these talent profiles, right? What new teams or what movement across departments have we seen as a result of this? So instead of just tracking retention, right, retention is one way they are here? Did they stay or did they leave? They’re tracking movement like cross pollination. How much cross departmental movement are we having? They’re also looking at things like mentoring, and, you know, circles, circles of learning and mentoring groups and hours gained through programs like this. So this becomes a more dynamic experience, and you start to uncover things that previously may have been invisible. So you start to gather visibility of your talent, of your organization, of your ecosystem and your environment, to then make more agile decisions on where you can go as an individual, where the organization can go as a leader, and then potentially how you can create sustainable paths that help avoid for disruption as the world of work changes. You know, there’s a lot of organizations that have pivoted into new industries or new areas in the last three or four years. There’s a lot of CEOs that are saying, we know that incorporating AI will be a competitive advantage in the next three or four years, but we’re experimenting on which areas and which projects. So we’re not 100% sure if you know what that path is going to be. How are you? How are you? How are you going to build career ladders and career paths for that type of environment, if you’re working in Excel, right? That’s very hard. It’s very hard to do with limited data that’s, you know, static. So the ability to do this in a way we’re working with leaders that say we want to create a process where people can drive this themselves, but also we get visibility to what their hopes and dreams are, and if we can match what they’re raising their hand and they’re interested in with the intelligence we’re using to drive our business. And there’s a greater chance that those two things can meet somewhere in the future, we can create something that’s less likely to be disrupted, but also more dynamic. So that way, you’re not setting your path linked to one thing, that thing can potentially move as the data changes.

Victor Reyes 34:04
I love that, and it’s a really powerful example of how an AI powered tool set can create both human and business outcomes, right?

Jason Cerrato 34:14
And as a result of that, and as a result of that, what happens is, for every piece of data that gets added, it potentially opens up a new course or a new opportunity or a new path. So the organ, the organizations that have adopted approaches like this, have reported employees taking training at higher completion rates because now they’re seeing how it links to opportunities or to paths or to, you know what this means for the organization. It’s showing the value and the what’s in it for me, but also, because the data doesn’t get stale, and old people are returning back to the system, you know, more frequently than they did before, because the information isn’t dying on the buying.

Victor Reyes 34:59
That’s great. I love it. So let’s turn to a polling question, which I think will set up the next segment really nicely in terms of value cases. So you’ll see here. The question is, how does your organization currently evaluate the value of technology investments? So Is it primarily on cost savings or efficiency, which I know popped up in the word cloud quite a bit. Is it a balance between that and employee performance, innovation and other impacts, just thinking about whether employees are using and adopting technologies, or do you even have a consistent framework? So we’ll give you a second to as we launch that poll and see what is left. To hear what you think.

Jason Cerrato 35:43
Yeah, I’m interested to see the results here. I was thinking about this as we were preparing for today, and I don’t want to share with you what my question is, until we see some of the results come in. But as you’re working with some of your clients, yeah, can you give us some insight into some of the conversations you’re having on this?

Victor Reyes 36:06
Yeah, sure. There is absolutely no question that the cost is important. Cost savings are important. But I think that we are seeing a turn, and you’ll see this in some of our data, that more than ever before, there is this acknowledgement that we have to have a balanced set of measures and outcomes, that that this, it can’t be just about taking out cost. We’re always going to have to have an eye on that. But in today’s world, given the nature of the technology, given the nature of the business environment, it’s got to be about some of these other things. And I love that, that right smack dab in the middle here, that this idea that we’ve got to have a focus on innovation, on longer term impacts, is really profound, and we’re seeing that constantly. Now, how to make that happen, and how to get from that conviction to somebody writing you a check to actually go make the investment is, is? That’s the hard part. So we’ll talk about that, but it’s great to see that.

Jason Cerrato 37:17
Well, thank you everyone for contributing to the poll. My two questions, my two questions were going to be here. One of the options was balanced between efficiency and employee performance. And as I was looking at the options, a question that I’ve asked some of your colleagues and peers in previous webinars like this with AI and especially agents and the way we’re kind of redesigning some of some of this work, aren’t we also potentially rethinking or re defining the concept of performance?

Victor Reyes 37:54
Absolutely? Yeah, absolutely performance, especially if you’re changing, as you said earlier that particularly the introduction to some of these AI technologies and agentic AI is going to change the very nature of what somebody’s job is. It’s going to change what you’re expecting of them. It should, and therefore it has to have an impact on what we mean by performance.

Jason Cerrato 38:16
Yeah, because in the last session, when we dove deep into the report, we were talking about the increasingly blurred lines between human machine collaboration, right? And then this other one I thought about today was this concept of adoption rates, and I was thinking about that as I was thinking of agents. So increasingly, people are going to be getting data from systems through agentic interfaces, where they may not be even accessing the system or the tool. They’re getting the data through an agent or through some other output. So ultimately, what you’re measuring is the outcome, and we’re going to have to come up with some new measure, because adoption may be hidden, or it may be some other thing that’s actually adopting the tool. Because I was just learning that we’ve gotten to the point now where we have agents of agents.

Victor Reyes 39:05
That’s right, oh, yeah, and multi agent systems and orchestration of agents. And it’s getting very complex in hopefully ultimately driving a different kind of simplicity, but a lot of complexity in the background. So, just a little food for thought. If we want to jump back in, I know we want to talk about business cases and then get a little more of your all’s feedback. So I want to, here we go, and want to take you into this, this chapter we called New Tech, New Work, right about value cases, and share with you, sort of our thinking about how to answer this question, how do we get more value out of work? And workforce technology is a very broad category, and what drove us to this, and the signals that we saw in the market were really, I think, kind of three big things that seem to have come together on us. One is, oftentimes, frankly, a checkered history of prior tech investments, right? And you see some of the data here where, you know, 42% of the organizations say that tech investments have been disappointing because they had either unrealistic business cases or they didn’t have data. 73% of the executives said that the inability to define metrics was the biggest challenge in terms of thinking about tech investments, and so a lot of prior investments have failed to meet expectations, or their business cases, or nobody can even tell you if they met their original business cases, because they they may have had a business case, and they took the money and ran, and nobody went back and checked. And so, you know, that’s the first thing is, you have leaders saying, do it. When I think about the next investment, do I want to put good money in after that? The second thing is the array of technologies in the marketplace that is coming at the organizations we’ve worked with is dizzying, right? There’s lots of shiny new objects out there and a lot of great stuff too, but, but from the perspective of a business leader that’s trying to make decisions about what’s the right tool for me. Should I stick with the platforms that I have as they invest? Should I go out and buy some best of breed solution? Should I go with somebody who’s established? Should I go with a startup like it’s just every day. There’s more things right to sort of think about from a tech perspective, which is exciting but daunting. And then the third thing, and you touched on this earlier, Jason, is that the very nature of the outcomes that the technology is expected to drive is different than it used to be. In many cases, it’s it’s no longer the case that it’s a your your average tech investment is a simple, I’m going to spend $1 here on this piece of technology, and I’m going to save, you know, X dollars on the other side of that, in pure labor savings, I’m just going to automate this piece of work, or I’m going to produce this many more, you know, widgets, and that’s a very clean and simple business case. Now I’m faced with a challenge that says there’s these technologies that are going to make people more productive or enhanced collaboration, or experience, or all these things that I know are good for them and good for the business, but how do I measure that? And so they’re struggling with that, with those three things coming together, and also speak to a lot of these tensions around again, automation versus augmentation. And am I really measuring outcomes versus outputs? How predictable are the outcomes that this tech is intended to drive. And so that’s really what brought us to this place. And, you know, and I’ll ask you to chime in here in a second, Jason, but again, I touched on a few of these. So you know what’s changing the nature of the value case challenge, right? You know, we went from a couple of players in most of the spaces in technology to maybe hundreds. We’ve got, you know, a handful of use cases that I’m trying to solve for maybe dozens, a broader range of metrics. You know, I’ve had clients use this AI tool, and it’s going to save everybody 30 minutes a week. That’s great. What are you going to do with the 30 minutes? And how are you going to know if you really if you really saved it, and is it driving business value? And so we talk a lot about navigating this ecosystem, understanding when do I maybe need to think about this particular type of investment differently, because on the one hand, I don’t want to waste the organization’s money, but on the other hand, I don’t want to be left behind. And I don’t want to be at a competitive disadvantage by not investing, or by just, you know, being paralyzed. You know, indecision is a decision. So, so I think I don’t know if you’re seeing some of that, Jason, this year, you know, engaging with different organizations.

Jason Cerrato 43:57
Yeah, 100% and I think, you know, it’s an interesting conversation, because, just like you were alluding to what a lot of these AI based tools allow for the ability to shift beyond the incremental outcomes to potentially exponential outcomes, but that’s because of the compounding effect of how they learn over time, how They add on top of each other, as you layer them or use them together, especially on some of these platforms, and as they learn across tools or across modules. But also, we’ve moved beyond this world where it’s just measuring widget by widget or module by module, now it’s the entire work stream, right? So what is the entire work stream, and the value of that work stream to drive outcomes, and how all of the pieces fit together to work in concert, and kind of reverse engineering all the different roles in achieving that outcome? Like one of the things that I’ve been talking about recently is there’s been a lot of conversations around skills based right, skills based X, skills based y, and you know, the success rate of becoming skills based, and I’ve been saying skills based is not the outcome, it’s the input right skills. Skills are the input to achieving some outcome that you need to determine in your organization you couldn’t achieve otherwise. Is it around flowing talent to the right work? Is it around gaining visibility of existing talent that you can’t uncover in your current data structure? Is it around driving organic growth with you know, without adding an additional head count, what is the outcome you’re trying to achieve that this helps unlock. That’s the outcome. Skills are just the input. But then there’s a whole chain of tools that help unlock some of that, and you need to figure out the way to kind of measure that, and figure out how you’re capturing that, because, like the individual said before, it can create so many benefits that if you’re not able to kind of capture where those benefits go, they can get diluted.

Victor Reyes 46:06
Yep, absolutely. So maybe I’ll dig into and share with you just a few of the thoughts that we present as kind of potential actors, ways of reframing the business case and the measures and how you actually think about these, these new, next generation technology investments. And then, because I want to make sure that we get time for one last question and polling question and some Q&A. So there’s a couple of things that we bring up here in terms of how to think about these, these very different kinds of investments at this moment in time. Right? One is, we’ve touched on it, but really reframe what it is you’re measuring, right as you were just saying, Jason, like, what are the outcomes? How are we measuring them? What’s the blend of human and business outcomes that we’re measuring? Again, it’s not that that impact on cost or cost structure goes away. But how do I augment and broaden that the set of of metrics that I’m really going to bake into this business case, I’m going to invest in some infrastructure to make sure I have some data that’s coming off of that that’s useful, that’s going to resonate still with a CFO as well as a CHRO as well as a COO, right? And sort of really think about when, when is this an investment case that warrants sort of a different, non traditional approach. There will still be investments in technologies that will be straight labor savings or productivity improvements, you know, in a manufacturing line, and that’s fine, but, but what we’re suggesting is not everything is going to be that way, and not everything is that way today in terms of some of the really exciting technologies that are out there. So call that out as you’re building the case. We also talk about this. You know, there’s a precedent here in terms of very different kinds of ways of thinking about and evaluating investments that isn’t particularly common for HR technology investments, but is common in other parts of the business, which is think about research and development investments. Think about product development investments, where you have organizations that are putting real, very significant dollars on the line, making huge, company-wide investments, but they’re doing it on the basis of saying, I’m going to have a portfolio of investments that I’m going to make, and they’re probabilistic. They’re not all going to pan out, yep, and, and I’m going to have some structure and rigor around how much I’m willing to spend and where I’m going to place my bets. I’m going to have some rigor around how I evaluate those things, how I pull the plug on them, but I also know that not 100% of them are going to deliver, individually, a very predictable outcome, but in the aggregate, I do have a very rigorous expectation of how they’re going to pan out, and I also may have very different time horizons that I think are realistic for those to play out over and you mentioned that earlier in our discussion, Jason and so how do you sort of reframe and re-characterize these investments in that way, which, again, people have been doing for a long time with r, d or with new products, just haven’t leveraged it in this context.

Jason Cerrato 49:18
And I think there was an article that came out earlier in the year, around the April/May timeframe, about Johnson & Johnson, they had created these project teams to deploy AI within their business, and they had very quickly realized that only about 15% of them were truly making an impact or were going to pay off, but so long as they had the ability to identify which 15% were the ones that were going to do that. It was worthwhile. It was worthwhile because then they could scrap the other ones quickly and focus on those 15 and then start and then start a new set to figure out which would be the next 15% that would create an impact.

Victor Reyes 49:54
That’s right, and I think it’s, it’s it’s also, I think it very much plays into what we’re seeing in terms of the nature of some of these technologies where they’re so new and they’re delivering really exciting things, but, but there’s a lot of change, and oftentimes it’s a it’s not one tool or piece of technology by itself that is going to deliver a very predictable result. It’s just, it could be a series of investments, that you have a high degree of confidence that if I make these two or three investments in the right way, in the right sequence, it’s going to really unlock a lot of value, or, as we’ve talked about in the past, I’m going to make an investment in something that’s really a foundational platform for my business, and will have will unlock all sorts of capabilities, and that’s certainly true in the talent intelligence space, right? So, so the last thing we mentioned is kind of thinking about the stakeholders, because this is also something that happens in a lot of conventional business case scenarios, where some you know, one stakeholder tends to be the owner of the business case or the approver of the business case, and now, and that was, in some respects easier when the nature of the benefits delivered was simpler and was confined to a particular function. I’m going to invest in this HR tool, and it’s going to save me this many heads in HR. This is we’re we’re in a very different world right now, where I’m going to make an investment and and it’s going to unlock value in a very diffuse way that’s very powerful for the enterprise, but it’s hard to capture from the perspective of a single stakeholder or or his or her budget. So you really think you need to think about, who am I engaging? Who am I co-creating this business case with the CFO, the CHRO, the CEO. Right to say, you know, what commitments do we make? What bets do we want to place, knowing that we’re going to capture the value in a lot of different places. So with that, I want to, we will have a little bit of time for questions. I want to launch one last polling question here, and then we’ll open it up to some Q and A and share some links and stuff with you as well. So what’s the biggest challenge your organization is facing when building a business case for new technology? Is it? Some of the things we talked about, unclear ROI. Is it? You know, just buy in from executives. Is it, you know, there’s too many other things going on prior, you know, poor performance, other things. I’d love to hear people’s feedback. And Jason, you know, maybe some of what you may have seen in the market.

Jason Cerrato 52:40
I think part of the thing that I think I’ve seen often, is people aren’t sure what problem they’re fully solving for, and sometimes, sometimes they’re looking for the tool to help identify the problem. And it’s a chicken, it’s a chicken or the egg. Conversation, yeah. So part of it is, how do they design the project around these measures and around the ROI without fully knowing exactly what it is they’re addressing, but thinking about your content here and listening to the research your first slide were those opposing tensions, and we talked about, you know, is there, is it just the acknowledgement and awareness of the dynamics, and there’s no such thing as as balance, but now you know, the ability to visualize and quantify where you are, I think, as we’ve talked about what some of this new capability allows for, and thinking of some of these new measures and creating ROI and value, what some of this capability around dynamic data and talent intelligence and AI creates is the ability to move beyond not just how many or when or how much, right, but who, but who and why, and additional context, right? So, when you So, when you get around, not just quantitative, but some of that qualitative. And you mentioned, not just the business measures, but some of those human measures, I think that’s how this ties a lot of the 2025, human capital trends together.

Victor Reyes 54:14
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s fascinating what we’re seeing here that, you know, we got a lot of votes for unclear ROI but, but just what’s overtaken that, as well as too many priorities, too many competing priorities and and to me, you know that that really resonates based on what a lot of my clients are up against, but it also speaks to this idea that that you really, even if you are building a business case off in one corner of the business. You’re ultimately going to have to be prepared to help the organization and leaders manage those priorities and those trade offs, because the reality is, this is about capital allocation, right? It’s like, you know, I only have so many dollars. I’m going to have to invest in them here or here or here. How do I help those leaders really compare in an apples to apples way, what the ultimate business value is of these different investments relative to one another, rather than coming at it from a siloed kind of functional perspective.

Jason Cerrato 55:16
We just started this session talking about transformation, and transformation is often a team sport, but a team can often bring competing priorities.