Work Tech Weekly

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 20...

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 h...

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 ente...

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...

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...

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 w...

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 practiti...

Most AI upskilling never reaches the people who need it most. It stays inside corporate training budgets, locked away from the average person. Michael Ioffe, Co-Founder and CEO of Arist, joins Steve Smith to talk about Make America AI Ready, a new partnership with the U.S. Department of Labor designed to deliver free AI upskilling to every American worker — entirely via text message. In this episo...

Every CEO is bullish on AI. Ask the people actually doing the work? The mood is different. Fear. Ambivalence. A vague sense that something important is being skipped. That gap is what Donald Thompson has been spending his time on. Donald is managing director of the Center for Organizational Effectiveness at Workplace Options, the largest independent provider of holistic wellbeing solutions support...

Most workplace technology has historically been built for desk workers. But desk workers represent only a small portion of the global workforce. In this episode, Steve Smith is joined by Sri Chellappa, CEO and Co-founder of Engagedly, to explore why frontline employees have largely been left out of the HR tech stack and what it takes to build systems that actually work for them. They discuss the o...

According to LinkedIn, SEO is dead, answer engines have replaced Google, and the entire go-to-market playbook has supposedly flipped overnight. In this episode, we’re joined by Helene Jelenc, Director of SEO at Flow Agency, to unpack what the data actually says about how software buyers are discovering brands in the AI era. We explore how search behavior is fragmenting across surfaces like Google,...

AI is accelerating faster than most organizations can process. What feels like progress on the surface also introduces a deeper leadership question: As tasks get automated and outputs get polished instantly, how do we protect judgment, development, and human connection? In this episode, we’re joined by Dan Riley, Co-Founder of RADICL, to explore the responsibility that comes with building and depl...

"The market just isn't ready for us." After 20 years advising HR tech founders, executives, and investors, Sarah White has heard that line more times than she can count — and she has zero patience for it. In this episode of Work Tech Weekly, Sarah joins Steve Smith to break down what's really stalling growth, killing deals, and quietly holding HR tech teams back. They dig into why unclear position...

AI didn’t just speed up work. It changed what matters at work. For decades, talent assessments measured traits, cognitive ability, and technical skills. That made sense when roles were stable and hard skills lasted longer than your iPhone upgrade cycle. But now? AI handles more of the execution. Technical skills commoditize fast. And the real differentiator isn’t what you know — it’s how you think...

From an investment perspective, the Work Tech market in 2026 looks… oddly healthy. The charts are trending up, capital is flowing again, and 2025 clocked in at $6.24 billion in funding — the third-biggest year the sector has ever had. On paper, it’s momentum, if you’re brave enough to say it out loud. However, most founders’ lived reality feels so far from OK. In this episode, we are talking with...

Why do hiring processes collapse under volume? Why has “perfect fit” made trust disappear from recruiting? Can AI be both a problem and a solution? Where the hell is Left Miami? In this episode of the Work Tech Weekly podcast, Steve Smith talks with Claire McTaggart — founder and CEO of SquarePeg — about how modern hiring systems trained candidates to game the process, and why recruiters are now d...

Why do global payroll implementations that were supposed to take 12 months still drag into year two? In this episode of the Work Tech Weekly podcast, Steve Smith sits down with Jerome Gouvernel — CEO and co-founder of datascalehr — to unpack why global payroll projects keep breaking down, and why the industry keeps selling a model that can’t scale. Jerome draws on 20 years of experience building g...

What makes sales kickoffs either catalytic or a Vegas-grade waste of money? You’ll find out in this episode of the Work Tech Weekly podcast, when Steve Smith welcomes Ryan Estis — former Fortune 500 CRO, bestselling author, and leadership keynote speaker — for a candid conversation on sales, leadership, kickoffs and (of course) AI. They dig into why human-centered leadership is a performance multi...

A new podcast is launching for people who want the inside scoop on what’s going in the Work Tech industry and its sometimes chaotic and ever-evolving landscape. The Work Tech Weekly Podcast is hosted by Steve Smith, Managing Director of Growth at Rep Cap. When he talks with the founders, executives, and other industry muckity-mucks that make things happen in the industry, he aims to surface the in...