3 things to focus on for 2024 and beyond

The HR tech industry is a fast-paced and dynamic arena where scaling up is essential for companies to remain competitive and meet client demands. However, success in this challenging market requires more than a great product and talented team members. It demands strategic planning, resilience, and a deep understanding of market dynamics. Hear the hot takes on the future of HR tech from Mike Ettling, CEO of Unit4.

If you want to find out more about HR technology, you can download the recently published HR Technology Market Report by UNLEASH, in partnership with Unit4, and also find other resource materials here.

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HR Tech has been a hot market for 10 years – 10, 12, 15 years – but the puck has shifted, and we’re now in a world of profitable growth. How HR Tech is going to keep innovating and surviving in the new investor dynamic in the new world, I think is a really interesting challenge, which everyone at this event is going to have to face up to.

Data Privacy

So I have a view on this, which may be a little bit cynical, but says actually there’s a very simple solution to all of this, and it depends on the underlying privacy legislation in different countries.

If you’re in Europe, you’re fine. If you’re in Libya, you’re toast when it comes to privacy.

The quick way to fix this, is you just quickly put an amendment in the GDPR Act, which says it applies to people and bots. So all AI and bots, have to follow the same privacy legislation in terms of how they operate. And I think that solves the problem. So if it’s my bot, it must inherit my rights to privacy as an EU citizen or not.

I think the problem is when you’ve got what I call quicksand when it comes to privacy, which you pretty much have in the USA, and you’re now going to lay an AI on top of it, it’s not the AI which is the problem, it’s the quicksand of the underlying privacy environment which is going to be the problem.

The Role of the Leader

The role of the leader in this changing world we’re going into is going to become much more about humanity and empathy. And I think it’s going to be really interesting. I hate leadership books because they all basically take a human concept, and try and turn it into a process. And process isn’t leadership. 

Leadership process is management and control. 

And I think, as we go down this world where people are going to be fearful of AI, it actually is going to be able to enhance what people do, how leaders show up, and what the process-orientated leader is going to do in the next five years. The leader with human empathy and a lot of it will know how to bring the humanists out in an organization, they’ll absolutely succeed. And, it’s going to be needed in the next four or five years as we go through this fundamental change.

Gen AI

So I love AI mainly because it’s defined my next career move when I’m finished with the CEO stuff and that’s a kill switch operator.

I think everyone must look at how it’s going to be used in the product and how you’ll use it in your product. But I think you have to get the balance right in the product because this is going to become so commoditized and available, you know on demand by AWS and Microsoft and Google and Others that you don’t want to end up over-investing.

The area we are focused on is how it transforms our business. If I think of running a software business everything from lead generation to meeting clients to better pictures and Proposals to customer support to testing in engineering you name it the whole value chain if I can take 40%, 50% of the effort out of my value chain – don’t put that to EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) – but actually reinvest it in more innovation, better product, I kill my competition, very simply.

So I actually think what we’re seeing now, I call it the dinosaur meterorite moment…

…because I think we’re gonna see a lot of software companies disappear as a result of this, not because it’s not in the product, but because other software companies have figured out how to change the whole value cycle of running a software business.

And I think for a startup and an early-stage company, this is very exciting, because before, where you had to think in a linear way about X amount of investment, or hiring a certain amount of people, maybe you don’t now, maybe you can get the same done with AI, which you had to do in the past with hiring people with the investment, you can invest more in competitive product.

I think it’s really exciting, but that’s how I think about it, not just in the product context.

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