tldr; A portable, user-owned record of verified skills has been built at least four times, including by Workday. It keeps dying, and never for technical reasons. Three things kill it every time: the moat, no trusted signer, and cold start. The only place verification actually took hold is the one place the law removed the choice.

October 2019. Workday Rising. Workday announces the future of hiring: Workday Credentials, and a companion app called WayTo. Individually owned, verifiable credentials. Proof of what you can do, carried from company to company, shared on your terms. Bhusri pitched it on CNBC. They’d acquired an identity startup to build it.

I know, because I downloaded it.

It sat on my phone for about a year. I put things in it. And to be exact about what “things” means, because it matters: one credential, issued by Workday, certifying that I had attended Workday Rising. A digital badge proving I’d been in the room where the wallet was announced.

I tried to add my PMP. The app wasn’t ready for it yet.

That’s the graveyard in two sentences. A wallet whose only issuer was the company that built the wallet, and no path to load the credential I’d actually earned from an outside body whose entire business is attesting that people can do things.

Then one day it was gone. Not deprecated with a migration path. Not sunset with a notice. Just gone.

And no, this wasn’t a conference demo that evaporated the following Monday. Workday published Terms of Use for WayTo with an effective date in May 2021. Live legal terms, a real product, a design team, a user. I know when it launched, because I was watching. I don’t know when it ended, because nobody said.

It never got a goodbye.

If you have never heard of WayTo, congratulations. You just heard the whole story.

Your best idea has already been built

Every practitioner who stares at the arms race long enough lands on the same design: a portable, user-owned portfolio of verified skills, handed to an employer like a business card. I landed on it years after I’d already been issued one. So did everyone else.

MIT was issuing diplomas on Blockcerts in 2017. The W3C published an open standard for verifiable credentials. Velocity Network, a consortium stacked with names you’d recognize from every expo floor, launched a working mainnet in 2022.

The technology was never the bottleneck. Say that out loud the next time someone tells you we just need better tools.

“It didn’t die, it evolved”

Somebody is already typing that Credentials didn’t fail, it became Skills Cloud. Fair, and it’s the most important distinction in this series.

Skills Cloud infers. It reads your worker data and your job architecture and produces probabilistic skill tags. Genuinely useful for cataloging, internal mobility, workforce planning. I’m not knocking it.

But inferring is not verifying. A probabilistic tag is a guess with good manners.

And here’s why that matters. A candidate uses an LLM to generate keywords. The platform uses ML to extract probabilistic tags. A screening tool matches one probability against the other. That’s algorithmic noise matching algorithmic noise, and everybody gets a confidence score for their trouble.

Inference solved cataloging for the enterprise. It did not solve trust between a candidate and an employer. Different problems. Only one of them is drowning us.

Killer one: the moat

My favorite piece of evidence in this whole saga comes from LinkedIn’s own help documentation.

LinkedIn has a verification badge now. Real infrastructure, built on Entra rails. It verifies three things: that you are who you say, that you work where you say, that you went to school where you say. The docs are explicit about the boundary. Not your title. Not your expertise. Not one claim about what you can do.

They built the rails all the way to the edge of the thing that matters. And stopped.

Now: Follow the money. Talent Solutions, meaning seats and postings and pipeline tools, is the majority of LinkedIn’s revenue, and the moat under it is self-reported profile data plus network effects. Verified portable competence means employers search less, InMail less, buy fewer seats.

The ambiguity is the product. Verifying skills wouldn’t improve it. It would end it.

Indeed runs a different flavor of the same incentive: their model monetizes application volume. The flood drowning your recruiters is somebody’s revenue line.

Neither company is evil. Both are rational. If you read Part 1, you know rational is the problem.

Killer two: nobody trusted will sign

The moat only explains half the graveyard.

Workday had no moat conflict. Their customer is the employer. Portable verified credentials would have made the platform more valuable, not less. Clean incentives, and it still died. So did Velocity, a consortium built specifically so no single vendor could strangle it.

Different killer. A credential is only as strong as whoever signs it, and nobody trusted will sign the claim that matters. Ask a past employer to vouch for how good someone actually was. You’ll get dates and a title, in the flat voice of someone reading a script legal wrote. Because legal wrote it.

Certifications work fine for the certifiable. My (now renewing, but not all of them, that’s another story for another time) Workday Pro certs are verifiable right now, no blockchain required. But look at what they certify: knowledge of a system. The things that actually drive a hire (judgment, architecture instinct, the ability to tell a VP their timeline is fiction without getting escorted out) are the least certifiable things a person has.

The chain can carry any claim securely. The problem is upstream. Nobody credible will make the claim.

Killer three: nobody shows up first

Candidates won’t maintain wallets no employer checks. Employers won’t check wallets no candidate carries. Cryptography has never once solved a chicken-and-egg problem, and it didn’t here.

I was the guy who showed up first. Nobody was on the other side of the room.

The one place it actually works

Velocity isn’t dead, by the way. It found traction.

Guess where?

Healthcare. The one corner of the labor market where verification is mandated by law and every day of delay is a compliance problem and an empty shift. Where regulation removed the choice, the infrastructure works fine. Instantly, even.

So, the technology works everywhere. It gets adopted exactly where the law forces it. That’s an incentives finding, and it’s the whole thesis in one data point.

The defection that pays

So what breaks an equilibrium this stable? Regulation, which is healthcare’s story. A coalition big enough to move together, which is what Velocity tried and the cold start ate. Or defection that pays off individually, which is the hopeful one.

Justin runs a 3D printing business out of our basement. When a customer asks whether he can print something, he doesn’t send a document describing his printing philosophy and core competencies. He shows them the last thing he printed. Twelve years old, and he arrived at proof-of-work hiring on his own, because nobody has taught him the vocabulary that lets adults avoid it.

The research has agreed with him for decades. Work samples and structured interviews sit far above resume screening as predictors of job performance. Resume screening doesn’t crack the top of the list. The instrument we’re all pointing AI at is the least predictive one in the drawer.

One caveat, or I’m just moving the arms race down the funnel: the take-home is already compromised. Candidates finish your case study with the same tools they used on the resume, and they should, because you would. An asynchronous work sample in 2026 is a resume with extra steps.

So when I say work samples, I mean observed. Live, structured. Watching someone reason is the thing AI can’t hand them. The friction is the instrument.

And no, you can’t put 2,000 hourly applicants through a live evaluation. Nobody’s asking you to. The move is directional: shift weight off top-of-funnel resume filtering toward short structured evaluations that actually predict something. Nobody converts a whole pipeline by Q4, and anyone promising that is selling. Weight the proxy a little less each quarter and watch what happens to quality of hire.

Seven years ago the future of hiring was announced on a stage, and it quietly evaporated off my phone while almost nobody noticed. That’s a market telling you, in its own language, what it’s actually optimizing for.

Nobody profitable wants to fix it. Nobody willing to fix it can.

Until one of those sentences changes, the arms race is the roadmap.

-Mike.

Director HR Technology | Undertaker

P.S. — Going to Rising this fall? Ask a longtime Workmate, warmly, whatever happened to WayTo. Then watch their face. I don’t need to ask. I still have the muscle memory of opening an app that isn’t there.

P.P.S. — My friend Doug Barkholz died on August 28th. He was 54.

In my twenties, Doug had every single thing I was fairly sure I was never going to get. Twin little kids. A house that looked enormous to a guy whose furniture was mostly borrowed. Bev, who was the reason the whole operation ran. And he was, irritatingly, the best athlete in whatever room he walked into. Volleyball, tennis, ping-pong, pick a sport, he was better at it than you by the second set.

The way we all ended up in each other's lives is the part I keep telling people this week.

Jenn set the ball. Doug hit it. It hit Bev.

Broke her arm.

That is the actual origin story of one of the most important friendships of my adult life. A good set, a better swing, and an ER visit.

I watched Nathan and Samantha a lot of nights while the three of them played. I didn't think of it as babysitting. I thought of it as the price of admission to a house where people liked each other out loud, which was not something I had a ton of reference points for at the time.

Doug was born Tuan Quang Nguyen, in Vietnam. He got here the way I got where I am, which is to say somebody chose him. Adopted people find each other. Nobody announces it. You just end up in the same kitchen at 3am and something in the wiring recognizes something in the wiring, and five years later you're the guy watching his kids.

His obituary lists his mother and his birth mother in the same sentence, right next to each other. He'd have wanted it that way. Both of them are real. That's the whole thing.

I idolized him. I'm not going to soften that with something more dignified. I was twenty-something and I looked at his life the way you look at a floor plan.

What I understand now, and didn't then, is that he wasn't showing me a life to envy. He was making room in his.

Bev, Nathan, Sammy — you have the whole thing. All of it.

The crew has got you, Doug. Somebody else can set for Bev.

tldr;

Rising is six weeks out, and everything on that expo floor is designed to sit on top of your tenant.

None of the demos were built on your data. The audit is how you know your ground truth before somebody in a branded polo describes it to you.

Five checks, about thirty minutes each: job data, security model, integration inventory, business process reality, and the why coverage.

Each check arms you with one question that separates a real product from a happy-path demo.

Half a day now. It’ll be the highest-ROI half day of your conference. I’ll be there; come argue with me.

Six weeks to Rising.

The session catalog is live, your inbox is filling with “will you be in Vegas?” emails from vendors whose products you cannot name, and somewhere a demo team is rehearsing on a tenant so clean it should be in a museum.

Here’s the thing about everything you’re going to see in that expo hall: all of it, every agent, every experience layer, every AI-powered anything, is designed to sit on top of your tenant. And none of it, not one demo, was built on your data.

The gap between those two facts is where implementation hangovers come from.

So before you fly, run the audit. Five checks. Thirty minutes each. The goal is not to fix anything (you won’t, not in six weeks, and that’s fine). The goal is to know your ground truth before someone else describes it to you, because the practitioner who knows their ground truth asks a different kind of question at the booth. The kind demo teams practice avoiding.

Check 1: Pull ten job profiles at random

Not your ten best. Ten random ones. Read them like a candidate would, or like an AI agent will.

When were they last touched? Do they describe the job as it exists, or the job as it existed when someone copied it forward during implementation? Do similar roles use similar language, or did five recruiters invent five dialects?

Why this one’s first: every AI capability you’ll see demoed this year (matching, sourcing, talent summaries, skills inference) runs on this data. The demo runs on curated profiles. Yours will run on whatever you just pulled.

THE BOOTH QUESTION: “Show me what your product does with a job profile that hasn’t been updated in four years. Not a cleaned one. That one is my tenant.”

Check 2: Pick one manager. Enumerate what they can see.

One mid-level manager. Trace their actual access: security groups, role assignments, the reports they can run, the data those reports expose. Not what the security matrix says on paper. What the tenant actually resolves.

If that exercise takes you more than thirty minutes, that’s a finding. If the answer surprises you, that’s a bigger finding.

Why it matters this year specifically: the biggest pitches at Rising are experience layers and universal search. One conversational front door across all your systems. Every one of those pitches is a stress test of your security model, because search surfaces whatever access allows, at scale, without the natural obscurity of nobody-knows-where-to-click.

THE BOOTH QUESTION: “Walk me through what happens when your search layer meets a security group that was misconfigured in 2021 and nobody noticed because the data was three menus deep.”

Check 3: Produce the integration number

How many integrations are running against your tenant right now? Not roughly. The number.

If you can’t produce it, you’re in good company (I have walked into organizations that genuinely could not give me a number), but you can’t orchestrate what you can’t inventory, and you definitely can’t budget for it. While you’re counting, mark which delivered integrations have been modified, because under the current Flex Credits policy language, modification changes how they’re metered. That’s not commentary, that’s just what the contract says now, and every new product you evaluate at Rising drinks from the same wallet.

THE BOOTH QUESTION: “What does your integration actually consume, in whose credits, and what happens to that math when we customize it? Show me the meter, not the diagram.”

Check 4: Count the steps in your three highest-volume BPs

Pick the three business processes that run the most: probably hire, job change, and one of your absence or comp flows. Count the steps. Then mark the ones that exist because of a workaround somebody built in 2019 and everyone has been stepping around ever since.

Why: the agent pitch this year is process automation. An agent can’t optimize a process nobody can accurately describe, and it absolutely will automate your workaround at machine speed if you hand it one. Garbage in, garbage out, but faster.

THE BOOTH QUESTION: “Before your agent optimizes this process, how does it find out that step six only exists because our old payroll vendor couldn’t handle mid-period transfers? Because nobody wrote that down.”

Check 5: Run the why coverage

Last one, and if you’ve been reading this newsletter all summer you saw it coming. Take your most load-bearing configuration (the calc field everything depends on, the condition rule with the weird exclusion, the modified integration from check 3) and ask the Bus Factor question: who else knows why this is the way it is?

If the answer is nobody, write the ledger entry now, from memory, dated and flagged as reconstructed. Four lines. Because here’s what happens after Rising: you come home with proposals. Change lands hardest on tenants where the why is undocumented, and you’re about to propose change.

THE BOOTH QUESTION: This one’s not for the vendor. It’s for you, on the flight home, reading your own notes: “does this proposal survive contact with the tenant I actually have, or the tenant I described in the meeting?”

Half a day

Five checks. Call it half a day, generously. What you get back: a ground truth nobody at Rising can hand-wave past, booth questions that end happy-path demos early, and (the quiet benefit) the beginnings of the case for whatever you actually do want to buy, because “our job data is clean, our security model is verified, and here’s our integration inventory” is how funding conversations start.

Clean your room before you shop for robots. Same religion, conference edition.

And yes: I’ll be at Rising. A couple of rooms, a lot of hallways. Details on exactly where in a few weeks, but if you run this audit and want to argue about what you found, come find me. That’s my favorite genre of conversation.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Ground Truth Department

P.S. — I found out during the first round of the mixed doubles at Arthur Ashe. Between matches, the DJ played "Jolene." Twenty thousand people who'd come to watch tennis sang and danced to every word, and nobody had to ask them to. That's as good an epitaph as I've ever heard a stadium PA deliver. She gave away more than she ever took, stayed kind for six decades whether anyone was watching or not, and never once made a fan feel small for being one. Rest now Dolly, and thank you.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

tldr; The resume was never a measure of competence. It was a proxy that survived because faking it took effort, and AI removed the effort from both sides at once. We now screen with AI and act surprised when candidates apply with AI. That is not an ethics problem, it is a prisoner’s dilemma, and you cannot ethics your way out of one.

“We’re drowning in AI-generated resumes. Every application looks perfect and they all read identical.”

Ten minutes later. Same meeting. “Okay, next item. The demo of the new AI screening tool.”

Nobody laughed. Nobody was supposed to.

That meeting is happening everywhere

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to write this as a story about dumb decisions, and it isn’t one. Everyone in that meeting is behaving rationally. Hold that thought, because it’s the whole point.

First, the numbers, because this stopped being a vibe a while ago.

LinkedIn is processing roughly 11,000 job applications per minute, up 45% year over year, per reporting in the New York Times. Recruiters describe a “1,000 applicant threshold” where a single competitive req clears a thousand applications in days. Around 90% of HR managers say their workload has gone up because of the AI application surge.

And here’s the number that should end every “AI is making hiring more efficient” sales call: per SHRM’s benchmarking, time-to-hire and cost-per-hire have both risen for three straight years. Right alongside the rollout of generative AI tooling on both sides of the funnel.

Read that again. Everyone is spending more money to hire more slowly. That is the arms race’s actual output. Not a side effect. The output.

The resume was already dead. AI just called the time.

Here’s the thing: the resume was never a measure of competence. It was a proxy. A lossy, self-reported, unverifiable proxy that survived for one reason only. Faking it took effort.

That friction was the entire security model. Not verification. Not validation. Just the assumption that a person wouldn’t spend forty hours tailoring lies for one application.

AI removed the friction. In both directions, at the same time. Candidates can now generate a keyword-perfect resume for any req in the time it took you to read this paragraph. Employers can generate a plausible-sounding rejection for ten thousand of them before lunch.

So both sides are now optimizing a document that neither side believes.

You cannot out-detect a dead signal. There is no screening tool sophisticated enough to extract truth from an artifact that no longer contains any. The vendors selling you AI to “cut through the noise” are selling noise-cancellation for a room where the signal already left.

We did this to ourselves, and I can prove it with one sentence

Here’s the sentence: We screen candidates with AI, and we are shocked, shocked, when candidates apply with AI.

That’s not an ethics problem. Run the symmetry test on any rule in your hiring process. If a rule doesn’t survive being reversed, it was never a principle. It was just leverage. “AI is fine when we use it to reject you, but cheating when you use it to reach us” fails that test so hard it should come with a laugh track.

And once both sides are armed, the escalation logic takes over. This is a textbook prisoner’s dilemma. Every individual move is rational. The TA leader can’t stop posting where the candidates are. She can’t hand-review a thousand applications with four recruiters. The candidate can’t unilaterally disarm either, because he knows a bot reads his resume before any human does. Each player’s best individual move sustains the worst collective outcome.

And the defining feature of a prisoner’s dilemma is this: you cannot ethics your way out of it. Responsible-use pledges don’t beat incentives. They never have. Which is an awkward thing to say out loud in a year when “Responsible AI” is on every conference agenda. I’ll say it anyway.

The part that actually turns me green

It gets worse, because employers aren’t just trapped in this equilibrium. We fund it.

Every recruiter seat license. Every ATS module. Every screening add-on, every sourcing tool, every “AI-powered talent intelligence platform.” All of it is revenue flowing to an intermediary economy whose business model depends on the resume staying exactly as ambiguous and unverifiable as it is today.

We are paying protection money to the arsonist. And buying our smoke detectors from them too.

(Who profits from the ambiguity, who quietly built the fix and let it die, and what LinkedIn’s own verification badge accidentally confesses: that’s Part 2. Bring a shovel. We’re touring a graveyard.)

The concession, because this newsletter isn’t a whine

If you run TA and you just signed a PO for a screening tool, I’m not calling you a sucker. The volume is real. The four-recruiters-and-a-thousand-apps math is real. The tool genuinely stops your team from drowning this quarter, and this quarter is when your requisitions are due.

That’s what makes it a trap. Traps built out of stupid decisions are easy to escape. Traps built out of rational ones are a different deal entirely.

And one more concession, ahead of Part 2: the research on what actually predicts job performance has been sitting in plain sight for decades. Observed work samples. Structured interviews. The Schmidt-Hunter line of research puts work sample validity miles ahead of resume screening, which doesn’t even crack the top predictors. (Not take-home assignments, before anyone writes in. Those fell to the same tools the resume did. Part 2 deals with that.) The better instrument exists. It’s just slower, and nobody got fired for buying the fast one.

So no, the arms race isn’t a failure of technology. The technology is working great. It’s a failure we’ve collectively decided to subscribe to. Annually. With auto-renew.

Back to that meeting from the top. The person who described the flood and the person who approved the flood-management tool were the same person. That’s not irony.

That’s the system. Working as designed.

— Mike.

Director HR Technology | Battle-Bot referee

Coming soon: the graveyard tour. Everyone who built the fix, including a name you know very well, and why the fix keeps dying.

P.S. Yes, I used AI to help research a piece about AI ruining hiring. The difference is I’m telling you.

tl;dr

• SHRM still sells hope to students (”backpack to boardroom,” $49 a year) and sells fear to the professionals who already paid in (the June SHRM26 keynote: HR faces “extinction”).

• The hope is the acquisition layer. The fear is the retention layer. Which one you get depends on whether your dues have cleared.

• In December a Colorado jury hit SHRM with $11.5M for racial discrimination and retaliation, and the judge let them weigh SHRM against the very expertise it sells. The court refused a retrial this spring. SHRM is appealing.

• I had a concession ready in June: tell the kid to join anyway, the scholarships are real. I’ve spent two months unable to write that sentence.

Years ago, at Temple’s Fox School of Business, SHRM was the cool kids club.

I’m not being cute about it. If you were in the business school and you so much as looked sideways at HR, SHRM was where the serious people were. The chapter had a vibe. The badge meant something. It meant you weren’t just taking a class, you were joining a profession. It meant arrival.

I wanted in. So I got in.

Then I graduated, got busy, got broke, and let it lapse. I drifted first. This was never going to be a story about SHRM leaving me.

Here’s what dragged me back to it. In June, at SHRM26 in Orlando, Johnny Taylor took the main stage in front of video walls full of humanoid robots and told twenty thousand HR professionals that their profession had “lost the plot” and was staring down extinction. The fix, per the keynote, was to rebrand yourself a “Chief Work Officer” and start conducting the robots before they conduct you.

And it occurred to me that I had no idea what SHRM even sells anymore. So I went and looked.

It sells two completely different things. Which one you get depends entirely on whether you’ve paid.

To the professionals in that ballroom, it sells dread. And not for the first time. 2024 was “a storm is coming for HR.” 2025 was “another monster year,” the storm now officially here. 2026 is extinction. Three years of the same escalating weather report from the same stage. If your product is HR’s anxiety, business is booming.

To the kid I used to be, it still sells hope. Aggressively. More than when I was at Fox. There’s a slogan now, “backpack to boardroom.” Student membership runs forty-nine bucks, pitched as an investment in your future. There’s a discounted two-year runway to walk you from student into full paying dues, and schools can bulk-buy memberships ten students at a time. Four hundred grand in scholarships. A mentoring cohort.

Sit with that split for a second. The eighteen-year-old gets arrival. The forty-eight-year-old gets survival. Same organization, same summer, opposite emotions, sorted by tenure.

That’s the actual business. Hope is how they get you in the door. Fear is how they keep you paying once you’re inside. The cool kids club I remember didn’t disappear. It moved to the front of the funnel, where the new customers are.

I could have published a version of that in June. I nearly did.

Then I sat with the other thing.

In December, a Colorado jury found SHRM liable for racial discrimination and retaliation against a former employee named Rehab Mohamed, and set the number at eleven and a half million dollars. Ten of that was punitive, which is a jury’s way of saying this was not a close call. This spring the court refused to give SHRM a do-over. They’re appealing.

Read the details and it gets worse. The internal investigation was run by someone who, by his own testimony, had never conducted a workplace discrimination investigation before. One training session. The organization that sells the certification, the toolkit, the webinar, and the breakout session on how to handle exactly this could not handle exactly this.

And the judge let the jury weigh SHRM against its own reputation. The court ruled SHRM’s standing as the authority on HR could not “reasonably be excluded” from the case. So a jury got to ask the question out loud: does the body that grades everyone else’s homework pass its own? It said no, eleven and a half million times.

Here’s the part that reframed the keynote for me. That verdict landed in December. The retrial was denied in the spring. So when Taylor stood in Orlando in June and told a room full of practitioners they had lost the plot, the house he was speaking from had already been told, by a federal jury, that it had lost it worse.

Now the concession, because a piece like this owes you one.

The scholarships are real money. The mentoring is real. The local chapters and the volunteers who run them are some of the best people in this field, and they had nothing to do with any of the above. A verdict against the national org is not a verdict against the person running your regional chapter for free on a Tuesday night. Keep those straight.

But here’s where I get stuck.

Two months ago I had a paragraph sitting right here that told the twenty-year-old to join anyway. The scholarships are real, I wrote. The network is real. Go get it.

I’ve tried to keep that paragraph. I can’t.

You don’t learn fairness from the house that just paid eleven and a half million dollars for forgetting it. The backpack deserves better than what’s waiting in the boardroom. Go look at other institutions like HRCI.

- Mike.

Director HR Technology | Highly disappointed

P.S. - Help me out, what other places should we send students to learn about the human resources profession?

tldr;

• Two people I respect and myself have three different names for the same job. I assumed we were all saying the same thing. We are not.

• Unicorn is a scarcity claim. Builder is a craft claim. HRIS gang is a solidarity claim. Each one is a different theory of why the work goes unseen.

• The real tell isn't which nickname you use. It's that the nicknames exist at all.

• Settled professions don't need affectionate in-group slang for themselves. Ours grew in the gap our official titles left behind.

• A field that has never had to defend itself as a discipline doesn't get to name itself. That's a problem we're about to feel in a much more expensive way.

Ceci calls us unicorns.

I call us builders.

Dani calls us the HRIS gang.

Three people, same discipline, three different words. I noticed it and thought, well, that's nice. Everyone has their own affectionate shorthand for the same thing. We're all basically saying the same thing.

We're not.

Three names, three arguments

Unicorn is a scarcity claim. You are rare. The market cannot reliably produce you. There is no degree program that outputs a person who can hold configuration, compliance, org design, and a straight face in the same meeting. If you're a unicorn, your value comes from how hard you are to replace. The compliment carries a warning inside it: rare things are also lonely things, and there is no bench behind you.

Builder is a craft claim. That's mine, and I'll own the bias. It says the identity lives in the making. You didn't advise on the thing. You didn't recommend the thing. You built the thing, and then you owned it at 11pm when it broke. Craft claims put the dignity in the work itself rather than in the title above it. That's the appeal. That's also the limitation, because craft claims don't scale into org charts very well.

HRIS gang is a solidarity claim. It's us. And any time there's an us, there's a them, and the them is usually the layer of the org chart that describes your job inaccurately in front of people who can fund it. Solidarity claims are the warmest of the three and the most honest about the emotional reality of the role. They also, quietly, concede something. You don't form a gang when you're already at the table.

Rare. Productive. Embattled.

Pick one and you've picked an entire theory of why this job feels invisible.

The part I actually can't stop thinking about

Here's what got me, though, and it isn't which name is right.

Professions with a settled identity do not need affectionate slang for themselves.

Surgeons are not the scalpel gang (although that is a far cooler name). Structural engineers do not refer to each other as unicorns, and they are genuinely rare and genuinely load-bearing. Actuaries are as niche as it gets and have never once needed a nickname to feel real. Those fields have a name, a body of knowledge, a credential that means something specific, and a shared story about what the work is for.

We have five nicknames and counting.

The nicknames didn't appear because we're clever. They appeared because the official language never described the work. "HRIS Analyst" describes maybe a fifth of what the job is now. "HR Technology" is a category, not a practice. "Systems Administrator" is a 2009 title on a 2026 job. So people built their own vocabulary in the gap, and the vocabulary is affectionate because it had to do emotional work that the titles never did.

The slang is a symptom. It's what grows in a discipline that never got formally defined.

Where the concession goes

Now, I don't want to be precious about this, because the nicknames are load-bearing and they've earned their keep.

"HRIS gang" got a lot of people through month 14, when the SI statement of work ended and the phone stopped getting answered. That kind of belonging is not decoration. It's retention. I've watched people stay in this field because of a group chat.

And there's a fair defense of the naming mess itself. The work genuinely changes every eighteen months. Position management, integrations, security design, and now agent governance. A field moving that fast has a real reason not to have settled on a name yet. That's not entirely a failure. Some of it is just velocity.

Fine. Both things are true.

Why this matters more than it used to

But here's where it stops being a fun vocabulary observation.

I've been writing about how competence gets proven in this industry. Screening systems reading resumes that other systems wrote. Credentials that live on a platform until the platform decides otherwise. The whole apparatus of demonstrating that you can actually do a thing.

You cannot credential a discipline that has not defined itself.

You cannot build a portable, verifiable record of skill in a field where five practitioners give you five different accounts of what the work even is. Every certification we have certifies product knowledge, which is exactly the thing that expires. None of them certify the actual practice, because the practice has no agreed shape. The nickname problem and the credential problem are the same problem wearing different clothes.

That's the bill coming due. Not today. But soon, and from a direction most of us aren't watching.

So

I'm not going to tell you to stop saying unicorn. I like unicorn. Ceci is right that we're rare and she's right that the market can't manufacture us.

And I'm not going to tell you to stop saying HRIS gang for similar reasons. There is and us and them right now, and we need the group emotional support.

I'm saying the reason we have different names is that we've never had to defend this as a discipline. Nobody made us write down what the work is, what good looks like, or what someone should be able to do before they're trusted with a tenant. We got to skip that step.

And a field that has never had to defend itself doesn't get to name itself.

So pick your word. Unicorn, builder, gang, whatever you've got.

Then be ready to say why.

— Mike.

P.S. I want to hear yours. What do you actually call this job when you're talking to someone who does it too, not the title on your badge? Reply and tell me. I'm collecting them, and I'm going back to Ceci and Dani to ask why they picked theirs, because I think the reasons are more interesting than the words.

tldr;

A scenario: an AI recommends a comp range bump, everyone nods, and six months later there’s an equity issue nobody can trace. It’s hypothetical. The gap it exposes is not.

The dangerous tier of AI in your tenant isn’t agents taking action. It’s recommendations that humans rubber-stamp. That’s action with extra steps and the accountability boiled off.

Governance is four named answers before any recommendation stream goes live: who owns the objective, who reviews, how a human challenges it cheaply, and what the rollback is.

Plus one ledger entry every time an accepted recommendation changes a standing number. The system logs the transaction. Somebody has to log the decision.

When it goes wrong, it will not be an AI failure. It will be a governance failure. Those have owners.

Let me give you a Tuesday morning.

Your tenant is running an AI capability that analyzes talent pipeline data and suggests comp range adjustments for open requisitions. This is real functionality. This is the good stuff. This is what the roadmap slide promised.

The agent suggests moving a range from $85K to $105K. Market data, pipeline conversion rates, a tidy confidence figure sitting next to the number.

The recruiter sees it and thinks: cool, the system says so. Adjusts the range.

The hiring manager sees the adjusted range with a system recommendation attached and approves it, because approving things with system recommendations attached is what Tuesday is for.

The comp partner is cc’d and says nothing, because it came from the tool that Finance signed off on last year.

The offer goes out at the new range. The next req in that job family anchors on it. So does the one after that. Every subsequent approver inherits a number that arrived pre-blessed.

Nobody asked: what market data? Which pipeline, over what period? What was the model optimizing for? Time-to-fill, quality of hire, and retention are different targets, they conflict, and the model picked one. Somebody in your organization needs to know which one, and why, and nobody does.

Six months later you have a comp equity issue you cannot trace, because it started with a recommendation that twenty people approved by not questioning it.

The dangerous tier is not the one you think

Everyone’s governance anxiety points at the scary tier: autonomous agents taking action in the tenant. And fine, that tier deserves respect. But it also gets respect. When an agent can execute a business process end to end, people instinctively demand approvals, logging, kill switches. Fear does the governance work for you.

The recommendation tier gets none of that, because recommendations feel safe. A human is “in the loop.” Except here’s what the loop actually looks like: we are phenomenal at deferring to something that sounds confident. Put a percentage next to a number and watch a whole meeting nod like it came down a mountain on a stone tablet. The research on automation bias has been saying this for decades. Your own last vendor demo said it louder.

A recommendation that humans reliably rubber-stamp is an action. It’s an action with extra steps, and the extra steps exist mainly to distribute the accountability until it evaporates. When the agent acts, the agent’s owner answers for it. When twenty people each add a nod, nobody answers for anything. The loop isn’t a control. The loop is a laundering mechanism.

So the question at this tier was never “can the AI do it?” It’s “can the human evaluate it?” And evaluation is a skill your org has to deliberately build and deliberately protect, because the default trajectory of every recommendation stream is toward the Tuesday morning above.

Why you can’t trace it

Notice the specific shape of the damage: not that the number was wrong. The number might have been right! Maybe $105K was correct for that req, that week, that market. The damage is that six months later, nobody can reconstruct why it happened, whether the conditions that justified it still hold, or how far the anchor has drifted through the job family since.

The system logged the transaction. Every click, every approval, timestamped and audit-ready. And none of it helps, because the audit trail records who touched it, not why anyone believed it. If you read the Why Ledger post a few weeks back, you already know where this lands: the what is everywhere and the why is nowhere. An accepted AI recommendation that changes a standing number is exactly the kind of decision that earns a ledger entry. Four lines. What the model claimed, what the human checked, what would have changed the answer. The day the equity question arrives, that entry is the difference between an explanation and an excavation.

Who holds the leash

Here’s the governance model that fits on an index card. Before any AI recommendation stream goes live in your tenant, four questions get answered with names. Not roles. Names.

Who owns the objective? Somebody approved what this model optimizes for, and knows what it trades away. If the answer is “the vendor’s default,” that’s an answer, and it’s a bad one, and now it has an owner anyway.

Who reviews? Not every recommendation, that’s fantasy. A sampling cadence. Somebody pulls ten accepted recommendations a month and interrogates them like they haven’t been pre-blessed.

How does a human say no, cheaply? If challenging the system costs a recruiter an awkward escalation and a reputation for being difficult, nobody will ever challenge the system. The override path has to be cheaper than the nod, or the nod wins every time. This is the question almost every org skips.

What’s the rollback? The model was right in March and wrong in September because the business changed and nobody told the model. Who notices? What’s the drift review? How do you unwind an anchor that’s already propagated through a job family?

Four names, a sampling cadence, a cheap override, a rollback plan, and a ledger entry per accepted change. That’s not a transformation program. That’s a Tuesday afternoon of decisions. You could have it done before the next release drops.

While it’s still hypothetical

Has the comp scenario actually happened? Not in my tenant. Not that I know of, which, if you’ve been paying attention, is exactly the problem: the whole failure mode is designed to be invisible until somebody goes looking.

The agents are coming either way. The recommendations are mostly already here, sitting in your tenant with tidy confidence figures, being nodded at. The dog always sees a squirrel named efficiency, and it just goes. Nobody’s arguing about the dog anymore.

The only open question is the leash, and the best time to answer it is while the scenario is still a scenario. Because the worst time to build a governance model is the Monday morning after you needed one.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Keeper of the Leash

P.S. Justin’s sand volleyball club has exactly one governance rule: when the ball hopper runs low, everybody goes out and shags balls. Last week, nobody did. Not defiance; everyone just figured someone else had it. Play stopped, and a dozen kids stood on the sand looking at each other over an empty hopper until Coach snapped them out of it. It looked like the Spider-Man meme for a second. A rule assigned to everybody is a rule assigned to nobody. Twelve-year-olds learn this in one afternoon. We build recommendation streams on it.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

tldr; The Silver Lake news isn’t the change. It’s the confirmation.

• Reuters reported talks, not a deal. ~$43B valuation, no terms, real chance it never closes.

• Workday already executed the PE playbook itself: 1,750 cuts in Feb 2025, ~400 more this February weighted toward customer support, consumption pricing via Flex Credits, growth decelerating into a margin story.

• Silver Lake wouldn’t arrive to impose discipline. The discipline is already installed. That’s the part worth worrying about.

• What a close actually changes for you: roadmap statements lose their accountability, the community layer gets a return threshold it’s never faced, and anything unmonetizable inside the hold window quietly slides.

• Do three things now: treat roadmap slides as risk items, convert verbal commitments to paper while pre-close leverage is at its peak, and inventory what you own versus what you rent.

• The fair counterargument: the public market has been a bad owner, and architectural work is genuinely easier without a ninety-day clock.

Yesterday afternoon, WDAY got halted.

By the time it reopened it was up double digits (the best single day the stock has ever had) and my phone was doing the thing where three separate practitioner group chats go off at once. Reuters had the story: Silver Lake in talks to take Workday private at something around a $43 billion valuation. Talks. Not a deal. No signed anything.

Within about ninety minutes, LinkedIn had already written the eulogy.

You know the post. You’ve probably drafted a version of it in your head. PE buys software company. PE cuts R&D. PE guts support. PE raises your renewal nine percent and calls it a partnership. It’s a good post. It’s mostly historically defensible.

It is also, in this specific case, about eighteen months late.

Here’s the thing nobody reacting to Thursday wants to sit with. Workday has already been running the private equity playbook. On itself. In public. With a filing requirement.

Count the moves

February 2025: 1,750 roles cut.

February 2026: roughly 400 more, weighted toward customer support and roles described as non-revenue-generating.

Read that phrase again. Non-revenue-generating. That is not SaaS-company language. That is deck language. That is the vocabulary of somebody building a bridge to a margin target.

Flex Credits: consumption pricing bolted onto the AI surface area. Sana. Pipedream. A product story that reorganized itself around one monetizable narrative in about four quarters flat.

Subscription growth decelerating from the high teens toward fourteen percent, with the gap between “growth story” and “profitability story” closed the way that gap always gets closed.

None of that required a sponsor. That was management, reading the same room the sponsor reads.

So when people say Silver Lake is going to come in and cut: cut what, exactly? The support org already took the hit. The consumption model is already installed. The AI-or-nothing product thesis is already the entire roadmap. Silver Lake wouldn’t be arriving to impose discipline. They’d be arriving because the discipline is already there, the multiple compressed anyway, and that is a very attractive combination if you have $43 billion and a ten-year clock.

The scary version isn’t what changes. It’s what doesn’t have to.

That’s the reframe.

We’ve been trained to fear the moment of acquisition (the announcement, the integration memo, the new logo on the support portal). But in situations like this, the damage lands in the two years before the deal, when a public company starts quietly optimizing itself into something buyable.

We watched that happen. Most of us filed a ticket during it.

What a close would actually change is narrower, and worse in a quieter way.

Roadmap commitments stop being commitments. Not because anyone’s lying: Because the disclosure obligations that made a forward-looking statement semi-accountable disappear with the ticker. Everything your AE showed you in a sales cycle becomes, formally, a nice conversation you had.

The unmonetizable stuff gets a review it has never had. The community layer (RUGs, Customer Sharing, the parts of Rising that aren’t a sales motion, the advisory structures) has never been asked to justify itself against a return threshold, because it never had to. Under a sponsor with a hold period, everything gets asked. Community is the easiest line item in the world to defend philosophically and the hardest one to defend in a model.

Anything that can’t monetize inside the hold window dies quietly. Not killed. Deprioritized. Sequenced. Moved to future consideration. You’ll recognize the language when you see it, because you’ve seen it.

What you actually do about it on Monday.

Stop treating roadmap slides as planning inputs. If a project plan of yours has a dependency on functionality that is currently a screenshot from Rising, that dependency is a risk item now. Write it down as one, with an owner and a date.

Get what you were promised onto paper while the leverage is good. Right now Workday needs clean quarters, clean retention, and zero customer noise more than it has in a decade. That is exactly when a renewal conversation goes your way. If you have an ask (pricing protection, a Flex Credits floor, a written delivery commitment) the window is open, and it will not stay open through a close.

Inventory what you own versus what you rent. Every custom integration, every calculated field nobody documented, every Studio job with one person’s name on it. If the vendor relationship gets more transactional, internal capability is the only asset you hold that doesn’t reprice.

Where the doom take is wrong

The “PE ruins everything” version is lazy in one specific way, and I’d rather name it than pretend it isn’t there.

Silver Lake is not a strip-and-flip shop. Dell, EA, Endeavor: those are long-hold, operationally involved bets, not SolarWinds-style margin surgery. And there is a real argument that the public market has been an actively bad owner for Workday: punished it for investing in AI, punished it for decelerating, punished it for not being an AI-native startup that didn’t exist in 2005, and left the stock forty percent off its peak while management did roughly the right things.

Multi-year architectural work is genuinely easier without an earnings call every ninety days. That’s not spin, and if you’ve ever watched a quarter-end kill a good idea inside your own shop, you already know it’s true.

The question isn’t whether private ownership could fund the rebuild. It’s whether it would, or whether it goes where that freedom usually goes.

Based on the last eighteen months, place your bets.

And it might not happen at all

Worth saying plainly, because the internet skipped this part on the way to the eulogy: these are talks. Reuters said talks. A deal at this size, at this valuation, with this much financing to assemble, has a real chance of never happening. Half the takes you read this week will be about an event that never occurs.

But an eighteen percent pop on a rumor is its own data point.

The market just told you what it thinks Workday is worth the moment it stops having to explain itself.

That’s the news.

- Mike.

Director HR Technology | Not an Undertaker

P.S. - If this thing signs before Rising, that conference is going to be the strangest one we’ve had in years. Half the sessions built around a roadmap, half the hallway conversations quietly asking whether the roadmap survives. I’ll be there either way. Come find me, and bring the version of your opinion you wouldn’t post.

tldr; I counted every answer to “what do you call yourself.” The most common one wasn’t a title. It was an if-statement.

• Four in ten gave an audience-conditional answer: “if they’re in HR I say X, if not I say Y”

• Two in ten used a straight functional title, mostly the senior folks

• One in ten for fixer language, one in ten for payroll-outcome framing

• One in seven were pure bit

• A handful couldn’t answer at all, and meant it

• The router you built works great on humans. It doesn’t work on agents.

Two weeks ago I asked what you call yourself. I expected a laugh and maybe twenty comments.

I got 91, and then I got numbers, which is the part nobody warned me about. Because once you have data, you have to stop telling the funny version of the story and start telling the true one.

So I counted. Here’s what’s actually in there.

The finding I didn’t expect

The single biggest group (call it four in ten of you) didn’t give me a title at all. They gave me a conditional statement.

“If they’re in HR, I say X. If they’re not, I say Y.” Over and over, with the variables swapped: IT for HR, HR for IT, “computers” for family, “accounting” at parties. Amélie Marzin-Germain runs three different answers depending on who’s in the room. Sakshi Vaid Srivastava’s family still thinks she “fixes people’s computers.” Aleefa Shakeel gets it from both directions (IT according to HR, HR according to IT) in the same sentence.

So essentially, you’ve built a small router that takes “audience” as input and returns “acceptable answer” as output, and you run it so fast you don’t notice you’re doing it anymore.

Nobody self-reported this as a system. Everybody described it as an inconvenience.

The rest of the tally

Straight functional titles, stated with no hedge (HRIS Manager, HR Systems Partner, HRIS Systems Strategist) came in around two in ten. I’m guessing these are mostly the senior, established folks. Enough tenure that the confusion has calcified into a title and nobody argues with it anymore.

Fixer language (”the one who fixes it when it breaks,” Aldair Maldonado’s “mechanic you bring the car to”) was about one in ten. Smaller than I expected, given it’s the answer that gets the most reactions when someone says it. High comedy, lower incidence. People love reading it more than they use it.

Payroll-outcome framing (”I make sure you get paid,” Charlie Spitzer’s “I pay people and make sure they don’t die without benefits” pure gold, btw) another one in ten, roughly. This one’s interesting because it’s the only category that skips the org chart entirely and answers in terms of what the person on the other end actually gets. No mention of HR, IT, or Workday. Just the outcome.

Pure bit (no real answer, just the joke) landed around one in seven. Cliff Jurkiewicz went with “I am Spartacus.” (although it was less bit, and more commentary on our profession once you toured his “rabbit hole”). Shawn Latta and Adam Calvert both reached for Friends independently (transponster, Chandler Bing - funny how it all circles around the dude who had a job that no one can name). Sara Ayers gave two: “System Therapist” and “Urgent Chaos Coordinator.” Small, specific note: three different people, unprompted, reached for a therapist metaphor. Diane G., Sara Ayers, and Laura Horton’s “Tenant Therapist” all landed on the same idea from different directions. Make of that what you will. I have thoughts. They’re for a different issue.

And then there’s the smallest group, which is also the most important one. A handful of you didn’t answer the question at all. Paulo Poinha’s response was basically “what am I, actually” (asked in earnest, not as a bit). That’s someone hitting the actual wall the first issue was about, in real time, in a comment box.

What this does to the original argument

The first issue said: we name ourselves after tools or failure modes because we’ve never written down our scope.

The tally sharpens that. The biggest group of you didn’t even get as far as picking a wrong name: you built an audience-detection system instead, and you did it so quietly you don’t count it as an answer. That’s a more sophisticated coping mechanism than “I’m a Workday admin,” and it’s also a more expensive one, because a router has no scope by design. It’s not supposed to have one. It’s built to say whatever gets a nod back.

Here’s the fair complication, and it matters: for a lot of you, the router isn’t a failure: it’s a translation skill you’ve built on purpose, and it’s genuinely useful when you’re the only person in the room who can talk to both HR and IT without an interpreter. I’m not telling you to stop doing it. Codeswitching between departments is a real skill, not a symptom.

The problem isn’t the router. It’s using the router as a substitute for ever writing the scope down anywhere. You can keep three audience-specific answers for cocktail parties and still have one written answer for the org chart. Most of you have the first. Almost none of you have the second.

The one answer the router can’t return

Here’s what bothers me, now that I’ve sat with these numbers for two weeks.

The router works. That’s the problem. It works well enough that nobody in this function has ever been forced to answer the question once, in writing, in a form that holds for every audience.

So let me put a fixed return value on the table, and you can tell me I’m wrong in the comments.

Finance doesn’t run a router. Finance owns the ledger. There’s a book, the book is authoritative, and every downstream number in the company resolves back to it. Nobody asks Finance what they do, because everybody already knows what Finance holds.

We hold one too. Not “HR data.” Not “the tenant.” The authoritative definition of how work is structured: what a job is, what a position is, who reports to whom, when someone becomes a worker and when they stop being one. Every headcount number Finance reports, every dollar payroll moves, every access decision security enforces, resolves back to a record somebody in this function configured.

Same species as Finance’s ledger. Different subject.

And it’s the same sentence in every room. HR, IT, your CFO, your aunt at Thanksgiving. It needs no audience check, which is exactly why your router was never built to return it.

I read a manifesto last month from a services firm. Five points on what this function should become. Point one hands us the AI and agent strategy outright (not IT, not the vendor, us).

Read it twice and the interesting part isn’t the grant. It’s that they had to address it to “HRIS.” A system acronym. People arguing that we should own the most consequential decision in the building, and still no word for the people who’d own it.

They weren’t being careless. There isn’t one.

What I’d do with this Monday

Take the version of your answer you already use with people who understand the domain: not the family-friendly one, the real one. Write it down as a sentence with a verb and an owner: not “I do the Workday thing” but “I own [decision], I configure [system boundary], I’m accountable when [specific failure].”

That’s the sentence from the last issue’s exercise. Turns out most of you already have the raw material for it sitting in your own comment history. You just haven’t been asked to write the serious version down in one place.

Close

Ninety-one (and still counting) answers, and the most common one wasn’t a title. It was an if-statement.

The router is a good piece of engineering. Fast, accurate, and it’s kept this function employable through twenty years of nobody knowing where to file us.

It has one hard limitation. It only runs when a human asks.

Agents don’t ask. They read the record and act on it, at speed, without checking who’s in the room. The thing we never wrote down is about to be consumed by readers who can’t be charmed into a nod.

Stop naming yourself after the room. Start naming yourself after the record.

-Mike

Director HR Technology | Career Actuary

P.S. After I finished counting, I asked Justin what I do for work. No setup, no context. Just asked him at the table.

“You make sure people get paid right.”

One in ten of you gave that answer. He gave it in about two seconds, without checking who was in the room, because nobody’s taught him yet that there’s an org chart to hedge around.

Charlie Spitzer and a seventh grader, same category.

Fixed return value. No router required.

tldr;

The CEO of OpenAI says the singularity is here. I asked an AI, and it disagreed. So does my seventh grader.

Transformation never arrives as a rupture. It arrives as Tuesdays that accumulate (see: 33 years from Dr. Sbaitso to now, and the entire cloud era).

• Anyone selling you a "moment" is selling. The honest question isn't "when does it arrive," it's "what does this touch."

• Your governance backlog isn't competing with your AI strategy. It is your AI strategy.

• Homework for the quarter: run one AI feature in sandbox, break it on purpose, write down where it broke.

On Saturday, the CEO of OpenAI announced that humanity has entered the singularity.

He said this on a podcast, which feels right. The most consequential threshold in human history, the moment machines surpass their makers, revealed between ad reads.

So I did the obvious thing. I asked an AI whether it was true.

It said no.

Not a hedge. Not a "well, it depends on your definition." It told me (and I'm paraphrasing only slightly) that it can't improve itself, can't remember yesterday without a filing system bolted to its side, and that there's an entire building full of humans employed specifically to keep it pointed in the right direction. Its exact framing was "that's a powerful tool, not an event horizon."

The machine was more skeptical of the machine than the man selling the machine. Which is a bit like your realtor telling you the house is overpriced. You should probably listen, because that opinion is working against its own interests.

And yes, this was a real conversation. I did not invent a sassy robot for narrative convenience. (The robot came pre-sassed.)

The 33-year "moment"

My problem with singularity talk isn't that the technology is unimpressive. It's very impressive. My problem is the shape of the claim.

The singularity is a rupture story. A before and an after. One day the machines can't, the next day they can, and everything downstream is unrecognizable. It's a great structure for a movie trailer and a terrible description of how technology has ever actually arrived.

I know this because I've been watching this particular movie since the opening credits. In the early '90s I installed a Sound Blaster card, and bundled with it came a program called Dr. Sbaitso, a "psychologist" that talked in a flat robot voice and mostly repeated your own words back as questions. ("WHY DO YOU FEEL THAT WAY.") If you cursed at it enough, it threw a parity error and rebooted. I ran that experiment. Repeatedly. For science (Quick aside: Yes, I know ELIZA was first).

(Full disclosure: when I brought this up with the AI, I called it "Dr. Sebago." The AI corrected me, then observed that Dr. Sebago sounds like Dr. Sbaitso retired to Maine to sell boat shoes. So, let's review: The program from 1992 could not remember the sentence I had just typed. The program from 2026 fact-checked a memory I'd been mangling for three decades and roasted me about deck footwear in the same reply. That's the curve. I am living on it, and apparently so is my dignity.)

Dr. Sbaitso to the thing that argued with me this weekend is roughly 33 years. The jump is staggering. But notice what it wasn't: a moment. There was no rupture, no threshold, no day the sirens went off. There was a long, boring grind of incremental progress that only looks like magic when you compress three decades into a before-and-after slide.

There was no lunch table moment. There was just Tuesday. Over and over. For thirty-three years.

The kid who never said wow

Here's the part that actually convinced me, and it happened in my own kitchen.

I mentioned to Justin (12, seventh grade, currently running a 3D printing operation out of my basement with the margins of a small cartel) that the CEO of OpenAI says we've entered the singularity.

He looked up from slicing a print file and said, "What's a singularity?"

I explained. Machines smarter than people. The future becoming unpredictable. The thing every sci-fi movie warned us about.

He shrugged and said, "Isn't that just... what AI does?" And went back to his print file.

That shrug is the whole argument. Justin has used AI for homework help since he was ten. To him it's an appliance, somewhere between the microwave and the label maker in the household hierarchy of marvels. The rupture story requires a before, and Justin doesn't have one. You cannot sell "the moment everything changed" to someone for whom it was always Tuesday.

The singularity, it turns out, is a nostalgia product. It's only for sale to people old enough to remember cursing at Dr. Sbaitso.

You've already lived this movie

And if you work in the Workday ecosystem, you've lived it twice, because you remember when "the cloud" was going to be a moment.

Remember that? The revolution. The rupture…The day on-prem died… Bueller? Bueller?

What it actually was: a decade of migrations. Tenant by tenant, integration by integration, one white-knuckle cutover weekend at a time. The cloud revolution absolutely happened, and not one person who lived through it can point to the day. It arrived as a thousand Saturdays in a conference room with cold pizza, and by the time the analysts declared it complete, you'd been living in it for years.

AI in your tenant will arrive exactly the same way. No singularity release. No Monday morning where the platform has transcended. A feature here, an agent there, a capability quietly folded into a business process you already own. Tuesdays. Accumulating.

Which means the rupture framing isn't just wrong, it's operationally wrong. It trains you to wait for an announcement that will never come, instead of managing a curve you are already standing on.

What the curve means on Monday

Three things, practically.

• One: anyone selling you a moment is selling. When a roadmap slide promises transformation as an event (a version, a launch date, a keynote reveal with dramatic lighting), that's a marketing shape, not a technology shape. The honest question is never "when does it arrive." It's "what does this touch." Which data. Which security groups. Which business processes. Moments are for stages. Curves are for architects.

• Two: the boring stuff is the AI strategy. Every AI capability that lands in your tenant lands on something. Your data quality. Your security model. Your business process hygiene. Ship an AI feature into a tenant where the supervisory org is held together with duct tape and wishful thinking, and you will get duct-tape-and-wishful-thinking answers, delivered confidently and at scale. Your unglamorous governance backlog is not competing with your AI strategy. It is your AI strategy.

• Three: gradual doesn't mean ignorable. The trap on the other side. Because there's no rupture, it's tempting to conclude nothing is happening. But 33 years of Tuesdays turned Dr. Sbaitso into something I genuinely can't fully explain, and the people who dismissed the curve in 2023 are already explaining gaps in their resumes. Pick one concrete thing this quarter. Run an AI feature in sandbox. Break it on purpose. Write down where it broke. That's the whole assignment.

Where Altman has a point

Fairness requires this: he's not entirely wrong. He's wrong about the shape.

The compounding is real. And here's the uncomfortable part. Me, spending a Saturday casually debating philosophy with a machine and losing on points? That would have sounded exactly like the singularity to 1994 me, sitting in front of Dr. Sbaitso, waiting for the parity error.

The goalposts move because the middle of a curve never feels like the middle. Every generation of "wow" becomes table stakes in about eighteen months, and then we forget we ever said wow. Altman is looking at that curve and calling it a moment. I get the temptation. It's just not how anyone will actually experience it.

We'll experience it the way Justin already does. As an appliance. As a Tuesday.

The close

So no, the singularity has not arrived, and you don't have to take my word for it. Take the AI's. (Or my seventh grader's. They agree, which should terrify Sam Altman more than anything.)

But something is arriving, at the speed it always arrives: gradually, unevenly, and directly on top of whatever foundation you've built.

The singularity won't be announced on a podcast. It'll show up in your tenant on a Tuesday, disguised as a feature release. Be ready for that one.

— Mike

Director HR Technology | Still looking for the parity error

P.S. Yes, I went looking for a working copy of Dr. Sbaitso, because journalism. It's on the Internet Archive, running in a browser-based DOS emulator, which means a 1992 chatbot is currently enjoying better uptime than several enterprise systems I could name. I asked it about the singularity. It asked me why I feel that way. Thirty-three years on, still undefeated.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

Fifty-five of you answered. Nobody agreed.

HRIS person. Workday admin. HR systems analyst. HR Tech. People Systems. Business systems. A few “depends who’s asking.” One of you said “professional translator,” which is the closest anybody got.

Twenty years in, and the most specific work in the building is done by people who can’t finish the sentence “I’m the—”

Here’s what I’ve been chewing on since. This isn’t a branding problem. It’s a scoping problem wearing a branding costume.

Every other function names itself by what it owns

Finance owns the ledger. Legal owns risk. Security owns the perimeter. Ask any of them what they do and you get a noun: a thing they’re accountable for, with a boundary around it.

Now listen to how we do it.

“Workday admin.” Named after a tool.

“HRIS analyst.” Named after a category of tool.

“I’m the one who fixes it when it breaks.” Named after a failure mode.

We name ourselves after the systems we operate or the disasters we absorb. Not one of those is a scope. They’re descriptions of proximity. I am near the thing. When the thing is bad, I am nearer.

The vendor-name trap

If your title is “Workday admin,” your professional identity is leased from someone else’s marketing department.

I’ve said before that vendor branding has a shelf life of about nine months, and I’ll keep saying it. Watch it happen in real time: Illuminate shipped with a naming architecture (Accelerate, Assist, Transform) that got quietly folded into Sana-based branding before most of us finished updating our slide decks. If you’d built your headline around any of those words, you’d be doing maintenance on your own identity right now.

The architecture is permanent. The branding is weather.

That logic runs all the way down to your title. Name yourself after a product and you inherit its release cycle. Name yourself after what you govern and you’re durable across a re-platform, an acquisition, and whatever the next three keynotes decide to call the same four ideas.

“I fix it when it breaks” is the most honest answer and the most expensive one

I love that answer. Every one of us has been that person at 11pm on a payroll weekend.

But it describes a service level, not a scope. And you cannot budget for a service level nobody ever wrote down.

That’s how a team of four ends up holding an entire ecosystem that Finance reads as one line item: because “the Workday thing” has never been described in terms of the decisions it controls. Only in terms of what it costs when it stops.

No name → no scope → no decision rights

This is the part that actually matters, and it’s why I’m not treating a poll about job titles as a bit.

A function with no stated scope doesn’t get decision rights. It gets consulted. There’s a difference, and you’ve felt it: you were in the meeting, you raised the concern, they thanked you, and the decision went the other way. You were the input. Somebody else was the owner.

Then it breaks in month fourteen and you get named after that, too.

Scope isn’t a title. Scope is a written answer to one question: which decisions cannot be made without me, and which ones are not mine to make.

Where the ambiguity is real

Fair concession, this job genuinely spans: Configuration, architecture, vendor management, change strategy, and occasionally light therapy. Any title narrow enough to be precise would be too narrow to be true.

And I know people who’ve worked the fuzziness on purpose. The undefined lane let them grow into finance systems, into analytics, into whole org design conversations that a clean title would have fenced off. That’s not nothing. Ambiguity has a growth setting.

But there’s a difference between choosing ambiguity and inheriting it. Most of us inherited it.

What I’d actually do Monday

Not fix your LinkedIn headline. That’s the cosmetic version.

Write the decision-rights list. One page, two columns. Column one: decisions that require my sign-off. Column two: decisions where I’m an input.

Then take it to your leader and get them to argue with it. Their edits are the whole point: Every line they move from column one to column two is a place you thought you had authority and didn’t. Better to find that out over coffee than in a postmortem.

Do that and the title question gets easy. You stop needing a name for what you touch, because you finally have one for what you hold.

Close

Fifty-five answers and no consensus isn’t a profession without a name.

It’s a profession that’s been describing where it stands instead of what it owns.

Stop naming yourself after the system. Start naming yourself after the decision.

tldr;

Nobody in this field chose it. We got matched to it, usually by a single keyword on a job posting.

Mine was SQL, in 2004. Within a couple of years I had upgraded an entire HRIS by myself, wired physical time clocks, and shipped plain-language HR analytics before the iPhone existed.

The sideways door isn’t random. It selects for exactly the people this work needs.

Also: the “revolutionary” conversational analytics your vendor demoed last quarter? I ran it in the mid-2000s. It was called EasyAsk. Hold that thought.

Reply with your origin story. I read every one.

In 2004 I was a temp.

SQL work for an e-discovery client. Paid the bills. Zero long-term plan, because I was in my twenties and the long-term plan was “keep having a job.”

Then I saw a posting. Somebody wanted strong SQL skills for something called an HRIS Specialist role.

I want to be honest about the decision process here. I did not feel a calling toward human resources technology. I did not have a vision of enterprise systems. I went to college for finance. I recognized one keyword. I applied because the ad said SQL and I spoke SQL. That’s the whole story. That’s everyone’s whole story.

I got the job (mainly because at the time, I was volunteering on a Linux project called MythTV and shipping code, and of course, SQL). And then the job got interesting.

Purple squirrel, first rodeo

If you’ve been in this field a while you know the term “purple squirrel”: the candidate who impossibly matches every requirement at once. Recruiters hunt them for years and never find one.

Here’s what nobody tells you: purple squirrels aren’t found. They’re manufactured, on the job, by small teams with big systems and no budget for specialists. You don’t match every requirement. You become every requirement, one emergency at a time.

At that first HRIS job I ended up doing everything, because there was nobody else to do it. I upgraded the HRIS itself (Personnel Data Systems) from an aging Windows 95 application to their web-based platform. Alone. Integrations included (lots of DTS and stored procedure work). I wired up Kronos time clocks, and I mean physically wired, as in “why is the HRIS guy holding a drill.”

And now the part that’s going to sound made up: I shipped conversational HR analytics before the iPhone existed.

I stood up an analytics package that let regular humans ask HR analytics questions in “plain language”. Type “what’s our headcount” in English, get an answer from the HR data. No report writer. No training class. Just ask.

The tool was called EasyAsk (holy cannoli, It's still around too). This was the mid-2000s. Flip phones. The natural-language query was “translated” (i.e. — mapped to SQL in the backend), ran against the HRIS and it worked, (mostly), which is roughly the same reliability rate as the version being demoed to your executives right now.

I need this audience to absorb that for a second.

“Ask your HR data questions in plain English” is the marquee demo of the 2026 AI era. Every vendor keynote. Every analyst deck. And a temp-turned-HRIS-guy was running it against a client-server HR system two decades ago, back when the revolutionary technology was a BlackBerry.

The technology underneath is different now, and genuinely better. But the lesson stands, and it’s the same lesson this newsletter beats weekly: the demo is never the hard part. The hard part in 2006 was the same as the hard part today. Whether the data underneath could survive being asked a question (and the mapping. Always with the mapping).

Everything old is new again. The people who’ve been here since the old version can tell you exactly where the new version is going to hurt.

The industry doesn’t let go

In 2008 the financial crisis (and a poorly timed back injury) did to me what it did to a lot of people. Laid off.

And here’s the detail I love in hindsight: two weeks after the layoff, I went to work for PDS. The company whose software I’d spent 4 years upgrading and wiring and interrogating from the customer side.

I didn’t escape the field during the worst job market of my lifetime. The field just moved me to the other side of the software. That’s the thing about HRIS: you don’t leave. The door only opens inward.

Twenty-plus years later I’ve been on the customer side, the vendor side, the implementation side, and whatever side “writes a newsletter about it” is. Every move traceable to one keyword on a job ad in 2004.

The sideways door is the point

There’s a podcast in our world, the HRIS Careers podcast, whose whole tagline is that no one gets into HRIS on purpose, but it sure is interesting to find out how they did. It’s the truest sentence anyone has said about this profession, and every origin story I’ve ever heard confirms it.

The person who “knew where the Access database lived.” The HR generalist who was “good with computers” and got handed the ATS. The payroll analyst who fixed one integration and was never allowed to do anything else again. The temp who knew SQL.

Nobody chose this. We got chosen, by proximity and competence, one weird problem at a time.

And here’s what I’ve come to believe about that: the sideways door isn’t a bug in how this profession staffs itself. It’s Ollivander’s shop (strap in Harry Potter fans).

The wand chooses the wizard. You walk in assuming you’re the customer, you wave a few sticks around, things explode, and then the right one finds you. And the old man’s explanation for why is the honest part: it’s not always clear. Not your transcript. Not your five-year plan. Something in the wiring.

That’s how this field recruits. Nobody picks HRIS off a shelf. The temp who knew SQL, the generalist who was good with computers, the payroll analyst who fixed one integration and was never allowed to do anything else again: the wand found every one of us, usually mid-explosion.

(Our ecosystem does contain one actual practicing wizard, the Workday Extend Archmage himself, Chris Humphrey, and I trust he’ll certify this framing as canon. The robes work because the magic is real.)

It only admits a specific kind of person. Someone curious enough to say yes to a job they can’t define. Someone unafraid of a system everyone else is afraid of. Someone who can stand between IT and HR and Finance and translate, all day, without belonging fully to any of them.

You can’t hire for that with a requisition. The wand has to choose you.

So no, we’re not failed IT people, and we’re not technical HR people, whatever that means. We’re the people who said yes to the weird job. Twenty years in, I’ve decided that’s not an accident to be embarrassed about. It’s the credential.

How’d you get in? Reply and tell me. I read every origin story, and I’ve never once heard a boring one.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Purple Squirrel, First Rodeo

P.S. I told Justin I was writing about how nobody plans to end up in my field. He pointed out that he didn’t plan Justin’s 3D Lab either: “I just kept insisting you buy printers.” So there it is. Twenty years in HR Technology and the door still only opens sideways, even in my own basement.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

No bullets today. Read the whole thing.

A few months back I published a breakdown of Workday's Flex Credits. The metered pricing. The grace period nobody reads correctly. The setup most teams still have not finished.

Practitioner stuff. The kind of thing I write so the people who build this for a living can walk into a budget meeting and not get caught flat.

It was neutral. Deliberately so. I do not sell Workday. I do not sell against Workday. I take the architecture apart and tell you what it does.

Then a reader forwarded me a sales email. From an account executive at a Workday competitor, going out to prospects.

And there, pasted into the pitch, was my work.

Not quoted. Lifted.

My headline, word for word. My subtitle, word for word. My summary. My grace period section, sentence for sentence. Dropped into sales material and aimed at buyers, to scare them off a platform I had analyzed without taking a side.

Neutral analysis went in one end. FUD came out the other.

And the targets were people on tight budgets, handed fear dressed up as my analysis and told to think twice. That is who it was built to spook.

Precision is the whole job

Whole passages, copied. Not a link with a pull quote. Identical down to the punctuation. I have the side by side.

They did not ask. They did not license it. They took a piece written to be vendor neutral and reframed it as a reason to fear one specific vendor.

Here is the part that got me. They did not even use my name. In the email I am "someone." I am "this person." They wanted the credibility of the analysis without the inconvenience of the byline.

They took the work and left the author in the parking lot.

I wrote about a pricing model. They turned it into a weapon. The fear was not in my work. They added it.

This was never really about the copyright

The copyright is real, and there are ways to handle that. I used them. Quietly. That part is done.

But the bigger point is bigger than one lifted article, and it belongs to all of you.

Independent practitioner writing only has value because it is independent. The entire reason you read a breakdown from someone like me instead of a vendor deck is that I am not running a play. The moment a vendor can strip-mine that work and bolt it onto a sales narrative, every independent voice in this space is worth a little less. Yours included.

Citation is a contract. You can quote me. You can argue with me. You can tell your customers I got it wrong.

What you cannot do is take my name off the analysis, take the neutrality out of it, and resell it as the case for your product.

That is not citation. That is laundering.

Watch your own bylines.

Your analysis is an asset. Treat it like one.

If a vendor ever quietly decides your independence is theirs to spend, notice it. Keep the evidence. Handle it. Quietly if you can, loudly if you have to.

I did not name the vendor here. Not because it is a secret, but because the lesson travels further than the grudge. Today it was my article. Tomorrow it is yours, and you find out from a forwarded email like I did.

I write about architecture over branding because branding has a shelf life and the architecture is permanent.

Turns out the same is true for a byline.

— Mike

P.S. I ran this past Justin, my in-house UX tester and resident seventh grader. Gave him the one-sentence version: someone copied my writing word for word, dropped it into their own thing, and never said it was mine.

He did not look up from his phone. "That's plagiarism. That's an automatic zero."

They teach this in elementary school. There is a rubric. There are consequences. My kid, who lost his volleyball shorts twice last month, knows you cite your sources.

One of us had a legal department. The other had a homework folder. Only one of them needed this explained.

tldr;

Two weeks ago the Bus Factor post said: you documented the what, and the why is still in your head. This is where the why goes instead.

Not a wiki. Not a documentation project. A ledger: four lines per decision, three minutes, written the day the decision happens.

The test for what earns an entry: if you’d have to explain it twice, it’s an entry.

The format: Date. Decision. Why. What we rejected. (Landmine, optional but recommended.)

The first copy of the why goes in the object’s own notes field (yes, the ones sitting blank in your tenant right now). The ledger is the commit log.

The audience is Month-14 you, audit-season you, your eventual successor, and the AI you will one day point at your tenant. In roughly that order.

I was dealing with an issue a few years ago that I want you to sit with: why does the offer approval route through a comp partner when the requisition is flagged remote? An HR Partner complained that it was a “useless routing step”.

Nobody knew.

So we did what every HRIS team does. Archaeology. Dug through old tickets. Searched Temas back three years. Found a thread that referenced a meeting that referenced a decision made by someone who left in 2019 (no notes, obviously, the meeting was the notes).

And then we did the other thing every HRIS team does. We kept the step. Because deleting a rule you don’t understand is scarier than living with one you can’t explain.

That’s how tenants calcify. Not through bad decisions. Through good decisions that outlived their reasons.

You cannot out-document the tenant

I know what the responsible voice in your head said after you ran the Bus Factor audit. “We need a documentation initiative.” Runbooks. A config workbook refresh. A wiki with a taxonomy and an owner and a quarterly review cadence.

Don’t.

I said it two weeks ago and I’ll say it harder now: a wiki nobody reads is just guilt with a URL. What-documentation is a photograph of a moving system. It’s stale the first time a release touches the config, which is to say, immediately. You will spend forty hours building it, feel wonderful for a month, and then it will depreciate in exactly the way the knowledge in your head does, except now there are two things rotting instead of one.

The problem was never the what. The tenant will tell anyone the what (that’s what a tenant is). The thing that dies when someone leaves is the why. And the why has a property that the what doesn’t:

The why never changes.

A decision happened once, on a specific day, for specific reasons, with specific alternatives on the table. That’s history. History doesn’t go stale. Which means you don’t document the system (unwinnable). You document the decisions (four lines, done forever).

The ledger

Here’s the entire practice. A running log, one place, append-only. Every entry:

DATE:      2026-03-11

DECISION: Comp eligibility rule excludes interns

WHY: 2019 acquisition brought 400 interns on a stipend structure that breaks the merit matrix

REJECTED:  Separate comp plan (Finance refused the headcount)

LANDMINE:  The intern flag feeds the benefits eligibility integration. Touch one, test the other.

That’s it. That entry takes three minutes to write and it just answered every question your successor, your auditor, and your own confused future self will ever ask about that rule. The Bus Factor post used this exact example as the knowledge trapped in your head. Now it’s trapped in a text file instead. Progress.

What earns an entry? Simple test: if you’d have to explain it twice, it’s an entry. The weird BP step. The security group shaped like a question mark. The integration you modified instead of replaced with an orchestration. The report you built because the delivered one lies. Anything where the config makes sense only if you were in the room.

Write it where the body is buried

Workday gave you a notes field on almost everything. Business process definitions have comments. Calc fields have descriptions. Condition rules, custom reports, integrations, security groups. Copious fields, shipped with the product, sitting blank in every tenant I have ever touched.

So the first copy of the why goes on the object itself. Paste the WHY line (dated) straight into the calc field description, the BP comment, the condition rule notes. Your successor doesn’t find it by knowing your ledger exists. They find it by opening the thing that confused them, which is the only place you can guarantee they’ll look.

Engineers figured this out fifty years ago: comments live in the code, history lives in the commit log. The note on the object is the comment. The ledger is the commit log. You want both, and here’s why the ledger doesn’t collapse into the notes fields:

Notes hold current state. People overwrite them. The reversals, the rejected alternatives, the story of how you got here: that’s the log’s job.

Cross-object decisions are homeless. The offer-routing decision touches a BP, an integration, and a security group. Which object gets the note? All three get a pointer. The decision itself lives in the ledger.

You can’t grep the tenant. Aggregating every comment field across every object type into one view is not a delivered experience. Your ledger is searchable today, from your phone, in one keystroke.

And this is where the robot argument gets teeth. When you eventually point an AI at your tenant, a dated why sitting in the object’s own description is context the model cannot miss. You’re not just keeping receipts anymore. You’re annotating the substrate.

The rules that keep it alive

Every documentation initiative you’ve ever watched die was killed by ceremony. So the ledger has exactly five rules, and four of them are about staying small.

Write it the day the decision happens. The why has a half-life of about a week. By Friday it’s fuzzy. By month three it’s vibes. By month fourteen it’s archaeology.

Two copies, both cheap. The why goes on the object, dated. The full entry goes in the ledger, which lives in one place (a doc, a channel, a text file; searchable beats structured). Thirty extra seconds. Worth it every time.

Three minutes, max. If an entry takes longer, you’re writing documentation again. Stop. Four lines. If it takes more than three minutes you will quit by August, and I’d rather have a scrappy ledger you keep than a beautiful one you abandoned.

No template committee. The moment this gets a SharePoint taxonomy, a review workflow, and a governance owner, it dies. It’s a ledger, not a program. Protect it from process the way you’d protect anything you actually need.

Append, don’t edit. When a decision gets reversed, that’s a new entry with its own why. Now you have the one thing no config workbook on earth contains: the story of how you got here.

Who you’re actually writing it for

Month-14 you. Seena Mojahedi’s framing from the last post: the SI leaves what-documentation because that’s what the SOW pays for, and around month fourteen something changes that nobody internal has the why for. The ledger is the thing the SOW never buys. Write it yourself, in real time, and Month 14 becomes a Tuesday.

Audit-season you. “Why is this configured this way” is the entire genre of auditor questions. Watching someone answer from a dated ledger entry instead of a shrug changes the temperature of the whole engagement.

Your successor. Someday there is one. The what they can read in the tenant. The ledger is the only artifact that makes them competent instead of merely credentialed.

And the robot. This is the part I need this audience to hear: sooner or later you are going to point an AI at your tenant. When that happens, the model will read your configuration fluently and explain it confidently, and without the why, some of what it confidently explains will be wrong (the config shows the intern exclusion; it does not show the acquisition, the stipend structure, or Finance saying no). Your ledger is the context layer. It’s the difference between an agent that knows why the rule exists and one that hallucinates a plausible reason and routes work accordingly. Clean your data before you buy the robot, yes. But also: keep your receipts, because the robot is going to ask.

Start with the audit

You don’t need to backfill a decade. You’ll never do it and the guilt will kill the habit.

Take the three or four spots the Bus Factor audit flagged (the ones where the honest answer to “who else knows this?” was nobody) and write those entries this week. From memory, dated today, flagged as reconstructed. Then keep the ledger going forward, three minutes at a time.

Your tenant is a decade of business decisions wearing a software costume.

Start keeping the receipts.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Tenant Archaeologist

P.S. Justin keeps a log in Justin’s 3D Lab. Not of printer settings (the printer knows the settings). Of failures: what got messy, what he changed, why the fix worked. I asked him why he bothers. He said, “because I already printed the same mistake twice, and filament costs money.” A twelve-year-old independently derived the why ledger the second time a failure got expensive. Most of us are still waiting for the third or fourth.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

tldr;

• Workday announced Sana for ITSM at the Sana AI Summit: agentic automation for onboarding, offboarding, access changes, and everyday IT requests. Built directly on the platform. Early adopters get it in the second half of this year.

• Buried in the announcement: the agent will “automatically trigger access changes when employees join, transfer teams, change roles, or leave.” That’s not a feature. That’s your JML integration layer becoming a product.

• This is genuinely good architecture. It’s also a career signal for anyone whose job security rests on being the only person who understands the spaghetti.

• The catch: the agent inherits your security model and your data. If those are duct tape, you just gave duct tape an execution engine.

• You have roughly six months before early adopter access opens. Use them.

The Announcement

At the Sana AI Summit in New York, Workday introduced Sana for ITSM. The pitch: most IT tickets shouldn’t exist in the first place. Password resets, software installs, access requests, all handled conversationally, inside Workday, routed through the same approval paths and audit trails your org already uses.

It’s Workday’s first formal step into the ITSM market, which puts them in the same ring as ServiceNow. That’s the market story, and the analysts will cover it just fine.

I want to talk about the sentence everyone skimmed past.

Read the Bullet Point Again

From the press release: Sana for ITSM will “automatically trigger access changes when employees join, transfer teams, change roles, or leave the company.”

Join. Transfer. Change roles. Leave.

If you’ve been in this ecosystem longer than a week, you know exactly what that sentence describes. That’s the joiner-mover-leaver layer. The Studio integrations. The provisioning feeds. The termination-triggered deactivation logic someone built in 2019 and nobody has touched since (because the person who built it left, and the documentation is a Visio diagram that lies).

That layer is the connective tissue between your tenant and every downstream system in the building. It’s also (let’s be honest) a meaningful chunk of why the HRIS team is untouchable at budget time. Nobody else understands it. Nobody else wants to.

Workday just announced they’re absorbing it into the platform.

This Is Good Architecture. Say It With Me.

Before anyone reaches for a pitchfork: this is the right design.

The agent lives next to the system that already knows who you are, what role you hold, who approves your access, and what the policy says. It doesn’t need a nightly file feed to learn that Maria transferred to Finance. It’s sitting inside the event. Actions flow through the same approvals and audit logs as human actions, so when the agent provisions access, there’s a trail.

Compare that to the current state at most orgs: an HR event fires, a Studio integration wakes up, a flat file lands somewhere, an identity tool ingests it, and four hours later (if the file didn’t fail) someone has a laptop login. We’ve been running swivel-chair provisioning with extra steps and calling it automation.

The Layer Cake holds. Workday stays the load-bearing wall. The agent is just a much better way to move things through the house.

The Part About You

Here’s the uncomfortable question, and I’m asking it because I like you:

I wrote last week that indispensability is organizational risk, not job security. This is what that looks like in practice. If your value proposition is “I am the only one who knows how the provisioning feeds work,” Workday just put an expiration date on it. Not tomorrow: Early adopters in R2, GA later, and enterprise reality means your org won’t touch it for a while after that. But the surface area is officially shrinking.

The people who come out ahead here are the ones who understood the why, not just the what. Why does the transfer feed suppress access removal for concurrent-job workers? Why does the term feed wait 24 hours? The agent can execute the what. Somebody still has to own the why (and defend it when the agent does something technically correct and contextually catastrophic).

That somebody should be you. That’s a promotion, not a pink slip. But only if you move first.

Duct Tape With an Execution Engine

Now the First Things First part, because there’s always a First Things First part.

The agent inherits your existing security model, your approval chains, your policy configuration. Workday is selling that as the trust story, and architecturally it is. But read it from the other direction: the agent is only as safe as the model it inherits.

That security group you cloned in a hurry during the acquisition and never rationalized? The agent inherits it. The approval chain that routes to a sup org that hasn’t had a manager since March? Inherited. The role assignments you keep meaning to audit? Inherited (and now attached to something that executes access changes automatically, at machine speed, without getting bored or suspicious).

A messy security model used to fail slowly, one confused human at a time. Give it an execution engine and it fails fast, at scale, with an audit trail politely documenting every mistake.

What I’d Do Before R2

Crawl, walk, run. Same as always.

Crawl: inventory. Every JML integration, every provisioning feed, every downstream system it touches. If you can’t produce the number, you’re not ready to evaluate the agent that replaces them. You can’t orchestrate what you can’t inventory, and you can’t retire it either.

Walk: document the why. Not the field mappings. The decisions. Every weird exception, every deliberate delay, every “we do it this way because of the 2021 incident.” That context is the thing the agent can’t infer and the thing your org will desperately need when it configures one.

Run: audit the security model. Before it becomes the operating system for an agent. This was already the right thing to do. Now it has a deadline.

The Bottom Line

Workday absorbing the JML layer is the platform doing what platforms do: eating the undifferentiated plumbing. It was always going to happen. The only question was whether you’d be the person who governs the thing that replaced the spaghetti (or the person who was the spaghetti).

Pick the first one. You’ve got until 26R2.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Recovering Spaghetti Chef

P.S. Justin recently lobbied for an automatic feeder for the dogs. It works great: dispenses on schedule, right portions, very impressive. He still got in trouble last week when Toby didn’t get fed, because the feeder jammed and nobody checked it. Turns out automating the task doesn’t automate the accountability. Somebody should put that on a slide at Rising.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

You scanned a piece of plastic hanging off a stranger’s backpack in the middle of a tech conference.

Bold move. I respect it. Here’s everything you were hoping this would be.

First, the important part

This tag was designed, printed, and invoiced by Justin. He’s twelve. He runs a fabrication operation out of our basement called Justin's 3D Lab, and when I commissioned this tag he charged me a 40% markup under a line item labeled “brand premium.” When I questioned it, he said: “You wrote a whole newsletter about vendors. I read it.”

Your scan just landed on his scoreboard. Every visit to this page is counted, because he is in an active competition with my best LinkedIn post ever, which reached 71,600 people and converted six newsletter subscribers. That story, and what it says about how our entire industry confuses reach with trust, is basically the thesis of everything I write.

So…Want to help a kid beat an algorithm?

What you actually get

The Department of First Things First is a weekly-ish newsletter for the people who run HR systems, not the people who buy them. Workday architecture, AI governance that survives contact with a real tenant, and the occasional enterprise software lesson delivered by the aforementioned twelve-year-old. Clean your data before you buy the robot. That’s the whole religion.

Start here: The Bus Factor Self-Audit — a one-page audit that tells you how much of your tenant’s “why” lives exclusively in one person’s head, and what breaks when that person takes a vacation. It’s free, it takes ten minutes, and half the people who run it get quietly horrified.

If we just met at Rising

If you were at the Shareathon AI roundtable on Sunday: the anonymized writeup of what that table said is going out to subscribers this week. Subscribing is how you get it. That was the deal.

If you’re a RUG leader holding one of these tags in your hand right now: flip it over. That title on the back is real, he earned it, and everything I said in the ten-minute talk about capture is demonstrated by the fact that you’re reading this sentence.

If you just scanned a randos backpack in a hallway: you’re my favorite kind of person. Come say hi.

I’m the one with the tag.

—Mike.

P.S. — Justin asked if this page has analytics. I said yes. He said, “good, because I want it on record when I win.” It is now on record.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

tldr;

The “bus factor” is the number of people who’d have to get hit by a bus before your tenant is in serious trouble. For most HRIS teams, it’s one. It’s you.

Being indispensable feels like leverage. It’s actually a liability the org will eventually “manage” — and the thing being managed is sometimes you.

You did document. That’s not the problem. You wrote down the what. The why is still in your head.

Tribal knowledge isn’t expertise. It’s depreciating inventory. Treat it like inventory.

There’s a one-page Bus Factor Self-Audit at the bottom. Run it before your next vacation. Assuming you can take one.

Ten years ago when I started this gig, I took a week of PTO and brought my work laptop to Maine (Confession: 2026 will be the first year I don't. Please don't be like me).

Nobody asked me to. I just knew the annual comp process was going to throw an error somewhere around day three, and I was the only person alive who knew which condition rule was load-bearing and which one was decorative.

Day three. 2:14 on a Wednesday. The IM came in. I fixed it from a Adirondack chair on a deck at the lake in eleven minutes.

And I felt great about it.

That’s the part I want to talk about. Not the error. The fact that I felt great.

Your bus factor is one

Engineers have a name for this. The “bus factor.” It’s the number of people who’d have to get hit by a bus before a project is in real trouble.

Not fired. Not poached. Hit by a bus. The framing is grim on purpose, because the polite versions (“key-person dependency,” “knowledge concentration”) let you nod along without feeling it.

For many HRIS teams, the bus factor is one.

It’s you. You already know it’s you. And somewhere under the pride, you know that’s not a flex. It’s a liability with your name on it.

Indispensable and irreplaceable are not the same word

Here’s the trap. Being the only one who knows how the tenant works feels like security. If they can’t run payroll without me, they can’t get rid of me. Right?

Run that logic all the way forward.

An organization that can’t function without one specific person doesn’t think “we’re so lucky to have them.” Eventually it thinks “we have an unacceptable risk and we need to fix it.” And “fix it” rarely means a raise and a backup. It means reduce our dependence on that person.

Indispensability isn’t a moat. It’s a flag you’re waving that reads single point of failure, right here. And risk, given enough time, gets managed. Sometimes the thing being managed is you.

You did document. That’s not the problem.

I know what you’re going to say. I documented everything. You’ve got runbooks. A config workbook. That SharePoint nobody opens.

I believe you. And it won’t save you — because what you wrote down is the what (we started down this road last week, but let's expand).

“The Comp Eligibility rule excludes interns.” Great. That’s the what.

The why (why it excludes interns, which acquisition that rule survived, which VP will lose their mind if it changes, the fact that it’s quietly load-bearing for a downstream integration nobody remembers building) that’s not in the workbook.

That’s in your head. It’s been in there so long you don’t experience it as knowledge anymore. It’s just… how things are.

Month 14 is when the lights go out

I'm going to call him out again because I'm encroaching in his space. Seena Mojahedi has a name for the moment this becomes everyone’s problem: Month 14.

Your SI implements. They write the what documentation, because that’s what the SOW pays for. Then the SOW ends. For about a year, muscle memory carries the team. Then, somewhere around month fourteen, something changes that nobody internal has the why for, and there’s no consultant left to ask.

That’s the bus factor going off without anyone getting hit by a bus. The knowledge didn’t leave on a stretcher. It just left.

Tribal knowledge is a depreciating asset

Here’s the reframe that actually changes behavior.

Stop thinking of the knowledge in your head as expertise. Start thinking of it as inventory. Specifically, depreciating inventory. It loses value every time someone who shared it leaves, every time a process changes and the reason gets fuzzier, every release that buries the original logic one layer deeper.

You wouldn’t run a warehouse without knowing what’s on the shelves. You’re running the most important system in the company on an inventory exactly one person can see (and that person is tired and wants to take a real vacation).

The fix isn’t “write more documentation.” You’ll never out-document a system this complex, and a wiki nobody reads is just guilt with a URL.

The fix is to find out where your bus factor is actually one (which specific processes, which specific rules, which specific integrations) and start there. Not all forty things. The three or four that would genuinely take the org down.

So run the audit

I built a thing. It’s a one-page Bus Factor Self-Audit: a short, slightly uncomfortable set of questions you run against your own tenant to find the spots where the honest answer to “who else knows this?” is nobody.

It won’t fix your documentation. It’ll do something more useful: it’ll show you the handful of places where you’re the single point of failure, so you can stop pretending the other forty matter equally and go fix the ones that’ll actually hurt.

Alrighty, link is here. It's a Google drive link, so I'm guessing Google's going to want you to login first. Fill out the audit. Fix the holes. Then take the vacation. Leave the laptop.

I’m still working on that part too. Let's hope 2026 is the year for all of us.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Recovering Single Point of Failure

P.S. I told Justin I was writing about what happens when the only person who knows how something works disappears. He thought about it and said, “you mean like when you’re the only one who knows the Wi-Fi password and you go to bed?”

Yeah, buddy. Exactly like that. Except the Wi-Fi password runs TA Tech for a couple hundred thousand people, and it can’t go to bed.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

tldr;

• I like to teach Justin where things started. Music, science, the whole origin tour. Last night it was Zork, the game that defined the text adventure (yes, Adventure came first, hold your letters).

• He walked into a dark room without the lamp and got eaten by a grue almost immediately. Indignant. “The game didn’t tell me.”

• It didn’t. Nobody documented it. Which is the exact reason your tenant has rooms you’re scared to walk into.

The origin tour

I have this thing I do with my son.

I show him where stuff started. Not the polished version. The origin through the genre-definier. We went from Muddy Waters, to Elvis, to the Beatles, to Springsteen, and then U2 (and discussed cultural appropriation along the way). From “why does the apple fall” to Newton actually writing it down. He’s eleven, twelve now (the birthday snuck up on me), and he’s got a better sense of where things come from than most adults I work with.

So last night I committed an act of parenting I’d been putting off for years.

I made him play Zork. The genre-defining text adventure. I was about his age when I first shoved a 5 1/4” floppy disk into the drive of a school Apple IIc to start my text adventure, and now it’s his turn. Just no more floppy disk. Time to go find it on Steam.

(And yes. I know. Colossal Cave Adventure predates it. Crowther and Woods got there first. I’m aware. But being first and defining the genre are two different things, and Zork is the one everybody else copied. Hold that thought. It’s going to matter at the end.)

Ninety seconds to a grue

Here’s how it went.

Justin, digital native, raised on games that hold your hand through a forty-minute tutorial, stares at a black screen that says “West of House.” No graphics. No arrow telling him where to go. Just a blinking cursor and the quiet contempt of 1980.

He finds the mailbox. He finds the house. He’s actually doing great.

Then he goes down. Into the dark.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

He types “go forward.”

He gets eaten by a grue.

He is OUTRAGED. “The game didn’t tell me I needed a light! How was I supposed to know?”

And I’m sitting there, trying not to laugh, watching my kid die in a forty-five-year-old game, and all I can think is: buddy, you just described every Workday environment I have ever walked into.

Your tenant has dark rooms

You operate in the light most days.

The stuff you touch every week is well-lit. You know where the switches are. You could move through it with your eyes closed.

But every tenant has dark rooms.

The integration that’s been running since 2019 that nobody can fully explain. The security group named “TEMP_2021” that turns out to be load-bearing. The calc field with a comment that just says “ask Barb.” (Barb left in 2022.) The business process with one step everyone is afraid to touch, because the last person who touched it caused a Career Limiting Event.

Those are dark rooms. And the thing about a dark room is that it’s completely fine. Right up until somebody walks into it.

A release drops. A vendor changes an API. A new analyst gets handed the keys and goes exploring. They walk into the dark, confident, with no light.

And the grue eats them.

The lamp is documentation. The lamp has a battery.

In Zork, the fix is simple. You grab the brass lantern from the living room before you go underground. The lamp is how you survive the dark.

In your tenant, the lamp is documentation.

Not the kind the SI handed you at go-live. That’s “what” documentation. “This integration moves data from A to B.” Great. Useless the second something breaks. Because when it breaks, you don’t need to know WHAT it does. You need to know WHY it was built that way. Why the field maps like that. Why that condition exists. Why somebody, three years ago, made a choice that looks insane until you understand the constraint they were under.

Most documentation tells you what. Almost none of it tells you why.

And here’s the part of Zork nobody remembers until it bites them.

The lamp has a battery.

It runs out. You can be standing in a perfectly safe room, lantern in hand, and the light just... dies. Because you wandered too long without a plan.

Tribal knowledge is a lamp with a battery.

The person who knows why the integration is built that way is your light source. And the day they take a new job, or go on a two-week vacation, or (the email we all dread) get hit by a bus, the battery dies. The room goes dark. And nobody left in the building remembers where the grue lives.

Month 14 is when the lights go out

There’s a specific moment this happens, and if you’ve lived it you already feel your stomach tightening.

The SI’s statement of work expires. The consultants pack up. The “what” documentation gets filed in a SharePoint nobody opens. And about a year later, something breaks in a room only the consultants ever walked.

You go to look. Pitch black.

You reach for the lamp. The battery’s dead. Everyone who carried it is gone.

That is a governance problem. You let your whole operation depend on light sources you didn’t own and couldn’t recharge.

How to not get eaten

You don’t fix this with a tool. You fix it with a walk.

Walk your dark rooms before the grue does. List every part of your tenant where exactly one person holds the light. That’s your bus factor. Every name that shows up once is a battery you don’t control.

Then write down the why. Not the what. The why. The constraint, the decision, the thing that’ll look batshit crazy to the next person who walks in cold.

It’s boring. It’s unsexy. It does not demo well. Nobody is putting “we documented our integration rationale” on a slide with a gradient.

But it’s the difference between an org that can lose a key person on a Tuesday and an org that goes pitch black the moment they do.

(I built a quick self-audit for exactly this. Five minutes, finds your dark rooms. Closest thing I’ve got to a flashlight you can keep. Link’s around here somewhere.)

The genre-definer, revisited

Remember the thing I made you hold your letters about?

Adventure came first. Zork defined the genre.

Workday wasn’t first either. PeopleSoft was running payroll while Workday was still a slide deck. SAP predates all of us. (I once worked for a vendor which built it’s payroll engine in COBOL. In 1977. Yes, they’re still around. I hope for my friend Earl Foster’s sake PASPR50.exe has been relegated to the great code gig in the sky.) But Workday defined the modern category, and everyone’s been responding to it since.

Being first is a footnote. Defining how everyone else thinks about the problem is the whole game.

Which is the actual reason I make my kid play the remake instead of the origin. The remake shows you what won. The origin shows you why.

Right now, in your tenant, somebody is about to walk into a dark room and reach for a lamp that isn’t there.

Grab the lantern. Write the why. Walk the rooms while you still have light.

The grue is patient. It’s been waiting in your tenant since 2005.

— Mike
Director HR Tech | Reformed Grue Bait

P.S. After dying twice, Justin asked me if real jobs have grues. I told him every single one does, buddy. Some of us just call them “undocumented integrations.” He nodded like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Then he grabbed the lamp and went back in.

P.P.S. What makes this gig fun is that story ideas come from everywhere. Laura Horton wrote a quick LinkedIn post which started these wheels turning when she posted about Workday config being a choose your own adventure story. That reminded me of Zork, then my failings as a parent, and then the fun began. Thanks Laura.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

tldr;

A 12-year-old and his buddy built a working mobility device this week from free, open-source plans. No dad. No certified consultants. No SOW.

It worked for two reasons enterprise software almost never gets right: the documentation was good enough to follow, and the builders had the discipline to actually follow it.

Your implementation had an army of experts and you still can't take a vacation without the tenant catching fire. That's a first-things-first problem.

For the last week, I haven't been able to see my family room floor.

It's been covered in 3D-printed parts. Purple frame pieces. Blue wheels. A rubber mallet (don't ask). My son Justin and a friend have been assembling a TMT (a Toddler Mobility Trainer) that they printed downstairs in the basement.

It's an open-source device from a group called MakeGood. The idea is simple and kind of beautiful. They publish the plans for free, you print the parts on a consumer 3D printer, and you build a mobility trainer for a kid who needs one.

Theirs is going to a child at CHOP.

(Yes, I'm proud. I'm allowed one sentence. Moving on.)

Here's the part that's been rattling around in my head all week, because I can't turn this brain off:

Two kids built a working device, correctly, with no engineering degree between them. And the reason it worked is the exact reason most of our enterprise projects don't.

Reason one: the instructions were good enough.

MakeGood says the build takes "intermediate" 3D printing skill. Then they add that even beginners can do it "with a little patience."

Here's my read: A volunteer organization documented a physical mobility device so well that a sixth grader could assemble it from a set of plans.

Now think about your tenant.

It was built by an army of certified consultants. People with four-figure day rates and Workday Pro stacks longer than mine (going to need to be selective with those recerts this year). And you still can't tell me why the comp business process routes to that one approval step everybody's afraid to touch.

The difference isn't talent. MakeGood didn't have a bigger budget than your SI. The difference is that somebody did the unglamorous work of writing down the why, not just the what.

This is the Month 14 problem (shoutout Seena). The SI leaves you a config workbook that tells you what the switches are set to. It almost never tells you why. So the day the SOW expires, you inherit a machine you can operate but can't explain. And the first time the business asks for something new, you're reverse-engineering your own system.

A kids' 3D printing project shipped better build docs than that. Let it sting a little.

Reason two: they actually followed the directions.

Watching them work was the real lesson.

They didn't rush. When a piece didn't seat right, they didn't force it and move on. They stopped, checked the fit, figured out what was off, fixed it. Every piece had to fit perfectly before they'd go to the next step.

I have not seen that discipline on a project plan in years.

Because in our world, the piece doesn't fit, we know it doesn't fit, and we ship it anyway. The integration's flaky but the date's locked. The security model's a mess but go-live is Monday. The data's dirty but the steering committee wants a demo.

We force the piece. We move on. We call it Phase 2.

And then we act surprised when we're three releases behind, afraid to take PTO, and the only person who understands the build is the one person about to take a job somewhere else.

A twelve-year-old checked the fit before moving on. When's the last time your project did?

The first thing, first.

None of this is a knock on consultants or the platform. The platform is fine. The consultants are mostly good.

The point is that the boring stuff is the whole game. Document the why. Verify the fit before you move on. Don't force the piece because the calendar told you to.

A kid with a printer and a little patience can change a stranger's life. But only because somebody before him did the unsexy work of documenting it well enough to be followed.

That's the job. Most of us just forget it's the job.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Reformed Piece-Forcer

P.S. If you've got a 3D printer collecting dust and a free weekend, MakeGood publishes everything for free at 3dmobility.org. Print one for a kid who needs it. (They recommend Bambu Lab printers, which means Justin finally has justification for the fleet in the basement. Jenn remains unconvinced.)

If you don't have a printer and still want to help, Justin is going to print a second chair. You can help here.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.

tldr;

• A team of senior ex-Workday leaders (former EVP of Products, former CTO, former chief technology architect, former CISO) launched an AI-native HR system called Sol.

• The pitch: replace your HRIS. Not extend it. Replace it. First customers go live in early 2027, so there's no product to kick the tires on yet.

• The interesting part isn't the company. It's that the people who designed Workday's foundation are now betting the foundation is the wrong shape for agentic work.

• Workday's position is the opposite: extend the core, don't burn it down. Both camps are made of people who built the same system.

• What you do on Tuesday: nothing dramatic. Treat it as a forcing question for the foundation you already run.

  ---

A few months ago our tennis club owner asked Justin to 3D print a locker for the new Tennixx ball machine. Sounds simple.

It wasn't.

The thing had to survive getting knocked around courtside, and it had to print in less than geological time. Those two goals fight each other. Strong wants thick walls and a lot of material. Printable wants thin and fast.

So he iterated. Five prototypes in OpenSCAD, each one printed, each one tested, each one wrong in a new way until it wasn't. Prototype five prints in a reasonable window and you can drop-kick it. (We tested that. For science. 😅)

Here's what that project taught him, and re-taught me. You don't find out whether a design holds by looking at it. You find out when you knock it around.

I thought about those five prototypes when a company called Sol showed up in my LinkedIn feed (thanks Dana! BTW - just spent a weekend in Niagara. Canada gets two thumbs up from me!)

Not because it's another HR startup. Because of who built it.

Sol was founded by Pete Schlampp, Jim Stratton, Jon Ruggiero, and Erin Yang. If those names don't mean anything to you, let me translate:

Schlampp ran Products and Strategy at Workday. Stratton was Workday's CTO. Ruggiero spent fifteen years there as SVP and chief technology architect. Yang spent thirteen years there, including running technology investing at Workday Ventures. Their CISO, Josh DeFigueiredo, was Workday's CISO. Their "Chief Work Officer" title is a phrase Workday itself coined.

These are not founder randos with a Figma file and a dream. This is the product and architecture brain trust of the system most of you log into every morning. They know exactly where every body is buried in that object model, because they buried some of them.

And the homepage they put their names on says this: "Work changed. Your HR system didn't."

That's the strength problem, scaled to the enterprise. They looked at the foundation they built, decided it won't survive the load that's coming, and walked off to design a new one.

Here's the actual claim, stripped of the launch copy:

Sol's argument is that HR systems capture transactions, not how work gets done. Read that as a builder, not a buyer. Your HRIS is, at its core, an effective-dated record of state changes. Hire. Promote. Transfer. Terminate. A worker object, a position, a sup org, a business process that moves a transaction from A to B. It's a very good foundation for what it was built to do.

The bet Sol is making: agents don't live in that world. An agent doesn't fire a discrete staffing event and go quiet. It needs continuous context. Who's doing what, with whom, right now, and why. The model that's brilliant at recording that someone changed jobs on the 1st is not the same model that captures how the work itself flows. One is a ledger, the other a nervous system.

An HR Executive piece in April put it well: every HRIS built in the last four decades was designed around a single concept, the employment relationship. None of them were built to track a workforce that now includes things that aren't employees at all.

If you've ever tried to make your tenant represent something it wasn't designed to represent, you already feel this, everyday.

The part where I refuse to let this be a press release with my name on it.

Workday is not sitting still, and they do not agree. Their bet is that you extend the core, you don't replace it. Agent System of Record went GA earlier this year. Sana is quickly iterating (so quickly in fact, it's hard to keep up with the changes). Extend and Orchestrate let you build on the same security and business-process spine. The bull case, argued most clearly by Josh Bersin, is that you unlock the data, the security, and the rules you already have, and let agents ride on that foundation.

So this is not a startup versus an incumbent. This is a real architectural disagreement between two groups of people who built the same system, looking at the same problem, and reaching opposite conclusions about whether the foundation survives the transition.

One group says the object model is the moat. The other group left to bet it's the anchor.

That's a way better story than "cool new vendor.”

My read, for whatever a practitioner's read is worth:

Sol's critique bites in exactly the places you already curse at. The moments where your tenant fights you because work went fluid and the model wants a clean transaction. Dotted-line everything. People doing three (or in some cases 30) roles. Project work that doesn't map to a position. Anyone who's tried to model real organizational life in a system built on the employment relationship knows the foundation has opinions, and they aren't always your opinions.

Where it's overblown: four decades of payroll, compliance, audit, security, and integration plumbing do not evaporate because a homepage says "agentic foundation." That plumbing is boring and load-bearing and it's the real reason ripping out an HRIS is a multi-year root canal. "AI-native from the ground up" is a beautiful sentence. It's also, right now, a sentence. There is no product until 2027.

Which is the thing I keep coming back to in this newsletter. "Agentic foundation" is a claim. It's not an architecture until someone shows you the data model. Branding has a shelf life of about nine months. The model is permanent. Read the model, not the logo.

So what do you do with this on Tuesday morning, when you have a tenant to run and a config backlog that does not care about Silicon Valley?

Nothing dramatic. You don't rip anything out for a product that doesn't exist yet. Anyone telling you to is selling something.

But you let it do one useful thing. You let it become a forcing question for the foundation you already run.

Go ask your current platform the questions Sol is implicitly asking. Can it register an agent as a real entity in the system, not a footnote? When an agent takes an action inside a process, does it land in the record itself, where you and Legal can see it, or in some side analytics tool? Can you scope and revoke what an agent is allowed to touch without filing an IT ticket and waiting a sprint?

If you've been reading this thing for a while, you know I already planted this flag. Sol just turned that argument into a funded company run by the people who'd know.

Here's where I land.

As a product, Sol is easy to ignore for now. No GA, no number, no tenant to break.

As a signal, it's the opposite of ignorable. The people who poured the foundation walked across the street and started selling rebuilds. You can disagree with them. Workday clearly does. But you can't wave them off, because they know the load limits of the thing you're standing on.

Prototype five won because Justin stopped trusting the render and started kicking it.

The question this launch puts on your desk isn't "should I buy Sol." It's whether you can say, with a straight face, that your foundation survives the load that's coming, or whether you just like how it looks in the render.

You find that out by loading it. Not by admiring it.

That's the whole job.

—Mike.

P.S. — Prototype five has been at the club a few days now, while we wait for filament to come for the “real build” (logo included, of course). The ball machine lives in it. It gets kicked, dropped, leaned on, ignored. Prototype five does not care. Justin who is now at the club more than me due to summer camp, checks daily to see whether anyone's broken it yet. Nobody has. He's twelve, and he already gets the thing half the vendors in my inbox don't: you don't get to call it done until the real world has had a real chance to wreck it. The rest of us are still working on that one.

tl;dr

There’s a war in HR tech nobody names, because naming it means admitting your org chart was designed by a raccoon. It’s the war between the people who buy the talent tech and the people who own it. These are never, under any circumstances, the same people.

TA sees a demo at a conference, has what can only be described as a religious experience, and signs a contract. Then HRIS gets handed the bill, the integration, the security model, and a Tuesday meeting that opens with the three most terrifying words in enterprise software: “so, quick favor…”

The fix is stupidly simple, which is what makes it enraging: put the person who buys it and the person who has to keep it alive in the same room before anyone signs anything. That’s the whole reform. We cannot, as a species, seem to do it.

Let me tell you about the calendar invite.

It arrives on a Tuesday, because of course it does. No agenda. No context. Just a title sitting there like a ransom note: “Quick sync — new ATS integration.”

And you, the HRIS person, stare at it. Because you have questions. Questions like: what new ATS? And: integration with WHAT? And, increasingly: am I being fired in this meeting, or worse, given a project?

You join the call. And over the next thirty minutes you learn that three months ago (THREE MONTHS) the talent acquisition team went to a conference. And at this conference, they saw a demo. And the demo was, and I cannot stress this enough, beautiful. Clean data. One radiant, photogenic candidate gliding through a hiring process like a salmon who has never known struggle. And TA gazed upon this demo, and they wept, and they signed a contract.

And nobody told you. Because why would they? You’re just the person who has to make it work.

Welcome to the Boundary Wars. Grab a helmet. (We didn’t budget for helmets. Use a coffee mug.)

Nobody Owns What They Buy (And They’ve Made That YOUR Problem)

Here is the structural insanity at the heart of all of this, and once you see it you cannot unsee it:

In most organizations, the people who buy the talent technology and the people who own the talent technology are completely different humans. Different teams. Different budgets. Different Saturdays.

The recruiting team buys it. I configure it. The recruiting team gets the credit. I get the 2 a.m. alert that says “requisition sync failed” (a phrase that has aged me roughly eleven years and counting).

I am, professionally and spiritually, the poor bastard who has to configure what the TA team buys. That is the most accurate sentence anyone has ever written about my job, and if you work in HRIS, you just felt it in a part of your soul you’d rather not discuss in public.

The Demo. Oh, The Demo.

Let’s talk about the demo, because the demo is where this entire catastrophe begins, and it is a masterpiece of controlled deception.

Every HR tech demo runs on what we in the industry call the “happy path.” This is a magical realm where the data is clean, there are no duplicate person records, every field maps perfectly, and the API has never once gone down at 9 a.m. the morning after a Workday release like a teenager refusing to get out of bed.

It is fiction. It is the software equivalent of a real estate photo shot with a fisheye lens. And TA (who, again, I genuinely do not blame, they are victims here too) looks at this and goes “yes, THAT, I want THAT,” not realizing the demo has the same relationship to their actual tenant that a cruise brochure has to a norovirus outbreak.

And then comes the phrase. The phrase that should be classified as a controlled substance. The two most expensive words in the English language:

“Seamless integration.”

There is no seam in recorded human history that has cost more to sew shut. “Seamless” is the word vendors invented so they would never have to say the true sentence, which is: “you will be doing this part, on a weekend, alone, possibly weeping.”

“It Just Sits On Top of Workday”

My personal favorite, because nothing — NOTHING — just sits on top of Workday. You do not casually rest things on top of Workday. Workday is not a coffee table.

There is a toll. There is always a toll. The field mapping. The security model. And my beloved: the headcount reconciliation, where TA’s shiny new tool insists you have 412 open roles, Workday swears it’s 389, and Finance strolls in with a spreadsheet that says 401 and the unshakeable confidence of a person who has never once been right but has also never once been told.

We call this a “single source of truth.” We have built a single source of three truths. It is Schrödinger’s headcount: simultaneously correct and catastrophically wrong until the precise moment someone opens the report in a board meeting.

Credit and Consequence: A Love Story With No Love In It

Here’s the asymmetry that turns a mild annoyance into an actual war.

TA gets the credit. The candidate-experience metric. The time-to-fill slide. The LinkedIn post with 1,400 likes about “transforming talent acquisition,” shared enthusiastically by people who have never once opened a business process diagram in their lives.

HRIS gets the consequence. The ticket. The Saturday. The release-cycle whack-a-mole where you fix one integration and two more pop up giggling. And the all-time classic: the security group nobody read, configured at speed, that quietly lets a recruiter see executive comp data they were never, ever supposed to see. (In the Department, we have a technical term for this. We call it a Career Limiting Event.)

Same software. Two completely different relationships with it. One of these people is at happy hour. The other is us. On a Saturday. Again.

So Whose Fault Is This? (Plot Twist)

And here is the part where I’m supposed to point at the recruiters and scream. Except (and I need you to really hear this) it is not their fault.

It genuinely is not. The recruiters are getting screamed at by a hiring manager about a req that’s been open for sixty days. Somebody sold them a tool that promised to make the screaming stop. They bought the aspirin. You would too. I would too.

The villain isn’t a person. The villain is the ORG CHART. It’s a buying process specifically engineered so the person who signs the contract and the person who inherits the total cost of ownership are in different departments, different budgets, and — crucially — different Saturdays.

You cannot fix that with a better integration. There is no integration on Earth powerful enough to repair a decision made in a room you weren’t invited to. The fix is letting the person who has to keep the thing alive sit in the room before the ink dries.

That’s it. That’s the reform. Put the buyer and the owner in the same meeting. It costs nothing. It requires no software. And somehow, across the entire profession, we treat it like cold fusion.

The Verdict

So here is where we are.

The Boundary Wars don’t end when TA wins or HRIS wins. They end when somebody — anybody — finally stops treating “buy it” and “own it” as two unrelated jobs performed by two unrelated people who meet for the very first time in a Tuesday calendar invite ominously titled “quick sync.”

Until that glorious day?

I’ll be right here. Configuring the thing you bought. Securing the thing you bought. Reconciling the thing you bought against the two other things you also bought.

On a Saturday.

You’re welcome.

— Mike

Director HR Tech | Legal Guardian of Software I Did Not Conceive

P.S. Justin begged me for me to load a new filament type into the printer last week. “It’ll be easy, Dad. Just load it.” Reader, it was not easy. Three hours. Two clogged nozzles. One full recalibration. Several (ok, many) words I will not be reprinting here, because my mother reads this newsletter. He picked the shiny thing; I owned the integration. The Boundary Wars start young, and they start at home.

The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.