Update from Stephen
Sorry I’ve been quiet here. The last month has been non-stop for me, personally and professionally! Here are some highlights:
🥂 MPL Live NYC → our biggest event yet. Record attendance, electric conversations, and a glimpse of the AI-powered workplace to come.
😅 HR Tech 2025 → fruitful but exhausting. Four days of demos, decks, and discussions. The kind of week where you need a month to recover.
🐶 New family addition → Daisy, our 10-week-old Goldendoodle. My daughters are over the moon. I’ve been on what I call “mini pat leave.”
Meet Sweet Daisy
📈 Huertanomics Field Notes milestone → crossed 250 subscribers (up 141% since last month!). Thank you to everyone sharing, commenting, and emailing back — it means the world.
It’s good to be back. Here are 5 signals I picked up on the ground in NYC + Vegas that point to where AI + HR is really headed.
1. Change Management Is Painful, But Power Is Real
Almost every conversation I had at MPL Live NYC, on the topic of AI, came back to this duality: the pain is real, but so is the progress.
The hype wave of 2023 has settled into the grind of 2025. Leaders are realizing this isn’t about one shiny tool - it’s about building an operating system for how work gets done.
From all of these conversations, I’m seeing a mini-playbook for sustainable AI transformation emerging. There more to this but here’s the gist:
🔍 Tools audit → what’s used, ditched, duplicated
🧩 Agree on tech stack → keep it simple, get IT’s buy in and focus on value
📜 Democratization + policies → don’t just give access; guide usage
🎉 Culture campaign → hackathons, AI weeks, prompting challenges
🛠 HR as sandbox → start with EX pain points
🚀 Share results → package early wins for CEO/CTO for buy in
♻️ Committee model → redeploy learnings org-wide
⚡ Open question: who owns redesigning the workplace of humans + bots? HR? IT? A new hybrid “Work Tech” team?
My bet: the technical CHRO is on the horizon.
2. Bots Aren’t It (...Not That I Thought They Were)
2024 was the year of the bot. Virtual assistants, copilots, Slack plug-ins that promised to change your life. Most… didn’t.
In 2025, we’re seeing a more sober take: bots can be useful, but only when paired with LLMs and embedded in workflows.
Things to consider before pulling the trigger :
What data does it connect to?
What workflow does it replace?
What’s the ROI (time or dollars)?
📌 Reminder: a chatbot ≠ transformation strategy. It’s a feature.
3. One UI to Rule Them All 🧙♂️
Every vendor at HR Tech pitched the same story: we’re the end-to-end system of record.
The race is on for the central UI of HR. Some want payroll to anchor it. Others want to collapse recruiting, performance, and learning into one pane of glass.
Here’s the tension: AI accelerates feature bloat. Differentiation is harder than ever.
Three stack archetypes are emerging:
🔗 API-first → lightweight HRIS with integrations
📊 Data-first → analytics layers + predictive models
😀 EX-first → obsessively employee-facing, frictionless UI
Will any of them wield the One Ring to unify HR? Time will tell. 🧙♂️
4. Middleware Will Be Everything
If “One UI” is the crown jewel, middleware is the plumbing. And you can make a lot of money from plumbing.
Everywhere in Vegas: workflow automation + agentic integrations.
Big players like Zapier digging deeper into HR
New entrants like Kinfolk building HR-native automation layers
This is why I keep returning to the Org Brain concept: without shared knowledge infrastructure, your AI stack collapses.
Trajectory I see:
60–70% of people processes → automated
10–20% → AI help desks (leave, PTO, payroll FAQs)
The rest → human judgment, strategy, values
⚠️ Automation without governance + bias detection = liability waiting to explode. Middleware will be the gatekeeper.
5. Outsourcing Your AI Innovation
2024’s debate was build vs. buy.
2025 adds a third path: outsource innovation to partner platforms.
ChartHop + TopicFlow demos → embedding AI directly into workflows, collapsing multi-step tasks into one click.
For lean People teams, this is pragmatic - especially for “remove a function” cases like performance management.
👉 Best example: Thomas Forstner at Juro built an AI-guided performance system that made the old review cycle obsolete.
Takeaway: you don’t have to build or buy everything. Outsourcing innovation can work.
If your AI transformation is stalling, this may be your best move. First step I would take is assessing my current vendors against each other.
Wrapping Up
We’re past the AI honeymoon. 2026 will be the year we stop piloting for the sake of piloting and start building systems that last.
Coming soon on Huertanomics:
🔮 Org Brain design deep dive with Future of Work bada$$ Darren Murph (ex-GitLab, ex-Ford, ex-Zillow)
🛠 Next “How I Built It” with my good freind Vanessa Monsequeria, VP People @ Gorilla
👉 If you haven’t already, explore more at Huertanomics Field Notes.
Or better yet — help us grow by sharing this with other HR leaders.
Let’s build it together.