The Candid Truth About AI in Talent Acquisition

Does HR Tech Have an AI Washing Problem?

The HCM market is one of the noisiest spaces in enterprise software right now, and most buyers can’t tell who’s actually AI-native and who’s just saying so. Opal Wagnac, global head of market positioning and strategy at Darwinbox, has been in this market long enough to spot the cycle. She and Steve get into how buyers can cut through AI washing in HCM, why most global platforms fail when they enter the US market, what buyers keep getting wrong in evaluations and why the technology has finally caught up to the ambition.

The Workplace Psychology Your AI Tools Are Missing

The quality of advice you get from any AI tool is only as good as the context you feed it — and most organizations are missing the most important context of all. Matt Poepsel, VP and Godfather of Talent Optimization at Predictive Index, asked a room full of HR leaders at Transform 2026 to estimate how much of their AI deployment energy goes toward people versus technology. The audience said 80 to 90 percent technology. That number explains almost everything going wrong with AI at work right now.

Why Certified Payroll Is Harder Than It Looks

Certified payroll has been a manual nightmare for decades. Coray Grove, founder of WagePath, is the one finally fixing it — with a platform that automates prevailing wage calculations and certified payroll reporting for contractors who've been keying data into PDF forms by hand. In this episode of Work Tech Weekly, Steve Smith and Coray dig into why contractors are leaving real money on the table with fringe benefit offsets, why some companies are three months behind on payments just because they can't file the reports, and what it means when a compliance product becomes the thing that lets you go after business you couldn't bid on before.

AI Coaching: The $20/Month Answer to a $500/Hour Problem

AI coaching has been a promise for years. Aaron Ward, co-founder and CEO of Huckleberry, is the one actually delivering on it — with a voice-based coaching platform you can put in the hands of every employee for $20 a month. In this live conversation from Transform 2026, Work Tech Weekly host Steve Smith and Aaron dig into why privacy is the whole product, why people are more honest with AI than with other humans, and what changes when the coaching conversation that used to happen at 10pm with your spouse happens with a coach who actually knows your situation.

The Candid Truth About AI in Talent Acquisition

AI in talent acquisition has a narrative problem. Everyone in work tech is talking about agentic AI. The practitioners doing the actual hiring? They're still figuring out Gen AI and automation. That gap between the market narrative and the market reality is bigger than most vendors want to admit. Trent Cotton has seen it from both sides. He spent nearly two decades as a talent acquisition practitioner before joining ICIMS as head of talent insights and analyst relations. This conversation was recorded live at Transform 2026 in Las Vegas. Host Steve Smith and Trent dig into the real state of AI in talent acquisition, what the data shows, where the friction is, and what it actually takes to earn trust from candidates, recruiters, and the C-suite. What you'll hear: - Why most TA orgs are using AI but far fewer are ready for agentic - The governance-first argument and why retrofitting it never works - What candidates actually distrust about AI in hiring and how to fix it - Why enterprise AI has shifted from piloting to operationalizing - The question every TA leader should be asking before they automate anything