Paper performance reviews. A kiosk that takes 10 minutes just to log in. An Excel spreadsheet living inside an ERP system nobody's touched since 2014.
That's the state of HR tech for roughly 60 to 70 percent of the global workforce right now. Not the edge cases. The majority.. And as Sri Chellappa, CEO and co-founder of Engagedly, puts it: “The current adoption of HR tech tools in the frontline is abysmally low.” More tech vendors are actively working to change that reality, but there’s a lot of ground to make up.
One of them is Sri. He’s been building performance and engagement software for years. And lately, he's been staring hard at the gap that most of the industry decided to step around — the one where frontline workers were supposed to be.
The question is: How did this come to be in the first place?
There was an old joke we used to tell in the newsroom: “News is what happens to an editor.” Example: If the editor’s house gets burglarized, there will soon be a story about the crime wave that’s occurring. The same thing is true for HR Tech: Most enterprise HR tools assume you have a laptop and are engaged in knowledge work. They assume "performance review" means a competency rubric your manager fills out once a year while also posting in Slack about the latest episode of The Pitt.
Here’s the thing: That's not the reality in every industry. Not manufacturing. Not logistics. Not healthcare floors or HVAC installation or field services.
Sri explains where the data actually lives for most frontline workers right now: “Data is dispersed across multiple ERP systems. Some of it is in Excel. A lot of those things are still very disconnected.” Paper and pencil for performance reviews. Disciplinary actions on printed forms. Nobody is asking how anyone feels about anything.
Desk worker engagement tools have pushed adoption close to 90 percent. Frontline? Sri estimates 30 or 40 percent — “maybe even lower.”
That gap is the product opportunity. And it's been sitting there for a while.
Engagedly is launching something new: Engagedly FX. Frontline experience.
Not a mobile-responsive version of their existing platform — Sri is clear about this. The tools need to be “similar but not the same.” A performance review for a field technician who installs HVAC needs to be fast, phone-native, and tied to KPIs that live in operational systems, not HR systems.
“You don't want to take time away from that,” Sri says of workers managing physical workspaces. “But at the same time, you don't want them doing it on paper and pencil either.”
The play is to pull KPIs from systems like ServiceTitan or Simpro directly into performance and feedback workflows. And Sri sees MCP-ready integrations as the thing that finally makes that tractable. The messy integration problem that's plagued workforce analytics for years? AI is starting to dissolve it — and that opens the door for tools that can actually serve mixed workforces without a six-figure IT project just to get started.
That's a real game changer. It turns what used to be a multi-quarter integration nightmare into something for businesses with people who wear Carhartt vests and work boots unironically.
Here's the layer that's easy to miss: skilled trades aren't like SDR roles. You can't just backfill a master electrician in 30 days. These workers have certifications, apprenticeships, licensing requirements — talent pipelines that require years of skill development. When you lose one skilled worker, you feel it in operations, not just in headcount.
Sri makes the point with characteristic dry humor: “Maybe someone's upset because the cafeteria doesn't have fresh coffee. … but how will you find out? You don’t find out if you’re [managing multiple] locations.”
The tools to find out — pulse surveys, career pathing, recognition, succession planning — are almost entirely absent from frontline environments right now. That's low-hanging fruit. Most of it is still on the tree.
Career path visibility matters here, too. Can someone move from apprentice to licensed technician to shift manager? Is that path written down anywhere that doesn't live entirely in one regional director's head? Probably not. And that's a retention risk that compounds over time.
Sri closes somewhere unexpected. Not with product roadmaps. With a genuine concern about what happens when the jobs that give people identity start to disappear.
He's not naive about AI's trajectory. Amazon, Walmart, Costco, Target — “All these big retailers will eventually do that because they have to compete.” New jobs will get created. But as Sri puts it: “They'll require new skills, and nobody's addressing that.”
The economics are worrying enough. But what actually sticks with me is a little further up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Even in a society where the basic things get covered — even in some version of abundance — people still need to feel like they're good at something. “We have a system of abundance,” Sri says. “But that might lead to people not being able to take care of the second part of Maslow's hierarchy, where they feel like they have a purpose.” He calls it a mental health problem. He's not wrong.
Frontline workers, for all the ways they've been overlooked by the tech stack, might actually be the clearest example of work that is irreducibly human. You can't prompt engineer a furnace installation. You can't automate the thing that makes a skilled tradesperson feel like a craftsperson.
That's worth building for.
When I asked Sri what he'd do if he were 22 again, knowing everything he knows now, he didn't say software. He said skilled trades — specifically something in HVAC or electrical — and then he'd build a business around it. “Use the juxtaposition of physical work and technology to build something interesting that can be accelerated by technology.”
That's a tell. When the guy building HR Tech for frontline workers says he'd go into the trades if he had a do-over, the conversation stops being theoretical.
Most of the innovation energy in tech is pointed at knowledge work. AI is disintermediating desk workers. The frontline — the part that actually requires someone to show up with their hands — has barely been touched by modern tooling, let alone AI. Sri's bet is that the people who build for that gap first will find themselves in a category of one.
I think he's right.
Oh, and check out Sri's IMDB page.