Work Tech Would You Rather: Vegas or Paris?

Musical accompaniment for this week's newsletter.

It’s that time of year again. Vacations and holidays are nothing more than ginormous credit card bills and social media accounts bursting with selfies and pictures of everything you ate. The kids are back in school. And it’s time to gear up for that autumnal Work Tech ritual known as conference season.

It’s also time for that important annual question: Do Work Tech industry events still matter?

If you are a Work Tech CEO or marketing leader who needs a hit of the sweet, sweet brand awareness, you better believe they do. So, it’s time to back up the money truck. And if your business model is separating tech vendors from their marketing dollars? You monetize everything down to slapping company logos on the toilet paper. It’s showtime.

And so this year, there’s a full-on conundrum in ConferenceLand. Two of the biggest stages in Work Tech are running the exact same three days this year. October 20-22. The HR Tech Conference — the grandaddy of them all — in Las Vegas, and UNLEASH World — the international industry ooh-la-la — in Paris. The same exact dates on opposite sides of the planet.

So the industry glitterati have a choice: Vegas or Paris?

The speaker lists for each speak volumes (HR Tech vs. UNLEASH). But let’s make this easy: Where is Josh Bersin going to be? You know, the guy whose last name functions as the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval in this business. He’s speaking at UNLEASH. HR Tech has the rest of his team. Divide and conquer makes sense here, but it’s telling to see where the person with the name on the door goes.

Then there’s Stacia Garr, co-founder of RedThread Research and one of maybe three people alive who genuinely understand People Analytics at scale, who is in Paris. Vegas got her senior analyst instead. David Green — arguably one of the other two — also Paris.

The C-suite at some of the biggest brands on Earth — L'Oréal's CEO, Ryanair's CEO, Renault's chairman, plus CHROs from SAP, Adidas, Lloyds Banking, Bristol Myers Squibb, Sony Music, Merck, Airbus, Orange, and Accor. Also Paris.

UNLEASH has real vendor CXO horsepower too: Kobe Verdonck at SD Worx, Eric Mosley of Workhuman, Mahe Bayireddi of Phenom, Rebecca Carr of SmartRecruiters, plus product brass like Max Wessel out of Workday and Yasamin Karimi at TechWolf. HR Tech's current list doesn’t have that kind of thud factor.

Global is where the growth is right now. If you're an analyst or a vendor CEO deciding where next year's pipeline actually lives, a room full of European and global enterprise buyers is the better bet over another lap of Mandalay Bay carpet. Talent follows TAM.

I’m curious: Where are y’all going? Drop your plans (or lack thereof) in the comments. I’m still undecided.

What else is going on this week?

AI's Oppenheimer Moment?

When the people who build this thing start hedging, maybe it’s time to start paying attention.

That’s what happened when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned against self-improving AI in language usually reserved for nuclear treaties: "gambling with our lives." That’s on top of the story that isn’t going about the breach at Hugging Face. You know it’s getting bad when even Washington starts to notice. Congress is apparently waking up to what people are now calling the "AI doomsday threat" but any real regulation is still years out. Nonetheless, the biggest AI rivals came out Saturday and said, “Yeah, we need to tap the brakes.”

What didn’t get as much hype was the impact on Work Tech. Anthropic's own economic model shows an AI economy where paychecks stay flat while labor's share of the pie shrinks by a third. TL;DR: The people who own the machines make all the money. Even AI productivity comes with an asterisk. BambooHR clocked workers spending 87 minutes a day with AI — 47 days a year — and burning nearly half of that cleaning up after it, not getting ahead. Meanwhile, the Journal says enterprises are spending more on AI with less certainty about what they're getting for it than a year ago. Also, worth noting: EY just put $100 million behind the skills AI can't replace, or what are sometimes called “soft skills.” When coding becomes a commodity, skills like EQ and collaboration matter more.

AI dominance isn’t inevitable. Yes, AI's reshaping software giants like Workday, but it’s not the SaaSpocalypse everyone feared. Jason Averbook reminds us that AI is something that happens with us, not to us. To make that point concrete, fast food is bringing back humans as the robot-fry-cook experiment gets walked back. Turns out that taking the people out of the workplace isn’t good for a people business.

HiBob Gets $166 million Salesforce Investment

Last week, Salesforce announced a $166 million investment in HiBob, the company behind the people management platform, Bob. In the great Work Tech vendor reshuffle, this definitely rearranged the furniture in the room. Read more on the Work Tech Weekly Substack.

This Week on the Work Tech Weekly Podcast

In the latest episode of Work Tech Weekly, I talk with Josh Millet, founder and CEO of Criteria Corp, to make the case that AI didn't break hiring but exposed a flaw that was already there. A resume was never reliable. Listen Now

Transactions

• Nvidia agrees to buy Hugging Face for $13 billion. The open-source AI darling just got bought by the company selling the picks and shovels, which tells you everything about who actually wins an AI gold rush. Let’s see what happens to "open" once it has a $13B parent company with opinions. (Financial Times)

• Harvey hits $15.5 billion valuation, months after reaching $11 billion. Legal AI is compounding valuations the way SaaS used to compound ARR, except this time the lawyers are cheering their own replacement on the way to the billable hour's funeral. (TechCrunch)

• Bending Spoons enters into a definitive agreement to acquire Miro for $1.355 billion. The serial-acquirer playbook (buy distressed, gut the team, jack the price) is now coming for enterprise SaaS names everyone assumed were untouchable. Miro sells for roughly 90% less than its 2022 valuation, a week after Bending Spoons closed Airtable. (Press Release)

• Capacity raises over $50 million in Series E to expand its unified AI-native customer experience platform. HR help desk is one use case for this St. Louis startup, but we’ll see whether its unified layer actually replaces headcount or just adds another dashboard nobody asked for. (Press Release)

• Minneapolis workforce trust platform Yardstik raises $30 million Series B, bringing total funding to $65 million. Background-check-and-trust infrastructure keeps quietly raising real money while everyone's busy staring at the AI headline acts. (DHRMap)

• Main Capital Partners enters the UK market with acquisition of Orgvue. A European PE firm buying its way into UK org-design software is just another example of how consolidation is the actual AI strategy for a lot of these vendors. (Press Release)

• Ollie raises $7.5 million in seed funding. The San Diego startup is developing an intelligent conversational AI assistant and agentic workspace platform for corporate workflows. (FinSMEs)

• Palette raises €3 million in pre-seed funding. The Copenhagen-based AI-native work collaboration startup makes it easier for teams to work with Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, and other tools. (Acadian Ventures)

• Recruiter.com acquires Feenyx for skills-based hiring. Another bolt-on acquisition in the skills-based hiring category. (HR Tech News)

• Jens Bender’s August 2026 Work Tech funding highlights. The monthly always helpful look from the European perspective. (LinkedIn)

Industry Notes

• Workday names Sarah Kennedy Ellis Chief Marketing Officer. A new CMO walks into Workday at a moment when the company's brand story — HCM incumbent vs. AI-native challengers — needs a clearer answer than it's had in a while. Whoever holds this seat inherits that fight immediately. (Press Release)

• American workers have slammed the brakes on switching jobs. The Great Resignation's hangover just keeps going — when nobody's moving, nobody's negotiating, and the labor market quietly hands leverage back to employers without anyone announcing it. (Wall Street Journal)

• Google Cloud, Accenture launch unit to put AI engineers on-site with customers. Two giants formalizing what's already an open secret — enterprise AI adoption is stalling without bodies in the room to actually make it work. The "AI engineer as consultant" model just got its own dedicated business unit. (Wall Street Journal)

• Making sovereign, open-weight AI the technology frontier. Mistral's making its "we're not OpenAI, and that's the point" pitch explicit. As the rest of the world grows increasingly uneasy with the erratic nature of American civilization, data sovereignty has become a real product differentiator. (Mistral)

• UKG launches voice-enabled AI and 'Agentic Pay' tools to support frontline workers. UKG doubling down on frontline workers specifically — voice-first UX for people who aren't sitting at a desk all day is the kind of unglamorous problem that actually moves adoption numbers. (HR Tech Feed)

• iCIMS debuts intelligent hiring platform. Another ATS incumbent reaches for the "intelligent" rebrand. The question that matters for buyers: is this actually new architecture, or the same funnel with an AI sticker on the box? (HR Tech Cube)

• Deel announcements. The EOR giant announces global equity administration and retirement benefits as the features arms race continues.

• Fuel50 founders outline a new vision for workforce intelligence in the age of AI. See workforce capability, skill gaps, and aspirations before AI reshapes the job itself, not after. (Press Release)

• Inspiring Workplaces Group introduces Inspiring Place to Work. Congratulations to Matt Manners and his team. (Inspiring Workplaces)

• Dave Christison joins Leland as VP of Marketing. The Awardco marketing leader makes a big move. (LinkedIn)

• Relate names Kristy McCann Flynn co-founder as company accelerates growth. Adding a co-founder title mid-growth-phase is an unusual move — usually a signal the company's scaling faster than its original founding story can carry alone. (Press Release)

• Lattice promotes Sophie Roberts to Chief Product and Technology Officer. (Lattice)

• Other HR Tech exec announcements. Culture Amp expands its Customer Advisory Board; Vensure names its first CISO; LumApps taps Sébastien Cano as CEO. (HR Tech Feed)

• HR tech partnerships in the news. PageUp deepens its Sapia.ai tie-up, and AWS just became ADP's official strategic cloud partner across 140 countries — the ecosystem-partnership layer of HR tech keeps quietly consolidating around a handful of platforms. (HR Tech Feed)

Worth Reading

• Wendell Berry's advice for a cataclysmic age. Sometimes the best career advice comes from someone who's never touched a computer. (The New Yorker)

• Remember filmstrips? These people are racing to save them. People fighting to preserve obsolete media is a nice little read as we wonder what AI is about to make obsolete next. (The New York Times)

• Who's watching the front desk? Lance Haun asks the unglamorous question about who's actually covering the human-facing jobs while everyone's busy automating the ones nobody sees. (Lance Haun)

• Parker Conrad drops $43 million for a Martha's Vineyard estate. The Rippling CEO’s real estate transaction was a record price in Massachusetts. (Wall Street Journal)