In this lively episode, Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman sit down with Quincy Valencia, SVP of Innovation at Harri, at the HR Tech conference. Known for her no-nonsense approach, Quincy offers her candid insights on the overhyped AI trend, emphasizing that companies should focus on the outcomes AI can deliver rather than getting lost in technical jargon. She highlights how AI has evolved since ChatGPT’s launch, moving beyond basic functionalities to transformative real-time data applications in industries like hospitality. As she discusses the future of HR technology, Quincy predicts continued shifts toward integrated ecosystems and strategic partnerships, suggesting that adaptability and innovation are critical for survival. The conversation wraps up with her advice for cautious companies exploring AI: prioritize business results over the technology’s novelty.
PODACAST TRANSCRIPTION
Podcast Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast.
[music]
Chad: Here we go.
Joel: Let's do this. We are live at HR Tech from the SmartRecruiters booth. This is the Chad and Cheese podcast and we are talking to Quincy Valencia.
Quincy Valencia: That's right.
Joel: Friend of the show for a long time.
Quincy Valencia: Friend.
Chad: Oh, god. Yeah. How many times has she been on?
Joel: Two?
Chad: 10?
Joel: No.
Chad: She's co-hosted.
Joel: Have you done a prediction show with us?
Quincy Valencia: No.
Joel: Oh, I thought you did.
Quincy Valencia: Did I? Yes, I did. I did the turkey show.
Chad: Turkey show.
Joel: Turkey show.
Quincy Valencia: I've done the turkey show.
Chad: Oh, yeah. Where you drove her crazy with that fucking turkey...
Quincy Valencia: Like three years in a row.
Joel: Gobble. The gobble still haunts you every night, doesn't it?
Quincy Valencia: Oh, that gobble. It really... It hadn't. I'd forgotten about it. Thanks, Chad, for bringing that back.
Chad: You're welcome.
Joel: This is what we do.
Quincy Valencia: It's now in my head.
Joel: Bring back the nightmares.
Quincy Valencia: I know.
Chad: That's why you love me.
Joel: So, you're fancily called, titled the SVP of Innovation at Harri.
Quincy Valencia: It's a very fancy title. That's right, yes.
Chad: It is very fancy.
Joel: Does that play pretty well in bars and concerts and places?
Quincy Valencia: It does. That's how I picked up my husband.
[laughter]
Joel: Boom. Boom.
Quincy Valencia: Worked.
Joel: I could go down a deep rabbit hole on that...
Chad: Very nice.
Quincy Valencia: I like this guy.
Joel: But I will not. I won't do it. No.
Chad: We're cutting that one right off.
Quincy Valencia: How'd you like to marry an SVP of Innovation, I said, and we're together. I mean, there you go.
Chad: Well, there you go. There you go. That just makes sense.
Quincy Valencia: No, it's a fun title. It's actually fun what I can do with it. It's the practice that makes it more fun.
Joel: Let's see how... No, I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna go there.
Chad: Don't do it. Don't do it.
Quincy Valencia: Don't go there. I won't go there.
Joel: Not gonna do it.
Chad: So, as SVP of Innovation, do you talk about AI much?
Quincy Valencia: I specifically said that I'm not talking about AI because nobody should be talking about AI, and everyone here is talking about AI and I don't understand that.
Joel: Okay, say more about that. Why shouldn't they?
Quincy Valencia: Two years ago, November, we all know what happened, November 29, 2022 when ChatGPT launched and it was a revolution. And everyone predicted, including analysts, 'cause that's what I did at the time that it would actually revolutionize the way that work was done and the way that technologists created solutions that support the businesses and they were right. It actually has in many ways and will continue to do so, but everyone dove in headfirst very quickly. It's not... I'm saying this and have to take it with a grain of salt, it's a "easy transition." The first transition that people did, it's let's do what we're already doing but drive it with a different engine which means that you get the ability to take more data and analyze it in different ways and marry data to make it more useful in the outcomes. And everybody has jumped on that at some point in time over the past two years and is doing it fairly well. The leading with AI thing is bizarre to me at this point in time. It's the, "Ooh, look at this shiny thing we have." It's like so everybody's got that. I've got it on my laptop, for God's sake. What it is doing, though...
Chad: It's on my phone.
Quincy Valencia: And what is innovative are the ways that I'm seeing people use that engine because it is so much more powerful. You have so much more computing power in the back and the backend to produce better outcomes and results for their clients, and that's super cool. It's the leading with AI messaging that's bizarre to me.
Joel: Have we overhyped AI?
Quincy Valencia: No.
Joel: No. Are we downplaying what AI is gonna mean to business?
Quincy Valencia: It depends who you're talking to. I actually think we're in the right spot. I love that I've seen vendors leap on it but with guardrails, and we have to. My natural inclination is to be, let's get in the lab and see what the crazy mad scientist can do and that's great until you're dealing with real people's lives and data and you're purporting that this tool can make decisions for you or help you make decisions. You have to make sure it's accurate and real. So, everybody has gone straight in for it which is great. People have done it with some proper guardrails in place which is even better. So, no, I don't think that we're overhyping it at all, and I don't think we're under-hyping. I think people saw really quickly, wow, this is pretty cool.
Joel: It's Goldilocks. We've Goldilocksed AI.
Quincy Valencia: It's the baby bear.
Joel: Okay.
Chad: Talk to me about, okay, so we take a look at ChatGPT and they've got $20 a month for users like us and then obviously you can do more as a business, but then you have Amazon Q where they're actually doing these AI developers that actually go back and fix your tech debt and do your upgrades and all this shit that, to be quite frank, developers just don't wanna do. They wanna be fashion-forward. Those are two entirely different business models which could garner a hell of a lot of money. I think Amazon Q is even, is bigger, just because if you implant that into AWS, it could explode. In our space, what have you seen that is really... For you, has been, yeah, no, that is innovative.
Quincy Valencia: So, I'll talk about our space, and I'll talk about my space specifically, not MySpace. That was like 2007.
Chad: Friendster? Can we talk about Friendster?
Quincy Valencia: Napster.
Joel: Who was in your top ten friends, Chad or me?
Quincy Valencia: Neither. I'm sorry.
Joel: Neither, okay.
Chad: Goddamn.
Quincy Valencia: I'm sorry. Well, I've known Chad longer, so it may... No, neither of you. No. And you don't like me.
Joel: The answer is you don't remember 'cause it was too...
Quincy Valencia: Chad said you don't like me, so.
Chad: Yeah, she doesn't have a T-shirt.
Quincy Valencia: I don't have a T-shirt.
Joel: Chad lies. I know you listen to the show.
Quincy Valencia: I know, I know, I know it is true. What was the question? Oh, what have people done?
Chad: Yes, innovative.
Quincy Valencia: So, what I've seen, I've seen such cool stuff. So, we talked about this before. So, the initial entree into this space were some things that vendors were already doing, but now they're doing it in a different way. And we saw this even a year ago at this very event where it's the assisted authoring and how can I help you out your performance review and how can I make you as a frontline manager more effective in your conversations that you have with your employees? And that is so impactful, and it was a great way to enter. But now we're seeing even more data come in and how are you bringing that in and we're marrying that with operational data. So, if you can take... For example, in the people space, I'll talk about hospitality because that's what Harri does. Nowhere is your labor data having that real-time more important than it is in the hospitality space because if your sales projections are off by $1000 in the course of a day, then your labor is eating up more of your profit than it should and you need to know and so having that at a weekly report is not helpful or useful.
Quincy Valencia: Now, you can get that in real-time. You're pulling from different databases, you're crunching it there and you can push those notifications to a McDonald's operator that says, you're operating at a much higher percentage of what your labor projection was. You may want to cut someone or your sales are trending higher. We expect it'll do that for the remainder of the week. You may wanna adjust your labor schedule. And then you... It's actually being done for you in an automated way, but you're informing, not HR necessarily... I mean, they still need to know.
Chad: The business.
Quincy Valencia: You're informing the business, you're informing the people that need the information at a level that they need it. So, businesses are operating here, they're not operating from here and they're much more nimble and they can be much more responsive. And we're already seeing extremely positive impacts on top and bottom lines in businesses.
Chad: That's so smart.
Quincy Valencia: And that's the power of AI.
Chad: That's so smart because that is business impact...
Quincy Valencia: That's right.
Chad: And that ties the business impact to talent, and we don't do that enough in our space.
Quincy Valencia: That's right. And we've been talking about this forever of how is it that we can actually make an impact if all the years that HR wanted that seat at the table that we all talked about and then HR got the seat at the table and didn't know what to do with it, in general, some people did but it wasn't necessarily their fault. It's very difficult to see the business impact when your people data is siloed from your operational data. And now, there's absolute systems in place that can do that without extreme complexity and making sure that it's done so that those operators can actually make an impact on their business.
Joel: Quincy, you say a lot of things that scare me and I'm sure I'm not alone in that. A lot of our listeners, viewers...
Chad: She does that intentionally, by the way.
Joel: A lot of our listeners and viewers are new to this AI thing. It's a little scary, a little much. What advice would you give a company just dipping their toe into AI? They've been afraid of it, intimidated, what advice would you give them to jump in?
Quincy Valencia: My advice would be don't ask about it. You're talking about buyers, right?
Joel: Yes.
Quincy Valencia: It's not the relevant conversation. The conversation is not, do you have any of that AI stuff that I've been hearing all about? It's irrelevant. The conversation is when they're evaluating vendors is what outcomes are being produced from whatever it is your tech stack is. If your vendor starts talking about, yes, we're using Gen AI to do this and this and this, then there are some questions when you're going through the process about the guardrails and about security and how are you guarding against hallucinations and all of those things there...
Chad: Auditing, yeah.
Quincy Valencia: And auditing. But the question is, it should never be, what do I do with this AI thing? My answer, and this is going to sound strange, but it's don't worry about how they're doing it. It's up to them, let the technologist do the tech thing. You need to know if they're gonna be able to provide you with the outcomes that you want for your business, and those are the questions that you ask. If you go down the path, then you have those security conversations and other things there. And where are they going with it? What are they doing that's different than the other vendors are doing, is also actually a really important thing too. And by different, it's not different just to be different. Again, it's that, how is this going to impact my business, not just my people model. And that's where I think all the focus needs to be, not the, ooh, AI.
Chad: So, on the hairy side of the house, actually, we were talking to Rebecca Carr earlier and she was talking about how really most of the older platforms, they're more of the Titanic and they can't handle high volume and that's kinda like their weak spot where a lot of the newer platforms, that's where they were really they were built to start with high volume. And that's where you guys really... I mean, that's where you guys...
Quincy Valencia: That's what we do...
Chad: Yeah, that's what you do.
Quincy Valencia: We focus on... It's hospitality, we're a hospitality space.
Chad: So, if you take a look forward and you have a lot of these platforms, these older platforms are really having problems adapting, do you just see a lot of M&A or do you see just a lot of loss in the market for some of those bigger platforms?
Quincy Valencia: I think it's gonna be a combination of... Well, there's three. I think some will not adapt quickly enough and if they haven't already gotten on that train, they're late, I fear. Some. There will be... We are still seeing now... Last year at this very event and in the analyst room, we were talking about seeing the swing back away from point solutions and toward that full platform solution. So, the importance of integrations is really, really important. So, whether your platform provider is really truly a full platform or whether they're integrating seamlessly with some of those others, it doesn't really matter. It's still a single source of truth. As long as the vendor has the ability to do that, I think they're gonna be okay. Those who are insisting on we have to build everything ourselves in the old way are gonna be done for and those who aren't migrating to the cloud or even multi-cloud solution, they're gonna have difficulty because it's hard to pull that data from the different places as we know and they simply can't compute it quickly enough to compete with everybody else in the market who is.
Quincy Valencia: So, there will continue to be... I predict that M&A is gonna pick up again. I think it's slowed some. We're gonna start seeing that again. People are ripe, they're at that stage...
Joel: Shit's on sale.
Quincy Valencia: Three years in. Shit's on sale. It's a flash sale, man. We're gonna see it.
Chad: A flash sale.
Quincy Valencia: Yeah. And then some have done really, really well. Some of your big platform providers have done quite well with coming very quickly at that, but those who haven't are gonna have a problem.
Joel: By the way, we have a Groupon for eightfold if you're in the market for buying someone at a discount.
[laughter]
Joel: One of the more popular stories recently is...
Quincy Valencia: That's my favorite line, by the way, of this entire show. So, I can leave now. We have a Groupon for eightfold.
Joel: I could drop the mic, that's good? Okay.
Quincy Valencia: I'm done.
Joel: Thank you very much, everybody.
Chad: He's been waiting all day to use that one. Perfect. Very nice.
Joel: No, she set me up perfectly.
Chad: Very nice.
Joel: One of the more popular stories in the news now is Klarna talking about being able to dump Salesforce, Workday. Some people are obviously skeptical of that but from your perspective, you've been around a while...
Quincy Valencia: Thanks a lot. Is that a way of saying I'm old?
Joel: You're experienced. You're a woman of a certain age and as you walk through the halls here...
Quincy Valencia: Chad's older.
Joel: Or you look at startups coming up and companies that are established, who do you say, oh, they're fucked because of the innovation that's happening?
Quincy Valencia: I can't say that.
Joel: Give me some categories if not companies like job writing services, maybe.
[laughter]
Joel: Not to lead the witness, but just giving you an example without naming a company but a category.
Quincy Valencia: I mean, that's sort of true, exactly what you just said. It's any of those categories that have been doing any of those, we'll write your... We'll create your job descriptions for you, we'll write your resume for you because I took a certification course and I know how to do that now. It's any of those... It's those things that people don't want to do or don't have the time to do or it's not as much of a value-add that now you don't need it anymore. You just don't. If that's your business, you might wanna think about pivoting or selling while somebody might... Joel might have a Groupon for you, I don't really know.
Joel: Thus the discount flash sale that we've been talking about.
Quincy Valencia: Yeah. I mean, that's really hard, it's that sort of thing because, and Chad said it before, developers, there's stuff that even developers they don't wanna do it and if that's how you're using your developers, you're wasting your money. Put them where they can add the most value and that's for delivering results for your clients and really ChatGPT on your laptop can write your job description for you. It's just... Yeah. I'll leave it there.
Chad: Predictions, predictions. What does 2025 look like for you and the landscape of our industry?
Quincy Valencia: So, I think we've touched on what it's gonna look like. So, it's more... The focus is gonna be less on... Please, dear God, okay, so this is a hope and a prediction but stop focusing on how you're doing things. I don't wanna hear... I don't wanna come to this event next year and hear about AI anymore so that's the first.
Chad: Investors love those two letters.
Quincy Valencia: I understand, but investors...
Chad: They do.
Quincy Valencia: Investors need to because they need to know how you're powering that engine, your buyers don't. So, the focus is gonna be very much on...
Chad: Not the same narrative is what you're saying.
Quincy Valencia: Correct. So, it's looking at how you're delivering business results for your clients. We're gonna start hearing more and more of that narrative which I already am hearing more of which is great and I'm also seeing it from... It's strange going from the analyst chair back to the vendor chair, but I'm still very much looking at what my fellow... Former fellow analysts you're are looking in, they're all seeing it too which is very, very good because they're in the backend, in the back room. That sounds really bad.
[laughter]
Quincy Valencia: Not with Diddy but with the vendors hearing what their goals, where they're headed with their products. So, I think we're gonna hear a lot of that. I think we're gonna continue to see an expansion of the skills-based workforce narrative which we've been hearing which I'm also sick of hearing about, but we're actually seeing results from it now, so it's not just talk and that's gonna expand. So, in the arena that we work in in hospitality, the traditional narrative has been you just need people who can breathe and no longer is that. They're becoming more sophisticated and they see that there, but the skills are different and you can't use those same models for a frontline just as workforce that you use somewhere else. So, continuing to find those gaps in that white space because that's not going away either. And particularly as... Oh God, I'm gonna talk about AI but as AI is rendering some jobs obsolete. So, people need to reskill.
Joel: Spoiler alert, I'm going to call you old again. I hope you're okay with that. You've been to a few of these HR tech conferences...
Quincy Valencia: One or two.
Joel: What stands out to you at this one? What are you sort of excited to explore and learn more about? And maybe just what is your take on the industry as a whole as we head into 2025?
Quincy Valencia: I can't say what's standing out for me yet because I just got here this morning. I haven't come around yet, so I can't tell you what I'm seeing yet.
Joel: Okay, I'll rephrase it. Who are you looking to check out or what sort of new technologies or businesses are you on the hunt for while you're here?
Quincy Valencia: That's a good question. So, I'm checking out everyone because I wanna see how the market is addressing those same issues that we as an organization are addressing. We're building a lot of software, but we also are looking at strategic partnerships. So, if there are things that we can deliver that we can get to market and realize revenue from more quickly, maybe we should. So, that's what I was talking about. We are a platform provider, no question, and we build things very, very well but there are so many things that we wanna take to market. There are some things that maybe we shouldn't build, maybe we should partner with someone to do that. So, specifically, I'm looking at... Well, I can't say that out loud 'cause I can't tell you what I'm looking at.
Joel: She also really wants to say acquisition but she won't.
Quincy Valencia: I didn't say that.
Joel: I said you want to say it but you're not saying it.
Quincy Valencia: I didn't say that I wanted to say it. I'm saying that it's very smart. The market is moving very quickly and I'm saying that sometimes it's really important to build things yourself...
Joel: Build or buy.
Quincy Valencia: And sometimes it's important to partner with people who already have that. So, just really looking to see... And how others are. So, as I'm walking around, I'm looking at... Even at our booth, we're Harri but we have an ADP flag in our booth because that's really important. And I'm seeing a whole lot of that around here too. You're looking at a whole lot of marrying of technologies...
Chad: Ecosystems.
Quincy Valencia: That's... The ecosystem which is really, really smart. And everybody's talked about ecosystem, it's like, oh, we're in the Workday ecosystem. So? Workday doesn't even know who you are, it doesn't mean a thing. If you're not actually working together to make sure that your products are marrying with yours, then you're not helping each other in either way. Sitting in someone's ecosystem is irrelevant to me.
Joel: Yeah. Billy Idol has a better connection with Workday than you do.
Quincy Valencia: Exactly.
Chad: That's Quincy Valencia, SVP of Innovation over at Harri. Quincy, if somebody wants to connect with you, where would you send them?
Quincy Valencia: Well, certainly you can go to harri.com and look what we have to offer. My personal email is quincy.valencia@harri.com and certainly you can find me on LinkedIn as well and MySpace. I think I still have a profile.
[laughter]
Joel: She deleted the Friendster account a week ago. Chad, that is another one in the can live from the SmartRecruiters booth at HR Tech. We out.
Chad: We out.
Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.