One thing’s for sure in HR tech: everything is agentic AI. Or better yet, just “agentic.” In the frigid back conference halls of the Mandalay Bay convention center, past the food court, and up the escalator banks, the word “agentic” bounced across the walls and danced through the air. It’s the hot new thing. Everyone’s talking about it. And maybe that’s the problem.
Over the course of the two and a half days at the 3Sixty Insights table, I was briefed, debriefed, and briefed again with vendors from across the HR tech industry. I met and spoke with many witty, intelligent, and forward-thinking people, all telling – or being told to tell – the same story. As an analyst, the result was often walking away from a meetings not quite sure what you just listened to and who said it. “Was that feature with company X or with company Y? Maybe it was company Z?”
But maybe it’s me (don’t answer that). Maybe by my eighth meeting of the day or 27 cups of coffee later, I can’t tell the difference between decaf and caffeinated either. Or maybe HR technology is beginning to enter into what I started calling it in Las Vegas: “The ‘It’s Toasted’ Era.” For those of you who’ve seen the early seasons of the period TV drama Mad Men, this reference might ring a bell. For those who aren’t, I’ll set the stage.
Mad Men centers around the life of Madison Avenue advertising firms in the 1960s. In one notable scene, the show’s main character, advertising executive Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm, is in a challenging advertising meeting with executives from Lucky Strike cigarettes. After coming under fire from federal regulators and health authorities around their health claims and cigarettes having been labelled as cancer-causing, there was no way to continue advertising that cigarettes were a safe product. The tobacco company is meeting with Draper and his team to figure out how to market themselves in this new reality.
The meeting goes poorly, and as one tobacco company executive gets up to leave the room, he states, “At least we know that if we have this problem, everybody has this problem.” That’s where Draper has his eureka moment: if Lucky Strike can’t make health claims, neither can their competitors. The playing field is leveled. You have nearly identical companies selling nearly identical products, meaning, “You can say anything you want.”
The team pivots to focus on how the product is made and come up with a new tagline: Lucky Strike – It’s Toasted. “But everybody else’s tobacco is toasted,” the tobacco executive bukes. “No,” says Draper, “Everybody else’s tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strike is toasted.”
While I’m not telling HR technology vendors to commit the morally onerous act of rebranding a knowingly damaging product to the public, it is time for the most ambitious vendors to stand out from the pack.
Agentic HR is becoming table stakes. Moreover, given that it’s free for most subscribed users, it may already be in its Napster/music streaming phase (a topic I’ll explore later), meaning getting people to pay for it, even if it becomes more advanced, is going to be an uphill battle when your competition is offering it for free or next to nothing. This means, for many companies, they really have nothing to lose – other than your business – when it comes to marketing.
But in an era of decisions by committee, must-have insert-percentage-point year over year growth, and shareholders that drive a business only towards the heading of revenue, ambitious marketers and advertisers have been cowed into submission. That means, with consolidation ramping up and private equity owning a large number of the vendors in question, no one wants to rock the boat. People want a sure thing and nice tidy return for when they make their inevitable strategic exit and leave the business behind. For many, there’s not enough skin in the game to take risks, and this has flattened the way people market their products.
But risk taking is exactly what needs to happen.
When the facts of your product become uninteresting or common amongst your competition, you can reframe the conversation and turn something unique or even mundane into a change of perception. A great example of this is something like Apple’s “Designed in California” branding which states something unspectacular boldly. Many products are made in California, but Apple made it into something that stood out.
Throughout my experience at HR Tech 2025, I saw many products that were functionally interchangeable. What was often missing was the story and emotions like security, comfort, and aspiration that come with deploying them successfully in a business.
If marketing and advertising is about inventing meaning where none exists, great storytelling and bold branding can do that. Instead of controlling the narrative of the product at the front end, vendors need to focus on emotions and outcomes, and what actually makes them stand out from the crowd and how it makes a difference to the people that use it.
