Perspectives

Enterprise HR technology has settled into a pattern that serves vendors more than the organisations paying for it. The core platforms are broad but shallow. They cover enough surface area to win procurement battles, but the moment an organisation needs something specific — a compliance workflow unique to a jurisdiction, a time-tracking model for a regulation the vendor has not prioritised, a recognition system embedded where people actually work — the answer is always the same: wait for the roadmap, or build it yourself.

Most organisations wait. The ones that do not are the ones I have spent my career working with.

I build products that sit in the gap. Some are native extensions of enterprise platforms. Some are standalone tools. Some use AI to reimagine processes that nobody has questioned in a decade. All of them share a common trait: they exist because I could not find them anywhere else.

The approach is always the same. Start with a real problem — not an abstract one, a specific one that a specific team is dealing with right now. Build the smallest thing that solves it. Ship it. Watch what happens. Iterate or move on.

AI changes the economics of everything above. The cost of closing a gap is dropping. The speed of going from problem to prototype is collapsing. A single architect with deep domain knowledge and modern AI tooling can now ship what used to require a full team.

The next generation of HR technology will not be built by the incumbent vendors alone. It will be shaped by the people closest to the problems — the architects, the consultants, the operators who have spent years watching the same gaps go unaddressed.