Tony Buffum: We hear about these startups hitting a billion bucks, these unicorns with no employees, and that that's the future. That's an exception to the rule. So often we see technology adoption driven by the media narratives around hey, we gotta replace people because that brings productivity. But the people always come back. The technology doesn't live on its own. Kelly Monahan: It is fascinating to me how many layoffs the tech industry did about twelve to eighteen months ago and how many people they've now hired back this past year. It is almost one to one when you look at the data. People got so excited about the shiny object. And don't get me wrong, agentic AI is changing my world and it's gonna turn a lot of people's worlds upside down. However, I think we've front-loaded that, figured we could do all these things without people. Technology does not create value. People working with technology creates value. And I think we lost that value proposition somewhere along the way because of these headlines of the one billion dollar company with no employees. Is that really the purpose of business? Is there something more that we should be doing here by creating economic opportunity, by helping out local communities? There is so much more to business than just transactional wealth. There is such a bigger purpose there, and we seem to have lost that. And AI seems to be the scapegoat for losing that. Tony Buffum: It does seem like a really easy default to be like, well, AI kind of means we get to work with people less. But the reality is AI doesn't happen without people. And we're not trying to be altruistic saying you have to bring people along. No, that's how businesses are successful. It's finding the right balance. In my HR formative experience, that's what really drove me crazy: living in that cycle of we gotta get rid of people, we gotta hit these numbers. And then we do that, and then we're like, we needed some of those people, let's go get them back. That tug of war is the definition of insanity. That dance is all for metrics. The real impact is when you actually put the effort into doing it right, solving for it, and bringing the people on the process.
