The product and technology keynote covered Responsible Intelligence (Avionté’s approach to embedding AI without sending customer data to third parties), new capabilities including Matching Agent and Avionté Chat, and back-office modernization already live inside AviontéBOLD.
The staffing industry is changing fast. Markets are shifting, technology is advancing, and expectations from clients and talent continue to evolve. But at Avionté CONNECT 2026, that reality was met not with anxiety, but with energy, curiosity, and a clear desire to find new ways to work smarter, move faster, and grow. Agency leaders and staffing professionals came ready to share ideas, tackle the challenges facing their businesses, and explore what’s next.
With more than 35 sessions, hands-on product experiences, and plenty of opportunities to connect with peers and Avionté experts, CONNECT is a place to learn, question, challenge, and look ahead.
That momentum came through loud and clear during one of CONNECT’s biggest sessions: the annual product keynote.
Last year, Avionté Chief Technology Officer, Odell Tuttle, took the stage to lay out where the industry was headed, and how Avionté planned to respond, with a vision for helping staffing agencies adapt, compete, and grow.
This year, Odell returned with Chief Product Officer Jason Froelich, and the difference was clear. There were no new promises to make. No talk of what might be possible somewhere down the line. The focus was on what Avionté had already delivered, and what customers could use today. Last year was about where we were going. This year was about showing how far we’ve come.
Attendees saw the technology, capabilities, and innovations already delivered, and how Avionté is continuing to turn that vision into real tools agencies can use to move their businesses forward.
It wasn’t possibility; it was proof.
As Odell explained: “Last year was about the big picture — where staffing is going, where the industry is leaning, the macro picture. We’re not here to hype the vision. We’re here to show you the work.”
And there was plenty of proof to show. Over the past year, Avionté delivered more than 1,000 product enhancements, reduced support resolution time by 28%, accelerated go-lives by 24%, and increased feature adoption by 24%. The team rebuilt AI matching based on customer feedback, expanded the capabilities of AviontéBOLD, and continued connecting more of the staffing lifecycle on a single platform.
But here’s what makes those deliveries especially important: they’re not being built as a collection of disconnected features. They’re being built on a foundation designed to bring more of the staffing business together.
At the center is AviontéBOLD, which increasingly unifies front- and back-office capabilities with mobile, communications, end-to-end analytics, and a growing integration ecosystem. The more an agency operates on this shared foundation, the more connected its data becomes—and the more effectively technology can support the workflows teams already use.
And that connected foundation is critical to where staffing technology is headed next: AI.
Over the past several years, Avionté has deliberately built the platform to support AI in a way that is embedded, governed, and designed around the realities of staffing—not simply bolted on as another tool. The goal is to bring intelligence into the workflows where agencies actually work, while keeping data connected to the system of record and maintaining the controls needed for responsible AI adoption.
That’s the thinking behind Responsible Intelligence: bringing AI into the platform without giving up control of the data that makes it valuable.
As Jason explained: “Where does the intelligence actually live? For most platforms, the answer is: outside. Your data leaves the platform, gets processed by a third-party AI layer, and comes back. That might sound fine in the abstract, so let me make it concrete.”
He then made the risk tangible, asking attendees to imagine a platform using AI to rank candidates against a job order. To do that, candidate profiles, including names, work history, skills, and sometimes compensation data, could be sent to a third-party model running on infrastructure the agency didn’t contract, audit, or even name in its data processing agreement.
“That data is now outside your control,” Jason explained. “Depending on the vendor’s terms of service, that data may be used to train models that serve other clients, potentially including competitors. You’re contributing your proprietary candidate intelligence to a shared pool.”
That’s the problem Avionté set out to solve. Responsible Intelligence is about bringing AI into the platform while keeping data connected, controlled, auditable, and explainable.
And as Odell explained, that required a fundamentally different approach to the platform itself.
“From the beginning, Avionté made a different architectural call. We decided to retool the platform from the inside to be AI-capable. Intelligence embedded directly in your workflows. AI that operates on your data — your fill rates, your candidate history, your client patterns — without it ever leaving the platform. Full audit trails, bias testing, and explainability built in.”
Odell TuttleCTO, Avionté
But Responsible Intelligence wasn’t the story of the keynote.
The story was about what that foundation is now making possible.
At CONNECT, Avionté brought the receipts, walking customers through how that foundation is translating into real capabilities across recruiting, talent engagement, the back office, analytics, automation, and beyond.
But the progress isn’t just about what Avionté is building. It’s also about how those decisions are being made. As Jason explains: “Responsible Intelligence is one of the decisions we made for you, but we are also making decisions with you. We’ve been doing a lot of listening to ensure we build products that add actual value to your day.”
That commitment to listening came through in the product updates Odell and Jason shared, with a look at just a few of the capabilities already delivered this year, along with what customers can expect to see rolling out later this year:
Candidate sourcing continues to be one of the biggest challenges facing staffing agencies. More than half of the audience identified it as a major pressure point for the next 12 to 18 months, with time, cost, and candidate quality all contributing to the challenge.
So Avionté approached the problem from a different angle.
Instead of simply asking how recruiters can search faster, the team asked: How can we help recruiters make better placements with the talent they already have?
The answer is Matching Agent.
Matching Agent surfaces best-fit candidates directly on a job order, explains why each candidate was recommended, and allows recruiters to adjust priorities such as skills, location, and pay.
That last part is important. Matching Agent isn’t designed to take the recruiter out of the process. It gives recruiters more information and a faster starting point, while keeping their experience and judgment at the center.
And early feedback has been enthusiastic. One customer reaction shared during the keynote captured it perfectly: “This AI auto-matcher is absolutely badass. I am freaking out over here. You guys made my decade with this one.”
For agencies, the opportunity is significant: make better use of the talent already in the database, reduce the time spent searching, and get recruiters focused faster on the conversations that lead to placements.
Finding the right candidate is only half the battle. In a competitive talent market, agencies also need to keep their best people engaged between assignments.
That’s where Avionté Mobile, formerly Avionté 24/7, comes in.
The mobile experience can push relevant job opportunities to matched, available talent in smart batches and notify candidates when a potential fit becomes available. Instead of relying on recruiters to remember to reach out—or hoping a candidate happens to check a job board—the opportunity comes directly to the talent.
Avionté Chat brings another important part of the relationship directly into AviontéBOLD.
Recruiters can communicate with talent without jumping between profiles, email notifications, and separate texting tools. Agency Chat allows conversations to be visible across the team, while Individual Chat supports one-to-one communication. If a candidate isn’t using the app, messages can automatically fall back to SMS.
The new Distribution Widget adds another layer of visibility, showing who received a job push and how they responded.
Together, these capabilities help turn engagement from a manual activity into a connected part of the staffing workflow.
Because the agencies that win aren’t necessarily the ones that simply find talent fastest.
They’re the ones that build relationships strong enough to bring that talent back.
The work doesn’t stop when a recruiter makes a placement. Behind every candidate, job, timesheet, invoice, and paycheck is an entire operational engine keeping the staffing business moving.
That’s why back-office modernization has been such an important part of the Avionté platform journey.
Two years ago, Avionté shared its vision for modernizing the back office: creating a cleaner, easier-to-use experience while strengthening the core functionality agencies rely on every day. The response was strong. Agencies wanted the power of the back office they already depended on, but with a more modern, intuitive experience.
And we listened. As we modernized back-office functionality, we focused on improving the experience without removing the critical functionality our clients rely on to run their day-to-day operations.
At CONNECT this year, Odell showed just how much of that vision is now a reality.
But the bigger story isn’t simply about a new look and feel. It’s about what becomes possible when more of the staffing lifecycle operates on one connected platform.
As Odell explained, the modernization has been intentional, prioritizing the workflows and roles that rely on the platform most: “The work your teams do most often is already unified. What’s still ahead is the deeper payroll and time entry layer. We prioritized by role — the people accessing the platform most frequently and across both offices.”
So, what does that mean for your agency?
When a recruiter places a candidate, the downstream back-office work can continue through connected workflows, reducing manual handoffs between systems and teams. That same approach is being applied to existing time-entry and payroll capabilities, with a more modern experience on the way.
That’s the real value of modernization: improving how people experience and move through the work without losing the functionality that keeps the business running.
As more of the business comes together, agencies also gain something incredibly valuable: a clearer picture of what’s happening across their operations.
Avionté’s expanding analytics capabilities are designed to help agencies turn that information into insight.
Avionté ANALYZE provides pre-built operational reports for the information agencies need most.
Avionté INSIGHTS connects information across the front office, back office, and mobile experience to provide a more unified view of the business.
And Avionté DataLink gives agencies direct access to more than 5,500 data elements, allowing them to work with their data through tools such as Power BI, Tableau, and Looker.
Again, the common thread is connection.
Data becomes more valuable when it isn’t trapped in isolated systems. And the ability to bring information together gives agencies a stronger foundation for understanding performance, identifying opportunities, and making decisions.
That same philosophy extends to integrations.
Rather than continuing to approach integrations as one-off requests or point solutions, Avionté is moving toward a more intentional interoperability strategy across areas including benefits, talent tax, billing, and user management.
The goal is a connected ecosystem where the pieces of an agency’s technology stack can work together—not another collection of applications that agencies have to manage separately.
It’s easy to look at the CONNECT product keynote as a list of new capabilities: Matching Agent, Avionté Mobile, Avionté Chat, back-office modernization, ANALYZE, INSIGHTS and DataLink, as well as exciting new features soon to be announced.
But taken together, they’re telling a much bigger story.
Avionté isn’t simply adding more tools to a staffing technology stack. It’s continuing to build a connected ecosystem designed to bring more of the staffing business together, with AviontéBOLD at the center.
That foundation matters.
It means recruiting, talent engagement, communication, operations, payroll, analytics, automation, and integrations can increasingly work from the same connected environment. It means data can move with the business instead of getting trapped in silos. And it creates the foundation for intelligence to be applied where it can have the greatest impact.
That’s where Responsible Intelligence fits in, not as the headline, but as part of the architecture supporting what’s being built.
But there’s another part of the story that may be even more important: how Avionté is deciding what to build in the first place.
Throughout the keynote, Odell and Jason emphasized that the platform is being shaped not only by what Avionté believes the industry needs, but by what customers are telling them they need.
As Jason put it: “You told us we needed to be careful when modernizing Back Office — be intentional, don’t rush it — we listened, we laid the groundwork, and now it’s moving. That feedback loop is not a feature. It’s what makes every feature better. We are building something here, together, and that partnership is the part that doesn’t show up in a demo.”
That intentionality shows up in the products themselves: rebuilding AI matching when customers said the first version created more work, redesigning the release process when customers said it was difficult to follow, and taking a deliberate approach to bringing the back office into BOLD.
The real headline, then, isn’t simply what customers can use today. It’s that the work is already happening—and customers are helping shape what comes next.
As Odell put it near the end of the keynote: “Every other year, I’ve been telling you what we’re thinking about building. This year, I’m showing you what we already built, and telling you what’s next.”
That’s the difference between a vision and a receipt.
A vision tells you where you’re going. A receipt shows you that you’ve already started getting there.
And at CONNECT 2026, Avionté made that progress tangible, with more already in customers’ hands, more on the way, and a clear commitment to keep building it together.
Want to see these features in action? Schedule a demo with the Avionté team.
WorkN is now Avionté Mobile. Building on the power and functionality of WorkN’s talent mobile app, Avionté Mobile is built for the high-volume staffing and recruiting industry.
