Avionté CONNECT 2025 Keynote with CTO Odell Tuttle

Good morning, and welcome back to CONNECT. It’s been great catching up with all of you guys the last couple of days. Folks, we are at an inflection point, not just in staffing and not just in tech, but in how work happens. I’m standing here today to share a vision of staffing’s AI powered future where technology amplifies human potential in ways we’ve never seen before. The agencies that embrace this transformation will thrive. Those that don’t, won’t. But with this shift comes uncertainty. Let’s address the elephant in the room. Is AI going to take my job? I mean, I can see it. The elephant is clearly dressed better than me. But let’s take a look at history for some perspective on this question. In 1913 Henry Ford installed the first moving assembly line to produce cars faster and more affordably. It replaced manual labor on the production line but it didn’t eliminate jobs. It created an entire ecosystem mechanics, dealerships, roads, insurance, whole industries formed around that innovation. Fast forward to the 1960s when automated teller machines were introduced, people projected that bank tellers would disappear. But what actually happened? Banks hired more tellers, opened more branches, and shifted staff to more complex financial services. The same story repeated again with spreadsheets and bookkeeping software. We didn’t lose accountants. We got financial analysts, business strategists, and BI experts. Here’s the pattern. Every time we’ve automated routine tasks, we’ve freed humans to do more valuable, more creative, and more relationship driven work. Now, yes, there is a robot in South Korea that can fry 800 pieces of chicken in an hour. Let’s call it RoboFryer. Now that’s impressive, but staffing isn’t fast food. Staffing is one of the most uniquely human endeavors. It requires building trust, creating relationships, thinking about how others think, assessing skills and cultural fit, and figuring out which people can actually work together, and managing through every uncertainty that might show up in your daily workflow, because after all, we’re dealing with human beings. This isn’t automation for automation’s sake. We’re not building machines to replace you. We’re building tools to make you better at what you do. And this transformation, this shift toward automation is coming at us like a freight train. You can either hop on you left behind. 87 percent of staffing companies now use AI for recruiting. That’s not the future. That’s today. By 2026, core AI tools will be table stakes among leading staffing agencies. Agencies that are agencies lagging in AI risk being labeled non-competitive because clients demand faster data-driven delivery. The gap widens when AI enabled agencies deliver faster placements, lower fees, and better quality matches. Traditional firms start losing placements in competitive verticals. According to some recent studies, companies that delay AI initiatives risk losing up to 5 percent of monthly revenue due to operational inefficiencies. Organizations face thirty to fifty percent performance gaps when recruiters remain stuck in manual workflows. Talent attrition increases as recruiters leave for AI-enabled agencies with better tools. Compliance risk grows as firms lack readiness for audits and AI regulations. Now here’s the reality. Early movers build data feedback loops and AI readiness that compound over time. So delaying AI adoption by even a few months can result in being years behind the leaders in terms of performance and efficiency. But here’s what most agencies are missing. The biggest asset isn’t the AI tools themselves. It’s the data that you already have. Whether you’re placing talent, filling orders, or adding payroll, every decision in staffing starts with data. And right now across the industry, most of that data is underused and unrefined. Luckily, this isn’t the first time we’ve been on the precipice of an industrial transformation. Let’s go back to the 1860s in rural Pennsylvania. There’s this black sticky substance bubbling up from the ground. Farmers are furious. It’s contaminating their water. It’s ruining their land. Most people see it as a nuisance to be cleaned up. But John D Rockefeller, he sees something different. He sees fuel. He sees lubricants. He sees the foundation of an industrial revolution. While others were focused on the immediate problem, Rockefeller understood that this black gold could power an entire economy. He didn’t just extract the oil, he built the infrastructure to refine it, transport it, distribute it. He created Standard Oil Company and by 1880, his company controlled 90 percent of America’s oil production. And the result? Rockefeller didn’t just become wealthy. He became the richest person in modern history. But more importantly, oil became the foundation of the modern economy. It powered industries, transformed transportation, and literally fueled the growth of nations. So here’s a parallel. Today, your staffing data is sitting there like that oil was a 150 years ago. Most people see it as administrative overhead, something that has to be managed, stored, and dealt with. But the smartest agencies, they’re seeing what Rockefeller saw. They’re not just collecting the data, they’re refining it, analyzing it, and using it to power their competitive advantage. Because in today’s market, data isn’t just information. Data is the new oil. We’re introducing a new way to think about data for better talent management using recency, frequency, and segmentation models. How recently did they work for you? What’s their total lifetime value? Have they come back more than once? What’s their likelihood percentage of returning? The shift, instead of recruiting to fill a job, recruit to build a data set of talent. Fill a talent pool, not just the position. But here’s the thing. Having a database full of names is like having a garage full of premium oil. That oil isn’t valuable unless you have a high-performance engine that can actually use it. You need a system in place that can maximize that data. When you have the right platform, that premium talent data becomes your competitive advantage, delivering maximum return on your investment. So if we have the oil and we have the high-performance engine, how do we make sure it can run? Who’s behind the wheel? Often the answer can be found by looking in the past. The Romans had a saying, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guards? In our world, the question becomes who will oversee the digital recruiter? Who ensures your AI makes the right decisions, follows your rules, represents your brand? The answer is you. It’s your job. AI won’t replace you. AI requires you. And that’s the opportunity to step into the role of orchestrator. AI becomes your associate, your multiplier, but it’s still your strategy, your judgment, your business. So how should we think about this partnership? Let me be clear. The way we see it, AI isn’t a minion that just follows orders. It’s not your boss that makes decisions for you. Think of it as an incredibly skilled junior associate, someone who handles the repetitive work so you can focus on relationships, strategy, and solving complex problems. When you talk about when we talk about AI, that’s what we mean. AI embedded in your workflow, doing real tasks under your supervision, but driving massive gains in productivity. So what does this look like in practice? Imagine one of your top recruiters, someone who knows exactly what to look for in a candidate. She’s great at reading between the lines, asking the right follow-up questions, and then sensing when someone is the right fit for a role. Now imagine she has an AI agent that thinks the way she thinks, screens like she would. The agent doesn’t just follow rules. It observes, it learns, and handles a straightforward repetitive tasks. Your recruiter would still review the edge cases, still make the final calls. But instead of personally screening 50 candidates a week, she oversees the screening of 200 plus while spending more time on coaching talent, building relationships with hiring managers, and closing the best candidates faster. AI doesn’t take her job. It expands her reach. Her judgment stays at the center, but now it scales. And that’s the point. AI can multiply the value of human expertise but only if it’s thoughtfully applied. And that’s where we come in. As a technologist, the most important part of my job, the job of everyone at Avionté, isn’t just building reliable software. It’s understanding the relationship between humans and technology and how that relationship shapes your workflows, your performance, and your growth now and ten years from now. We have to design for more than just functionality. We have to think about the interfaces between people and machines. Because if we want AI to be useful, not just powerful, we have to make sure it’s aligned with how your business actually runs. And that’s why we don’t start with features. We start with outcomes. At Avionté, our product process works off a model called working backwards. We literally write the press release as the first step in the process before we even begin writing requirements. We answer key questions very early like: “Who is the customer or the user? What problems are being solved? What is the user experience?” This philosophy drives improvement downstream and ensures products don’t lose sight of what matters along the way. When it comes to an agentic platform, you don’t wake up one day and it magically appears. You need a platform with an AI-oriented design, and that’s what we’ve spent the last three years working towards. Rather than building generic AI tools and hoping they fit your workflows, we started with a fundamental question. How do staffing professionals actually work? We spent time with recruiters, account managers, and back office teams. We watched how they move through their day, where they get stuck, what decisions require human judgment, and what tasks drain their energy without adding value. We discovered that what we discovered shaped our entire approach. AI in BOLD needs to be built from real industry pain points, not generic playbooks. Ethical by design to protect your data and your decisions. Embedded, not bolted on, living directly where recruiters work. And it needs to feel like an assistant, a helpful human under your control. To get there, we need to be intentional and focus on the foundation of the platform. There are a number of major providers in our space that are trying to retrofit AI onto legacy systems, adding AI features to existing architectures that weren’t designed for it. This allows them to bring features to market quickly, but ultimately, it’s difficult to integrate modern AI models. APIs are limited. New capabilities are slow to deploy. Features tend to be siloed and don’t work together well. So while others are adding AI features on top of legacy systems, we’ve been rebuilding BOLD to be AI native. Every architectural decision, every data structure, and every API endpoint has been designed with one question in mind. How do we make this intelligent? We’re developing a modern cloud native API first architecture built for AI first workflows. We can deploy agentic AI that operates end-to-end because our platform is designed for it. Let me show you the foundational layers that make everything possible. Starting with our APIs, we didn’t just create APIs for integrations. We created APIs specifically designed for AI consumption. High-fidelity API specs with structured, predictable responses. Webhooks for real-time event notifications when talent and jobs are created or updated. Bulk API endpoints that allow AI agents to process thousands of records efficiently. And global standards for consistency across all the endpoints. This isn’t just about connecting systems. It’s about creating unlimited possibilities for how AI can work with your data and processes while maintaining security and compliance at every step. Building off those APIs, we’ve been restructuring all data to power agentic AI that creates insights in real time. Your historical patterns become predictive intelligence. Your successful placements become templates for future success. But here’s the critical insight. Clean structured data is what separates powerful AI from noisy AI. If your database is full of duplicates, outdated contacts, and incomplete profiles, your AI will amplify those problems, not solve them. We spent three years working to ensure that every piece of data flowing through BOLD is structured consistently across all modules and workflows, connected meaningfully so that AI can understand relationships between talent, jobs, and outcomes. And updated continuously with feedback loops that improve the data quality over time. And accessible instantly for real-time AI decision making. As AI continues to analyze and learn from this data, it only gets smarter and better at executing tasks, making the information you thought was valuable ten times more powerful. Next, we completely rebuilt our search engine from the ground up, moving from an old search architecture to the most modern open search. And this powers something called vector search, the breakthrough that makes everything else possible. And here’s why this matters. Traditional search like other older ATS systems or search engines, is like looking for exact phrases in a filing cabinet. Some of the best engineers I know haven’t been hired because they had specific words on their resume and survived a matching algorithm by an ATS. Though they’re hired because someone could look at their act their experience and assert that they’d be a good fit. Vector search is more like that. An experienced recruiter who knows that relationship building and client development describes similar skills that someone with or someone with team leadership or experience could handle project management responsibilities. So you might be thinking, yeah, that sounds great, but what does it look like? Well, here’s what happens behind the scenes. Every piece of text gets converted by AI into a mathematical representation called a vector. Basically, a list of numbers that captures the meaning and the context. When a candidate’s resume mentions collaborated with cross-functional teams and a job posting asks for works well with diverse stakeholders, the system recognizes these as semantically similar even though they share zero keywords. It catches those perfect matches that slip through traditional keyword filters like the ones that make you go, how did nobody else find this candidate? This is why modern recruiting platforms are starting to feel less robotic and more like a technology partner. With these foundational layers in place, we’ve been systematically building AI capabilities that work together seamlessly. Starting with Avionté PIXEL, your AI-powered recruiting assistant. You told us you wanted PIXEL to feel more conversational and work with diverse talent pools, including Spanish speaking candidates. We rebuilt PIXEL with Anthropic’s latest models, so your talent now experiences natural flowing conversations while you capture all the screening data you need. Interview completion rates are up significantly and you can engage with broader talent pools than ever before. We’ve also enhanced your content creation workflow with AI generators for both job descriptions and interview questions. Simply provide basic role information and get professional job descriptions or tailored interview questions in seconds. You get sophisticated first drafts with your expertise, streamlining your workflows so you can focus more time on relationship building and placements. Once a talent is hired, Simple’s AI photo time feature addresses buddy punching and inaccurate time reporting, two issues that can eat into your margins and damage client relationships. Using biometric face recognition, the system verifies the identity when talent clocks in, eliminating fraud while maintaining full privacy compliance. As a result, accurate payroll, fewer client disputes, and bulletproof time records. These aren’t just features. They’re delivering measurable business results. Pixel has automated hundreds of thousands of interviews across our customer base, allowing recruiters to keep connected and reduce time to fill. One client reduced their recruiters’ administrative burden by sixty percent through automation and then reinvested that time in deeper into deeper candidate and client relationships. Another agency saw their time to fill decreased by 35 percent within three months of implementing AI assisted candidate screening. That’s not incremental improvement. That’s competitive transformation. When talent applies through mobile and engages with job opportunities on our platform, retention jumps to 77 percent compared to 25 percent for traditional web portals. This level of engagement creates the talent pools that power AI success. So what’s next on the horizon? AI talent matching. We’re replacing auto matcher with an intelligent AI that analyzes talent data in BOLD and suggests the best matches for jobs. But this isn’t just better matching, it’s explainable matching. You’ll see exactly why each candidate was suggested, building your confidence in AI recommendations. Automated talent campaigns, talent engagement campaigns, pre-built engagement workflows based on best practices we’ve learned across the industry, allowing faster implementations and better results. Enhanced interview capabilities. Dedicated interview sections in talent profiles with AI generated interview questions tailored to each role. The AI learns from your successful placements to suggest questions that actually predict success. Everything I’ve shown so far, the AI generated content, the intelligent search, the automated engagements, these are just the foundation. They’re preparing your data, your workflows, and your team for what comes next. The next evolution isn’t just AI that helps you work faster. It’s AI that can work independently towards goals that you set, checking in when it needs guidance and learning from every interaction to get better at its job. Agentic AI is the future. It refers to artificial intelligence systems that can autonomously perceive their environment, make decisions, and take actions to achieve specified goals with minimum human intervention. Think about your best recruiter, the one who takes a job order and not just post it, but thinks through where the right candidates might be, proactively communicates, and presents you with a comprehensive ranked list of qualified candidates. That’s agentic AI. Now some of you may be wondering, are agents real? Are they ready? Can they be enabled in BOLD? What do they look like? And what will they do? What will my experience look like? Will they go to a Coldplay concert with me? This isn’t science fiction. AI agents are real and ready. The foundational technology already exists today. Avionté developers are already using agents today to assist with complex high value security, coding, service, and test applications. Most importantly, we’re building these capabilities into your platform now and building them iteratively. We’re working with AWS and Anthropic as well as other vendors. So to build these tools that will allow AI agents to work with our software at scale. Ultimately, AI agents will be able to interface across all the front office and back office workflows end-to-end. And as we build toward that, we have tools for you to get the efficiency gains from AI right now. We have a robust certified partner and integration network, many of them who are here and plug into BOLD so you can leverage the power of BOLD and the efficiencies of AI with no delay. We’re also reimagining the future state of staffing where we don’t use AI on processes you currently have, but reinvent what those processes should be, starting with the end result in mind. We need an approach that’s practical, framework with the right level of structure and creativity. So what might this look like? Not that. We asked our technology and product teams to think through this problem and build a framework for how we will build and deploy AI agents at Avionté. And while it will evolve, especially with feedback from our customers, we’re adhering to a few core principles. Agents should be able to perform well-defined tasks that can deliver immediate value. They should fit in with the way you work today, but with the flexibility to support new workflows and client priorities. It needs to work within BOLD. It shouldn’t change the way customers use BOLD today if they choose not to turn on a function immediately. Users should have clear, transparent understanding into agent activities with appropriate controls for configuration and review of outputs. As we study the problem, we realize that we’re organizing agents into specific task families that fit closely to job roles. Specialists, not generalists. Here’s what we came up with. Talent search agents that continuously scan job boards, social networks, and your database to build candidate pipelines before you even post a job. This goes back to creating a pool of talent, increasing your top of funnel, and not just creating not just recruiting for one job at a time Interview agents that conduct initial interviews, verify credentials, and present you with ranked qualified candidates AI spots opportunities before humans can It identifies which clients are likely to increase their contractor needs which talent are most likely to accept new assignments and which matches have the highest probability of success. Client outreach agents to handle routine check-ins and updates and escalate issues that need human attention. Compliance agents to monitor regulatory changes and automatically update processes to maintain compliance where necessary. Data research agents to scan your insights database and other databases and data repositories to find optimizations for your business. What’s great about this approach is that you can already imagine how these agents might fit into your existing workflows to help you do work you already do today. This approach also allows us to test, design, and deploy agents iteratively with feedback from our customers throughout the development cycle. Avionté customers can pick and choose the agents they want and configure them accordingly. And we can add and retire agents as needed without messing with the underlying code. We’re moving at your speed. Not too fast, not too slow. We’re putting AI into the workflows you already use today. It will amplify and accelerate your performance without requiring you to learn new platforms and languages. This gives you and us together an unprecedented control in how we make this work. When adopting AI, your AI destiny becomes both success and failure is in your hands. The opportunity is 50 percent potential, 50 percent risk. And success requires agentic AI that’s tested, verified, safe, and compliant. Selective implementation, turn capabilities on and off depending on your comfort level. Human oversight and control at every critical decision point, a compliance-first approach to avoid regulatory hot water. And here’s the truth: isolated AI features won’t cut it in the new landscape. While your competitors are playing with ChatGPT, you need integrated industry-specific AI that understands staffing. You can’t just pick any platform though. Companies rushing into AI too quickly are taking on significant compliance risk. We’re taking a safe and measured approach. Privacy first design. Your data stays your data. Transparent AI decisions. You can see how and why AI recommends human oversight critical decisions always involve human review. Regulatory compliance built-in safeguards for employment law, privacy regulations, and industry standards. Our AI policy is published and transparent. We build on Anthropic because they’re an AI safety and research company focused on responsible AI development. Additionally, they’re a public benefit corporation. We’re bringing AI agent capabilities directly to our products. You don’t need AI expertise on your team. You don’t need to hire data scientists. You need to focus on what you do best, building relationships and making great matches. Now you might be wondering, with all these AI capabilities and agent workflows, how do we ensure everything works reliably together? The answer lies in the foundation we’ve been building for the last three years. Every small enhancement has been designed with this moment in mind. If we’re doing our jobs correctly, you won’t notice most of the changes. They’ll be picked up naturally. You’ll realize hours of saved time with just a few tweaks to how the system works, and we continue to enhance BOLD for AI. 100,000 weekly active users on our mobile platform. Four nines of availability is our baseline. We would routinely hit five nines. One tenth of a second mean response time and over fifty million API requests per week. And year to date, we’ve done 775 deployments and counting. Why do these numbers matter? This level of performance and reliability is essential for AI agents that need to process data and make decisions across your entire operation. Page load times improve by 50 percent because AI agents need responsiveness. The user interface has been redesigned with our new design system creating consistency across every interaction. This isn’t just a faster version of what you had before. This is a platform engineered specifically to support human AI collaboration at enterprise scale. Here’s something that might not seem directly related to AI, but it’s actually the foundation that makes everything else possible. Avionté’s back office has been processing more than 15 billion dollars in billings and issuing over 4 million W2s annually. With 800 plus clients trusting us with their most critical operations, we’ve become one of the largest payroll prop providers in staffing. Today, we’re not just improving back office. We’re unifying it with the front office in a single platform. What you’re seeing is the evolution of that proven foundation into a truly integrated system. Why this matters for AI? When agents can work seamlessly across recruiting, placement, onboarding, timekeeping, payroll, and billing all in one unified system, they can optimize workflows that span your entire operation. Unlike competitors using multiple disconnected systems or agents that have complete visibility and can automate steps that would otherwise require manual intervention. We’re SOC 2 Type 2 certified and continue to audit ISO, CCPA, GDPR, PCI, and CIS. This includes both Avionté and Simple. We can and have supported clients through major cyber attacks and continue to partner to make your business secure. But security for AI requires additional layers, model security, data privacy and training, audit trails for AI decision, bias monitoring, and compliance that spans both employment law and emerging AI regulations. And we’ve got that covered too. On top of being focused on security, we continue to work on the little improvements that make a big difference Items you shared feedback on directly and what we’ve been evaluating on our own direct deposit validation to prevent payroll errors talent search by full social for finding the right John Smith SMS number sharing between recruiters Alphabetized and pinable search terms. Enhanced invoice viewing with correction tracking. And each of these might save you thirty seconds, but you multiply that across thousands of users doing millions of transactions, it adds up to hours of productivity gained every day. More importantly, each of these improvements makes the platform more consistent, more predictable, and more reliable. And the consistency is exactly what AI agents need to function effectively. This is why we can confidently say that agencies using our platform will have a sustainable competitive advantage. It’s not just about having AI features. It’s about having AI built on a foundation that was designed for intelligence from the ground up. While others are retrofitting AI onto legacy systems and dealing with integration challenges and performance bottlenecks, our customers will be deploying agents that work seamlessly across every aspect of their business. So where do we go from here? You’ve seen the foundation. You understand the vision. You know the capabilities are real. The question now is, how do we build this future together? Your feedback is fundamental to our infrastructure development. AI is the way forward, and we’re building it with you, not for you. We’re we’re conducting regular advisory sessions with customers to ensure we’re solving real problems, not creating new ones. We’re thinking about the impact of full workflow automation, what multi agent co coordination could look like, and how to use AI to give you better, more prescriptive data among many other things. None of these ideas and potential build outs can occur in a vacuum. We take your feedback, your usage data industry trends, and innovations in technology into consideration as well. We wanna ensure we’re setting you up for success today, tomorrow, and well into the future. We’re looking at the forest and the trees, considering what the future of staffing looks like while while remaining focused on optimizing the current experience. We’re providing training, documentation, and support to help your team make the most of AI capabilities. This includes AI literacy workshops, best practices guides, and one on one consultation with implementation strategies. The opportunity cost of waiting versus the advantage of moving now has never been clearer. While others hesitate, you gain competitive advantage. Engage with our product advisory sessions and help shape the future of AI and staffing and test AI capabilities in low risk scenarios. Invest in team AI literacy. The human skills that complement AI are becoming more valuable, not less. Think beyond the current processes. We don’t just automate what you do now. Reimagine what’s possible. No one gets left behind in this transformation. We’re thinking ahead so you can focus on the now. You’re the skipper of your organization. We’re your crew helping you navigate the waters, making sure you have the best tools to navigate whatever waters lie ahead. We’re building toward a future where technology amplifies human capability, where routine work be happens automatically, and where your expertise creates exponentially more value. Think about it. Your best recruiter working on with AI agents that never sleep, never forget a detail, and can process thousands of candidates while she focuses on building the relationships and closing deals. Your account manager supported by AI that predicts client needs and suggests per perfect timing for expansion conversations. Your back office running so smoothly that compliance happens automatically and insights appear before you need them. The unstoppable potential of people and technology combined isn’t just our vision. It’s your competitive reality. The agencies that embrace this partnership will define the future of our industry. We are innovative, enthusiastic, energetic, and passionate about what you do every day. We’re not just your technology partner, we’re your competitive advantage. Our promise to you is to continue to build a system that’s more integrated, more usable, and more intelligent. Rishabh gave us this vision. He carved the path for us to build the future of staffing, and we will pursue that call to action for him. Thank you.