While in Nashville for Payroll Congress, datascalehr CEO and Co-Founder, Jerome Gouvernel, sat down with industry analyst and strategic advisor, Pete A. Tiliakos, for an episode of The Source podcast, presented by DailyPay.

The two covered a wide range of topics in just over 20 minutes, including:

• How EORs are quietly disrupting the payroll industry
• The real impact AI and machine learning are having on payroll (and why it’s mostly not ChatGPT)
• The dawn of global payroll ‘on tap’ and the advent of the global payroll API
• Jerome’s prediction for what the payroll industry will look like in 5 years

And more…

Highlights from Jerome 

On what’s changed in payroll over the past few years:

“What has changed is EORs. That’s the main thing I see as an agent of change. Initially it [payroll] started off as a curiosity, something on the side, specific use cases. But we’ve seen recently that the big players in the space are not only resetting expectations for EORs but also for traditional payroll aggregators and HR software providers.”

On AI and machine learning in the payroll space:

“I had used machine learning in my previous roles running innovation labs, and we felt like there was a lot of possibility around being able to recognize HR payroll rules from the data itself. So we ran some tests and one thing led to another and we decided to found a company that specializes in analyzing any data file from any source, and you load it into datascalehr, and the machine learning recognizes what it is—what kind of data, rules, how it gets validated.”

“Using an AI model is easy. But using it in a productive way in an enterprise-grade platform is a completely different thing.”

On the need for more specialized services in the payroll industry:

“As the payroll industry is maturing, we’re seeing more and more of a need for specialized services. A provider cannot expect to build all of their own technology. Think of any other industry—nobody builds their entire stack. Maybe Apple is an exception. But nobody else does.”

On customer perception of the payroll outsourcing industry:

“We’ve created this industry, but our customers don’t really care about this industry. They just want outcomes. People are getting tired of the distinctions we create. I think some players right now are starting to change the game and reset customer expectations.”

Listen now

Tune into the podcast episode via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or listen below.

Oh… and Nashville is COOL!