Ask The Analyst: What single factor will decide who wins and loses vendor contracts in the next 12 months?

Every week for The Briefing, UNLEASH’s weekly intelligence email for senior business decision-makers, we ask our community of analysts – the true HR experts – to the biggest challenges facing HR.

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This week’s question: What single factor will decide who wins and loses vendor contracts in the next 12 months?

Here are their thoughts.

Nicole Roberts, HR Industry Analyst, 3Sixty Insights:

The single factor will be how easy a vendor makes it for its internal champion to get the deal approved.

Buyers are operating in environments where budgets are scrutinized, buying committees are larger, and every investment is competing for priority. Your champion may love your solution, but enthusiasm alone does not get a contract signed.

Winning vendors will give that champion everything they need to build the case: clear business outcomes, realistic ROI, total cost of ownership, implementation expectations, integration and security answers, and evidence that the organization can actually realize the promised value.

Vendors need to recognize that their champion is essentially selling the solution internally on their behalf. Enable them. Give them the evidence. Anticipate the objections. And above all, don’t make their job harder.

In the next 12 months, the easiest solution to champion internally may beat the most impressive solution in the demo.

Valérie Fichelle, Senior Analyst in HR/Finance Transformation and Efficiency, NexaRH:

"Ask and Get" is becoming the new standard – users ask, and they get. This represents the most significant shift in HR technology since the rise of SaaS.

To win contracts, fully integrated multifunctional HCM or best of breed vendors will need to demonstrate that their platforms are open, queryable, controllable, and orchestratable through AI assistants such as Claude, Copilot, ChatGPT, or internally hosted open-source AI models.

The value is no longer concentrated on the application itself. It is moving toward the ability to expose reliable, secure, and actionable data to an ecosystem of intelligent agents.

Over the next 12 months, the most common buyer questions may well be: Does your platform support an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server? How does it enable me to move from conversational interactions to operational workflows across my HR technology stack, without requiring to replace them?

In practical terms, employees are increasingly comfortable talking to, dictating to, querying, and listening to their applications. Meanwhile, HR teams can automate data cleansing and analysis, adjust workflows, and generate code to prototype forms and custom reports, all without coding expertise.

At the same time, point-to-point integration costs and timelines are shrinking in favor of truly interconnected HR ecosystems. Yet not all buyers start from the same place. Data quality and AI governance maturity vary widely.

The real question vendors will need to answer is: How can you accelerate my journey to "Ask and Get," regardless of where I am today or my size?

Cheney Hamilton, Research Director, Bloor Research International:

Accountability. Specifically, whether a vendor can answer one question without hesitation: when your tool gets it wrong, who carries the liability? The ground has shifted.

A US federal court has ruled that Workday must face discrimination claims over its AI hiring tools, which means the vendor is no longer safely behind the customer in the firing line. And with the EU AI Act's employment provisions deferred to late 2027, regulation won't be doing the sorting for a while. Buyers will.

Earlier this year I put three questions publicly to twenty-five HR tech vendors: who is operationally accountable for your tool's decisions, how do you test your bias stack, and what is your position on the workers your product displaces.

The silence was instructive. That silence is becoming commercially expensive, because the buying committee has changed. General Counsel now sits in procurement, and legal teams don't purchase on roadmap demos. They purchase on documented accountability: audit trails, bias testing evidence, contractual liability positions, and honesty about displacement.

Vendors who can answer will win contracts almost by default, because most of their competitors still can't. Capability gets you shortlisted. Accountability gets you signed. In the next twelve months, that's the whole game.

Trish Steed, Co-Founder, Chief Strategy Officer, & Analyst, H3HR Advisors:

I believe the factor is which vendor focuses on their proven operating model and decision architecture and not just the AI features or usability.

Right now, leaders are inundated with pitches that highlight all the features AI has and how easy it is to get decision support. Those things are nice to have, but not the reason I’d sign a contract if I were the buyer.

C-Suite leaders are becoming savvier related to which questions in the buying process get them to a proven operating model or decision architecture. They want to know how it supports the business processes and be pushed to ensure they are not just applying it to outdated processes. If it answers the “wrong” questions, it won’t produce the results they need.

Buyers are also looking at the governance and security, the integration architecture, and the data architecture to feel comfortable that everything works as intended. They don’t want surprises that blow up after the purchase.

The winners will be the vendors that help build AI-capable organizations, not those that rely on the latest features to close the deal.