"Putting Perfume on a Pig": The Truth About AI in Performance Management

Not all AI in performance management is the same. There’s a real difference between AI layered onto a broken process and AI built into the foundation — and after 25 years in this market, Lana Peters can tell them apart on sight. Lana is chief revenue and customer experience officer at Klaar, a predictive performance management platform built from the ground up for AI. She joined Work Tech Weekly host Steve Smith live at Transform 2026 to make the case that the latest wave of HR tech is genuinely different — not a rebrand, not a feature update, not perfume on a pig. They get into what predictive performance management actually looks like in practice, why managers are the linchpin of whether any of this works, how HR is shifting from cost center to profit center, and what the HR buyer is focused on right now. Thirty years of broken promises. This conversation is about what’s finally different.