Why Global Payroll Implementations Still Fail (And What Vendors Won’t Say About It)

Why do global payroll implementations that were supposed to take 12 months still drag into year two? In this episode of the Work Tech Weekly podcast, Steve Smith sits down with Jerome Gouvernel — CEO and co-founder of datascalehr — to unpack why global payroll projects keep breaking down, and why the industry keeps selling a model that can’t scale. Jerome draws on 20 years of experience building global payroll systems to explain why traditional implementations are still waterfall, why promises of “full compliance” are economically fragile, and why most integration work forces teams to learn system languages they’ll never use again. They also dig into the growing hype around enterprise AI — why compliance can’t be “vibe coded,” why auditability matters more than automation, and why you need a data strategy before you can have a real AI strategy.