The Pendulum Always Swings (And Yes, We’ve All Seen This Before)

Here’s the thing about working in HR tech marketing for over two decades: you start to see patterns. Not just trends — actual, predictable, almost boringly reliable cycles that play out the same way every single time a shiny new thing enters the conversation.

I’ve watched it happen with big data. Video interviewing. DEI. And now (obviously) AI.

And every time, without fail, I think… here we go again.

The hype-to-backlash cycle in HR tech isn’t new — it’s a pattern that repeats with every emerging technology, and knowing where you are in it changes everything.

The Cycle (You Know This One)

It starts with something genuinely new hitting the scene. Vendors notice. Of course they do — that’s their job. Within months, you’ve got product roadmaps pivoting, marketing decks updating, and a wave of announcements about how Brand X has “integrated” the thing into their platform. The early movers look smart. The late movers scramble. Buyers get excited (and a little confused).

Then it becomes table stakes. Every vendor has it now. Or claims to. The messaging homogenizes. What was once a differentiator becomes a checkbox.

And then… the pendulum swings.

The backlash arrives, right on schedule. Thought leaders (bless them) start publishing pieces about how vendors are overselling the thing, misdescribing it, slapping a label on something that doesn’t quite deserve it. A thousand think pieces bloom. Definitions proliferate. Everyone suddenly has a framework for understanding what the thing actually is, from workflow automation all the way up to fully autonomous generative capability — or whatever the spectrum du jour happens to be.

Analyst channels pick it up. Buyers start asking sharper questions. Vendors and marketers respond by publishing their own definitional content, staking their territory in the discourse. And eventually, the dust settles, the cycle completes, and we do it all over again with the next shiny thing.

It is, I promise you, entirely predictable. And completely natural.

A Brief Note to Our Friends in HR Tech (With Love)

Here’s something that doesn’t get said enough: marketing is almost always ahead of the technology cycle. Not because marketers are smarter than the product people, the analysts, or the practitioners — but because it’s literally our job to watch how ideas move through markets. We’re students of adoption, of language, of what makes something stick and what makes it slide.

So when you start seeing the backlash content — the “vendors are overselling this” pieces, the framework posts, the careful definitional work distinguishing workflow automation from machine learning from generative AI — there’s a decent chance a marketer identified that gap first. Not to deceive anyone. To close the gap. And when the broader conversation eventually catches up and starts asking the harder questions? That’s often because someone in marketing noticed the overclaiming early, flagged it, and started building the vocabulary to talk about it more precisely.

I’m not saying this to be smug about it (okay, maybe a little). I’m saying it because it matters for how you read the cycle. The “vendors are overselling this” conversation isn’t emerging organically from a suddenly more sophisticated buyer base. It’s emerging because marketers have been having it internally — and sometimes publicly — for a while already, and the signal is finally breaking through.

The HR tech world builds remarkable things. Marketers just happen to see the story arc coming… usually before the credits roll.

Why This Happens (Every. Single. Time.)

Because humans are humans, and markets are markets.

When something new enters a category, the first job is awareness — vendors and marketers do what they do, which is amplify. Some of that amplification gets ahead of the reality. It always does. There’s no malicious conspiracy here; it’s just the gap between what’s possible and what’s shipping, combined with competitive pressure to not be the last one to say the word.

The backlash phase isn’t a correction so much as it’s the market catching up to the hype. Buyers get more sophisticated. Analysts get more precise. And yes — the people publishing “vendors are lying to you about [X]” content are themselves participating in the cycle. The anti-hype piece is just as much a product of the hype machine as the hype itself. It’s a feature, not a bug.

The definitional arms race that follows? That’s territory staking. Whoever gets their framework into the lexicon first wins a certain kind of authority. It’s not purely cynical — someone does need to define the thing clearly — but it’s worth knowing that’s what’s happening when you see seventeen versions of the same “what AI really means” post land in your LinkedIn feed in the same week.

Vendors who survive the backlash phase aren’t the ones who hyped the loudest — they’re the ones who got specific early about what their technology actually does and doesn’t do.

What This Means If You’re a Vendor

Stop panicking about the backlash phase. It’s not a crisis; it’s a phase. The buyers asking harder questions are better buyers. The market maturing is a good thing for vendors who actually built something real.

What it does mean is that vague claims have a shorter shelf life than they used to. If you said you had AI in your product 18 months ago and what you meant was “we have a few rules-based automations and a chatbot,” that gap is going to get surfaced. It always does. The cycle has a way of doing that.

The vendors who come out of the backlash phase with their credibility intact are the ones who got specific early — about what their technology actually does, what problem it actually solves, and what it doesn’t do yet. Honesty is not just a nice-to-have in this phase of the cycle. It’s a competitive advantage.

What This Means If You’re a Buyer

You’re getting smarter, and that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen. The harder questions you’re asking now — what do you mean by AI? Where exactly in the workflow does it operate? What does autonomous actually look like in your product? — are the right questions. Ask them.

But also… don’t overcorrect. The backlash phase can produce its own distortions. Not every vendor who used the word “AI” before the definitional consensus was lying to you. Some of them were just early, and imprecise, and moving fast in a market that rewarded moving fast. Context matters.

What This Means If You’re a Marketer

You’ve seen this before. (If you haven’t, you will.) The best thing you can do at every phase of the cycle is stay specific, stay honest, and resist the pressure to overclaim. The hype phase rewards bold language. The backlash phase punishes it. The long game rewards precision.

Also — and I say this with genuine affection for the marketing and analyst community — if you’re noticing that someone else is building content around an idea that feels familiar… welcome to intellectual life in a small industry. There are not that many new ideas under the sun. There are just new technologies running through the same very predictable human behavior loop.

The observation that vendors oversell emerging technology is not, itself, an emerging idea. It’s a known thing that keeps being rediscovered because the cycle keeps cycling. That’s not a criticism of anyone making the observation now. It’s actually kind of the point.

Same As It Ever Was

The pendulum swings. It always has. Big data, video interviewing, DEI, AI — the technology changes, the players change, the specific claims change. But the arc of hype to backlash to definitional clarity to mainstream adoption? That part stays remarkably consistent.

Which means the smartest move — for vendors, buyers, and marketers alike — isn’t to react to each phase as if it’s unprecedented. It’s to recognize where you are in the cycle, act accordingly, and maybe even get a little ahead of the next swing.

Because it’s coming. It always does.

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Maren Hogan is the Founder and CEO of Red Branch Media, an anti-agency agency specializing in B2B marketing for HR tech. She’s been watching this particular movie for over 20 years and is not remotely surprised by the ending.