Pinnacle Group

Technology changes. Business models change. Markets change. What never does?

As Pinnacle Group marks 30 years, Founder and CEO Nina Vaca takes the stage at SIA's CollaborationX to answer that question.

Her talk, "Thirty Years of Disruption: What Never Changes," looks back on three decades of navigating disruption: the rise of the internet, globalization, automation, and now AI. And it looks at what it took to build a company from a startup into a global enterprise through all of it.

The takeaway is the part that matters most: the leadership principles that held through every technology cycle, and why they may matter more in the next decade than ever before.

Executive Perspectives session
Wednesday, September 30 | 1:45 to 2:45 pm, immediately after lunch
General Session Room, Trinity Ballroom 4-8, Omni Dallas Hotel

If you're in Dallas for CollaborationX, this is the session to attend.

Full session details in the comments.

Worker classification. Co-employment exposure. Audit trails that hold up under scrutiny.

Risk is the part of an external workforce program that gets attention after something has already gone wrong. It's worth an hour with peers who manage it at scale before that happens.

It also doesn't stay in one lane: part policy, part program design, part VMS configuration. We work across all three.

Pinnacle Group is a Platinum sponsor at CWS Summit, September 28–29 in Dallas, with the PinnacleSI team at Booth #206.

Private meetings with our on-site team are still available. Message us to reserve one.

AI adoption in contingent workforce programs is accelerating. But most enterprises are skipping a step that will determine whether it delivers anything at all.

A recent piece from Staffing Industry Analysts makes the point clearly: AI functions as an orchestration layer across your workforce ecosystem, not a standalone fix. That means its value depends entirely on what sits underneath it - harmonized data, consistent taxonomies, and systems that can actually talk to each other.

Without that foundation, AI has nothing to work with.

This matters for procurement and HR leaders evaluating where to invest. The question is not whether AI can improve your contingent workforce program. It is whether your program is structured well enough to support it. Inconsistent supplier data, fragmented VMS configurations, and misaligned taxonomies across your extended workforce will limit any AI implementation before it starts.

The article also notes that buyers are beginning to evaluate suppliers on their ability to support AI-enabled workflows and VMS interoperability. That is a meaningful shift. Supplier readiness is becoming part of the program governance conversation, not just a technology one.

At Pinnacle Group, this aligns with what we see in practice. The enterprises with the most control over their external workforce programs - clear visibility into spend, supplier performance, and workforce data - are the ones positioned to actually benefit from AI investment. Governance is not a prerequisite for AI alone. It is a prerequisite for program performance, full stop.

If your program is still working through data consistency or supplier alignment, that is the right place to start.

Read more: https://www.staffingindustry.com/editorial/cws-30-contingent-workforce-strategies/ai-in-contingent-workforce-programs-from-automation-to-orchestration

AI in contingent workforce programs: From automation to orchestration For enterprise buyers, this shift to AI can affect not only efficiency but also how workforce strategies are designed, governed and scaled.

Labor Day is a simple idea: take a day to honor the work, and the people who do it.

Every good outcome starts with someone's effort. The planning, the follow-through, the quiet hours nobody sees. A society that stops to acknowledge that is a society that understands where its progress comes from.

Today we're grateful for the people whose work makes everything else possible.

Happy Labor Day from Pinnacle Group.

Regulatory change rarely arrives with a clean runway.

The U.S. State Department is proposing changes to J-1 visa regulations that would impose stricter deadlines under SEVIS - the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System - and expand termination authority for program sponsors.

For global enterprise organizations, this is not just a domestic compliance story.

Any workforce program with international talent components - across the U.S., APAC, or elsewhere - needs to consider what tighter compliance timelines and expanded sponsor liability mean for program governance infrastructure. The administrative and risk exposure does not stay contained to one region. It follows the program.

This is the kind of regulatory development that surfaces slowly and then lands hard. Organizations managing extended workforce programs across multiple geographies tend to feel it most acutely when their governance model was not built to absorb regulatory change - only to react to it.

Centralized visibility, consistent compliance frameworks, and governance structures designed for cross-border complexity are not optional features of a mature workforce program. They are the difference between managing a regulatory shift and being managed by it.

If your extended workforce program governance was not designed with global regulatory adaptability in mind, this is a reasonable moment to assess where the gaps are.

Read more:

Proposed J-1 Visa Changes Would Raise Compliance Stakes Proposed J-1 visa changes would raise compliance demands for employers and universities, with stricter SEVIS deadlines and expanded termination authority.

Most external workforce programs don't have a data problem. They have a visibility problem: spend, headcount, and supplier activity spread across systems that don't reconcile.

The fix rarely sits in one place. Part of it is program design. Part of it is how the VMS was configured. Solving one without the other gets you a partial answer.

We work across both, so you can trace a problem end to end in a single conversation.

The Pinnacle Group and PinnacleSI teams are at Booth #206, and we're holding private meeting slots for working sessions like this one. Thirty minutes, your program, your questions.

Message us to reserve time.

Overview - 2026 CWS Summit North America

Six weeks to CWS Summit North America in Dallas.

CWS Summit brings together the people running contingent workforce programs at enterprise scale. Few events put that much practical experience in one place.

Pinnacle Group is a Platinum sponsor, and the PinnacleSI team is with us at Booth #206: program advisory, VMS design and implementation, and program management in one place.

If you're a contingent workforce professional and want to attend, reach out and we'll get you a free pass.

Request a pass: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=J-0Z16oZik6ZZAsubuj6ak45dOqx_XxCmS1ZC7j8rv5UMVZUNlBTTVBYSkM1Q01FOU84MEFBWENaSi4u&route=shorturl

Booth #206, September 28–29.

Most VMS implementations that underdeliver have one thing in common: the organization treated the platform as the solution.

The pattern is consistent. VMS success depends on structured program design and disciplined ex*****on across multiple phases, not on feature selection or platform capability alone. Standardized workflows, cross-functional governance, and deliberate change management are what drive compliance, scalability, and measurable ROI. The technology enables all of that, but it does not create it.

This matches what we see working with enterprise organizations on workforce program design and implementation. The hard work happens before go-live. Who owns the process? How are supplier workflows standardized across regions while accommodating local regulatory requirements? What does governance look like when the program scales?

Platforms do not answer those questions. Program structure does.

If your organization is evaluating a VMS implementation or trying to understand why a current one is not delivering, the conversation worth having is about governance and operating model design, not technology.

Read more: https://www.staffingindustry.com/news/cws-global-daily-news/why-vms-success-depends-on-structure-not-technology

Why VMS success depends on structure, not technology Stakeholder alignment, process consistency and adoption hurdles often derail outcomes — unless organizations follow a disciplined rollout model.