Ethan Ray is a senior research analyst at 451 Research from S&P Global Energy Horizons, where he contributes to the Workforce Productivity & Collaboration practice. Ethan leads research on employee experience technologies, performance and talent management systems, human capital management tools, and people analytics platforms, with a particular focus on how data and behavioral science drive organizational effectiveness. Ethan joined S&P Global in July 2025. Prior to this, he was a senior people scientist at Culture Amp, where he served as a strategic adviser to HR teams and senior leaders on evidence-based employee survey strategies and performance management initiatives. He also held roles in talent management at New York Life Insurance Company and served as an adjunct faculty member at Baruch College, where he taught courses in organizational psychology. Ethan holds a Bachelor of Science in Biobehavioral Health from Pennsylvania State University, a Master of Science in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from Baruch College, and a Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. During his Ph.D. studies, his research focused on the intersection of technology and employee dynamics, particularly examining biases in asynchronous video interviews and perceptions of leadership in remote work environments.
Insights into product features show what a vendor does; workforce dynamics offer additional insight as to whether a vendor can deliver. This report analyzes workforce signals across the emerging talent intelligence market using S&P Global's Headcount Analytics dataset.
Employee engagement has become structurally uneven. Engagement strategies fail when organizations expand insight faster than their capacity to act, an imbalance that is most acute in frontline roles, where engagement levers are structurally limited compared with non-frontline work.
The vendor is extending its long-standing presence in the video interviewing and proctoring space into agentic AI. With the launch of Ivy, its autonomous interviewer agent, Talview is entering a competitive market where buyers are reassessing AI-supported candidate evaluation at scale.
The company is reimagining background screening as a portable and reusable, candidate-verified and controlled trust credential. It is aimed at replacing one-time checks with a persistent, biometric authentication layer across workforce hiring and customer onboarding.
The company's platform brings together communications, knowledge access, inspections, coaching and onboarding in a mobile‑first, offline-capable design built for distributed teams. Ocasta's phased, hub‑based approach provides an alternative to broader employee experience platforms that may be less equipped to address the specific demands of frontline environments.
Employee engagement remained resilient in 2025 despite economic uncertainty, accelerating adoption of AI-enabled tools and continued experimentation with organizational and work models.
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