SHRM Georgia Conference 2026 recap: CloudApper meets the Georgia HR community

The SHRM Georgia Conference & Expo came back to Savannah at the end of September. Three days of sessions, a packed expo floor, and a lot of honest talk about what’s actually working in HR right now and what isn’t.

CloudApper was there as a Silver Sponsor and exhibitor. We brought a working demo, a few hundred conversations worth of patience, and one clear message: you don’t need a new system. You need a way to build what your current one can’t do.

A moment on stage

Tyler Mitchell, Senior Account Executive at CloudApper, spoke from the main stage. The SHRM Georgia banners behind him read Educate • Partner • Connect on one side and Advancing & Elevating Human Resources in Georgia on the other. The room was full.

He talked about something we hear constantly from HR teams: how do you add the workflows and features your organization actually needs without ripping out the system you already run?

Most HR departments are on UKG, Oracle, Dayforce, or Workday. Those platforms handle payroll, benefits, and core HR well enough. The problem is everything around the edges. Shift rules that don’t match your union contract. Approval chains that don’t exist in the software. Custom data your field team needs to capture but can’t. Tyler’s point was straightforward: you can build those things on top of your existing system, and you don’t need a developer to do it.

On the expo floor

We set up the booth with a live demo instead of slides. People could sit down and actually see what “Build What Your HR System Can’t” looks like in practice: custom workflows, integrations, and tools running on top of HR systems they already use.

The conversations got specific fast. Someone asked about automating shift differential calculations for a union shop. Another person wanted to know if their field crews could clock in and handle PTO requests from a shared tablet instead of calling HR every time. (That’s exactly what hrPad does, and we were able to show it running live at the booth.) A few people asked about multi-state compliance rules and whether they could build approval workflows their current platform just doesn’t support.

The same story kept surfacing in different forms: people know what they need. They’ve known for months. But their vendor’s timeline is six months out and the internal IT queue is even longer.

Representing CloudApper in Savannah

Tyler Mitchell and Joshua Nelson were both there for the full conference, talking to attendees between sessions and on the expo floor. The SHRM Georgia crowd is a real mix. Some people are running payroll and compliance day to day. Others are thinking about workforce strategy at an organizational level. We ended up in very different conversations depending on who stopped by, which made the days go quickly.

We sponsored Leopold’s Ice Cream on the expo floor, which felt right for Savannah. It made the afternoon a little easier to get through after a few hours of standing.

What we took away

Three things kept coming up across the conference.

HR teams are tired of waiting. The gap between knowing what you need and actually having it built is too long at most organizations. It doesn’t matter if it’s a new onboarding step or an overtime approval workflow. The backlog is real, and it costs people time every single week.

Nobody wants to replace their HR system. Not one person we talked to was looking to rip out their system of record. They just want to extend what it can do without introducing risk or retraining their staff. The system works. It’s the stuff around it that doesn’t.

Customization keeps getting stuck on developer timelines. A few people told us flat out that they’d stopped requesting features from their HR system vendor because the cost and timeline never made sense. When they saw that CloudApper lets them describe what they need in plain language and get it built on top of their existing platform without a dev project, that was the thing that pulled them into the booth.

Educate, partner, connect

That phrase was everywhere at the conference for a reason. SHRM Georgia works because it’s where the state’s HR community actually talks to each other about what they’re dealing with, not just sits through keynotes.

For us, the best booth conversations started with someone describing a problem they hadn’t been able to solve. Most of them ended the same way: with them looking at a working example of how CloudApper handles it using the HR system they already have. A few of those conversations touched on time capture for deskless workers, which led straight into hrPad and how a shared tablet can replace a dedicated kiosk and still give employees self-service access to HR.

That’s the part of events like this that’s hard to replicate any other way. You can publish content and run ads, but you can’t manufacture the moment someone sees their own problem solved in front of them.

What comes next

If you stopped by the booth in Savannah, thanks. We’re glad we got to hear what your team is dealing with and show you what’s possible.

If we didn’t connect at the conference, here’s the short version: CloudApper adds custom workflows, integrations, and tools to your existing HR system without touching what’s already working. You can see how it works on the AI for HR Systems page. If your team includes frontline or deskless workers, hrPad turns a shared tablet into a time clock and HR self-service kiosk that syncs with your HR system.

We’ll be back in Savannah next year.

“Real conversations. Fresh perspectives. A moment on stage.”