All Judges In

Watch PAICE Win the ISPI 2026 Shark Tank Competition

by Sam Rogers
5 min read
video
announcement
conference
whitepaper
paice
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Three days ago, we walked into a Shark Tank-style competition at the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) 2026 Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. Seven participants pitched. Two received a clean sweep from every judge. PAICE.work was one of them.

Here is the full presentation.

Watch the Presentation

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Why This Matters

ISPI is the professional home of Human Performance Technology (HPT), a discipline built on decades of evidence-based, systematic approaches to measuring and improving what people actually do at work. Gilbert, Mager, Rummler, Thalheimer, Phillips, Brinkerhoff. These are the names that built the science of performance improvement.

The Shark Tank format put PAICE in front of judges who evaluate ideas for a living. Not technology enthusiasts looking for the next shiny tool, but performance improvement professionals who ask one question above all others: does it actually work?

Every judge said yes. All in.

That validation matters because it comes from exactly the community best positioned to evaluate what PAICE does. We are not asking the HPT field to learn something new. We are showing them that People+AI collaboration measurement is the next application of frameworks they have refined for over sixty years.

What We Presented

The presentation centered on our newest whitepaper, Closing the Collaboration Gap: A Behavioral Skill Framework for Human-AI Performance Improvement, which we released at the conference on March 31.

The core argument is straightforward:

Organizations cannot answer the most basic capability question. They know their people are using AI. They have no idea whether those people are using it well. Training completion rates and usage dashboards tell you about activity, not quality. A professional can pass every AI literacy module and still accept a hallucinated citation under deadline pressure.

Behavioral measurement fills the gap. PAICE (People + AI Collaboration Effectiveness) measures what professionals actually do when working with AI, not what they claim or what they know. Through strategic failure injection, placing realistic errors into AI responses and observing whether professionals catch them without prompting, the assessment produces behavioral evidence that traditional approaches cannot.

The HPT lineage is real. The whitepaper maps PAICE directly to established performance improvement frameworks. Gilbert's focus on worthy performance over activity. Mager and Pipe's distinction between knowledge deficits and execution deficits. Thalheimer's demand that evaluation measure decisions, not perceptions. These are not decorative citations. They shaped how the system was built.

The full whitepaper is available at paice.work/whitepapers, and the detailed announcement post walks through each section.

What's Happened Since Nashville

The conference was three days ago. The momentum since then has been immediate.

New university research partner. We have submitted a formal study proposal with a new university partner to validate the PAICE behavioral measurement methodology through controlled research. This builds on our commitment to evidence-based assessment and opens a new avenue for peer-reviewed validation of the framework.

First potential Asian partner. We are in active conversations with what would be our first partner in Asia, expanding PAICE's geographic reach into a market where AI adoption is accelerating rapidly and the demand for collaboration measurement is growing.

HPT community response. The performance improvement community's reaction at ISPI confirmed something we have believed from the beginning: measuring People+AI collaboration is not a new discipline requiring new frameworks. It is the next application of a discipline that already exists. The practitioners who have spent their careers making human performance measurable and improvable see PAICE as a natural extension of their work.

What's Next

The ISPI win and the connections made in Nashville are accelerating several priorities:

Research validation. The university study proposal, once approved, will produce independent peer-reviewed evidence about the effectiveness of behavioral measurement for AI collaboration. This is the kind of evidence the HPT community values most, and it is the kind of evidence PAICE was designed to produce.

Global expansion. The conversations with our potential Asian partner represent the beginning of PAICE's international growth. AI collaboration is not a regional challenge. It is a global one. As regulatory frameworks mature in different markets, the demand for behavioral measurement will follow.

Community building. The HPT community represents a natural base of practitioners who already understand why behavioral measurement matters, why training completion is insufficient, and why self-reported confidence is unreliable. We are building relationships with this community to help them bring People+AI collaboration measurement to their clients and organizations.

The water is moving fast. The rapids are not slowing down. But after Nashville, we are not navigating alone.

Want to see how your AI collaboration capabilities measure up? Take the PAICE assessment to get personalized insights and recommendations.

Get Involved:

📖 The ISPI Whitepaper:

📖 Understanding PAICE:

📖 Previous Whitepapers:

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