How leading companies are building flexible, digital, outcome based talent models, and what it takes to scale them.
“I believe AI is the most consequential technology of our time. I also believe in humans. This report will show you why.”
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Specialized expertise is the top reason companies bring in independent talent, named by 71%. Cost ties for last. Programs measured on hourly rate are measuring the wrong thing.
55% of leaders who made AI layoffs call them the wrong call, and 36% of companies that cut roles for AI have already rehired more than half of them.
AI assistants and answer engines went from 9% of profile reads on Human Cloud in February to about 21% by October.
“They said we don’t care about cost savings, that is not important to us. We want to save time and energy and relieve burden off of our [full-time employees].”
“We wanted to be able to see who we were working with, make sure that they were classified correctly, and then [...] once we ensured that they were classified correctly, then we could start thinking about cost savings.”
“[The agencies] would be going after the same exact talent that we were going after on the full-time side. And we [were], so to speak, competing with ourselves.”
“If it’s a procurement person, they’ve usually been shoved into this category because they were category providers in procurement and then suddenly they’re in charge of people and purchasing people.”
“If it’s high judgment and core part of the organization, it has to be a full-time employee. But if it’s specialized and it’s episodic, then it could be a freelancer or a contractor. And then if it’s pattern recognition and if it’s repeatable, that’s where your synthetic labor comes in.”
“At Cisco, we just rolled out in August: 90,000 employees have agents. So I have an agent, think about it as my digital worker.”
“One of the things that we’re really looking at is a consultative partner.”
“All this rogue spend that you talked about, why? Because this system doesn’t work for me. I’m going around it. Well, give me a system that works for me, and I won’t go around it.”
“The whole MSP VMS layering system [...] disengages the hiring manager from the talent.”
“How would you price that risk into your hiring decision matrix? Because I don’t think you’re thinking about that when all you’re looking at is bill rates.”
“You wouldn’t go on your banking app and not expect compliance.”
“Nearshoring is not just placing people inside your team. There is a lot of management, expectation management, and deliverable management you have to do to make this really work.”
“We went really deep into all Git repositories. In open source since the beginning of Git, analyzed every line of code.”
“I don’t just want to be referred to a pop-up AI agent. I want people behind it that care and know what they’re doing. It’s not just the login.”
“Let them find a way to buy whatever way they need to buy. [...] Whatever way they need to do it, get it through procurement.”
4x entrepreneur, angel investor, author of The Human Cloud (HarperCollins), with experience advising companies like Microsoft, Deloitte, and G7 governments on how to use flexible talent.
20+ years leading global HR and talent transformation. Former CHRO at FLIR Systems, VP HR at Stanley Black & Decker, and VP HR Client Strategy at Upwork.
Founded Independently, which helps companies engage independent contractors compliantly. Before that he founded one of the first employers of record, which later merged into People 2.0.
Human Cloud is where the world’s best companies rebuild their future workforce. By using the Human Cloud Platforms, companies can find, vet, then deploy over 3,400 workforce solutions under one contract. Instead of frustrating your hiring managers through one general marketplace, or one managed service provider, Human Cloud gives you access to specialized solutions that work with you to create the exact right plan, with the exact right people, at the exact right time.
humancloud.comIndependently is a compliance-as-a-service platform that automates independent contractor classification at scale. It delivers third-party due diligence, defensible classification decisions, audit-ready documentation, and indemnification on every assessment.
Independently on Human CloudThis study draws on five sources: the study’s own surveys of both sides of the market, and the data Human Cloud holds on how work gets done beyond traditional talent channels.
Our 2026 Annual Flexible Workforce Study surveyed both sides of the market: the companies that use flexible talent and the solutions that supply it.
Fielded August to September 2026.
An exclusive community of company executives implementing flexible talent across their organizations.
The largest database on how work gets done beyond traditional talent channels.
Every solution, every capability and skill set and every region, ranked by HC Score: the open-sourced ranking algorithm for the flexible workforce.
Explore Solution Cloud →Microsoft, NASA, Stanley Black & Decker and more than 2,000 other companies using solutions on Human Cloud.
Explore Company Cloud →Ten chapters, 40 exhibits, business cases verified by named companies, and a one-page action plan for innovation, HR and procurement leaders and for the solutions that serve them.
