Agents are here. Are your leaders solving problems or creating more?
Canva lays off or reassigns about 22% of its staff. Employee engagement hits a 15-year low. Bob Cicero of Cisco shows us what happens when 90,000 employees get an AI agent.
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Hi everyone,
Looking for some light reading or listening this weekend? Here is where we would start.
This week on the Human Cloud Podcast
Agents are here. Are your leaders solving problems or creating more?
Every company is handing out AI agents, yet few are measuring if they're used right.
Bob Cicero, Global Director of Workplace Experience at Cisco, is seeing it firsthand across 90,000 employees.
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Here's a preview of what we learned.
1. Agents are here.
Cisco gave 90,000 employees an AI agent in August, and Bob expects each person to run ten.
2. Every employee is a leader now.
Bob says everyone will soon manage digital workers, yet only 46% of employees strongly agree they know what's expected of them at work.1
3. Leaders can't get it right alone.
In our view, agents built without the right context create more problems than they solve. The fix is outside experts who know the work well enough to build the agent around it.
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"Everyone needs to be a leader now, because everyone is going to have digital workers."
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Ready to tell your own story? Book your podcast episode →
Where To Find Us Next
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Invite only · Arlington, TX Healthcare Staffing Executive Dinner This Monday, November 9 · 7:30 PM CT · Hearsay Arlington Tony Buffum hosts healthcare staffing, talent, and workforce leaders with FoxHire and IMS People Possible. Know someone who should be in the room? Send them our way. |
Miami
Second week of December · Miami, FL
Reply to learn more.
Catch up on the Human Cloud Podcast
Three more episodes worth a weekend listen.
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October 27 Charlie McGinn, President, Safeguard Global EOR went from a compliance tool to a growth lever. Now the hard part is choosing one. |
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October 20 Amir Reiter, Founder & Chairman, CloudTask AI SDRs aren't working. What converts now is the phone, the five-minute callback, and the 60-second follow-up. |
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October 6 Joel Kammeyer, Head of Community, Direct Collective He reads the questions 300+ contingent workforce leaders ask each other every day. Agentic AI, candidate fraud, and off-program SOW spend top the list. |
Weekend Reads
From Matthew
• Layoffs up, flexible talent up
From Tony
• Compliance rules keep changing. Solutions move faster to cover the risk.
From the industry
Meet This Edition's Partner
Safeguard Global provides employer of record (EOR), global payroll, contractor payments, recruitment, entity setup, HR/benefits, and finance/tax/accounting services to help organizations hire and manage teams compliantly in 187 countries without needing local entities.
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Sources
1 Gallup Q3 2026 engagement data, via HR Dive, "Employee engagement hits 15-year low, Gallup finds" (Nov 3, 2026).
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