How PE can stop swapping talent for tokens

Hey everyone,

Yesterday was my keynote at Private Equity International in New York. My argument was simple: winning companies don't swap talent for tokens. The shortcut makes headlines. Redesigned work creates value.

We also held our Executive Dinner with 15 Operating Partners, Safeguard Global, and Horizon Five, two leading solutions enabling the future workforce.

Expect a deep dive on how private equity firms can use Human Cloud for value creation next week.

A recap of my keynote

• The headlines promised fewer people. Block cut nearly half its workforce. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate roles. Atlassian cut 1,600.^[1][2][3] Challenger counts 120,136 AI-attributed job cuts through September.^[4]

• Then reality sent the invoice. Klarna said in May 2025 that it had gone too far on AI customer service, and it started recruiting human agents again.^[5] About a third of hiring managers who cut roles for AI later filled the same or similar roles.^[6]
• The hiring model was broken before AI arrived. Only 6% of organizations have the talent to deliver priority projects. 62% report growing skills gaps. 67% of HR leaders say AI-generated applications are slowing their hiring.^[7][8][9]

Here's what I'm hearing across the conference:

1. Value creation is harder to prove than cost cuts. Commercial growth is harder to underwrite than cost reductions, and AI use cases are everywhere while ROI is still hard to find. The question is where the value actually shows up in the P&L.
2. Execution is moving faster than organizations. Data readiness and change management come first. CEOs need to champion AI and experimentation, and one interesting idea is PortCos acting as AI labs, sharing what they learn across the portfolio.
3. Talent is changing. Human judgment, EQ, curiosity, and adaptability are gaining value. New capabilities include forward-deployed engineers, AI-fluent leaders, and specialized experts.

Three things I heard yesterday that stood out:

"AI can accelerate your business, but it can also accelerate your dysfunction."

"The challenge isn't identifying the opportunity anymore. It's organizing to capture the value."

"Need to balance not micro-measuring everything, or else you stifle creativity and innovation."

Here's how Human Cloud is helping:

We help you assemble everything you need to match your AI strategy with your talent strategy, whether it's talent platforms, employers of record, or all the internal work needed to champion this across your organization.

We've spent 10+ years bringing new talent models into organizations from Microsoft, to Stanley Black & Decker, and aggregated 3k+ solutions into one intelligent layer so you can focus on just Human Cloud, not the 140+ solutions most solutions have to build entire programs to manage.

If you want to learn more about how Human Cloud can help your organization, find time with me »

Here's to making the world work!

- Tony

Tony Buffum Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer at Human Cloud. 20+ years in global HR and talent transformation. Former CHRO at FLIR Systems, VP HR at Stanley Black & Decker, VP HR Client Strategy at Upwork. Grab time with me »

PS: Forgot to scan the QR code, or weren't at the conference? Find the presentation here »

Want to take action? Launch an RFP for your biggest challenges. Need an offshore infrastructure generalist to run server admin, patching and backups? There was an RFP for that. Need vetted marketing benches to scale across a PE portfolio? There was an RFP for that. Launch an RFP →