Matthew Mottola: When I look at AI and when I look at the reduction of layers, this reduction in layers just makes more sense. If you look at the industry of talent, both the staffing and the contingent world, it's been just adding layers to justify why you should get paid for somebody else working. That is the talent industry: we make money when someone else does the work. There's two truths that I don't see changing. The first is that nothing beats a human. We're still gonna need a human. And the second is there's always gonna need to be some sort of support or service layer. Now, as that relates to AI, AI is just pushing on what's already broken. It's not necessarily creating new good things. It's not really helping the interview process. We now have this world where the person applying for a job is using AI. The filter screening for it is using AI. At the end of the day, interview loops are just getting longer. Candidates are just getting more confused. TA teams are doing worse than they were before. So the biggest problem I see is AI is not fixing the core of this talent industry, which is you just need to get good people to work with you. Whether it's contingent or HR, we should all be doing the same thing: hey CEO, CMO, CTO, we're gonna help you find the best people. Joel Kammeyer: I grew up in talent acquisition within the contingent space. I think you're absolutely right. I've applied for jobs before. You don't hear back for twelve months and then all of a sudden you get this rejection email that they didn't even look at you. Talent acquisition at its core is a little bit broken in that way. With AI, I think it has the potential to do great things. We can't lean on it exclusively though.
