Matthew Mottola: The full talent industry, both HR and procurement, we are at this inflection point. I thought we were at an inflection point in 2016, then 2019, then 2021. We were very early in the freelance world, now flexible talent world. This inflection point right now is driven by the underlying principle that talent is broken. Staffing is broken, agencies are broken, and they're only broken because there's now another option. If there never was the internet, if there never was AI, then it probably never would be broken. But that's just like saying if the steam engine didn't create an engine, then horses would be around. Staffing and agencies are fundamentally broken. They take too long, they're too expensive, and they're too generalist. Now the inflection point is the fact that the business teams and the hiring managers, they know that. It's no secret that going through your existing TA or procurement team is just gonna slow things down. The difference was there wasn't an alternative. Now there is an alternative. If procurement leaders don't step up and become leaders, the CTO is already going around you, and they're already having their middle management go to platforms. They might be using their corporate card. They might be opening up POs that you didn't approve. They're finding creative ways to go around you. Now, AI just makes this worse and more risky because there's a legal component, there's a classification component. From the workforce side, there's things like bias, there's things like cyber risk. And at the end of the day, you procurement leaders are going to be the one that gets the axe if all of a sudden there's a misclassification lawsuit, or your AI went rogue because a contractor that you don't even know about was using it in ways they shouldn't. So we're at this inflection point. These people need to be in a community with their peers. The carrot and the stick. The carrot is if they join Direct Collective, they'll know what's best in class. The stick is if they don't, they're gonna have nothing to tell their boss when they're on the chopping block.
