By Dave Albertson, CEO & Co-Founder, Manage AI
Key takeaways:
- AI displacement isn’t arriving as a dramatic announcement. It’s a slow erosion of standing reqs, with AI publicly cited in 4.5% of 2025 U.S. job losses and CFOs privately projecting nine times that figure in 2026.
- Staffing firms face an AI challenge on two fronts at once: automating their own operations to stay competitive and positioning themselves as advisors to clients who are quietly making workforce decisions without them.
- The firms that own the next era will help clients decide which work stays human, which goes to AI, and how to manage both, turning vendor relationships into strategic ones.
You may already be experiencing the subtle signals. There often isn’t a big announcement or a formal meeting about it. It’s a phone call, maybe an email, from a client you’ve worked with for years.
“Hey, we’re going to hold off on filling two of those five roles. Our CEO thinks AI can handle it.”
You’ll push back a little. They’ll be polite. The req will go away.
Then it’ll happen again. A different client, a different role. And then the worst version: silence. The standing req that came in every quarter just doesn’t come. No call. No explanation. The demand disappears and nobody is discussing the details of why.
That’s how most staffing firms are going to find out the market has shifted underneath them. Not with a dramatic announcement, with a slow fade.
The numbers are starting to back this up. In 2025, AI was directly cited as the driver in 4.5% of all U.S. job losses, a number that barely existed two years ago. And that only counts what companies said publicly. A recent Fortune report found that CFOs are privately admitting AI related cuts in 2026 will be nine times higher than what was reported last year. Salesforce eliminated 4,000 customer support roles after its AI agents began handling half of all customer interactions. Jack Dorsey cut 40% of Block’s entire workforce and wrote publicly that most major companies would reach the same conclusion within twelve months.
Right now those are mostly big tech headlines. But the mindset is spreading into every industry your firm serves. And here’s the part that makes this more complicated than a simple doom story: demand for human talent in healthcare, skilled trades, cybersecurity, and AI-related roles is actually growing. The staffing industry isn’t collapsing. It’s reallocating. Certain types of roles are fading. New ones are emerging. But that reallocation is exactly the point. The roles your firm has filled for years may not be the roles your clients need filled tomorrow.
If staffing firms exist to place human talent, and clients are quietly deciding that AI can handle more of the work, where does that leave the firms in the middle?
I’m going to give you some important takeaways for your firm. But first, let’s anchor this with a broader perspective on this shift, because how you respond to that shift depends entirely on how you view what’s coming.
What is your belief?
Belief systems around AI vary wildly. On one end, you’ve got people asking if AI is even that good and if the hype is real. On the other end, people are convinced we’re days away from Skynet and every human job disappearing overnight.
The reality, as usual, may be in the middle. But it’s a lot closer to extremely transformative than most staffing leaders are comfortable admitting.
The AI transformation is happening in three big waves
Wave one has been happening for a while. It gave us a flood of new AI tools. These tools can do amazing things. But they’ve also created a lot of complexity, a lot of promising prototypes, but not a lot of operationalized business value. Research from MIT, McKinsey, and PwC all point to the same conclusion: roughly 95% of companies experimenting with AI have not yet achieved measurable business impact. Only about 5% have started to figure it out, but those 5% are pulling away fast.
Wave two is part of why the 5% is succeeding. They realized early that AI isn’t a software tool you buy. It’s a workforce you build. That unlock is driving a massive wave of AI workers flooding into early-adopting companies, and it’s about to flood into mid and late adopters too. The people on the front lines of this are sounding the alarm. As a friend of mine in executive talent staffing put it: “The people standing on the beach can already see it. But most of the population is still a few miles inland with no clue what they’re about to brace for.”
Wave three is AI workforce management. This is the wave where humans and companies develop new methods and systems for managing AI effectively, harnessing blended teams of AI and people to create unprecedented growth and scale.
No matter where your belief system sits, these waves are coming. Some believe more AI workers will create more demand for human labor, new roles, new categories, new work that doesn’t exist yet. Others believe it’s heading toward mass layoffs and painful transitions as skilled workers have to reinvent themselves for a world where AI handles functions that used to require people.
Here’s what both sides agree on: staffing firms are going to be standing square in the middle of something unprecedented.
The dual challenge no one else faces
What makes staffing unique in this moment is that AI hits you from both sides of the equation simultaneously.
Side one: your own operations. Recruiting workflows, candidate screening, client communication, compliance documentation, timesheet reconciliation, back-office processes. All of it is ripe for AI. And the firms that figure out how to run AI-augmented operations will be dramatically leaner, faster, and more profitable than the ones still doing everything manually.
American Staffing Association (ASA) and LinkedIn research already shows that staffing talent is adopting AI skills 46% faster than the broader labor market. Your people are moving. The question is whether the firm is moving with them.
But here’s the side that almost nobody in staffing is talking about yet.
Side two: your clients’ workforce decisions. Gartner predicts 40% of enterprise applications will have AI agents built in by the end of this year. Research from the Josh Bersin Company predicts AI-powered “superagents” will eliminate up to 30% of traditional HR roles in 2026 alone, not just chatbots answering PTO questions, but autonomous systems handling end-to-end workflows like payroll, benefits enrollment, and candidate screening. Your clients are making workforce decisions around AI right now. Some will ask for your help. Most won’t, they’ll just stop calling.
ASA’s own chief economist, Noah Yosif, put it plainly: companies are in a mindset of investing more in AI, which means “putting labor on the back burner.” The firm that can walk into that conversation and help clients think through what stays human, what goes to AI, and how to manage both becomes the strategic advisor. The firm that can’t becomes the vendor watching reqs dry up without knowing why. And someone else, a consultant, a competitor, a new entrant, takes the relationship with them.
That’s the dual challenge. Internal operations on one side. Client advisory on the other. The firms that figure out both will own the next era of staffing. The ones that ignore either side are going to find themselves increasingly irrelevant.
The firms that win both sides
The staffing firms that figure out AI workforce management now win on both fronts. They run leaner, faster, more profitable operations internally. And they become the trusted advisor their clients need as blended workforces become the norm.
That second part is the one most staffing leaders aren’t thinking about yet, and it’s the bigger opportunity. When your client is trying to figure out which roles stay human, which ones go to AI, and how to manage a workforce that includes both, the firm that can help them think through that question owns the relationship. Not just the reqs. The relationship.
This isn’t about becoming a technology company. It’s about doing what the best staffing firms have always done, understanding the workforce better than anyone else in the room, and extending that to include AI. The firms that can speak this language will be in conversations their competitors don’t even know are happening. The ones that can’t will keep waiting for the phone to ring.
Dave Albertson is CEO & Co-Founder of Manage AI, where he and his team help midsize companies build and manage AI workforces on infrastructure they own. A product and technology minded leader with a background spanning Fortune 500 companies, high-growth venture-backed businesses, and startups, Dave previously co-founded Shelvspace, taking it from idea to acquisition. He is a featured presenter at the American Staffing Association’s AI in Staffing week and has led AI education programs across several executive groups and industry verticals. Dave holds an MBA from Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business.
