The noise around AI is loud. Hear from the people actually doing the work.
Key takeaways:
- Adding more AI tools seems like the right answer. But the next level is about building AI workforces, with dedicated headcount to manage digital workers the same way you manage people.
- Most staffing firms have a governance gap they don’t know about: most employees are already using AI on the job without any formal policy or training in place.
- The same AI making recruitment faster is also making candidate fraud cheaper and easier to scale. And firms without structured verification workflows are increasingly exposed.
Everyone in staffing has an opinion about AI. You’ve heard the pitches. You’ve sat through the demos. And you’ve probably walked out of at least one conference session where someone promised it would change everything.
But what are firms actually doing with it? And what’s working?
In our conversations with leaders and experts in the industry, what we heard was less about hype and more about choices: which processes to automate, when to keep humans in the mix, and how AI is reshaping the competitive playing field in ways that demand a strategic response.
Here are some of the primary ways industry leaders are using AI today.
1. They’re building actual AI workforces
Brandon Metcalf, CEO of Asymbl, doesn’t talk about AI in terms of tools. He talks about it in terms of headcount.
When he joined The Staffing Show in December, he described running roughly 100 “digital workers” inside Asymbl across about 10 different business functions, and hiring a chief digital labor officer whose entire job is finding new places to deploy them. “His whole job is to go across the company and look for ways for us to leverage digital workers to elevate the productivity that humans are doing,” Metcalf said.
This is a workforce strategy rather than an IT initiative. Metcalf’s target for 2026 is to have 30% of all organizational productivity generated by digital labor. In 2025 alone, Asymbl saved $5 million through this approach.
The mindset shift he’s pushing for the broader industry is significant. Most firms ask, “What can AI automate?” Metcalf asks what jobs need to get done and then decides whether a human or a digital worker should do them. “We genuinely look at it as we’re not displacing our human workers,” he said. “The jobs will evolve, the jobs will change, but everyone ends up becoming sort of a manager, and they’re managing these digital workers to a system.”
In short, AI isn’t something you bolt onto existing operations. It’s something you staff for.
2. They’re putting AI over every recruiter conversation
Erich Hugunin has spent nearly 20 years in staffing technology. Now VP of Sales at Ringover, he joined The Staffing Show in October to make the case for an approach that’s gaining ground: AI layered over your entire communication infrastructure, not just bolted onto one process.
“Our AI is over top of everything that everyone’s doing,” Hugunin said. The setup he described — an AI-first, integrated omnichannel platform that connects voice, text, and WhatsApp directly into the ATS — is designed to operate invisibly. “The goal is to make it easy for the recruiters to work and do their job, and have the AI do everything in the background for them.”
In practice, that means call transcription, conversation intelligence, real-time coaching cues, and automated logging, all without requiring recruiters to change how they work. The recruiter stays in the conversation. The AI handles the documentation and the pattern recognition.
This approach addresses something the industry rarely discusses: most of the time recruiters spend not recruiting is on administrative work that surrounds their calls, not the calls themselves. When AI handles the before-and-after, recruiters do more of the tasks that actually generate revenue, like time with candidates and clients.
3. They’re building governance before someone gets them in trouble
This is the one nobody wants to talk about, and it’s the one that keeps Rob Mann busy.
“Most firms don’t realize that 80-90% of their employees are already using AI in some form, whether it’s a public LLM, a paid tool, or something you’ve provided,” Mann told us in December. When he ran roundtables at the Healthcare Staffing Summit, he asked who had both an AI policy and AI training in place. Almost no hands went up. “That gap is huge,” he said.
The exposure is real. Employees using public AI tools with candidate data. Models trained on prompts that introduce bias into screening. Decisions made by agents that no one can explain to a regulator.
His prescription is direct: establish policy, train on it consistently, and keep humans in the loop. He pointed to one provider he advises whose AI screening tool includes a candidate-facing option: if the system flags a rejection, a candidate can request human review. “That keeps a human in the loop and gives the agency an out: ‘We didn’t just let the AI boot you; a human looked at it too.'”
You don’t have to have the perfect AI program. You have to have a program. Build it now, before the decision gets made for you.
4. They’re rethinking how they sell because buyers have changed
Dan Mori has run the Staffing Sales Summit for years. He joined The Staffing Show in January with a clear message: the way staffing firms are selling hasn’t kept pace with how buyers are buying.
“This AI disruption — we went from the pandemic shutting things down, to remote work, to digitization, and then AI came in and permeated everything,” Mori said. “It’s had a major impact on the way buyers view talent, the way they want to source it.”
The shift Mori describes is structural, not cyclical. Firms aren’t just competing against other staffing agencies anymore. They’re competing against clients’ in-house hiring teams, teams that now have AI-assisted sourcing, automated outreach, and predictive candidate matching built into their HR platforms. The question clients are asking is no longer just “can you fill this?” It’s “why do I need you to fill this?”
That’s a different sales conversation. It requires staffing firms to articulate value that goes beyond volume and speed, things like specialist market access, compliance expertise, and human judgment at critical decision points. Mori’s point is that firms still leading with transactional value propositions are becoming interchangeable. The ones holding margin are the ones who’ve made themselves genuinely hard to replace.
If you haven’t updated your value proposition in the last 18 months, you’re probably pitching to a buyer who’s moved on.
5. They’re using AI to defend against AI-enabled fraud
This one catches most leaders off guard. But it shouldn’t.
Dan Barren, Senior Vice President of Workforce Solutions at MedPro Healthcare Staffing, made the case in a piece published this week: the same AI driving efficiency in recruiting is making candidate fraud cheaper, faster, and harder to detect. AI-generated resumes. Identity spoofing. Proxy interviews where one person applies and another shows up on-site. Synthetic references. Deepfake-assisted video screens.
“What used to be rare edge cases are now scalable, low-cost, and increasingly sophisticated,” Barren wrote. And in high-compliance sectors like healthcare, the consequences of a fraudulent placement aren’t just operational. They’re regulatory, and in some cases, involve patient safety.
His response isn’t to make the candidate experience a gauntlet. It’s to build a structured, repeatable verification workflow, one where consistency is the protection. Credential validation through primary sources before submission. Cross-checking name data across resume, LinkedIn, and certifications. Flagging digital signals, like sudden IP or geographic inconsistencies, that suggest something’s off. “Fraud thrives in informal processes,” Barren wrote. “A documented, repeatable intake checklist removes ambiguity and protects recruiters from subjective judgment calls.”
While most firms look at AI’s offensive use cases, this one is about shoring up the vulnerabilities that AI created.
Staffing agencies making real progress with AI today are treating it like a business decision, not a technology experiment. They’re hiring to manage it, embedding it where recruiters actually work, governing it before it governs them, repositioning around it, and defending against it where it’s being weaponized.
Whether to use AI is no longer the question. It’s about how. Check out The Staffing Show podcast for more industry insights on AI and beyond.
