This week was one of the most fruitful I have had in a while with new conversations at EQ.app, not just because customers could see the value but because they were asking the right questions.
Not which model are we using.
More like:
Where does candidate or client context get lost?
Which process is still being held together by email, spreadsheets, and memory?
Which team is doing invisible cleanup every day to protect the customer experience?
Which repetitive task is consuming expensive human judgment that should be reserved for sales, relationships, and decisions?
The real conversation is about data quality, information quality, and whether the right people have the right context at the right moment.
That is where the bottleneck still is.
7.4million jobs open.
BLS reported 23,000 jobs lost, ADP recorded only 44,000 private hires, and AI drove 33% of July job cuts yet Recruit’s HR-tech revenue rose 20.9% and
Adecco grew 5.6%, showing a labor market splitting sharply by sector, skill and operating model.Something shifted in my conversations this week.
The AI signal is also becoming more concrete: economists lean slightly negative on near-term employment, Challenger is recording actual cuts attributed to AI, while 8x8’s customer data shows rapid deployment of AI into live frontline workflows rather than isolated pilots.
I spoke with a highly sophisticated staffing CEO running a billion-dollar business. What struck me was not just his candor when he said, “we don’t know what we don’t know about AI.”
It was what came next. “He said people in staffing are delusional if they think their data is the savior, if by data they just mean the candidate records they already have.”
Another leader I spoke with, from a company north of $100 million that recently sold, made a similar point from a different angle. “People think the value is having 500,000 records. It is not.
The value is knowing which 50,000 matter most, which ones are placeable, current, reachable, and commercially relevant.”
You need it in one place!
That gap is widening.
We are also starting to see very different shapes of firms emerge. In a few cases, the companies where we have created the most value do not need constant interaction from us anymore at EQ.app
We may speak every few months while the AI workers keep the machine moving in the background.
I recorded a podcast this week and got asked where all this is going over the next three years.
Honestly, I find the next three months hard enough to predict in AI technology. But over three years, a few things feel much clearer.
Relationships will matter more.
Trust will matter more.
Brand will matter more.
The models will keep improving. They will complete more tasks with more accuracy. But the firms that benefit most will not just be the ones with access to better models. They will be the ones with the best systems around them.
System design is becoming the strategy.
BLS: Employment Situation — July 2026
BLS: Job Openings and Labor Turnover — June 2026
American Staffing Association: Staffing Index Grows in July
The Conference Board: 60% of Corporate America Has Not Moved Beyond Early AI Adoption
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