Global Talent #46

🔥 Opening Shot

Eleven months. That’s how long this newsletter sat quiet while I was deep in the operating trenches at Lundi. I won’t pretend the gap didn’t happen, but I’m glad to be back, because the first story I want to tell is one almost everyone is getting wrong.

You’ve seen the headlines: company cuts staff, credits AI, stock pops. Clean narrative. The trouble is it’s only half the story. AI is now the single most common reason U.S. employers give for layoffs, three months running, and in May it drove 40% of all announced cuts, a record. Yet the very sector doing most of the cutting, technology, is also posting the most hiring plans of the year. Klarna swapped 700 people for AI, watched quality crater, and hired humans back. Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” turned out to be powered by remote workers reviewing the footage, not the autonomous AI everyone assumed.

Here’s what’s actually happening: much of that work isn’t being eliminated. It’s being relocated. “AI” is the cover story. Geography is the move.

I’ve watched this from the inside for fifteen years. The companies that win the relocation don’t improvise it. They don’t fire in San Francisco on Friday and scramble to stitch together contractors in Bogotá on Monday. They build the team on purpose, with structure, and they own the operation. The ones who improvise inherit a compliance mess and a team that quits in six months.

That’s the theme this issue, and honestly the theme of the whole moment: speed without structure gets expensive, fast. You don’t need more AI hype. You need a plan for where your work is going to live.

Welcome back.

📌 On the Radar

1. “AI” is the reason for the cuts. It’s not the whole story. AI was the most-cited reason for U.S. layoffs for the third straight month in May, with 38,579 jobs cut — 40% of the month’s total and an all-time high (Challenger, Gray & Christmas). For the year, AI has been blamed for 87,714 cuts, already more than all of 2025. But look closer: technology is both the biggest job-cutter of 2026 and the sector with the most hiring plans. Even Challenger’s own analyst calls it “not yet the jobpocalypse some predicted.”

So the roles aren’t simply vanishing. They’re being cut in one place and rebuilt in another — often cheaper, often abroad. Whether your industry admits it or not, work is being relocated, and the only question that matters is whether you do it deliberately or by accident. Accidental offshoring — a contractor here, an agency there — is how you end up with zero operational control and a classification problem (see below). Decide where your work lives. Then build it properly.

2. 2026 is the year the classification bill comes due. Contractor hiring is up roughly 50% year over year, and about a third of U.S. employers admit they’ve misclassified someone. Regulators noticed. The U.S. Department of Labor opened new independent-contractor rulemaking on Feb 26, 2026; since April 6, UK hirers are jointly liable for unpaid PAYE down their labor supply chain; the Netherlands has ended its enforcement moratorium and is issuing retroactive fines.

The cheap, fast way to hire across borders — paper everyone as a contractor — is exactly what’s getting fined in 2026. The savings look great right up until an audit reprices them with penalties and back-taxes attached. The companies that sleep at night built the structure before they needed it. Contractors are a bridge, not a building.

3. There’s a ceiling on renting your team forever. Here’s a number most growth plans miss: somewhere around 15 to 25 people in a single country, the math on running your own legal entity starts to beat paying per-head employer-of-record fees indefinitely. An EOR is the right way to start in a new market, and it’s exactly how we get teams live fast. The trap isn’t using one. The trap is treating it as the whole plan.

Because employment is only half the job. A platform can put people on a compliant payroll, but it won’t recruit them, run the operation day to day, or hand you the keys when you’re ready to own it. If you’ve got 20 people in one country, you don’t just want them employed. You want them built, run well, and eventually yours. You select the people. The right partner recruits them, operates the team, and transfers it to you when the time comes.

📊 Chart of the Week

Share of monthly U.S. job cuts attributed to AI. Source: Challenger, Gray & Christmas, May 2026.

In January, AI was blamed for 7% of U.S. job cuts. By May it was 40% — a record. Read that as a tipping point, not a fad: companies are reorganizing around AI in real time. But “we cut it” and “the work is done” are not the same sentence. Someone, somewhere, still does the job, and they’re employed by someone. The firms that win this reshuffle decide where that work lives on purpose, and build the team to last.

🚀 One More Thing

A newsletter that goes quiet for eleven months and comes back owes you something more useful than “we’re back.” So here it is. If you’re relocating work right now, whether you call it an AI restructuring, an offshore build, or just “we need 15 people in Colombia by Q4,” and you want it done with structure instead of improvisation, let’s talk. No pitch. Just a straight conversation with someone who’s built these teams, operated them, and handed them over.

It’s good to be back.