Global Talent #51

Brought to you by Lundi: we design, hire, and run international teams.

🔥 Opening Shot

Three headlines crossed my desk this week that look unrelated. They are not.

ISG reported the fastest growth the global tech services market has ever recorded: up 43 percent in a single quarter, driven almost entirely by AI infrastructure. Allianz's travel insurance arm said AI will let it cut up to 1,800 call center roles across Europe. And the OECD published its annual Employment Outlook, showing that where you sit inside a country now shapes your job prospects more than which country you sit in.

Put them together and you get the real story. Work is detaching from place and being reallocated at a speed I have not seen in twenty years of building international teams. Machines are absorbing the manual layer. Budgets are following the machines. And the human work that remains is landing unevenly: some cities are compounding advantages while others hollow out.

Most companies experience this as weather. It happens to them: a vendor reprices, a function gets automated, a market gets expensive. The operators I respect treat it as a map. They decide which work stays human, where that work should live, and who should own the structure around it.

Work is moving either way. The only question is whether you decide where it lands.

That is not a recruiting decision. It is capital allocation.

This Week's Number: 65% vs 2.7% — last quarter's growth in cloud and AI services versus human-delivered managed services (ISG Index, Q2 2026).

📌 On the Radar

1. The tech services market just had its fastest quarter ever. The human part barely grew.
ISG's Q2 Index put combined global spend on tech and business services at a record $42.4 billion, up 43% year over year, the highest growth rate ever measured — but the composition is the story. Cloud-based as-a-service spend soared 65% (AI infrastructure alone up 78%), while human-delivered managed services grew just 2.7%, with classic IT outsourcing down 3% (ISG Index, July 9, 2026). ISG's Steve Hall was blunt about why: "traditional labor-intensive work is increasingly displaced by LLMs," providers face pricing deflation, and most current activity is "work moving between providers and changing operating models rather than entirely new outsourcing demand."

Read that as a CFO. The per-hour work you rent from vendors is deflating, and deflation flows to whoever owns the structure, not whoever holds the invoice. Renting capacity is still the right way to enter a market and the wrong place to live once a function matters. When the economics of a category are being repriced this fast, owners capture the savings; renters wait for a new rate card.

2. The OECD just told you the country is the wrong unit of analysis.
The OECD's Employment Outlook 2026, released July 7, is built around one finding: labor markets are local, not national. Employment-rate gaps between regions inside the same OECD country run more than 20 percentage points, local access to jobs shapes incomes and mobility, and workers mostly do not move to opportunity; adjustment happens through joblessness, "leaving lasting scars for displaced workers." AI and trade shocks are widening the spread, favoring regions that generate service and non-routine work.

Every executive says "we are hiring in Poland" or "we are building in Mexico." That sentence hides the actual decision. Two cities in the same country can differ more in talent depth, wage curve, and attrition than the countries themselves do. And since workers will not come to the work, the leverage sits with companies that bring work to the workers, deliberately, in the right second or third city rather than the obvious capital. Country selection is strategy theater; city selection is where the returns are. That knowledge does not live in a listicle. It lives in operators.

3. Allianz put a number on AI's first real org-design pass: up to 1,800 roles.
Allianz Partners, the group's travel insurance and assistance arm, told staff this month that growing AI use will eliminate 1,500 to 1,800 positions across Europe, through voluntary departures and early retirement, concentrated in phone-based customer service and claims. Roughly 14,000 of its 22,600 employees handle customer inquiries and claims by phone, which is why the schemes opened first in Spain, France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux. (Announced by the CEO to German press; no public release to link.)

This is the pattern to internalize: AI does not delete functions, it deletes the manual-process layer inside them, and it starts in the highest-cost geographies. What gets rebuilt afterward is smaller, more skilled, and closer to the process owner. That rebuilt team, usually 10 to 60 people, is precisely the unit most companies then improvise: a few contractors here, a vendor there, nobody owning the whole. Rebuild it once, properly, in a market you chose on purpose, inside a structure someone actually operates. The companies that treat the AI rebuild as a location and ownership decision will bank the margin twice.

📊 Chart of the Week

Caption: Year-over-year growth in annual contract value by segment, global ISG Index, Q2 2026. Source: ISG (Information Services Group), released July 9, 2026.

One chart, one message: budgets are rotating toward compute and away from labor-based services, and the human-delivered categories are splitting. Back-office BPO is up 34% while IT outsourcing shrinks, because the work that survives automation is the work closest to judgment and process ownership. For a CFO the divergence is the point. The categories you rent are being repriced at different speeds, and your contract structure decides who pockets the difference.

🚀 One More Thing

If this edition has one takeaway, it is that the map of work is being redrawn faster than most org charts can follow. If you are staring at one of these decisions right now (a function to rebuild after automation, a vendor renewal that smells expensive, a second city to pick in a market you already like), book a strategy session and bring the messy version of the problem. I will tell you what I would do. No pitch. Just insight from someone who has been there.

📖 New here? My book, Winning the Global Talent War, is the full playbook behind this newsletter.