AI and Global Talent Are the Same Bet

Everyone keeps talking about AI and global talent like they are two different conversations.

They are not.

They are brother and sister.

Same family. Same DNA. Same basic promise:

Small inputs. Big outputs.

AKA LEVERAGE.

THE WHOLE THEME OF THIS NEWSLETTER.

For the last 30 freaking years, the outsourcing/offshoring playbook was simple.

Need admin work done? Hire in the Philippines.

Need data entry? Philippines.

Need tech? India.

Find someone cheaper than an American and hand them a checklist.

That worked for a while.

Because labor arbitrage is a HELL OF A DRUG.

But the bottom of that stack is getting eaten alive.

Screening.

Scheduling.

Data cleanup.

Basic customer triage.

Moving information from one box to another box.

Writing the first draft of the thing nobody wants to write.

AI agents can do that now.

Not perfectly….But well enough that pretending otherwise is insane.

So if your entire global talent strategy is “find cheap people to do repetitive tasks,” I have some rough news for you.

SKYNET IS COMING FOR YOUR BUSINESS MODEL.

Commodity work goes to machines.

Human work moves up the stack.

• Judgment.

• Relationships.

• Handling the weird shit.

That is the work left for humans.

And unless you believe in a post-labor economy (I certainly do not), human work is not going anywhere.

It is just changing shape!

And the best humans for that work, defined by quality-to-cost ratio, are not necessarily sitting within 20 miles of your office.

The best recruiter for your company might be in Colombia.

The best customer success person might be in South Africa.

The best operator might be in Kosovo.

The best finance person might be in the Philippines.

Not because they are “cheap.”

Because their quality/cost ratio is out of this world!

This is the thing the BPO/staffing model never really understood.

They built a lazy playbook around entire countries.

“Cheap admin labor.”

The problem was the model.

Direct hiring changes the relationship immediately.

The person is not worker #4,400 at some vendor juggling six clients.

They know Bob in accounting needs things written a certain way or he will silently hate everyone involved.

That context compounds.

AI is great at processing information.

But it has low give a shit factor.

It does not look at three candidates and say, “This one is less obvious on paper, but I think she is the right bet for this manager.”

That is judgment!

That is sommelier work!

That is what we’ve been building internally for the last two years, and it is going to become more important, not less.

Any waiter can hand you fifteen bottles in your price range and slam them on the table.

A sommelier makes you confident in the bet.

That is where human work is going.

Which means the future is not “hire cheap VAs.”

The future is:

Use AI agents to kill the boring stuff.

Then hire the best humans you can find, anywhere on earth, for the work that actually requires a human.

The companies that win the next five years are not going to be the ones who found the cheapest labor.

The ones that win will ask:

Which parts of this role are actually commodity work?

Which parts require taste, judgment, relationship, or accountability?

What should the machine do?

What should the human do?

Where on planet earth can I find the best human for that job?

That is the map now.

GET GOING.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon

P.S. We are doing both at Sagan. Get in on the action.