Insights and Strategies

Why the AI doom loop in recruitment is a measurement failure, not a behaviour problem The term doing the rounds is the AI doom loop. Candidates use AI to generate applications at volume. Employers use AI to filter them. Both sides optimise against an algorithm rather than against the job. Reported application volumes now sit in the hundreds per role, and most practitioners will tell you privately that the published averages understate it. The diagnosis is accurate. The prescr

What the hiring-AI reckoning reveals about every scoring system, including the one running your contact centre. William Rochelle asked the question that started this, plainly, in a recent piece: what if the job you applied for never existed? It is a good question, and behind it sits a mechanism worth following, first through hiring, where it is finally getting attention, and then onto a contact centre floor, where I have spent twenty-six years watching the identical failure r

The BPO industry is debating whether to sell outcomes. It has not worked out how to prove who caused them. In the fourth quarter of its 2025 financial year, Concentrix wrote off USD 1,523.3 million of goodwill. The trigger was not a lost client, a failed integration or a collapse in demand. The company's own release attributes the charge primarily to the trading range of its share price and market capitalisation. In the same twelve months, revenue grew 2.2 percent to USD 9,82

Updated July 2026. This article was first published in May 2026 against Version 1.0 of our sector deep-dive. The underlying report has since been through an external verification pass and reissued as Version 2.0, with nine substantive corrections and a published revision register. Three figures in the original article have changed, one section has been materially expanded, and one claim has been qualified. The changes are summarised at the end. We have left the original argum

Why contact centres are the test case for PwC's two-track thesis, and why the track is a decision, not a destiny PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, drawn from over a billion job advertisements, makes an argument that deserves to be taken seriously. AI is not eliminating jobs at the rate the forecasts promised. It is splitting them. Some roles are being “Professionalised”. AI absorbs the routine tasks and leaves the human with the harder, more expert work. Others are being D

Why your AI oversight layer has a failure rate, and why nobody is measuring it A large enterprise recently described its AI hiring system to the press. The system screens hundreds of thousands of applicants a year and recommends a shortlist. Human recruiters then review those recommendations before anyone is hired. To demonstrate that humans remained in control, the organisation offered a statistic: Recruiters hire around 85 per cent of the candidates the AI recommends. That