Human Cloud

By WRKdefined Podcast NetworkBusiness Technology Management

Human Cloud episodes

August 25Sebastian Alvarez, CTO of Remotely, The New Framework for AI Software Development
Every engineering leader is being asked the same question right now: if AI writes the code, why do we still need the team? The answer nobody wants to hear is that code was never the bottleneck. Writing more of it, faster, just means shipping more software nobody asked for.
Sebastian Alvarez co-founded Remotely to solve the version of that problem that actually matters, which is figuring out who is genuinely good. His team analyzed the public GitHub firehose, mapping engineers worldwide by what they actually build, then layered cultural fit screening on top. The result is roughly 8,000 accepted engineers out of more than 200,000 evaluated.
We're building Human Cloud to do the same thing one layer up, so companies can find the right talent partner in minutes instead of months.
In this episode, Sebastian Alvarez shares:
Why "let's fire everyone and run Claude" fails on contact with reality, and what the same headcount plus AI actually unlocks
The team structure he'd build from scratch today: a talker, a builder, and a designer, each pointed at one business KPI
Why he'd kill the technical interview entirely, since writing code by hand stopped being a differentiator
The three things buyers actually mean when they ask for an "AI developer," and why the question is unanswerable until you pick one
How mapping every public commit on GitHub, then screening for culture instead of syntax, produced a network that converts at roughly 4%
Why the internal team building your company's own context layer may be the highest-leverage pod you staff
Sebastian Alvarez is co-founder and CTO of Remotely, where he built the GitHub commit-analysis engine that maps engineers worldwide. He was previously the first engineer at Olapic, scaling its Argentina engineering org to nearly 100 people before the company was acquired.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms, so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
49 min
August 22John Healy, How Putting AI in the Hands of End Users Is Rewriting the World of Work
Every enterprise transformation starts the same way. Leadership tasks HR with fixing how work gets done. Then procurement. Then a consultancy. Nothing moves. The people who actually do the work are the last ones in the room, and usually they are not in it at all.
John Healy ran the experiment in reverse. A high-tech company with 30,000 workers globally handed him free rein. He put the end users in the room and left HR and procurement out of it. Two ground rules: you cannot swap out any technology, and you cannot change any policy. Then he loaded the company's own workflows and policy manuals into their private LLM and started keying in every point of failure as people named it out loud.
Three hours later they had working interfaces that let a manager kick off a project and get to talent. Six months later it was deployed, adopted by word of mouth, with the old system still running untouched for anyone who wanted it.
We're building Human Cloud from the other side of that same shift, so any company gets a two click front door to trusted talent without having to build one from scratch.
In this episode, John Healy shares:
Why the thing that has not changed in 30 years is trust, and why every CV, background check, and interview loop is just an expensive workaround for not having it
How he ran a design thinking workshop with the end users and deliberately kept HR and procurement out of the room, and why that created a safe space instead of a fight
The two ground rules that made a six month transformation possible: change no technology, change no policy
Known talent versus unknown talent, and why trust is the only thing standing between a manager and a two click hire
How he gets paid on whether the AI agents he built get retained, improved, or terminated, and what a governance model for agents actually looks like
Why rogue spend is a user experience problem, not a compliance problem, and what happens when you give people a system that actually works
John Healy is Chief Executive at WHRRR.WORK. He spent 30 years at Kelly Services, where he ran the Office of the Future of Work, and now advises companies and governments on radically rethinking how people connect with work.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
48 min
August 18Lee Cage Jr., Director of Enterprise Transformation, How HR Can Drive the Business Forward
Most CEOs have the same private complaint about HR: it shows up with workshops when the business asked for revenue. The function that owns the single largest line item on the P&L is still, in a lot of rooms, treated as overhead. That gap is not an HR problem. It is a translation problem.
Lee Cage Jr. has spent eighteen years in Army HR and now leads enterprise transformation, strategy, and technology at BDO USA, where he has guided nonprofits, healthcare systems, and large automotive organizations through the change. He came to HR wanting to be a cultural anthropologist, and he still works that way: studying how people actually behave at work, then rebuilding the systems around what he finds.
We're building Human Cloud so the same reframe holds on the buying side, so business teams can go get an outcome without first converting it into a full-time headcount.
In this episode, Lee Cage Jr. shares:
Why an HR leader who cannot name the company's KPIs has already lost the argument, and what changes the moment they can
The 1 FTE trap: how budgeting only in whole headcount makes organizations miss the 0.25 and 0.5 people who would outperform
Why he believes everybody is already an independent contractor, and what at-will employment really means for how you structure work
Lock and shift is not transformation: if the business process survives the migration unchanged, nothing was transformed
Why laying off every junior to fund AI quietly guarantees you will have no competent leaders in a decade
Lee Cage Jr. is Director of Enterprise Transformation, Strategy & Technology at BDO USA and an eighteen-year Army HR leader, with degrees from Lipscomb and Emory, an incoming PhD in leadership and strategic innovation, and a podcast of his own called Fifteen Minutes With.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms, so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
41 min
August 11Matt Watson, Founder & CEO at Full Scale, How to Build Long-Term Global Software Teams
Almost everyone who tries offshore software development has a horror story. Matt Watson heard those stories for years before he built a 300-person engineering firm that works, and his conclusion was that the failures had nothing to do with talent, cost, or time zones. They came from a structural choice: putting a project manager between the client and the engineers, so the people building the product never talked to the people who understood the problem.
Matt is a four-time founder who built and sold three SaaS companies, then created Full Scale in 2018 because he needed developers he could actually afford. He hired a hundred people in twelve months, faster than any software company he ever started, and spent the next eight years learning what separates a global team that compounds from one that quietly stalls out. His clients include AMC Theaters, which has a team of twenty-one and flew six of its own employees to the Philippines just to build the relationship.
We're building Human Cloud so companies can find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months, so building a global team becomes a repeatable strategy rather than a gamble.
In this episode, Matt Watson shares:
Why most offshore software development fails, and why the project-manager layer between client and engineer is the single point of failure
How to build a long-term global team without long-term contracts, and what commitment level actually produces compounding results
Why AI made proximity to the problem more important, not less, and what "the speed of context" means for how you structure a team
Why English fluency, not cost, drove the Philippines decision, and why communication-heavy work follows different geography rules than task-based work
The management habit that quietly kills distributed teams, the cultural dynamics behind it, and what to ask instead
What changed in how clients think about headcount: the backfill reflex is gone, and what that signals about fixed seats versus flexible capacity
Why services businesses are easy to start and brutal to scale, the exact inverse of SaaS, and what buyers should look for in a partner because of it
Matt Watson is the Founder & CEO of Full Scale, a four-time founder with three SaaS exits, author of Product Driven, and host of the Startup Hustle podcast.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms, so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
34 min
August 04Quentin Cloarec, Co-founder & CEO at Trees Engineering, on Why the Future of Talent Doesn't Need Staffing Firms
Every service industry is about to be rebuilt on top of AI, and staffing is first in line. The traditional agency model was built on recruiters reading resumes and playing a numbers game. That entire premise is now optional, and the incumbents have the most to lose by admitting it.
Quentin Cloarec has been AI-native since 2021. From Kuala Lumpur, he built Trees Engineering into a talent platform placing specialized engineers on billion-dollar energy, renewables, and data-center projects, and he is now rebuilding the whole company on an AI agent that pre-qualifies candidates on WhatsApp, sources from its own live database, and matches on capability instead of keywords.
We're building Human Cloud to do the same thing from the company side, so businesses can find and deploy the right flexible talent solution in minutes instead of months.
In this episode, Quentin Cloarec shares:
Why the traditional staffing world can't adopt AI even though it should, and how the innovator's dilemma keeps them reading CVs while the market moves
How AI interviews 100 candidates for roughly 10 cents each, turning sourcing from a cost center into a live, always-on database
Why the "match" was never the hard part, and the real value is the managed service, the relationship, and the vetting
The bold prediction that recruiters become community managers, paid to build relationships while AI does the mundane work
Why the winners will be specialized talent platforms that "destroy their industry to reinvent it," building the human infrastructure layer, exactly the problem Human Cloud and Trees are solving from opposite ends of the market
Quentin Cloarec is a French energy engineer who spent his career in the manpower industry before founding Trees Engineering, and is now launching TreesOS to help recruitment companies rebuild their processes on top of AI.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms, so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
37 min
July 28Brett Riley, Founder at ITARMI, How 4,000 Engineers ON ITARMI Are Rewiring the World's Data Centers
The world runs on infrastructure most people never see. Fiber optic cables, GPU racks, network switches, data centers the size of eight football fields. And right now, every major enterprise is racing to build more of it faster than ever. The question nobody asks: who actually installs all of this?
Brett Riley built ITARMI to answer that question. After a career pivot from training racehorses in South Africa to IT sales in London, he saw a gap that billion-dollar companies couldn't fill: reliable, compliant, outcome-driven IT engineers available anywhere in the world. Today ITARMI deploys 4,000 engineers across 170 countries through an orchestration platform inspired by Uber's model.
We're building Human Cloud to solve the same problem from the company side: helping businesses find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. Brett is doing it from the ground up, one data center at a time.
In this episode, Brett Riley shares:
Why the data center buildout is compressing hardware refresh cycles from 3-5 years to 18 months, creating accelerating demand for physical IT talent that AI cannot replace
How ITARMI achieved 99%+ SLA delivery by treating freelancers as co-marketing partners, not disposable labor
The cybersecurity reality most executives ignore: AI-powered breaches that penetrate infrastructure in 45 seconds
Why he believes "SaaS is dead" and the future is orchestration platforms that monetize data, not licenses
How the Uber-for-IT model actually works at scale, including geofencing, facial recognition, and digital sign-offs that prove outcome delivery
Brett Riley is the founder of ITARMI, a global workforce orchestration platform that has completed 180,000+ engineering visits across 170 countries, serving brands like Amazon, Nike, Louis Vuitton, and major banking institutions.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
39 min
May 26Joaquin Titievsky, CEO at Talentum, Why AI Recruiters Are Making HR Firms 50% Faster
What happens when AI stops optimizing the recruiting process and starts replacing the parts that never needed a human in the first place? That's the question Joaquin Titievsky answered by building Talentum, an AI recruiting platform born from running an 80-client talent agency in Latin America and realizing the only way to scale was to stop hiring more recruiters.
Talentum automates sourcing, outreach, screening, and interview scheduling so HR consulting firms can focus on the one thing AI still can't do: evaluating culture fit and soft skills. The result? 50% faster placements and more closed deals for the firms using it.
We're building Human Cloud to solve the same problem from the company side, giving businesses a single front door to discover, compare, and deploy the right workforce solutions. Talentum makes the recruiters faster. Human Cloud makes the companies smarter about which recruiters to use.
In this episode, Joaquin shares:
Why resumes tell you who doesn't fit, not who does, and how that insight shaped Talentum's entire AI approach
How HR consulting firms are using AI recruiters to close 50% more deals without hiring additional staff
The case for building step by step toward a vision rather than trying to disrupt an enterprise's entire workflow on day one
Why context-aware AI that understands "managed a 10K-person company" outperforms keyword-based tools like LinkedIn Recruiter
How a 23-year-old founder in Argentina built a global recruiting platform with customers across the US and Europe, proving the flexible workforce works both ways
Joaquin Titievsky is the CEO and co-founder of Talentum, an AI-powered recruiting platform serving HR consulting firms across the US and Europe. He started Talentum at age 20 as a talent agency in Argentina, grew it to 80+ clients and 100+ placements, then rebuilt it as an AI-first platform after seeing that manual recruiting couldn't scale.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
30 min
May 19Jeremy Lyons, Founder at RecOps Collective, Why Your AI Strategy Needs an Ethics Layer Before Anything Else
Every TA leader is under pressure to show AI results yesterday. But most are skipping the step that determines whether any of it actually works: defining their AI strategy.
Jeremy Lyons founded RecOps Collective to help companies build the operational foundations that make AI adoption stick. His thesis is simple but contrarian: before you touch a single AI tool, answer one question. Are you building a co-pilot or a replacement? The answer changes everything downstream.
We built Human Cloud to solve the same structural problem from the company side: when you have hundreds of workforce platforms and zero infrastructure connecting them, even the best AI strategy falls apart at execution.
In this episode, Jeremy shares:
Why the co-pilot vs. replacement decision is the single most important AI choice a TA leader will make
How conferences are 70% AI in the title and 10% AI in real application, and what fills the gap
The ethics-first framework that separates companies who adopt AI successfully from those who just buy tools
Why agent-to-agent interviewing could collapse time-to-fill to single digit days
How psychometric matching between interviewers and candidates could transform hiring quality using data companies already have
Jeremy Lyons is a second-generation recruiter with nine years in recruiting operations. He founded RecOps Collective to help companies build operationally sound TA functions ready for AI adoption.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
35 min
May 12Rich Wilson & Davie Gow, The 40-40-20 Workforce: From Theory to Reality at Arnold Clark
The 80-20 workforce model is dead. Rich Wilson, CEO of Gigged.AI, says we're headed for 40-40-20: 40% full-time, 40% contingent, 20% AI agents. And Davie Gow, CTO at Arnold Clark, is actually building it inside one of the UK's largest family-run businesses.
Gigged.AI built a blended workforce platform that lets enterprises tap into on-demand talent through outcome-based statements of work, not just day-rate contracts. Arnold Clark uses it to bring in specialized tech talent for projects ranging from Umbraco migrations to mobile app development, all while keeping procurement, legal, and compliance teams comfortable.
We're building Human Cloud to solve the same problem from the buyer's side: helping companies discover, compare, and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months.
In this episode, Rich and Davie share:
Why the 40-40-20 workforce model is replacing the old 80-20 split, and what that means for every CHRO and CTO listening
How Davie transformed Arnold Clark from "we don't use contractors" to a scalable on-demand talent program in under two years
The IR35 compliance framework that got Arnold Clark's legal and accounting teams to say yes to outcome-based contracting
Why the biggest blocker to workforce innovation isn't technology, it's procurement teams who weren't brought on the journey early enough
How AI agent adoption follows the exact same organizational playbook as contractor adoption, and why solving one accelerates the other
Rich Wilson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Gigged.AI, previously at Gartner and the Allegis Group, with deep expertise in contingent staffing and future of work advisory. Davie Gow is the CTO at Arnold Clark with 40 years in technology, including 20 years as an independent contractor and senior roles at Lidos and Lockheed Martin.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
42 min
May 05Jack Spencer, Founder at Freeflexer, What It Takes to Realize the Flexible-First Future of Work
The flexible-first future of work is not a theory. It is already here. But the infrastructure to support it is not. Regulation is tightening across every major European market. Buyers are still trapped in three-month vendor analysis cycles. And the word "contingent" continues to undersell what is fundamentally a growth strategy, not a contingency plan.
Jack Spencer has been building that infrastructure from the ground up. He was early at YunoJuno, launched Freeflexer, and has spent years helping enterprises across the UK and EU build flexible workforce programs that hold up under real regulatory pressure. His core message: you can indemnify tax liability, but you cannot indemnify against operational disruption. The companies that own their workforce governance will win. The ones that keep pushing liability downstream will pay for it in ways no insurance policy covers.
We are building Human Cloud to make this transition possible at scale, so companies can discover, compare, and deploy the right flexible talent solutions with verified data instead of paid-for rankings.
In this episode, Jack shares:
What the UK Employment Rights Bill, IR35 updates, and VBAR mean for every company using flexible talent
Why "contingent" is the worst branding in workforce history and what it actually costs the industry
The three revenue plateaus (500K, 10M, 50M) that talent solutions hit and what breaks at each stage
How paid-for analyst rankings keep the same shortlist in place for a decade
Why direct sourcing is surging as enterprises try to own their own talent pipelines
What happens when lawyers make workforce decisions in a vacuum and the best talent walks away
Jack Spencer is the founder of Freeflexer and a UK-based flexible workforce strategist who helps enterprises build compliant, scalable contingent workforce programs across Europe.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms, so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.
53 min

About Human Cloud

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Welcome to the Human Cloud, where technology-led talent strategies take organizations from human "resources" to human potential. Each week, Matthew Mottola, CEO of Human Cloud and 4x entrepreneur, and…

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