AI as a board-level concern: Hays, Mercor and what comes next

Most recruitment boards are having the wrong conversation about AI.

They receive updates from operations and approve budgets when asked. They assume their job is oversight rather than strategy.

For them, AI sits alongside CRM migrations and reporting tool upgrades as a useful technology to be managed, not a fundamental shift in how the business competes.

That assumption is increasingly expensive.

Oversight isn’t strategy
Treating AI as an operational concern has a specific cost: it limits what you can see. The questions asked at operational level are about tools, implementation, and efficiency. But there are questions that matter more.

Like this one: what happens to your fee model when clients can source candidates themselves? Sourcing is becoming a commodity. Compliance, assessment, and outcome quality are rising in value. Businesses that don't get ahead of that shift will find clients forcing the conversation. 

Or this uncomfortable question around compensation: Commission structures built around process made sense when consultants owned that process. AI is taking it over. If your model still rewards activity and volume over relationship ownership and judgment, you're incentivising the wrong things. 

Then there's exit. Valuations and acquisition attractiveness are increasingly tied to AI maturity. A business with clean data infrastructure and measurable AI-enabled workflows is a different asset to one that has bought a few tools and called it transformation. If exit is on your horizon, that distinction is already being made in due diligence conversations.

These are board-level questions about competitive positioning and business model viability. 

In most recruitment businesses, nobody is asking them.