For three years, the industry has been asking the same question about AI in recruiting: what can it do? TA teams pointed it at speed. At efficiency. At operating capacity. And a lot of it worked. Everything got faster.

But motion isn't momentum.

Kyle Lagunas has spent those same years studying how AI is landing inside TA functions: Not the demo version, the version that has to work on Monday morning.

Surveys of 350+ senior HR and talent leaders. A head-to-head benchmark of 12 AI interviewers. A hard look at candidate fraud as it escalated from edge case to security threat. Across his research, the pattern is consistent–and it's splitting the function in two: Teams treating AI as a headcount play, and teams treating it as a capability shift.

The gap between them widens every quarter.

The teams pulling ahead stopped asking what AI can do and started asking a harder question: How does it work best? Where should it augment their teams, where should it assist them, and where should it automate the work outright?

That last one is the part making everyone nervous. They know where AI delivers today (sourcing, screening, scheduling, candidate communication) and where it's shelfware. They figured out that orchestrating outcomes beats AI-ifying everything. The rest are pointing AI at broken processes and getting to the same dead ends faster. That's not a criticism; nobody handed the industry a playbook for this.

But the bottleneck was never the technology. It's readiness, it’s governance, literacy, and commitment.

Underneath all of it, the recruiter's job is changing shape and staying the same: Less process execution, more judgment, more relationships, more of the calls only a human can defend.

At a time when everyone knows AI matters somehow, but are drowning in vendor promises about what it can do, Kyle steps past the polished pitch decks to show what the evidence says separates the teams building momentum from the ones revving hard and grinding gears. Whether AI belongs in recruiting is settled. What the work becomes now that it's here is the question worth answering.

The teams pulling ahead have made their move, and there's always a next move. This keynote is about finding yours.

Attendee Takeaways

The reframe that reorganizes every AI decision you make. From "what can this tool do?" to "what should recruiters own, and what should AI do for them?" The highest-performing teams use that one distinction to make faster vendor calls they can defend.
The evidence map. Where AI is producing real results in TA today (sourcing, screening, scheduling, candidate communication) and where it's theater that vendors are overselling and buyers are overbuying. Receipts included: 350+ leaders surveyed, 12 AI interviewers benchmarked. You'll be able to tell the difference in your own stack.
Orchestration beats agent count. The teams pulling ahead aren't the ones who bought the most AI. They're the ones who thought hardest about how it all works together. What that means for how you buy, build, and sequence.
Building the team for what's coming, not what's leaving. The capabilities that gain value as execution gets automated (judgment, relationships, stakeholder trust), and why recruiters who lead AI as stewards will outrun the ones waiting to be told what to do. How to start reshaping roles and hiring profiles now, before the market forces it.

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