Talked to 8 remote work platform founders/operators at a the Running Remote conference. Biggest topic by far was AI. 50/50 on whether the outlook is bright or grim.

I spent a week at the Running Remote conference in Austin recently, sitting down with people who run flexible-talent platforms, freelance marketplaces, and remote-first companies. AI dominated every conversation. Bigger than any other topic, including the obvious ones (return-to-office, taxation, where to base your company).

The split was almost exactly even. Half the people I talked to are optimistic. They think AI will compress workflows, enable smaller teams to ship more, and free workers from doing the boring bits. Half think we’re heading into a brutal correction, particularly at the enterprise level.

The most concrete claim came from a guy who runs a flexible-talent aggregator. He said for companies spending over a billion on talent, 40% layoffs are coming. The companies will publicly say 10%. The mechanism he described: LinkedIn’s “builder” framing, where five roles are being compressed into a single position. Jack Dorsey’s Block went from teams of 14 to teams of 6. The arithmetic only goes one way.

His own company runs at 98% automated production: articles, video clips, social scheduling, guest emails, using Claude with a custom “/human” command trained to make the output not look like AI.

I pushed back. I think AI output is sloppy and the curated stuff wins long-term. He didn’t budge. His counter: underwear vs t-shirt. Some work you want optimised and cheap, some work you want curated and visible. The question isn’t whether to automate, but what to automate.

I’m genuinely curious what people in this sub are seeing. If you’re working remotely now, are you watching colleagues get cut? Are you the one doing the cutting? Or is this all louder on conference stages than it is in actual workplaces?

Full convo is here: https://studio.youtube.com/video/XWYMmrPegXY It’s the first of the published conversations.