By Olga Fragis, Founder & CEO, Live Assets IT Staffing Solutions
If you believed the loudest voices of the last two years, AI was supposed to make recruiters obsolete. So it is worth pausing on what just happened. In the middle of the biggest AI boom in history, one of the world’s largest consulting firms paid 1.1 billion dollars to buy a recruitment outsourcing company. That is not an industry being automated away. That is the market telling us something. And it is a big part of why, today, I am sharing some news of our own.
In July 2026, Live Assets IT Staffing Solutions, a boutique IT recruitment agency founded in Toronto in 2003, announced its expansion into Europe, with Dublin, Ireland as its first city.
Let me start with the deal that has the whole industry talking, because it sets up everything I want to say.
On June 29, 2026, Korn Ferry announced it had agreed to acquire AMS, the UK-headquartered recruitment process outsourcing firm, for roughly 1.1 billion dollars. The combined company will have more than 16,000 people and will place a professional into a job roughly every 90 seconds. Korn Ferry’s CEO said afterward that he only wished they had done the deal sooner.
Now, why would a company spend that kind of money on recruitment outsourcing in 2026, at the exact moment AI is supposedly making hiring a solved problem?
Because the premise was wrong. And understanding why it was wrong explains both where the talent market is heading and where we are taking Live Assets next.
AI Was Supposed to Replace Recruiters. It Didn’t.
For the last two years, the story about AI and hiring has been relentlessly one-directional. AI would screen the resumes. AI would source the candidates. AI would run the first interviews. The human recruiter, the story went, was a cost to be optimised away.
Some of that automation is real, and we have written honestly about how AI is now part of nearly every IT interview. The tools are genuinely useful. But somewhere in the excitement, a lot of people confused “AI can do parts of recruitment” with “AI can do recruitment.” Those are very different claims.
The Korn Ferry deal quietly settles the argument. As one industry analyst put it, companies are investing in recruitment outsourcing precisely because technology is useless without skilled humans to drive it. AI has not shrunk the value of great recruitment partners. It has increased it.
“The people predicting that AI would end recruitment fundamentally misunderstood what recruitment is. It was never just matching keywords to job descriptions. It was judgment, relationships, and understanding people. AI cannot replace those things. It just makes the firms who are good at them more valuable.”
Olga Fragis, Founder & CEO, Live Assets IT Staffing Solutions
What This Means for the Canadian and US IT Markets
For the North American businesses we work with every day, this shift is already visible.
Across Canada and the United States, IT hiring is being reshaped by AI on both sides of the table. Companies are using AI to screen at scale. Candidates are using AI to prepare and apply. And in the middle of all that automation, a strange thing is happening. The signal is getting harder to find, not easier. When everyone has access to the same tools, the resumes start to look the same, the applications blur together, and the genuinely great candidate becomes harder to distinguish from the one who simply optimised their keywords.
That is exactly the moment a human recruiter with real relationships becomes most valuable. Not less.
The Canadian market, and Toronto in particular, has become one of the most important IT talent hubs in North America. We have written about how Toronto is now home to the fourth-largest AI talent pool on the continent. The US market, for all its scale, is facing the same core challenge: too much noise, not enough signal, and a growing need for partners who can tell the difference between a candidate who looks right on paper and one who will actually thrive on the team.
AI made the haystack bigger. It did not make the needle easier to find. That still takes people.
Why the Human Parts of Recruitment Are Winning
Strip away the corporate language and the Korn Ferry deal tells us three simple things about where hiring is heading.
First, recruitment outsourcing is growing, not shrinking. RPO represents roughly 60 percent of AMS’s revenue, and Korn Ferry did not spend over a billion dollars on a declining business. In the middle of the AI era, the smart money is flowing toward recruitment services.
Second, recruitment has evolved beyond filling vacancies. The modern partner is expected to handle workforce planning, skills strategy, and long-term talent decisions. AI handles the repetitive parts. Humans handle the judgment.
Third, AI is a layer, not a replacement. It is becoming one more component inside an already complex talent ecosystem, one that still needs human expertise to design, integrate, and manage well. The question is no longer AI or a recruitment partner. It is how to combine both.
This is the same conviction we built our Hybrid RPO model around. And it is the conviction behind the news I want to share.
Our Next Chapter: Live Assets Is Coming to Europe
For over 20 years, Live Assets has served clients across Canada and the United States. We have built our reputation one relationship at a time, on the belief that people thrive when they are treated as living assets, not commodities. That belief has never depended on geography. And now we are taking it across the Atlantic.
Today, I am proud to announce that Live Assets is expanding into Europe. Our first city will be Dublin, Ireland.
This is not a decision we made lightly, and it is not a flag we are planting at random. Dublin is one of the most significant technology hubs in the world, and the reasons it works for the companies who base themselves there are the same reasons it works for us.
Dublin’s Silicon Docks is home to the European headquarters of Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, LinkedIn, Stripe, and dozens of other technology companies. Ireland produces the highest number of STEM graduates per capita in Europe. It is an English-speaking gateway to the European Union, with a deep, multilingual, and highly skilled IT talent pool. And as the tech sector matures and transforms, the demand for genuine, relationship-driven recruitment there is only growing.
In short, Dublin is a city built on exactly the kind of IT talent we have spent two decades placing, and exactly the kind of transformation we understand well.
“We are not expanding to Europe to plant a flag. We are expanding because our clients are increasingly building teams that span continents, and because the human, relationship-first recruitment we have always believed in translates anywhere people build great things together. Dublin is where that next chapter begins.”
Olga Fragis, Founder & CEO, Live Assets IT Staffing Solutions
A Transatlantic Bridge for IT Talent
Here is what excites me most about this move. For our North American clients, a Dublin presence is not just a European office. It is a bridge.
More and more of the companies we work with in Canada and the US are building teams that stretch across borders. They need talent in Toronto and Dublin. They are opening European operations and want a recruitment partner who already understands both markets and can move between them with the same standards and the same care. And European companies looking to tap North American talent, or to establish a presence here, will now have a partner who knows both sides of the Atlantic personally.
The technology transformation happening in IT is global. The AI shift does not stop at a border. Neither does the need for recruitment that actually understands people. By putting down roots in Dublin, we are building a genuine transatlantic capability, grounded in the same boutique, human approach that has defined us from day one.
Recruitment in the AI Era: Our Next Chapter
The headlines said AI would make recruitment obsolete. The largest players in the industry are voting with 1.1 billion dollars that the opposite is true. Recruitment is growing. The human parts of hiring are becoming more valuable, not less. And AI, for all its genuine usefulness, is a layer in the process, not a replacement for the people who run it.
We see that shift clearly across the Canadian and US markets. And rather than retreat from it, we are leaning in, and growing. Dublin is our first step into Europe, and it will not be our last.
The technology will keep changing. Our belief will not. People thrive when they are treated as living assets, and hiring works best when a real human is thinking carefully about the match. That is true in Toronto. It is true in New York. And soon, it will be true in Dublin too.
Building IT teams across North America or Europe, and want a recruitment partner who understands both?
Whether you are scaling in Toronto, hiring in the US, or establishing a presence in Dublin, we would love to have a real conversation about what you are building. No pitch decks. No pressure. Just two people figuring out what is next.
Get in touch today, here.
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