Yes, salaries for AI Native candidates are racing higher and the Mag10 are paying Billion Dollar packages for AI leaders. Though I’m not writing about them or the increase in salaries, I’m interested in the new logic of work – and how smart companies are taking advantage of the situation without paying overs.

These companies are doing two things differently.

Paying for capabilities.

Paying for skills.

They aren’t paying for someone to be in a “job.”

They are paying for a specific, time-sensitive capability to build systems that will fundamentally change their business.

And, they are paying for core skills essential for the competitiveness of the company in a volatile market: creativity, critical thinking, judgement and speed of learning.

This logic is leaking out from the AI frontier and into the rest of the market. Most companies are deers in headlights right now. The companies that understand this shift are building an insurmountable talent advantage.


The Winner’s Playbook

My friends in HR are struggling. Their job has always been to help fit talent into neat little boxes, through rigorous Org Design & Job Design. These boxes don’t exist anymore.

The winners are breaking down work into its core components and acquiring *talent with a precision that was previously impossible.

Not *talent like “Sales Leaders with a Math PHD from Stanford who speaks 5 languages” talent.

*Talent that is excited by companies when they talk about work in this way. Game respects game.

They also aren’t asking for $300k salaries. They are yearning to meet companies who think this way, and they are available!

This is how talent forward companies are doing it:

They deconstruct work into TASKS

Instead of hiring a permanent, full-time “Marketing Manager,” winning companies are unbundling that role into its core tasks.

– Task: Daily market trend & competitor analysis.

– Solution = AI agent

– Task: Defining the core brand strategy & negotiating a key partnership.

– Solution: Hire an elite human strategist.

– Task: Compiling weekly performance dashboards.

– Solution: Automate it.

This is about 10xing output. Which has recently become the most popular interview question for 2026, drastically reducing interview times; “how do you 10x output?“

Task based work ensures that your most expensive and valuable resource – elite human talent – spends 100% of their time on high-judgement work that only they can do.

At last, the new human renaissance!

Everything else is automated or outsourced. So, stop paying brilliant people to fill out spreadsheets. Pay them for their creativity, problem solving and logic.

They pay a premium for SKILLS, not credentials

They are treating talent like a strategic asset, not a fixed cost. If you need a data expert to enhance your database why would you hire those capabilities full-time?

You rent the skill, deploy it with maximum impact, and then release it. You get elite talent for the exact moment you need it, without the long-term overhead.

It allows you to build a far more agile and potent workforce than any of your “LeTs wRitE a jOb dEscRipTion aNd poSt an aD” competitors.

They Organise Work into High-Impact PROJECTS

The age of assigning someone to a permanent “function” with a vague set of rolling responsibilities is over.

Winning companies structure work into short-term, high-impact sprints.

A defined output.

A clear owner.

A definitive end state.

This model forces a level of clarity and urgency that a permanent “job” never could. It allows you to swarm your best talent – both internal and external – on your most critical business problems, solve them at warp speed, and then redeploy. It’s how you build momentum, retain the most driven employees and stay ahead in a market that changes by the week.

They Forge an Elite, Permanent CORE

So, do points #1, #2, #3 mean you fire everyone and run your company on a revolving door of contractors? No.

Your core staff, your nucleus is critically essential: an elite, and flexible core team that lives and breathes your mission. They are the keepers of your culture, the drivers of your vision, and the source of your velocity. These are the people who nailed the interview question “how do you 10x your output.” They are your force multipliers.

*Quick moment, take a second to think… the more force multipliers I have on my team…

You get it.

Whilst some companies are reducing teams, others are adding more force multipliers – and they’re gonna win.

Check out Ajay Prakash. He’s the Head of Growth at Superpower – awesome company. I’ve shared his post from last month below. He built 30 Agents to take more TASKS off his plate whilst he focuses on high-impact PROJECTS. He isn’t firing anyone. We are helping him find many more people with this type of mindset.

Contractors, on the other hand, are different but are as essential as your core team. They compliment the core. They are the surgical specialists you bring in for a specific mission to release speed and not distract your core.

They don’t need to be a perfect cultural fit. You don’t need to really manage them because they are guns for hire. They come in, execute a specific task with world-class skill, and they move on. Your team, permanent and contractors, is your only competitive advantage now.

As Alfred Wahlforss (Co-Founder & CEO at Listen) puts it, “talent density is the brand.”

One exceptional hire attracts more. They will also compress a six-month roadmap into six weeks. Their leverage is exponential.

So, how are winning companies building this essential core?

With deadly shoot-outs across George Street and back-alley knife fights in Little Collins!

They are fighting for them… almost like their company depends on them 😏.

A company’s talent is existential. More than ever before.

They’re rejecting the HR-sub, resume-hiring, box filling slow-me-downs and are getting creative.

They’re putting engineering puzzles on billboards. They’re making candidates build AI agents to interview with their AI agents. They’re pushing recruiters to the limit – I’ve honestly never worked harder and it’s amazing work.

They’re scrapping resume screening entirely in favour of a simple meritocracy: “Show us what you can do!”

And in return, they’re giving the best candidate what the best candidates want.

Ownership.

Whether of a task, project or outcome.

Once they taste that, they don’t go back.