The company that helped invent temporary staffing is rebuilding itself for an age of AI agents, scarce skills and permanent uncertainty. Its wager is that better technology makes human judgment more valuable, not less.
AMN began by placing traveling nurses. Forty years later, it sells health systems something broader: the people, software and operating discipline to keep care moving when labor gets scarce, expensive or suddenly unavailable.
EngageRocket is a Singapore-based HR technology company that turns continuous employee feedback into actionable people-analytics. Founded in 2016 by two former Gallup leaders, its cloud platform runs engagement, lifecycle and pulse surveys (BELONG), 360-degree and multi-rater feedback (GROW), and performance workflows (PERFORM), pairing survey software with people-science advisory. It serves enterprises across 30+ countries - including Toyota, Sephora, Nikon, Epson and CGS-CIMB - to improve engagement, reduce turnover and support data-informed HR decisions.
eQ8 is a Sydney-based SaaS company building a dedicated end-to-end platform for Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP). Founded by Alicia Roach and Chris Hare, the platform lets organizations model dynamic scenarios, forecast the size, shape and skills of the workforce they will need, identify skills gaps, and align talent decisions with business strategy. Its stated mission is to democratize strategic workforce planning so it is accessible to any organization, not just those able to afford lengthy consulting engagements.
HONO is an AI-native HR technology company that runs the full employee lifecycle - hire to retire - on a single platform spanning core HR, global payroll, talent management and workforce analytics. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Gurugram, India, HONO layers conversational AI over enterprise HR operations and in 2026 launched what it calls the world's first 'headless' HRMS, replacing navigation-heavy screens with a natural-language execution engine. It serves 300+ enterprise clients across 30+ countries, covering over a million employees.
Staffinc Group is an Indonesian tech-enabled workforce solutions company (formerly Sampingan) that helps businesses recruit, deploy and manage large, distributed frontline and blue-collar teams. It combines an outsourcing/manpower service with a cloud HR software suite - covering recruitment, attendance, shift management, payroll, performance tracking and earned wage access - drawing on a pool of more than 1.5 million pre-vetted workers across 350+ cities in Indonesia.
Workforce Optimizer is a Singapore-based B2B software company that builds an AI-enabled workforce management (WFM) platform. It uses machine learning and mathematical optimization to predict labour demand, automatically generate optimized staff schedules from millions of complex rules, track time and attendance, and dynamically redeploy people in real time when unplanned events occur. Originally founded as FriarTuck, the company serves healthcare, retail, and public-sector customers - including Singapore General Hospital and National University Hospital - and optimizes more than 20 million assignments each year for tens of thousands of daily users.
X0PA AI is a Singapore-based HR technology company that builds an AI-powered talent acquisition platform to make hiring more objective, faster and less biased. Founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Nina Alag Suri, the SaaS platform uses machine learning, predictive analytics and natural language processing to source, screen, score and rank candidates for enterprises, governments and universities. It has since expanded into an agentic AI suite of named hiring agents and positions itself around responsible, explainable AI, having become one of the first HR-tech firms to earn Singapore's AI Verify certification.
Spire.AI is an enterprise AI company whose full-stack SaaS platform is powered by a single, domain-intelligent Generative Skills AI engine. Built on a live knowledge graph with more than 14 million skill-adjacency edges, it helps large organizations acquire, deploy, reskill, mobilize and retain talent in a skills-first way. Founded in 2007 by Saurabh Jain and Shweta Jain and headquartered in Bengaluru, India, the company has evolved its research into OpenKnowra, a context-intelligence layer that pairs enterprise understanding with autonomous execution.
Flexon Technologies is a Pleasanton, California-based IT services and staffing firm founded in 2015 that pairs technology consulting, custom software development and cloud/DevOps engineering with a global talent-sourcing practice. Under CEO Amar Bandaru, the roughly 120-person, bootstrapped company has moved into AI - building Talent360.ai, an AI-powered talent-management and recruiting platform, alongside a suite of vertical products (Flex EHR, Flex LMS, Flex TMS, Flex LPS, Flex FIT) aimed largely at healthcare and enterprise operations.
Go2 is an AI-powered remote staffing and workforce management company that hires, trains, and manages frontline support teams for businesses on a subscription basis. Founded in 2016 by Scott Moran, it pairs a global talent pool - drawn from more than 50 countries - with a software platform that uses data and AI to match workers to employers on skills, work style and cultural fit, then tracks productivity and coaching after placement. The dual model lets Go2 operate as both a staffing provider and a workforce-data platform, with AI capabilities first developed in its Cowork initiative now being rolled back into Go2 for a fall product launch.
Censia is a San Francisco-based talent intelligence company that uses AI to turn billions of workforce data points into skills-based profiles of employees and candidates. Its platform enriches HR systems - most notably Workday - so enterprises can see hidden internal talent, plan their workforce around skills rather than job titles, and make faster, fairer hiring and mobility decisions. Founded in 2017 and led by CEO Joanna Riley, Censia sells to large enterprises and pitches itself on ethical, bias-aware AI applied to talent data.
Smart Access is an AI platform for frontline operations that closes the gap between how work is supposed to be done and how it actually gets done on the floor. Built for large retail, distribution, and logistics operations, it digitizes standard operating procedures, tracks frontline performance in real time, and turns floor-level observations into mobile coaching and skill-building for workers. Founded in 2015 by Tim Regnier and John White, the company raised a $12M Series A led by Lobby Capital.
Workhelix is an enterprise AI-measurement company that breaks jobs down into individual tasks - hundreds of thousands of them per client - and scores each one for how much generative AI can actually help. Founded by economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, and Daniel Rock alongside CEO James Milin, the company pairs proprietary task-scoring software with data scientists to tell C-suite leaders where to deploy AI, how it is being adopted, and what return it is producing. It raised a $15M Series A in February 2025 and counts Wayfair, Coursera, Accenture, and BAYADA among its customers.
Time Doctor is a bootstrapped workforce-analytics and time-tracking platform built for remote, hybrid, and distributed teams. Launched in 2012 by Rob Rawson and Liam Martin, it gives managers real-time visibility into how work happens - tracking time, app and website usage, productivity trends, and workload balance - while pairing the data with AI-supported insights. Used by 280,000+ people across 30+ countries and integrating with 60+ tools, Time Doctor turns activity data into fairer policies, better workload decisions, and burnout prevention.
M7 Health is an AI-powered workforce operations platform built for the realities of hospital nurse staffing and scheduling. Founded in 2022 by a former bedside nurse and her Harvard Business School classmate, M7 forecasts staffing demand, auto-balances schedules, fills open shifts before hospitals reach for expensive premium labor, and gives nurses a real voice in when they work. It now runs as the workforce operating system for 15,000+ healthcare professionals across 60+ hospitals.

Dawn Klinghoffer is Vice President of HR Business Insights at Microsoft, where she leads people analytics for one of the world's largest technology companies. A mathematics major from Bucknell University who started as an actuary in Hartford, Connecticut, she joined Microsoft's fledgling people analytics team in 2003 and spent over 25 years turning HR data into strategic decisions. Her most recognized contribution: replacing the industry's standard 'employee engagement' metric with 'employee thriving' - a framework adopted by Microsoft in 2022 that has influenced HR practices globally and was published in Harvard Business Review.
Scott Morello is VP of HR Business Insights for Activision Blizzard King at Microsoft, a role he stepped into in October 2023 after building the people analytics function at Activision Blizzard. Before corporate life, he was a marine ecologist - his PhD from UMass Boston studied species interactions in Gulf of Maine intertidal zones. That pivot from counting mussels to measuring workforces defines his unusual edge: he brings the precision of population ecology to questions about how organizations actually behave.
Brian Sharp is the CEO of Time Doctor, a workforce analytics platform trusted by over 10,000 organizations globally. A 27-year veteran of building and rebuilding companies, Sharp started his first business at 22 after spinning records as a DJ at 14, and has since navigated every stage of company-building - from bootstrapped startups to $100M+ enterprises. Appointed CEO in February 2026, he champions a philosophy he calls 'Help & Hustle': the belief that high performance and personal happiness are not a tradeoff. He hosts the podcast 'High Performance Happiness' and runs a course called 'Burnout to Balance' for remote leaders.
Colleen Gallagher is the CEO of Textio, an AI-powered HR tech company helping organizations attract and develop top talent through bias-aware communication tools. A US Navy veteran turned finance executive, she rose through the ranks at Textio - from CFO to COO to CEO - bringing operational rigor and a conviction that most hiring fails because it mistakes likability for competence. Under her leadership, Textio launched Lavalier, an interview intelligence platform designed to replace gut-feel hiring with structured, evidence-based evaluation.