Key facts

• Remote CEO Job van der Voort wants the company's roughly 2,000 employees to become 10 times more effective within a year, matching expected gains from AI tools.
• He says the goal is to train and improve existing staff, not to replace them with AI or cut jobs.
• Remote made an internal AI course compulsory after uptake was uneven, then released it publicly as AI for Actual Work.
• The company plans neither significant workforce growth nor shrinkage as it handles payroll and international hiring for customers.
• Van der Voort says customers have not told Remote they are replacing employees with AI agents, though AI companies are hiring aggressively.
• Demand for independent contractors has risen sharply, driven by AI firms needing data labeling and model feedback, including from PhDs.
• Remote is profitable and cash-flow positive, has not raised private capital since 2022 and has no plans to go public or sell.
• Its staff work in 90 countries, with about 20% in the US, and it is building AI agents for payroll tasks.
• Van der Voort criticizes complex European hiring and employment rules and says his next venture could be in robotics.

AI as a forcing function for existing teams

Remote chief executive Job van der Voort has set an ambitious internal target: he wants his staff to be 10 times more effective a year from now, because he expects their AI tools to be 10 times more effective too. The company, which provides payroll and international hiring services, is not pursuing that goal by replacing people with software. Instead, van der Voort says the priority is to train the employees Remote already has.

That stance is notable at a moment when many technology leaders are forecasting deep changes to white-collar work. Remote has about 2,000 employees and continues to grow, but van der Voort does not plan a major expansion or a significant reduction in headcount. When teams get busier, their first instinct is often to ask for another hire. The arguments for adding people can be persuasive, which is precisely what makes the request difficult to refuse.

Remote has tried to change that default. Staff are encouraged to solve problems with AI first. Van der Voort describes the policy as a useful forcing function: if teams cannot simply add more people, they have to look for different solutions. The approach does not assume that AI can do everything. It assumes that employees need room, incentives and training to discover what the technology can actually take off their plates.

The CEO's background helps explain his interest in building systems that work across borders. He is Dutch, studied neuroscience and left a PhD program to start a company with a friend. That venture ran out of money quickly. He later joined a remote-first software company where staff were spread around the world, and hiring and paying people across countries proved a constant struggle. He left in January 2019 and started Remote a week later with co-founder Marcelo Lebre.

Mandatory AI training instead of replacement hiring

Uptake inside Remote was uneven. Some employees adopted AI tools quickly, while a large group did not. The company responded by building an AI course and making it compulsory. It later made the course free to the public under the name AI for Actual Work. The move reflects a broader management bet: if AI is going to change how work gets done, the workforce needs a common baseline of knowledge rather than scattered experimentation.

The training push has not erased resistance. Some payroll teams initially believed that tools like these could not work for them because they had done the job the same way for 20 years. Remote still contends with that skepticism. Van der Voort's answer is not to dismiss experienced staff and hire younger workers who already use AI. He says he wants to take care of the people he hires and help them improve.

That philosophy carries costs and risks. Retraining takes time, and not every employee will make the transition at the same pace. But it also preserves institutional knowledge, especially in payroll and compliance, where mistakes can be expensive and rules vary sharply between countries. The CEO's argument is that AI adoption should be treated as a skills upgrade across the organization, not as a simple headcount decision.

The company's internal target of 10 times greater effectiveness is deliberately aggressive. It is also difficult to measure. Productivity gains from AI can be uneven, and some tasks may become faster while others require more review. For a payroll provider, efficiency cannot come at the expense of accuracy. The more plausible outcome is a mix of automation, better tooling and changed workflows, with employees handling exceptions and judgment calls.

Customers are not reporting an AI replacement wave

Remote's customer base offers another window into the labor market. Most of its customers are startups that employ knowledge workers. Van der Voort says Remote has not seen them hire faster or slower because of AI. AI companies are the exception: they are growing extremely quickly. The last major shift he identifies was the wave of layoffs in 2022, when venture funding began to fall. Since then, he describes the market as stable.

No customer has told Remote that it is replacing an employee with an AI agent, according to van der Voort. He acknowledges that the company does not always know why someone leaves a customer's workforce. Still, the absence of explicit replacement stories is notable. Many companies are trying to make their people more effective, and van der Voort says most are not yet fully on the AI bandwagon.

That gap between headline predictions and day-to-day hiring may reflect how difficult it is to redesign work around AI. Tools can draft text, summarize information and automate routine steps, but companies still need people to set policy, manage exceptions, verify outputs and handle customers. In payroll and global employment, the stakes are high because errors can affect pay, taxes and legal compliance. Adoption is therefore likely to be incremental in many organizations, even if the long-term direction is clear.

The CEO's view also challenges a common assumption about AI and employment. If tools become more capable, companies could use them to reduce headcount. But they could also use them to pursue more work with the same team. Remote is choosing the second path, at least for now. Its experiment will be watched by other companies trying to decide whether AI is primarily a cost-cutting lever or a capability multiplier.

Contractor demand and the data-labeling boom

The clearest labor-market change van der Voort sees is not between employees and AI agents. It is between employees and contractors. Demand for independent contractors has gone up massively, he says, because AI companies need people to label data and give feedback to their models. The work began with relatively simple labeling tasks. Now many contractors are PhDs who do the work alongside their research.

That shift helps explain why some AI companies can scale quickly without building large permanent payrolls. Contractors offer flexibility and specialized knowledge. But the model also raises questions about classification, benefits, pay stability and the long-term development of workers. Van der Voort expects the contractor market to keep growing for the next few years, though he is candid about the limits of prediction. What happens beyond that, he says, nobody knows.

The data-labeling boom is a reminder that AI systems depend on human labor. Models need examples, corrections and feedback, much of which comes from people reviewing content or evaluating outputs. As systems become more advanced, the work may become more specialized. That could create opportunities for experts in law, medicine, science and other fields to earn income from AI training and evaluation. It could also create new dependencies for AI companies that need reliable, high-quality human input.

For Remote, the contractor trend is both an opportunity and a challenge. The company's core business is helping organizations hire and pay people across borders. If more work moves to contractors, demand for compliant onboarding, payments and classification support may rise. But the rules around contractor status are complex and vary by jurisdiction. Companies that misclassify workers can face penalties, back payments and reputational damage.

Profitable, private and building payroll agents

Remote is profitable and cash-flow positive, according to van der Voort. Its last funding round was a Series C in 2022, and it has not raised private capital since because it has no need to. He says the company has no plans to go public or to sell. That financial position gives Remote more room to pursue a long-term AI strategy without the pressure of a near-term exit.

Its customers range from a global fast-food chain to an AI research company, and number in the tens of thousands. Remote's own staff are in 90 countries, with the largest group, about 20%, in the US. The company can be accessed through an MCP server, allowing authorized AI assistants to work with it within a user's permissions. Remote is also building agents that automate payroll tasks across countries, such as chasing staff to submit expenses on time.

The agent strategy is a natural extension of Remote's business. Payroll involves many repetitive steps, deadline tracking and cross-border coordination. Agents could reduce manual follow-up and help teams spot missing information earlier. But automation in this area must be tightly controlled. Payroll errors can damage trust, and cross-border compliance requires careful handling of sensitive data and local rules. The company's challenge is to gain efficiency without weakening reliability.

Competition remains intense. Remote comes up against other global employment platforms in some deals, but van der Voort says its main rivals are local payroll firms that have done the same work for two decades, and sometimes an office of accountants. Those competitors may lack modern software, but they possess deep local knowledge and long-standing client relationships. AI could help Remote close some of that gap, but it will not eliminate the need for local expertise.

Europe's rules and the next venture

Labour law differs in every European country, and the challenge grows as Remote gets bigger, van der Voort says. He is not optimistic about the direction of regulation. He argues that complicated rules around hiring, employing people and setting up businesses are bad for Europe. For a company that helps employers navigate those rules, complexity is also a market opportunity. But it raises costs, slows expansion and makes it harder for smaller companies to operate across borders.

Van der Voort's longer-term interests extend beyond software. He says his next company could be in robotics, because he thinks software is sort of getting solved. He thinks about it every day. For now, he plans to keep growing Remote. His advice to graduates is to join a startup, fail a lot and keep going. The way to win, he says, is basically to just stick around.

Source: TNW | Podcasts News