CollaborationX 2026: AI Agents Reshaping Staffing Workflows
Asendia AI as Platinum Sponsor at SIA CollaborationX 2026: key takeaways on AI agents for staffing, workflow automation, and what's actually working for firms today.
What AI Agents Are Doing for Staffing Firms
SIA CollaborationX is Staffing Industry Analysts' flagship annual conference and the room where the industry actually decides what it believes. Not through trend decks, but through direct conversations between the people who run staffing firms and the people building what comes next. This year in Dallas, it was three days of the sharpest minds in staffing in one building: operators who've been in the industry for decades sitting next to founders building its future, all trying to answer the same question: what does AI actually look like when it works?
We were back as a Platinum Sponsor this year, and here's a look at what happened.
On the Main Stage: Rihab Lajmi at CollaborationX 2026
One of the highlights of the conference for us was watching our Co-Founder and CEO, Rihab Lajmi, take the stage for the panel "Unleashing the Full Value of AI Agents: Redesigning Staffing Firm Workflows."
The panel opened with a question the room was already wrestling with: is it better to build AI into existing workflows, or to start fresh with a completely redesigned process? Rihab's answer cut through the noise:
"You get really excited about the potential of what you can build with AI and you start imagining your organization ten or fifteen years from now. But the problem with that is a lot of folks will end up automating their idea of what a workflow would look like versus the actual workflow."
Most companies make the same mistake at the start: they automate what they think the workflow looks like - the clean, polished version that leadership describes in a meeting. But then you go sit with your best recruiters, and you find something entirely different: hundreds of micro decisions happening every single day, completely undocumented which directly drive placements, client satisfaction, and ROI.
That gap is exactly where AI implementations stall.
The insight is simple and uncomfortable at the same time. The org chart version of recruiting doesn't capture how your best recruiter actually works. And if your AI agent is built on the org chart version, it won't perform like your best recruiter either.
Customer Spotlight: Justin Clarke, FStaff
One of our early partners took the stage at CollaborationX to show what changed when his team redesigned the first touch with candidates. Justin Clarke, CEO and Founder of FStaff, started the company at 19 and is now 25 years deep in staffing.
On why he chose to work with us:
"Asendia was important to me because they understood staffing, they understood the industry, and they were really good at listening."
And the goal was never to cut the team:
"We're not trying to replace our recruiters, but we're trying to improve the candidate experience. That was the whole goal."
The early outcomes he shared:
- Driver leads contacted: 19% → 100%
- Lead-to-full application conversion: 18% → 38%
- Candidates screened per team member: 10 to 15 → 25+
- Hired workers placed on assignment: 30% → 50%+
He also shared that FStaff has grown 28% in one year since incorporating Asendia AI.
What stood out to us most, was where he thinks staffing is going:
"The future is not staffing to skills, it's staffing to culture. We need to be working on getting people to the right place to work, not just the right pay for their skills."
That's a vision worth building. And it's the kind of thinking we get to be a part of every day when our partners are people like Justin Clarke.
The AI Adoption Framework for Staffing Firms
Rather than trying to rethink the entire organization, Rihab laid out the approach that's actually working for firms right now:
- Pick one workflow. The most painful, highest-volume part of the process. For most staffing firms, that's top-of-funnel: sourcing, outreach, and first-touch screening.
- Get close to the actual work. Sit with the people who do the job best. Understand the decisions they make that no one has ever written down.
- Build the agent around your best people. The goal isn't a generic AI recruiter. It's your best recruiter, running at scale, their judgment, their standards, their way of reading a candidate.
- Make it win, then expand. Prove ROI on one workflow. Then iterate and grow from there. The firms that are ahead right now are the ones that started focused, not the ones that tried to do everything at once.
The underlying point: recruiters aren't being replaced, their role is changing. They're moving from managing candidate interactions to managing a fleet of agents doing that work for them. The skill that matters now isn't sourcing or outreach. It's judgment and closing.
What Staffing Firms Should Take Away from CollaborationX 2026
Every conference sends you home with something different. This one sent us back with clarity.
The staffing industry isn't in the early stages of an AI transition anymore. It's in the middle of one. The firms that moved early are already pulling ahead, in speed, in placement quality, in the relationships they're able to maintain at scale. The ones still waiting for a cleaner, more certain moment are watching that gap grow.
The good news: the path forward isn't complicated. It just requires getting closer to your own work than you've probably been comfortable with before.
See You at SIA Healthcare Summit
CollaborationX was the start of the conversation for us, not the end of it. We'll be at SIA Healthcare Summit next month in Arlington, and we'd love to keep building.
Whether you want to talk about where to start, compare notes on what's working, or just meet the team behind the product, come find us.
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