Industry intelligence for people leaders

ISSUE NO. 39 · WEEK 40, 2026

HR Leadership Weekly

Industry intelligence for people leaders

The ‘Revenue Per Employee’ Race

6 min read

How Remote, Glean, and Anthropic Are Reshaping the Workforce Equation

Published: May 27, 2026 | By Senior HR Tech Correspondent

The conversation around AI and the workforce has shifted dramatically over the past few weeks. It is no longer a question of whether AI will change how companies operate — it is a question of which companies will be the first to prove that AI can scale revenue without scaling headcount.

Three stories emerging during the week of May 25-31 paint a striking picture of where HR technology is headed.

Remote: $300M ARR Without Adding a Head

Amsterdam-based payroll service provider Remote announced this week that it had surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue and achieved cash-flow positivity. But the real story, according to CEO Job van der Voort, is what happened behind the scenes: a 50% increase in revenue per employee after the company adopted AI at every level of the organization.

“As we are talking, on the second screen of my laptop, I have five different Claude instances running, building different things,” van der Voort told TechCrunch. “Some of those are for me, but a lot of them are for Remote.”

Remote’s approach goes beyond the CEO’s office or engineering department. Employees across all functions have been launching apps in Remote Labs, an internal marketplace built on the company’s own technology. The company now helps clients create custom workflows using the same AI tools that have driven its internal productivity gains.

The numbers are telling. Remote’s core payroll business has grown more than 300% year over year — growth van der Voort attributes largely to AI adoption. More than 85% of all code written by Remote engineers in the last month was generated by AI, up from a much smaller fraction a year ago. The company’s engineering contribution volume has risen more than 60% over the same period.

What is particularly notable about Remote’s story is that it has not laid off anyone. Instead, it has deferred hiring. “We’re actively evaluating: Do we actually need more people, or do we want to spend more time on upskilling the people that we have to use AI tools?” van der Voort said.

The Remote MCP Advantage

Remote also launched Remote MCP this week — an interface based on the Model Context Protocol that grants AI agents and external platforms direct access to payroll and compliance data. Partners including BambooHR and Workday can now use Remote as an underlying engine.

This positions Remote at the center of a potentially transformative trend: the commoditization of HR infrastructure. If AI agents can interact directly with payroll data through standards like MCP, the HR platform itself may become invisible — a backend service that AI agents call without human users ever opening a dashboard.

“If you use ChatGPT or Claude, you can control all of Remote; if you really wanted to, you don’t have to interact with our platform anymore,” van der Voort said. “I think that’s where the future goes.”

Glean: $300M in Top Line, AI Budget-Cutting as a Selling Point

Meanwhile, enterprise search startup Glean announced its top line had crossed $300 million, with AI-powered budget cutting becoming its primary selling point to enterprise customers. In a cost-conscious environment where companies are scrutinizing every dollar of spend, Glean’s positioning as both an AI tool and a cost-reduction instrument has resonated.

The convergence is telling: Glean and Remote, both at $300M ARR, represent two different approaches to the same opportunity. Glean focuses on helping companies manage AI sprawl and find the information they need in an increasingly AI-assisted workplace. Remote focuses on the operational infrastructure that allows companies to employ anyone, anywhere, with AI handling the complexity.

The Gartner Data: AI Layoffs Are Happening, But Returns Are Murky

A Gartner survey released earlier in May found that approximately 80% of companies using autonomous technology have cut jobs since AI adoption. However, the study’s key finding was more nuanced: workforce reductions were not necessarily translating into meaningful financial returns.

This creates an interesting dynamic for Q2 earnings season, which begins shortly after this reporting period. Companies that cite AI as the reason for headcount reductions will face investor scrutiny on whether those reductions are actually improving margins. The ones that succeed in combining AI adoption with revenue growth — like Remote — will set a new benchmark for what “efficient scaling” looks like.

Anthropic’s $65 Billion Bet on the AI Workforce

Perhaps the most consequential story of the week came on May 28 when Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H round at a $965 billion post-money valuation, near its anticipated IPO. The funding will be used to “advance our safety and interpretability research, expand compute to meet growing demand for Claude, and scale the products and partnerships our customers rely on.”

The company’s run rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier in May, and the Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic expects a 130% revenue surge to bring it to its first operating profit. Claude’s latest advancement — the Opus 4.8 model released the same day as the funding announcement — touts better capabilities in agentic tasks, advanced coding, and self-correction.

Anthropic’s trajectory illustrates the flip side of the revenue-per-employee story. While Remote is growing revenue per employee through AI, Anthropic is building the AI workforce at an unprecedented scale. The company’s enterprise growth has been driven largely by Claude Code, the agentic coding tool that is beginning to reshape how software teams operate.

The Q2 Earnings Preview: What to Watch

As companies prepare for Q2 earnings, three themes will dominate the conversation:

  • Revenue per employee — Companies that can demonstrate AI-driven productivity gains without massive headcount reductions will earn premium valuations. Remote’s 50% increase is a benchmark others will try to match.
  • Token costs vs. value created — The debate over tokenmaxxing that began earlier this year will intensify as companies report their Q2 AI spend. The ones that link AI investment to measurable output — not just adoption rates — will outperform.
  • Hiring deferral — The question is not whether companies will lay off workers because of AI. The question is whether they will simply stop hiring, as Remote has done, and let attrition do the work.

The data from this week suggests that the AI workforce transformation is no longer theoretical. It is happening, and it is creating a new hierarchy of companies: those that use AI to amplify their existing workforce, those that use AI to replace their workforce, and those building the workforce of the future.

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