NEW YORK — As corporate giants pour billions into artificial intelligence only to see projects stall in development, veteran talent platform PowerToFly is making a major pivot: relaunching as an AI workforce company dedicated to supplying the human expertise required to make models reliable and safe.
The company announced the repositioning alongside plans to host the PTF AI Summit: Train. Hire. Transform., a free virtual conference scheduled for October 14. The initiative is aimed directly at enterprise executives, technical leaders, and HR practitioners struggling to move AI pilots into full production.
Solving the 70% People Bottleneck
While industry attention has focused heavily on GPUs and foundational model architectures, research suggests that the primary obstacle to successful adoption lies elsewhere. According to Boston Consulting Group (BCG), approximately 70% of the effort required for successful digital and AI transformations centers on people and organizational processes, rather than technology alone.
AI initiatives frequently stumble when models generate hallucinations, exhibit bias, or lack context-specific precision. Addressing those pitfalls requires human domain experts—such as doctors, lawyers, accountants, and linguists—to train datasets, benchmark quality, test edge cases, and run red-teaming exercises before software is released to customers.
“We’ve spent twelve years building a community of professionals most companies have never thought to look for,” said Milena Berry, CEO and Co-Founder of PowerToFly. “Now we’re applying that same idea to AI: making sure the people who build it, train it, and shape what it learns reflect the world it serves.”
A Dual Approach: Full-Time Hires and Model Training
Under its expanded mandate, PowerToFly offers two primary pathways for businesses:
- Direct Hiring: Placing AI-fluent engineering, operational, and product professionals into permanent corporate roles.
- AI Services on Demand: Supplying specialized human labor for data annotation, model evaluation, safety testing, and red-teaming across technical and non-technical disciplines.
The company enters the market with a foundation of more than 1.1 million professionals across 190 countries, including 380,000 domain specialists and 65,000 AI-focused professionals. Over 75% of the network identifies as women or BIPOC—a metric the company argues is critical for mitigating algorithmic bias and building models that perform accurately across diverse demographics.
PowerToFly’s roster of existing clients includes enterprise names such as Visa, Deloitte, Nestlé, Zapier, and Arize AI.
Virtual Summit Set for October 14
To mark the launch, the company’s upcoming three-hour summit (running from 12:00 PM to 3:00 PM ET) will explore why typical hiring searches miss key AI talent, how to bridge the gap between data collection and deployment, and what frameworks are required to scale past proof-of-concept stages.
The sessions will offer SHRM continuing education credits for human resource professionals, signaling PowerToFly’s strategy to position human capital leaders as central architects of corporate AI rollouts.
Register for free at resources.powertofly.com/register-now-for-ptf-ai-summit. To learn more about PowerToFly’s services, visit powertofly.com/employers.
