HR is being asked to govern tools it didn’t buy and can’t see

PLUS: 71% of firms exceeded their AI token budget last year. Most are still tracking it in a spreadsheet.

From the aibl team

It’s been a mad two weeks since workforceLIVE, as we prepare for the next in the leadership series, growthLIVE on 10 June, at the Arding Rooms in London. But we don’t want to move on before sharing some of the most valuable insights from the people and capabilities event.

Our lead article summarises some of the best conversations (and heated debates) from the day. We talked about the pressures on middle management, the plight of junior employees, and the ‘impossible mandate’ for HR/People management. We left the day firm in our belief that tech can’t fix people problems, but people can make the tech sing.

Next week we’ll get back to our mid-market survey research. This week we’re sharing recent stories and data that struck us as particularly interesting.

If you’re exceeding your token budget, misery loves company — 70%+ are saying the same. We also distilled the findings from an excellent report on AI from the European Investment Bank. Useful to have hard data that isn’t exclusive to the States.

One finding reinforces what we heard at workforceLIVE: training spend produces the strongest return. One extra percentage point in employee training amplifies AI’s productivity effect by 5.9%. Software and data investment adds 2.4%. Hardware subsidies alone won’t shift the outcome.

Middle managers, shadow AI and the HR privacy trap

Last week’s workforceLIVE roundtables surfaced some of the most candid thinking we’ve heard from mid-market leaders on AI and the workplace. Sessions ran under Chatham House Rule, so observations are anonymised.

Middle managers are being squeezed from both sides

The ‘frozen middle’ is a familiar phenomenon: it’s the layer that stalls progress, caught between executive ambition and operational reality.

Middle managers’ influence has rested on two things: control of information and administrative coordination. AI is dismantling both. It opens up information that used to flow through them and automates the coordination work that justified their role. At the same time, organisations are flattening structures. They’re testing how far they can cut the middle layer without breaking the business.

This is removing what organisations will need most as AI becomes more autonomous: the foreman-level knowledge senior leaders rarely have. Through this lens, the layer best placed to govern AI is also the slowest to adopt it.

The junior pipeline is breaking

Entry-level roles are where professional judgment develops. You do the foundational work, make mistakes cheaply, and build the instincts that underpin harder decisions later. But businesses often regard these roles as cheap labour rather than future talent, so they’re the first target for automation. The next generation of foremen isn’t being built.

Junior staff look up and find nobody there.

The anxiety isn’t only about redundancy. It’s about having no clear path through.

Token costs and the CFOs who didn’t see them coming

The average monthly AI spend by mid-sized firms grew 36% between 2024 and 2025, hitting $85,000 a month, yet 61% are still tracking those costs in spreadsheets alongside their third-party monitoring tools, according to CloudZero. A separate CloudZero report found 71% of companies exceeded their AI budgets in 2025.

Agentic adoption was always going to drive this kind of demand, but the finance function wasn’t watching. Uber’s CTO disclosed last month that 5,000 engineers burned through the company’s entire 2026 token budget in four months. ServiceNow hit the same wall. Deloitte found over half of CFOs now name cost management as a top-three internal risk.

aibl’s read: mid-market finance functions were built around predictable fixed-seat contracts, and agentic workflows break that assumption at the infrastructure level. Consumption multiplies with use, varies with complexity, and compounds across every workflow running in parallel. Monitoring tools tell you what you spent; they don’t anchor what you’ll spend next.

Firms treating token costs as a technical detail rather than a financial one are already exposed. Getting costs under control means building the ability to act on them, not just to see them.

Product spotlight of the week

Personio is an HR platform built specifically for European mid-market firms that have outgrown spreadsheets but aren’t ready for Workday-scale complexity.

The problem it targets is familiar. Small HR teams run recruiting, onboarding, payroll, performance, and compliance across multiple European markets, usually across too many disconnected tools. Personio consolidates those into a single system. It offers native payroll for the UK, Germany, Austria, and Spain, where local labour law and GDPR add compliance complexity.

Smart Automations identify manual bottlenecks and suggest workflows to fix them, such as auto-approving routine leave requests. An AI Assistant, now live to all users after a beta period, lets employees self-serve HR queries. It reduces the volume routed through the HR team directly.

Pricing is quote-based, per active employee, with a 14-day trial.

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