How GenAI Is Transforming Tech Teams

This post is an adapted excerpt from our latest research report, the Blended Teams Playbook. Download it here.

The AI Talent Gap is real.

Nearly half of global IT leaders report that they cannot demonstrate AI's value and lack the talent and skills within their workforce to deploy it effectively. This talent gap is particularly acute in specialized areas like generative AI, where 62% of corporate leaders say a lack of talent is their biggest barrier to adoption. Traditional hiring approaches are falling short, leaving many companies stuck in the planning phase while their competitors race ahead.

But the most skilled tech professionals are increasingly choosing independence over traditional employment, creating an unprecedented — if time-sensitive — opportunity for forward-thinking companies to accelerate their AI initiatives.

The Great Betrayal and the Remaking of the Highly-Skilled Workforce

Over the past few years, the full-time vs. freelance paradigm has quickly shifted, upending the way innovation leaders think about building teams and deploying talent within their organizations.

Not long ago, freelancers were cast as second-rate workers in the gig economy: commoditized cogs hustling for gigs because they couldn't get full-time jobs. This characterization was always unfair: As Daniel Pink documented over 20 years ago in his best-selling book Free Agent Nation, there's long been an elite class of coders, consultants, and creators who eschew the shackles of full-time employment for the freedom and flexibility of going out on their own. Now, we're seeing that elite class quickly grow.

The pandemic was a catalyst as highly skilled workers took an existential step back. Life was short, and the old rules of work were quickly being broken. This begged the question: How did they want to work, and what did they want to work on? The tech layoffs were a second catalyst; our research team found that following the tech layoffs of late 2022, two-thirds of knowledge workers lost trust in full-time employment, and 74% said that the layoffs had made freelancing more attractive.

Now, companies' GenAI struggles are colliding with the Fractional Economy to create the perfect storm for change. As corporate leaders identify talent and strategy as the largest gaps holding them back from adopting GenAI, they're turning to highly skilled freelancers—who greatly outpace full-time employees in GenAI adoption and expertise—to get out of their innovation rut. Forty-five percent of corporate leaders say that freelance talent has doubled their organizational agility; 40% say it's doubled their quality of work, and 39% say it's doubled their innovation and scalability.

Perhaps thanks to the entrepreneurial nature of freelancing, studies consistently show that freelancers are more enthusiastic adopters of new technology like GenAI. They’re also more likely to rate themselves as highly skilled. In a survey of top product, engineering, data science, and design talent in the A.Team network, 92% said that GenAI had boosted their productivity.

The impact is felt across a vast array of essential software development processes, including code review, CI/CD, spec creation, and debugging.

Enter the Blended Team

To take advantage of this alternate talent pipeline, the most forward-thinking innovation leaders are adopting a new paradigm of blended teams—supercharging a smaller core team with specialized freelance talent to unlock innovation. Blended teams are different from the outsourcing of the past; most of the tasks outsourced to near-shore devs tended to be the kind of rote tasks that GenAI is—ironically—getting very good at today. Blended teams mean truly embedding freelance talent inside your existing teams to infuse them with new skills, expertise, and ideas.

This model has added benefits. The most common advantage we see at A.Team is that these “free agent” product builders deliver a vast knowledge and experience advantage — particularly when it comes to AI. AI is very new, and most full-time employees have only deployed new AI use cases and infrastructure once — most of the time, they haven’t done it at all. On the flip side, many top fractional AI architects have led deployments at a half dozen companies; they know the pitfalls that lurk around the corner.

If your team isn’t accustomed to building new products zero-to-one — which is the case inside most organizations — this model allows you to infuse your team with people who are and can build at the speed of AI.

In the words of Rand Fishkin, CEO of SparkToro: “I hate relying completely on [full-time] employees instead of freelancers. Usually, a freelancer is performing at tip-top level month one.”

The third benefit is flexibility. Workforce planning is dead. After all, how can you plan your hiring 6-12 months out when we have no idea what technological leaps are around the corner? Are you confident that GPT5 or Claude 4 won’t make you completely rethink what’s possible for your business? We need a more flexible workforce.

“I don’t think workforce planning is going to be a term we use,” said AJ Thomas, former Chaos Pilot at GoogleX and Founder & CEO of The Troublemaker Lab. “Even though we use those words, we don’t do that right now. Then it changes because the pace of business has changed. I think what’s needed is talent agility — communities of talent like A.Team that allow us to come together and create blended teams.”

‍This is a modified excerpt from our Blended Teams Playbook. To get the full guide to how innovation leaders are bridging the AI talent gap, download the full report here.