"There's more freelancers than freelance opportunities" – Marketplace expert, Eryn Peters

Welcome to Monday Mornings! A publication about the new world of work beyond the 9-5 — exploring the rise of mass entrepreneurialism. Through sharp analysis and interviews with the builders, thinkers, and leaders driving this shift, Monday Mornings unpacks what a post 9-5 world means for individuals, businesses, and society.

This edition is a Q&A Interview, where an expert guest offers their take on the future of work, along with our signature Monday Marvels and Monday Moanings.

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Happy Monday, folks!

This week, I’m talking to Eryn Peters. 

Eryn is deeply embedded in the future of work space and expert in freelance marketplaces. Over the past decade, she has helped scale two freelance talent platforms to unicorn ($1B+) valuations, advised VC firms, and worked with companies around the world to rethink how they build teams.

The AI Maturity Index, Eryn’s latest project, has gathered over 200,000 data points on how individuals and teams are integrating AI into their workflows. She also counts herself among the early wave of digital nomads.

Eryn shared with me:

• Why full time roles won’t be replaced by freelancers like-for-like

• Today’s job seekers are being misled: personal brand is not so important

• Why AI is not the main reason for job losses… yet.

Enjoy!

Q: Great to have you here, Eryn! You describe yourself as a Future of Work Evangelist — what impact do you seek to make with your work?

A: I categorise the future of work into three parts. First, remote work/digital nomadism and globalisation of teams. Second: portfolio careers/freelancing, and the move towards skills-based organisations. The third very obvious (and loud) is the implication of AI and technology upon jobs as we know them.

My work touches on all three. And as an evangelist, my role is to spread information for positive impact. So far, my work with talent platforms and everything in the future of workspace has impacted four and a half million people in over 190 countries.

My goal is to drive up that number and it is my hope to make work (which is such a big part of our lives) a more enjoyable place to be, where everybody gets to win.

I’m really focused on the connection between the different stakeholders in the future of work: the companies, talent and the platforms and how they all interact. I’m close enough to see what’s really happening, and not just what the media thinks will poke buttons. But right now, I see so much friction in these connections. Everyone wants to collaborate, but not many people are really thinking about win-wins between these groups: they are just thinking about themselves.

Q: Creating more shared understanding is my mission with Monday Mornings, too. With that in mind, what do we need to understand about freelance talent platforms?

A: Today there are hundreds, if not thousands, of talent platforms, also known as freelance marketplaces. But many platforms are slow to react to the new skills we need.

Some platforms say ‘we only accept the top 3% of talent’ but then don’t have upskilling programmes or a plan to reshape their talent pool. It’s just marketing.

And the world of junior talent is disappearing (with AI already able to do a lot of what junior developers or designers were doing) and now we’re in more need of people who can translate business problems into prompts, briefs, or strategies. That’s all mid-to-senior skill level territory. The platforms aren’t shaping the future of work…. even though they could.  

I see the platforms as a kind of halfway house. No one needs a talent platform in order to freelance but it is much easier for companies to hire through a platform. It gives them people who are somewhat vetted and consolidated in terms of price, and then they can send just one invoice to the platform for all of the talent they’ve hired.

It’s the same on the freelance side. Yes, freelancers could market themselves directly to an enterprise. But many people who are great at their technical skills – whether they’re a designer, writer, or a software developer, don’t necessarily have strong sales skills. Platforms help freelancers to punch above their weight, that’s their real value.

Early platforms like Fiverr or Upwork were horizontal marketplaces where you could find an accountant, a lawyer, and a designer all in one place. Now they are highly specialised, vertically integrated e.g. AI engineers just for healthcare. This kind of niching lets platforms better understand nuances in skillsets and build stronger matching tech. But the more you niche down, the more you start to look like an agency. At what point is that really a tech platform, versus just a database or a network? A lot of agencies operate with a giant database of freelancers they call on. So is it platform? Or just a network?

And, despite what these platforms say: nobody owns talent. My research showed the average freelancer is on four different platforms.

Q: Have platforms enabled employers to snap up freelance talent more readily than they might full time hires?

A: We’re in an economic downturn so realistically there’s now wave of people who never saw themselves freelancing who are now doing it because they got pushed out. Meanwhile, companies are trying to cut headcount and might turn to freelancers, but not at the same rate.

So no, we have a surge in supply but there is not enough demand. Right now, I do think there are more freelancers than freelance opportunities. I don’t think we’ll just replace full-time roles with freelancers on a one-to-one basis.

But I do think we’ll increasingly shift to thinking in terms of skills, tasks, and deliverables aka what does success in this role look like? If you think about the way most organisations hire today (role-based hiring) and compare that with the actual pace of change within organisations, it just doesn’t work. Because employers don’t care about hiring the best talent — only about getting the work done.

Q: We keep hearing about the move towards skills-based hiring, is this happening any time soon?

A: Job descriptions are not really accurate for the job you end up doing on day one, let alone six months later. The fact employers are saying you’re going to come in under a specific title and compensation plan and your trajectory is tied to that… it’s fundamentally broken. Skills based hiring is a solution to this.

It’s basically about hiring for outcomes, rather than full-time positions. It’s about saying “once that outcome is done, we’re done.” So hires are made based on someone’s capability to deliver a result.

People talk about skills-based organisations constantly, The World Economic Forum talks about them, and talent platforms operate on skill-matching logic. But I haven’t seen a single company doing it fully. Not one.

Why? Because it’s terrifying. Suddenly, compensation is out the window and you have no benchmark, and hierarchies disappear. It would require rebuilding a company from scratch and pretending none of the baggage of the past 80 years ever existed.

But we do need to push this needle forward because the current system is broken. We’re seeing a massive breakdown in the candidate experience. Bots are writing resumes, bots are reviewing resumes. We have more resumes than ever, more jobs than ever. But no one’s getting hired. The over-reliance on technology for hiring is a broken system and isn’t going to be fixed any time soon.

Amazon’s predictive hiring AI was found to reinforce bias because the data was so often biased against women, people of colour, or anyone who didn’t follow the traditional path. So it just ended up reproducing the same kinds of people. That’s the core flaw in how AI is being applied to hiring. These systems are trained on resumes, job descriptions, and what’s worked before – but that just makes teams more homogenous. And that’s a loss for everyone.

So what happens? We go back to referrals. We ask “Do you know someone I can hire?” Which then also creates more homogenous teams and reduces access for people without networks.

So when I think about the future of organisations, I’m thinking about all of this and what it’ll take for companies and workers to truly connect again.

Q: Amongst all this disruption, what advice do you have for job seekers to stay resilient and get hired?

A: I think the main thing is to build your network beyond your first degree – beyond just the people you already know.

It’s not just about asking for an intro for an open role. That’s one way, sure. But more importantly: how are you regularly expanding your group? Are you going to events, meeting new people, grabbing coffee with folks, building relationships?

Build real human connections. And don’t just reach out when you want something. Follow up, check in, offer value. That’s what lands jobs.

As for the popular advice to “build a personal brand,” I think people need to be more critical. Not everyone needs to be a thought leader or post on LinkedIn every day. You don’t need master SEO just to get your resume through the system, or need to know the LinkedIn algorithm to get hired. Especially since so much of the content is AI-generated now, this content gets valued less and less.

You can build your brand through relationships, referrals, pro bono work, or showing up in meaningful ways. A personal brand is not a content strategy, it’s your reputation, your network and your impact.

Q: We’re seemingly experiencing a White-Collar Unravelling and jobs crisis. How much is AI to blame?

A: I think we need to put a grain of salt on the whole AI conversation.

Over 80% of AI implementation projects are still failing across the board. In terms of who's made the most money in the AI race, it’s not OpenAI. It’s Accenture. Because nobody really knows what they’re doing, and companies are paying consultancies to figure it out.

There’s a lot of talk about AI taking jobs, but the real reason for job loss is economic pressure. It’s interest rates, recessions, trade wars, tariffs… that is all what’s making companies reduce headcount, and AI becomes a convenient scapegoat.

When you look closer, most of those automation projects aren’t even working. The digital transformation industry is projected to hit $12 trillion by 2032. But the truth is, most of those transformation projects are failing. What’s missing is the clarity, the benchmarking, the practical navigation. That’s what we’re trying to offer with the AI Maturity Index: diagnostic tool for individuals, teams, and consultants to understand their AI readiness and adoption level. My cofounder Iwo and I kept seeing how much media coverage was fear-based: “AI is going to steal your job!”

But what we were seeing in practice was a lot more nuanced. The World Economic Forum has some key stats: 90 million jobs will be displaced, but 170 million will be created. A billion jobs will be changed. Most of us won’t lose our jobs to AI, our jobs will just evolve.

65% of kids entering elementary school today will work in jobs that don’t exist yet. So this is a huge transformation moment, and we need to treat it as an opportunity, not just a threat.

That’s a wrap for today’s interview, to learn more about Eryn’s work: Visit her website, take the AI Maturity Index for yourself, and subscribe to her future of work newsletter: Weekly Workforce.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s interview. What else do you think should be considered? Share your opinions in the comments or reply directly!

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And, in other news this month…

👍Monday Marvels 

Greenpoint in New York, has a new coworking space in its midst, The Chat Haus. Except, with a twist. This is a coworking space for AI chatbots, and everything is made out of cardboard. Artist Ben-Reuven built the exhibit to attempt to bring humour to the fact that most of his work is being impacted by AI.

👎 Monday Moanings

Loggerheads continue over the UK’s proposed Employment Rights Bill. Small business owners are pushing back, warning that the reforms could have the opposite effect to what’s intended. Instead of protecting workers, they argue the legislation will discourage hiring and expansion, particularly because smaller firms can't absorb the risks that larger companies can.

That’s it for today, thanks for reading and I will see you again for our next Briefing, in May.

Monday Mornings is written and hosted by Ellen Donnelly, a writer, speaker, and business coach focused on the future of work. She specialises in the shift towards mass entrepreneurialism, and supports founders navigating career pivots in her private coaching practice, The Ask.