Hi 👋 We just got back from Accountex and our brains are still buzzing. Two days of booth conversations, a few hundred boxes of Paracetamail handed out, and one very tired team that would not trade a minute of it. This edition has a lot in it. The biggest shift in the global talent market in a decade, why insurance brokers are quietly rethinking how they talk to clients, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we built every piece of our Accountex booth ourselves. Grab a coffee. Let's get into it. ☕
NEWS
AI skills are now the hardest roles to fill on the planet
ManpowerGroup's 2026 survey of 39,000 employers in 41 countries: for the first time in history, AI capabilities are the single hardest skill to recruit for globally. 72% of employers cannot fill the roles they need.
52% of insurance agencies say client communication will decide who wins in 2026
Vertafore's 2026 agency trends report flags a clear shift. With premium growth slowing, brokers can no longer compete on price, and 52% of leaders now point to client communication as the deciding factor in retention.
Lawyers are still running complex matters on Word checklists and sticky notes
Bloomberg Law's 2026 workflow report finds 41% of firms cite fragmented tools as their primary pain, with project delays and status update chaos rooted in manual processes piled on top of inboxes.
What can we learn from this?
Hiring your way out of this is over. The talent everyone wants does not exist in the quantity firms need. Premium growth is slowing, clients are getting pickier, and your competition just bought 50 AI engineers.
The firms who win will be the ones who fix the structure underneath. Clean workflows, clear handoffs, client communication that does not live in someone's inbox. The leverage is no longer in who you hire. It is in how work moves between the people you already have.
BEHIND THE SCENES
We brought a pharmacy to Accountex 💊
Two days. One pharmacy-themed booth. A lot of accountants laughing harder than they probably expected to.
We used Accountex to show our new product to the public for the first time, wrapped inside a satire version of paracetamol. We called it Paracetamail: prescription-strength relief for the migraine known as your inbox. Each box came with a serious diagnosis (chronic email overload, acute follow-up fatigue, severe context loss) and a not-so-serious cure that happens to be the actual product we have been building for two years.
People loved it. We did not expect the lines we got. Turns out the fastest way into a finance leader's brain is making them laugh first.
👉 Get your dose of Paracetamail 💊
We made all our Accountex merch ourselves in the makerspace
Turns out you cannot order "pharmacy-themed accounting trade show kit" off the shelf. So we built it. We printed our own designs onto lab coats, fired up the embroidery machine for the patches, made our own mugs, and pressed our own pins.
Late nights, a lot of cardboard, one near-disaster involving the laser cutter that we will not be writing about. Worth every minute.
INSIGHTS
"72% of employers cannot fill the roles they need. AI skills are now the #1 hardest hire on earth."
(Insight from ManpowerGroup 2026 Talent Shortage Survey)
🔍 The Systems View
Toto De Brant, Co-founder Alkmist
Hiring scarce talent is a tax. Building structure is leverage. Every workflow you fix now is one less engineer you need to hire later.
💬 Behavioral Perspective
Mathias Celis, Co-founder Alkmist | PhD Psychology & Business Economics
A talent shortage is a story firms tell themselves to avoid changing how work flows. The actual shortage is structure. People are not the bottleneck. The way work moves between them is.
TIPS
Stop sending generic reminders. They train clients to ignore you. Vary the tone, the channel, and the timing. Identical pings every 4 days create habituation, and habituation kills response rates.
ONE LAST THING 😅
Client at 4:47pm Friday: "Quick question, super easy, should only take 2 minutes of your time." It is never 2 minutes. It has never been 2 minutes.
See you for the next one!
