How AI Will Transform Contingent Workforce Management by 2030

Meet Chris Farmer – Global Head of Contingent Workforce Strategy

As the Global Head of Contingent Workforce Strategy and Strategic Sourcing at Salesforce, Chris Farmer leads one of the most complex and forward-thinking CW programs in the industry. Chris has spent over five years at Salesforce, building on his background in sourcing, procurement, and workforce transformation. He offers a direct, practical view of where the industry is going and what needs to change.

Outside the office, Chris is an avid adventurer. He rock climbs, backcountry skis, and has a deep loyalty to the color blue — from his wardrobe to his car to his phone.

At ProcureCon 2025, Chris shared a direct, often blunt take on what CW leaders, MSPs, and VMS platforms should expect by 2030 and why waiting to adapt is the biggest risk of all.

The MSP Model Is Evolving — And AI Is the Catalyst

When Salesforce needed real-time contractor pay trends in India, Chris turned to his MSP. What he got: a 10-day estimate and a handoff through multiple internal teams. What he did instead: asked ChatGPT. It returned a complete breakdown with sources in under five minutes.

“The kicker is my MSP never even got back to me. They forgot I even asked the question.”

That moment revealed a bigger issue. If an MSP can’t provide basic, time-sensitive insights — especially when AI can — its value proposition erodes quickly.

“If you’re an MSP and you don’t see AI as your biggest threat, I think you’re blind.”

This isn’t a hypothetical. According to Gartner (2024), 87% of organizations are actively automating HR and workforce admin tasks — most of which MSPs historically handled manually.

Legacy VMS Wasn’t Built for an AI-Powered Contingent Workforce

Chris didn’t hold back when describing the challenges of working with legacy VMS systems. He called out how difficult, slow, and inflexible they’ve become — especially when business needs change rapidly.

“It’s a terrible beast to make changes to. They don’t want to help you. They don’t care.”

He contrasted that with Slack’s internal system before it was acquired by Salesforce — a setup where all hiring activity lived inside Slack. Requisitions, approvals, and offboarding could all happen without ever logging into a VMS.

“You’ll just interact through Slack or text or voice, and the VMS will sit invisibly in the background.”

Instead of relying on outdated infrastructure, Chris pointed to platforms like FlexTrack, which are built on Salesforce and allow no-code customization — giving program leaders agility without engineering bottlenecks. It reflects where the market is going: IDC (2024) reports that 40% of enterprises will adopt low-code/no-code HR platforms by 2027 to stay responsive to business needs.

The Next Gen CW Program Will Manage People and Machines

For Chris, AI isn’t about replacing contractors — it’s about unlocking capacity. Most companies, he says, have more great ideas than they have the time or headcount to execute.

“Any company I’ve worked for has 100 great ideas but only the resources to pursue 10 — and usually not that well.”

With AI stepping in to handle tasks and processes, companies can move faster on the rest. And for CW leaders, this shift means managing both human and digital workers.

“Contingent workforce program owners of 2030 are going to manage a dual split of human contingent workers and AI digital workforces. It’s going to be a Wild West mix — and I’m excited for it.”

That view aligns with broader industry trends. Deloitte (2024) found that 59% of HR leaders plan to integrate AI-powered digital agents into their workforce strategies within five years.

AI Isn’t Just Efficient — It’s Critical for Catching Fraud Humans Can’t

Fraud in contingent hiring is getting more sophisticated and harder to detect. Chris raised examples of shadow workers logging in remotely from restricted countries, fake credentials, and even deepfake interviews.

“AI can find fraud — VPNs tracing back to North Korea, false identification, deepfakes. It can spot things we just can’t manually catch fast enough.”

In industries where 1099 contractors are engaged for projects with little notice — like creative or marketing campaigns — AI can now vet those workers in hours while still ensuring compliance.

And the threat is growing. According to iCIMS (2024), 17% of employers have already encountered deepfake candidates, a figure expected to double by 2026.

AI Needs Oversight — Not Autopilot

Chris made one thing clear: AI is a tool, not a decision-maker. Leaders who treat it as a set-it-and-forget-it solution are setting themselves up for costly mistakes.

“My fear is that we rely too much on the system and not partner with it. The best future is AI and humans co-piloting together.”

That means program managers and HR leaders must stay deeply engaged with the outputs AI provides — questioning them, validating them, and knowing when human context matters more than a model’s logic.

This philosophy is catching on across industries. World Economic Forum (2024) reports that 84% of executives believe human oversight of AI decision-making will become a formal requirement within two years.

Redefining the Role of CW Leadership

Chris Farmer isn’t offering predictions — he’s laying out a new job description.

The traditional role of contingent workforce leaders has been grounded in volume, process, and vendor oversight. But as AI reshapes everything from fraud detection to hiring speed, that model no longer holds. The leaders who will thrive through 2030 aren’t just managing programs — they’re designing systems, blending human and digital talent, and using technology as a lever for business velocity.

“The best future is AI and humans co-piloting together.”

That co-pilot mindset is the shift: CW leaders must become orchestrators of intelligence, not just headcount.

So if you’re still focused on filling reqs faster, it’s time to aim higher. The opportunity — and the mandate — is to build a smarter, faster, more adaptive workforce. The tools are here. The talent is out there. The real question is whether you’re ready to lead the transformation — or get left behind by it.

Interview Transcript

Joseph Cole (01:18.158)
Chris, nice to meet you. Welcome. So why don’t you give us an introduction about yourself, what you do, who you work for, maybe something personal that people might not know about you.

Chris Farmer (01:24.141)
you as well. Thank you.

Chris Farmer (01:32.835)
Yeah, sure thing. Yeah, Chris Farmer. I own the Global Contingent Workforce program at Salesforce. And I’ve been there about five years. personal thing, you wouldn’t guess my favorite color is blue by any means. Just because I’m wearing a blue suit, blue phone. My car is also blue. But I’m a big adventurer. I love rock climbing and back country skiing. So yeah. Amazing.

Joseph Cole (01:47.608)
Ha

Joseph Cole (01:51.96)
Really?

Joseph Cole (01:56.59)
Oh, awesome, awesome. And by the way, we’ve got blue here of Glider, so we’re aligned here. Samantha, I also like the blue on your wrist. Oh, no way. Okay, well, we’ll have to get a shot of that later. awesome. So obviously, we’re here at ProcureCon 2025. What is it that you’re most excited about learning here or most interested in?

Chris Farmer (02:03.383)
Yes, it kind of permeates

Chris Farmer (02:19.661)
Yeah, AI, obviously. I’m more curious to see what people are actually doing with it versus what they’re talking about doing with it. Like most of the buzzwords, I feel like it gets oversaturated. But I always ask the question of, so what? So the way I always vet these things is, essentially, we exist as an industry, as the people in all these roles, to connect contract talent with employment opportunities.

And if you can’t tell me in 30 seconds or less how whatever your AI thing.

helps that process or adds value in that process, then I’m not sure you understand what you’re offering. So I’m curious to see the real-world application. and I always love seeing like the smaller companies like I said that pop up at ProcureCon because it’s a little less expensive if they come here versus CWS and just I’m always love what the creativity people come up with of like oh we can make it do this or we can have a new technology do that and people are always running and gutting and I love that kind of energy to it.

Joseph Cole (02:57.784)
Yeah.

Joseph Cole (03:19.084)
Yeah, awesome. No, I agree with you. OK, so the conversation that we’re going to talk to you about today is, what will the MSP and VMS look like in 2030? 2030 is only five years away, but it sounds like such a big milestone, right? And how will AI impact the VMS and MSP?

Chris Farmer (03:21.913)
It’s so good.

Chris Farmer (03:32.163)
Big Mas.

Chris Farmer (03:39.043)
Yep, yep, yep. So if you are an MSP and you do not see AI as your biggest threat, I think you’re blind. I think you don’t know what’s coming for you. I’ll give you an example. My MSP, so as last year, 12, 15 months ago, something like that, there was a contract being negotiated in India.

from our professional services team, my peers on the sourcing team, and they came to me and said, hey, we’re seeing massive cost of living increases in India in this contract. Like, they’re pushing for a really unrealistic number. Can you verify what’s happening? And I said, sure, let me check. So I go to my MSP first, because they’re.

They’re massive, they’re global, they have all the data. They’ll tell you they have trillions of data points of payroll data or whatever it is. So I’m like, hey, can you tell me what’s going on in India with cost of living and pay rates? And they said, yeah, we’ll look into this. It’ll probably take us about 10 days to get an answer for you. And I was like, OK. And I pushed them a bit. And they said, there’s another team we have to reach out to and another team. they have all these things. And it’s just like, that’s not going to work.

Joseph Cole (04:40.366)
Wow.

Chris Farmer (04:51.417)
because we’re at the last minute to sign this contract. And so I reach out to a friend of mine in the industry and he goes, have you asked Chat GPT this question? And I was like, oh, because this is like right when that first was coming out. And I was like, let’s go there. And in like five seconds, we had detailed analysis of what’s happening in India.

Joseph Cole (05:00.876)
Yeah.

Joseph Cole (05:05.304)
bright.

Joseph Cole (05:12.696)
Wow.

Chris Farmer (05:13.119)
average rates that are going on with sources. And of course, I went and checked the sources to make sure that AI is just not making step up, because that does happen. And I had an answer back to my team in like 5- 10 minutes. And the kicker is my MSP never even got back to me. They forgot that I asked the question. So if you’re MSP, essentially, there’s kind of two components. But your services are basically an army of people to do administrative tasks.

Joseph Cole (05:29.198)
Really? Okay.

Chris Farmer (05:43.225)
and strategic thinking. But if your army of people that can do those tasks can be replaced very easily with AI that can talk to me just through chatting, and now you see, like, I don’t you’ve ever seen the demonstrations of audio, the way ChatTPT talks to people now, back and forth. Like, it’s getting really, really good. And if you marry that capability with a next-gen, like, VMS solution, MSPs were probably going to…

Joseph Cole (05:57.26)
Right.

Joseph Cole (06:03.694)
It’s insane.

Chris Farmer (06:12.313)
not be needed in three to five years.

Joseph Cole (06:14.542)
Yeah, 100%. It’s amazing how fast the pace of change is with AI and the impact it’s having across all different technologies, different companies, different roles. Now what about the VMS specifically? What would you say, what advice or what challenges or what challenges that you’re having?

Chris Farmer (06:21.219)
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Farmer (06:34.751)
So challenges is I currently sit with a very ancient VMS that a lot of people have because it’s very prevalent. It’s one of the top two, I’d say. It is a terrible beast to try to make any changes to. And that company is not customer service friendly. They don’t want to help you. They don’t care. And that’s just not going to cut it in the future. And there’s all these technologies coming out. Like they can’t integrate with Slack.

Joseph Cole (06:37.686)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Joseph Cole (06:54.019)
Yeah.

Joseph Cole (07:03.918)
Yeah.

Chris Farmer (07:04.6)
Actually, when Salesforce acquired Slack, I felt pretty bad for them because Slack had this really cool setup where you never had to go into their VMS ever. It sat in the background. It was all Slack interface. You could hire, approve time, open a requisition, terminate all through a Slack interface. And when we bought them, we had to force them onto our standard program and that was not allowed.

Joseph Cole (07:13.634)
Yeah. really? Through Slack?

Joseph Cole (07:26.712)
Yeah, yeah.

Chris Farmer (07:29.753)
But I think that’s exactly what’s gonna happen is you’re just gonna see the interface for this stuff just become Like a chat GPT style slack for example or text messaging or something and the VMS is gonna sit in the background But the big VMS is aren’t built to do that But there’s new exciting ones up and coming flex track is a great example because they’re built on Salesforce for example And so as Salesforce evolves flex track just gains more and more capabilities are basically future proofing themselves

Joseph Cole (07:37.826)
Right, right.

Joseph Cole (07:48.568)
Yeah. Right.

Joseph Cole (07:58.136)
bright.

Chris Farmer (07:58.697)
And the really cool thing with that is I can go into FlexTrack and I can change custom fields or I can change logic of what things are vetted which way. And that’s all done in a few minutes with no code. I can click things around instead of having to go to my engineering team and spend all sorts of months trying to add a single custom field and things like that. That’s the future of what’s coming for VMS. And anybody who’s not built on that kind of architecture is going to get, I think they’re just going to fall behind.

Joseph Cole (08:26.424)
Yeah. Right. So MSPs and VMSs, listen up, because Chris Farmer has given you some advice.

Chris Farmer (08:34.819)
That’s right, and I’m telling everybody, I’m like, listen, there’s really cool things we can do, you all just need to catch up. So, yeah.

Joseph Cole (08:40.396)
Right, right. And it’s not like don’t work for a big company, right? Awesome. AI is scary. Obviously, it’s impacting technology and the way we use technology. But it’s also scary for contingent workforce professionals, basically anyone, right?

Chris Farmer (08:44.397)
That’s right. Yes.

Joseph Cole (09:01.986)
I guess what risks or what concerns do you have about it specific to your role or like the general ecosystem?

Chris Farmer (09:10.797)
Yeah, think we have to be really careful with how it’s used. It’s obviously super powerful. I mean, one of the things I’m going to call you guys out, right? You’re an AI-based interview platform, right? Yeah, so it’s very easy to have the AI just dismiss a bunch of behaviors or people that may not be a problem, but it looks like it is to the system, right? So I think my.

Joseph Cole (09:25.142)
Yeah, interview and assessments.

Chris Farmer (09:39.289)
My fear would be that we rely too much on the system and not partner with the system. I think the best, most productive future is where AI and humans are co-partnered together versus AI just running away with things. Because I think that’s the most powerful application of it. And I don’t think we can just build something and just turn it on and walk away. I think we’ll run into all sorts of weird stuff with that. And would you agree with that for my client-friend who’s speaking? Yeah.

Joseph Cole (09:45.314)
Yeah.

Joseph Cole (09:52.962)
Yeah.

Joseph Cole (09:56.312)
Yeah.

Joseph Cole (09:59.938)
Yeah. And we agree with that from a glider’s perspective in terms of ensuring that the human, for example you, is involved, right? And that AI is augmenting and supporting you versus making that decision about who should I hire? But the thing is, there’s also inherent bias amongst people in terms of hiring and making sure that the AI doesn’t perpetuate that as well. Yeah.

Chris Farmer (10:10.637)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Chris Farmer (10:17.39)
Yeah.

Chris Farmer (10:27.063)
Right, because it’s trained on data sets, if, depending on the quality of your data, right, obviously. But on the flip side, I think some really big fears and concerns can be solved with AI that can’t be solved right now, or are now starting to be solved because AI is coming along. Think of all, and this is public knowledge, but think of all these bigger tech companies that have problems with basically agents from foreign countries that you don’t want to be hiring.

Joseph Cole (10:31.413)
Exactly.

Joseph Cole (10:54.327)
Yeah.

Chris Farmer (10:54.861)
but they present either false identification or…

Someone gets hired and then someone else is actually doing the work. But the VPN is tracing back to North Korea, is remotely accessing their desktop. It’s happening, right? And there’s Wall Street Journal articles about this happening. And it’s really sad because some of that, there’s people who are being coerced. The foreign country will kidnap their families, force them to do the work. Otherwise, their families are in harm. And so AI is a great way to find stuff like that.

Joseph Cole (11:02.253)
Yeah.

Joseph Cole (11:07.362)
And it’s happening.

Joseph Cole (11:27.128)
Yeah.

Chris Farmer (11:28.503)
happening because it can analyze all the data points and all the background check documents and all these things that would just take us forever to do manually but they can do it super fast.

Joseph Cole (11:34.754)
Yeah.

Joseph Cole (11:39.352)
Has Salesforce experienced fraud like that? For example, we, I think on LinkedIn, it was a post about deep fakes, like actual deep fakes, you know, taking part in interviews. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Farmer (11:53.273)
Oh, interesting. I haven’t seen that. That’s all of that. I’m just saying I’m on every interview. But I’d be very curious to find out, right? Because it is really curious. It is very curious.

Joseph Cole (11:59.768)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it’s insane. Now, I guess what skills do you think are becoming more important? And it’s twofold, right? Skills from you as a CW professional, and then also like candidates. Like what kind of skills are you seeing in more demand for your hiring programs?

Chris Farmer (12:26.103)
Yeah, so Salesforce is now an agent force company. So, agentic AI is our entire focus now. And this has been the last couple months, we completely shifted. And this is part of what love about Salesforce. And our leader, I call him Uncle Benny, so Mark Benioff. Because he’s like your eclectic uncle who walks around the house with like…

Joseph Cole (12:44.652)
Hahaha

Chris Farmer (12:50.741)
mysteriously large amounts of money and a mysterious amounts of like interesting friends and he’s always thinking of new things but so I really respect him because we had like a company kickoff here’s our direction where we’re going and then literally like two weeks later they said just kidding agent force is so powerful we’re shifting everything to that and we’re going that way so from a cell source perspective my program perspective a lot of

Joseph Cole (12:52.78)
Yeah.

Joseph Cole (13:12.834)
Yeah.

Chris Farmer (13:18.211)
programming, developing skills based on that kind of, those kind of roles, that kind of skill set.

There’s a lot happening and I think I don’t know if you look at like there’s an op-ed that he did in the Wall Street Journal a couple days ago about This is the last generation of CEOs that just manages human workforces the next The next wave is a combination of human and AI or digital workforces, right? So the combination of those two things is really interesting And I think I don’t know. I think the futures there’s a lot of crazy things

Joseph Cole (13:40.46)
Yeah.

Joseph Cole (13:46.786)
Yeah, yeah.

Joseph Cole (13:54.094)
The future is crazy. Yeah.

Chris Farmer (13:56.377)
And one more thing I’ll give a shout out to, the other thing we’re solving with AI that I think we’re all afraid of like misclassification, right? That’s always been like the industry boogie man forever. In the 1099 space, there’s a partner company that I’ve partnered with called Out of the Box that specializes in creative talent. So the problem with compliance and creative talent, right? In a generic like developer role, someone wants to be an IC.

Joseph Cole (14:14.901)
Okay.

Joseph Cole (14:22.222)
you

Chris Farmer (14:26.283)
It takes a few weeks to vet them out, go through the right channels, confirm they meet the qualifications, you’re good to go. But in the creative space, Matthew McConaughey is one of our brand ambassadors, right? So if…

suddenly they’re able to get Matthew McConaughey available, they have to put together a photo shoot in 24 hours, 36 hours, until Matthew McConaughey is going to show up, do something for five minutes, and get paid millions of dollars or something. The rapid dynamics of that, the intensity is insane. But how do you engage with people compliantly in that short amount of time? And this is where AI can come in. And what we’re doing in that space is…

Joseph Cole (14:40.59)
Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Joseph Cole (14:49.57)
Yeah.

Chris Farmer (15:06.509)
they’re able to vet 1099’s creative 1099 talent same day within an hour or two to verify that everyone they just suddenly put together for a photo shoot that’s happening tomorrow morning is good to go, compliantly engaged and paid.

Joseph Cole (15:13.39)
again.

Joseph Cole (15:18.85)
Yeah. Yeah.

One thing I noticed is with the camera, yeah, maybe the mic, so that, yeah, yeah, yeah, there you go, that’s better. I just noticed it now. That’s great. Yeah, no, no, think we, because we can take little segments out. Okay, question specific to contingent programs because they…

Chris Farmer (15:27.025)
am I blocking? There we go. I’ll do this. There we go. Well, you have a lot of footage of me

Joseph Cole (15:44.534)
often times are high volume, right? Do you think there’s risk with AI, obviously reducing the volume? And I guess the impact of your role, I guess like what will the new value prop be for CW leaders?

Chris Farmer (16:02.009)
I think the new value prop for CW leaders will be you’re able to do more compliantly in less time with these new AI partners. And I think the impetus will be on us as continuing workforce leaders to understand how all those tools fit together and how we can use them.

Joseph Cole (16:09.379)
Yeah.

Joseph Cole (16:22.924)
No. Yeah.

Chris Farmer (16:23.001)
Which is again, I’m talking about walking around ProcureCon, right? It’s like, I see Glider AI. It’s like, okay, how do I use that as a tool? Like it’s cool, but how do I fit that into my end-to-end process, right? Again, the whole vetting of like, how do I help contract talent find employment opportunities in the best, most efficient and compliant way? And that’s…

Joseph Cole (16:42.2)
bright.

Chris Farmer (16:43.757)
That’s what we got to do. And that’s always been our value prop is how do we do that for our companies? But now how do we do that with powerful tools that means we may need less people, but we’ll probably see more volume because companies don’t have a tendency of just sitting on large amounts of cash, right? So if you say AI reduces your contingent workforce by 50 % or something, right? Because it can just do all these other things.

Joseph Cole (16:48.194)
Right.

Joseph Cole (16:56.814)
How interesting.

Yeah.

Chris Farmer (17:09.655)
Companies don’t usually just sit on a bunch of cash and be like, OK, cool, now we just make more money. The investors are pushing to like, hey, you have a pile of cash. You got to go get a return on that. So they’re most likely just going to redeploy all that talent into new projects that they didn’t have the bandwidth to do before. Because any company I’ve ever worked for, there’s usually 100 ideas, and they’re working on three or 10 or 20 really poorly. And there’s like 80 waiting for them to get to.

Joseph Cole (17:13.762)
right.

Joseph Cole (17:18.796)
Right.

Joseph Cole (17:25.122)
Yeah.

Joseph Cole (17:30.466)
Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Chris Farmer (17:38.957)
My guess is AI just enables us to go get through like 30, 40, 50 more things that we’re waiting for us to work on and it will transform companies.

Joseph Cole (17:43.832)
Right. Right.

And it makes your role more strategic too, right? You’re doing more with less, also you’re making more informed decisions. cool, so last question for you. 2030 is just around the corner, five years away, but it sounds like such a big, crazy number, right? We’ve spoken a little bit about it, but I don’t know, do you have any more predictions or things that you foresee that are gonna happen with contingent workforce in 2030?

Chris Farmer (17:51.032)
Yeah.

Chris Farmer (17:55.971)
Exactly.

Chris Farmer (18:02.331)
It’s Right.

Chris Farmer (18:16.217)
Yeah, I think the contingent workforce program owners of 2030 are going to be managing a dual split of human contingent workers and AI digital workforce. And I think that’s going to be really interesting mix. And who knows, man? This is Wild West. And I’m so excited to see where it goes. And also, these tools are insane. And I cannot wait to see what comes next.

Joseph Cole (18:28.92)
Yeah.

Joseph Cole (18:35.8)
Yeah.

Joseph Cole (18:42.23)
Awesome, thanks so much Chris. And actually let’s do one more take of your intro, just since now we’ve got the mic here. then, yeah that looks perfect. we’ll do just another take. Hey Chris, welcome. Why don’t you give a quick background about who you are, what you do, who you work for.

Chris Farmer (19:02.221)
Yeah, sure thing. Chris Farmer, I am the global contingent workforce owner here at Salesforce. I’ve been owning this program about five years. yeah, just excited to be here and see all the new AI stuff. Awesome. Thank you so much, Cheers.

Joseph Cole (19:15.842)
Awesome, thank you so much, Kirst.