People strategy Blogs

Raya Alkhatib is a highly accomplished Corporate Partner and the Head of the Corporate and M&A Practice at Bird & Bird’s Riyadh office. She offers sophisticated, market-leading counsel on a comprehensive range of corporate matters for both international and local clients.

Most FSfirms have run AI pilots. Scaling into live, regulated operations is where programmes stall, shadow AI, governance gaps, and the wrong team structure.

What DORA, the EU AI Act and FCA Consumer Duty mean for financial services leaders, explained clearly, plus the people gap most firms have not filled.

Lateral hiring is at record levels. Business cases are more rigorous than they have ever been, and the investment in finding and landing senior talent has never been higher. And yet integration outcomes remain stubbornly inconsistent. The hire is getting more sophisticated but what happens next often is not.

For a long time, the war for talent was a skills race. Which candidate had done the launch, led the transformation, shipped the product. The logic was simple: find the person who has already done the thing you need done. That logic no longer holds.

Ask most HR leaders to describe strategic workforce planning and you'll get a familiar answer: forecasting headcount, modelling future demand, identifying gaps.

Pushback from leadership is often framed as resistance to HR. In practice, it usually points to something else. It signals that HR is not yet shaping decisions at the level it could be.

As we move further into 2026, fresh from recent travels and conversations, it’s increasingly clear that the market is shifting even faster than many expected.

Offshore law firms have spent the past two decades oscillating between three models