Kalpesh Baxi and Duncan Stuart, Kritmatta's co-founders, went to the TEAM Network event on 25 September.

We went as a Service Partner rather than as an exhibitor. No stand, no stage, no deck. That turned out to be the useful version of the day, because the conversations that followed were the ones members wanted to have rather than the ones we had prepared.

The questions were about admin, not about AI

The thing that stood out across the day was how little of the conversation was actually about AI.

Nobody asked which model sits underneath the product. What came up instead was the shape of a consultant's day: the notes that do not get written up, the CRM that is accurate until Tuesday afternoon, the update a client asked for that is sitting in someone's head rather than in an email.

That is the honest state of AI adoption in independent recruitment right now. The interest is real, but it starts from a workload problem rather than a technology one. The question underneath almost every conversation was some version of the same thing: can this take work off my consultants, or is it one more system for them to keep fed.

The information problem is a chat thread problem

The second recurring theme was where the information actually lives.

For most of the agencies we spoke to, the real record of a placement is spread across a WhatsApp group, an email chain and a folder of documents. An offer gets agreed in a chat thread. A rate gets confirmed in a reply. A contract revision gets uploaded somewhere and mentioned to nobody.

None of that is unusual, and none of it is bad practice. It is simply how fast-moving agencies work. The cost shows up later, when a consultant is reconstructing a week from memory, or when something agreed on a Friday afternoon never makes it into the system at all.

That is the problem Kritmatta was built around. It monitors the channels where the work actually happens, surfaces the signal as it appears, and drafts the update. The consultant still decides whether to send it.

"Where would we even start" came up more than scepticism

We expected more pushback than we got. What came up far more often than scepticism was a practical version of hesitation: people who were fairly convinced AI could help, and genuinely unsure what the first step looks like in a business of fifteen people with no technical team.

That is a fair question, and it is the one most AI pitches answer badly. The answer that landed best was the least ambitious one: pick the single channel where things currently get missed, start there, and leave the rest of the stack alone.

Nothing gets migrated. Nobody is asked to work out of a new window. If the first agent does not save anyone time within a week, the experiment was cheap.

Why TEAM Network members are the right room

Kritmatta became an official TEAM Network Service Partner earlier this year, with an exclusive deal for members that sits outside standard pricing.

Events like this are the reason the partnership is worth having. TEAM Network is a community of independent recruitment businesses, which is the exact type of business Kritmatta was built for: lean teams, high message volume, and no appetite for a six-week implementation project.

Thanks to everyone who gave us their time on the day. If you are a TEAM Network member and we did not get to speak, the member deal is still open, and the conversation is usually more useful than the demo.