Remote, a global payroll and employment platform, has launched Remote Expense Cards, letting companies issue virtual cards to eligible employer of record (EOR) employees for work expenses. The cards are typically ready within one business day. Employees no longer need to use personal funds and wait for reimbursement. Admins decide who gets a card, what it can buy, and how much can be spent, and policies apply at the moment of purchase. Each transaction is recorded automatically against the employee's employment data, including entity, role, location, and tax status. Employees attach a receipt in the Remote app to finalise the expense. The cards carry a $0 platform fee and no per-card charge. They are available to eligible EOR customers in supported countries.

How to hire remote employees across borders. To hire remote employees across borders, identify markets where the needed skills are available, confirm which locations your organization can employ in, and agree on a lawful employment and payroll route before making an offer. The recruiting plan must include how a new colleague will be paid, onboarded, and supported after joining. In Global by Default at BambooHR's HR Virtual Summit 2026, Remote's talent acquisition director Anastasia Pshegodskaya described a sequence that often runs backward. A team meets a candidate it wants to hire, then asks HR whether it can employ that person where they live. Her recommendation was to settle the possible markets and operating arrangements before the urgent vacancy appears. Pshegodskaya works for an employer-of-record provider, and her session included a case for that service. The underlying planning question is broader than any vendor: what is the organization prepared to offer someone in a particular place, and can it keep that promise? When does cross-border hiring make sense? Cross-border hiring makes sense when a needed capability is hard to find in the organization's current markets and the business can support a role in another location. Pshegodskaya suggested checking three conditions: a narrow existing pipeline, a business reason to expand the search, and evidence that the needed skills are concentrated elsewhere. Starting from the cheapest labor market can miss the people the job actually requires. Her own examples ranged beyond software engineering. A team may find language skills or customer support experience in a region it had not considered, while a different role points to another market. Search by the work and the talent pool, then test whether the location supports the team's hours, service needs, and ability to manage the role. Remote's 2025 survey of 3,650 HR and business leaders found that 73% expected more than half their new hires to be international by 2026. That is a forecast from surveyed leaders, not a count of hires that subsequently occurred. It signals interest in wider talent markets; an employer still needs its own reason to enter one. What must be settled before an international offer? Before an international offer, establish whether the organization can engage the person in that country, which employment arrangement fits the work, who will advise on local requirements, and how pay and benefits will be delivered. Pshegodskaya discussed a local entity, an employer of record, and contractor engagement as possible arrangements. They are different routes with different obligations; the correct choice depends on the country and the actual working relationship. HR should also confirm the pay currency and timing, benefits, onboarding documents, ownership of records, and the person who can answer the candidate's questions. Pshegodskaya stressed the experience of a candidate who hears "we want to hire you" only to learn afterward that the company cannot employ them locally. That is a preventable loss if the search begins with an approved list of locations. Remote's survey found that 74% of its respondents reported compliance challenges abroad. The figure comes from the company's own survey and does not tell any employer which arrangement is suitable in a particular jurisdiction. Local employment and tax questions need qualified advice for the specific country and role. How should a small HR team prepare for global hiring? A small HR team can prepare by keeping a short, current record of where it can hire, who approves a new market, and what steps must happen between candidate selection and offer. Pshegodskaya called this an operating layer: talent markets, employment and payroll support, a shared record of employee information, and local expertise. The record should name an owner who updates it when circumstances change. The team also needs an intake conversation with the hiring manager. What skill is genuinely scarce? Which time-zone overlap is necessary? Does the manager know how the person will receive context and feedback? My colleague Guy J. Giguère's piece on recognizing transferable skills explores a nearby choice: sometimes the best candidate is already in reach but has experience under a different title. His piece on crowded applicant pools and skill shortages makes the same distinction at market level. Broaden the location search after making the capability requirement clear. What makes cross-border hiring work after the offer? The hire works when the employee can do the job, get paid correctly, and access the same decisions and development as colleagues elsewhere. Pshegodskaya put onboarding, documentation, manager expectations, and fair access to opportunity alongside payroll in her session. An international offer is only the first test of the employer's plan. Start with a market where the needed talent and a workable employment arrangement meet. Give the hiring manager clear conditions for that location, and let candidates know the arrangement before asking them to commit. The goal is a search that can end in an offer the organization is ready to honor. Head of AI, RVEAL | Jo Harmse is a data scientist and cofounder of RVEAL, where he heads AI. He has also cofounded a software development firm building AI workflow systems for public and private... Ready to find career alignment? Take the assessment and get 3 free coaching sessions with Leo.

SaaStr AI App of the Week: Remote. The $300M payroll platform your AI agent can run. Remote, the $300M ARR global payroll platform, has launched an MCP server enabling AI agents to handle payroll directly, while generating over 85% of its code with AI and boosting revenue per employee by 50% without layoffs. Learn AI Tools Remote is a seven-year-old global payroll and employment platform based in Amsterdam. It leaned in early to making payroll (and more) for distributed and global teams work, and is one of the most trusted vendors in the space. Its payroll business has passed $300 million in ARR, growing more than 300% year over year, and it's cash-flow positive. Use them. But it makes the AI App of the Week list for what it did with AI in 2026, not for the payroll business itself. The short version: Remote shipped an MCP server so AI agents can operate payroll directly, more than 85% of its code is now written by AI, and revenue per employee is up 50% without cutting a single job. What's new in 2026: * Remote MCP, an interface on the Model Context Protocol, gives AI agents secure access to payroll, contract, compliance and org data * Platforms like BambooHR and Workday can now use Remote as the underlying payroll engine * More than 85% of all code was written by AI in the last month, and engineering contributions are up 60%+ year over year * Revenue per employee is up 50% with no layoffs; hiring plans are being re-evaluated toward upskilling instead * Remote Build embeds forward-deployed engineers with customers to build AI workflows inside their orgs * Remote Labs, an internal AI marketplace, lets any employee ship tools on company infrastructure * AI-powered payroll now runs in more than 100 countries on proprietary calculation engines 1. Remote MCP: your AI agent can run payroll. The headline feature is Remote MCP. Built on the Model Context Protocol, it lets AI agents and external platforms read and act on payroll and compliance data with access controls attached. BambooHR and Workday can plug Remote in as the engine underneath their own products. Learn AI Tools CEO Job van der Voort's framing is blunt: connect ChatGPT or Claude and "you can control all of Remote," to the point where "you don't have to interact with our platform anymore." He thinks that is where the future goes, and he is building for the version where the software disappears and the agent is the interface. Remote's own team demos the practical version: the Chief People Officer, who describes herself as non-technical, built a working global case-management tracker with plain-English prompts, wired into live workforce and compliance data through Remote MCP. No engineering ticket, no implementation cycle. 2. The CEO's personal agent is the security model. Payroll data is about as sensitive as corporate data gets, so the interesting part of Remote MCP is not the access, it is the containment. Van der Voort's early explorer is his own open-source personal agent, which he named Jim. His description of the setup: Jim can interact with Remote, "but he cannot do destructive things." The agent gets the access it needs and nothing more. That scoped, non-destructive pattern is the whole product thesis. If agents are going to touch payroll, the permission model has to be built for agents that will, eventually, do something unexpected. 3. More than 85% of the code is written by AI. Internally, Remote is one of the more aggressive adopters among companies its size. Engineering contributions are up more than 60% over the last year, and van der Voort says that in the last month, "more than 85% of all of our code is written by AI." He describes the trend as accelerating, not plateauing. Five Claude instances run on his second screen while he works, building things for him and for the company. The Slack agent that summarizes discussions started as one of these experiments. This is the part of the story that rhymes with every AI-native startup right now, except Remote is doing it at $300M+ in ARR with a compliance-heavy product where a bad deploy can mean someone doesn't get paid. 4. Revenue per employee is up 50%, with zero layoffs. The number van der Voort leads with is not ARR. It is revenue per employee, up 50% after AI adoption across every function, not just engineering. And unlike the Cloudflare story this week, where a 20% cut accompanied the efficiency gains, Remote says it has not cut jobs over AI. What changed is hiring. Departments that planned to grow headcount are now asked a question first: "do we actually need more people," or should the money go to upskilling the team and buying more AI instead? Some roles that would have been hired simply were not. The company frames it as deferred hiring rather than avoided hiring, which is honest about the direction of travel. Learn AI Tools Van der Voort's own summary of his job as CEO now: make sure the company doesn't run out of money and grows as fast as possible, with AI spend rising but tracked. "This adds a whole new fun angle, I would say." 5. Remote Build: forward-deployed AI engineers. Remote knows it is ahead of most of its customers on internal AI adoption, so it productized the gap. Remote Build embeds engineers directly with customers and prospects to build AI-powered workflows inside their organizations. Van der Voort calls it what investors call it: forward-deployed engineers. The model will be familiar to anyone who watched Palantir. The difference is the domain: instead of data infrastructure, the engineers are wiring AI into payroll, compliance and HR operations, the exact processes most companies have never automated because the regulatory surface is terrifying. Remote Labs, the internal marketplace where employees ship tools on company infrastructure, is the pipeline that feeds it. 6. AI payroll is now live in more than 100 countries. The product underneath the AI story is still payroll, and Remote's bet is that owning the hard parts outright is the moat. The company owns and operates 100% of its legal entities rather than routing through aggregators, and it built proprietary AI-powered calculation engines for payroll, now running in its most popular hiring countries and expanding. The pitch against the old model: multi-country payroll through aggregators means delays, errors and compliance risk from chains of local vendors. Remote's version processes instantly with the compliance logic in the engine. Newer additions include AI-powered employee surveys that run engagement analysis in under a minute and AI-supported recruiting. Van der Voort's line on scope: "We do payroll for everybody, period." Not just distributed teams. Most of Remote's customers have people in offices. Zapier, the AI orchestration platform, is one of them. It hired into 8 countries through Remote's EOR in the last six months, cut about 80% of the time spent on manual payroll data entry after integrating BambooHR with Remote, and gets compliance guidance in under 30 minutes instead of several hours. 7. Where it fits and where it doesn't. Remote fits companies hiring across borders that want payroll to disappear into infrastructure, and now, teams that want agents to operate that infrastructure through MCP rather than clicking through a dashboard. MCP-based access to payroll is new, and the security model, however well scoped, is unproven at enterprise scale with auditors watching. Arguably, start agents read-only. Second, the category is crowded: Deel, Rippling and a dozen others all claim the AI payroll story now, and Remote's answer is depth of owned infrastructure, which is real but slower to evaluate than a feature checklist. 8. The "disappear in a good way" thesis. As agentic AI rises, many companies could "virtually disappear, in a good way." Remote is unusual in saying this about itself on the record. Most vendors pitch the agent as a feature of their platform. Remote is pitching the platform as a backend the agent calls, with BambooHR and Workday as the first evidence. If Van der Voort is right, the winners in HR software are not the best dashboards but the best infrastructure: the owned entities, the compliance depth, the calculation engines. Everything a chatbot cannot fake. That is a bet worth watching.