Deel’s Global Hiring Report Highlights AI Trainer Surge and Currency Hedging Shift

New updates have been reported about Deel.

Deel has placed itself at the center of cross‑border labor trends with its 2025 State of Global Hiring Report, drawing on data from over one million workers at more than 37,000 companies in 150+ countries. The report shows AI training has become the fastest‑growing cross‑border role on Deel’s platform, while top‑funded startups are using Deel to access high‑income markets for specialized talent rather than to arbitrage labor costs.

General AI trainer roles grew 283% in 2025, with over 70,000 people now training AI systems for over 600 organizations, and pay ranges diverging from $15–20 per hour for basic annotation to $100+ per hour for high‑skill subject‑matter experts. Deel’s data also reveals a persistent U.S. gender pay gap among AI trainers and confirms that seven of the ten most common cross‑border roles globally are sales, marketing, or customer‑facing, underscoring ongoing demand for local market expertise.

For roughly 100 startups founded between 2020 and 2025 that raised at least $100 million, Deel’s platform shows cross‑border hiring skewed toward the U.K., Canada, Germany, Australia, and Spain, with software developers representing 28% of international hires and AI engineers also in demand. These top startups are 13.6 percentage points more likely than SMBs to hire software developers across borders, indicating Deel’s enterprise and growth‑stage customer base is using international hiring to secure scarce skills rather than cheap labor.

The report identifies an “urban boomerang,” with remote workers on Deel moving back toward major metropolitan centers such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, London, and Paris after earlier pandemic‑era dispersion. Compensation data from the platform shows leadership roles driving global pay growth, including U.S. project managers, COOs, and CEOs, while Latin American executives and financial analysts recorded triple‑digit increases that highlight accelerating professionalization in emerging markets.

A key structural trend in Deel’s payments business is “currency hopping,” where contractors in inflation‑prone economies are increasingly choosing USD or stablecoins instead of local currencies to preserve purchasing power. USD now features in half of the ten most common country‑currency payout combinations on Deel, with Argentina seeing more contractors opting for USD than pesos and leading stablecoin adoption, while markets like Bolivia show USD usage tracking inflation cycles.

Deel executives frame these behaviors as evidence that workers are using the platform’s multi‑currency and stablecoin capabilities to manage risk and participate in a more borderless labor market, creating product and compliance opportunities around payroll flexibility and global mobility. Additional findings relevant to Deel’s strategy include language‑ and proximity‑driven hiring corridors, enterprises using employer‑of‑record services for compliance‑sensitive roles, strong growth in professional services, healthcare, and life sciences, and rapid expansion in legal and medical administrative positions alongside AI trainers.