By Matt Sharples, Founder & CEO, TriCom - May 2026
Read only the layoff trackers and you'd think Kansas City's IT sector is in retreat. Through November of 2025, U.S. employers announced over 1.1 million layoffs. Tech companies cut roughly 96,000 workers in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Six in ten companies expect to reduce headcount again this year, and four in ten plan to replace workers with AI by year-end (Resume.org).
Read only the salary surveys and you'd think we're in a war for talent. Tech unemployment hit a historic 2.8% in 2025, AI/ML engineer pay is up 9.2% year-over-year, and Addison Group projects tech salaries to climb 8–10% in 2026 — three times the pace of inflation (Auxis).
Both are true. After thirty-plus years placing IT professionals across this market — first from a studio apartment in 1994, now from offices in Leawood and Minneapolis — this is the most bifurcated tech labor market I have ever seen. Generalist roles, expensive senior layers, and anything an LLM can plausibly automate are being cut. AI, cybersecurity, cloud, and data specialists are commanding record premiums.
For Kansas City's IT community — hiring managers, technologists, educators, and civic partners — the macro story is choppy, but the local story is unusually favorable. Here's what I'm seeing, and what I think it means for us.
BCG estimates 50–55% of U.S. jobs will be reshaped by AI in the next two to three years, while only 10–15% face elimination over a longer horizon (BCG). CompTIA found more than 275,000 active job postings in January 2026 referenced AI skills — most not as dedicated AI jobs, but as fluency requirements layered onto traditional developer, analyst, and PM roles.
KC has clearer examples of this than most outsiders realize. H&R Block has rebuilt its technology stack around AI in under two years — the OpenAI partnership, AI Tax Assist and Sidekick, 152% growth in client AI usage since 2023 — all driven from the KC headquarters. Burns & McDonnell is recruiting AI Solutions Architects for grid modernization. Black & Veatch is hiring across cybersecurity infrastructure. These are employee-owned, Midwest-rooted firms quietly becoming sophisticated AI consumers — and they're doing it from here.
The practical signal: clients aren't asking for "AI engineers." They're asking for senior developers, BAs, and PMs who can confidently work alongside AI tools. That's a hiring profile, not a job title — and it's the single fastest-growing requirement in our 2026 client briefs.
The cybersecurity skills gap is now permanent. ISC2 puts the global shortfall at 4.8 million unfilled positions, with 522,000 in the U.S. alone, and organizations report only a 72% fill rate on security roles (Cybersecurity Guide). The Linux Foundation reports 68% of organizations are understaffed in AI/ML, 65% in cybersecurity, and 59% in cloud (Auxis).
Kansas City mirrors the national pattern. Cybersecurity job postings here grew 85% from 2021 to 2023 (KC Tech Council). CISSP is the #1 most-demanded certification in the metro, with CISA at #4 and Secret Clearance at #3 — the latter reflecting a quietly growing defense-tech footprint.
The structural challenge: the four-state region (KS, MO, IA, NE) graduates roughly 8,800 computer science students per year against a metro that posted nearly 19,000 tech jobs in 2024 (Startland News). The 2026 demographic cliff in college enrollment will tighten that further. The shortage isn't cyclical; it's demographic. The work being done by KC TechBridge, EnterpriseKC — whose TalentSphere portal and Heartland Cyber Range are directly attacking the region's 9,000+ open cybersecurity roles — alongside Per Scholas Kansas City, i.c.stars Kansas City, WeCode KC, Centriq Training, and Great Jobs KC isn't a nice-to-have. It is the supply side of the equation.
Coastal tech hubs have lost share. Seattle, NYC, San Francisco, and Los Angeles have all seen 5–13% declines in tech worker activity since 2023, and seven of the ten most affordable metros for young homeowners are now in the Midwest (Yahoo Finance / JLL). KC sits squarely in that wave — not as a Columbus-with-Intel-money story, but as a steady, multi-vertical mid-market story anchored by financial services, healthcare, telecom, engineering, and agribusiness.
The numbers are clean. KC employs 74,973 tech professionals generating a $12.4 billion economic footprint — 9% of the regional economy. Tech postings rebounded 9% in 2024 to 18,902, and KC was named the #2 most cost-effective tech market in the country for office rent and wages (TriCom KC Tech Talent Trends Report 2026).
The piece that matters most: 97% of KC employers post fewer than 20 tech jobs per year. Demand isn't concentrated in a handful of giants — it's distributed across hundreds of mid-market firms across banking, insurance, healthcare, engineering, manufacturing, ag-tech, and professional services. That's why hiring here feels different than in Austin or Seattle. It's a relationship economy, not a logo economy. Thirty years of placing technologists into those exact employers has taught me one thing above all: in this market, the firms that invest in long relationships outperform the firms that optimize for speed and volume. Always.
And the physical city is changing underneath us in a way it hasn't in a generation. Kansas City has committed roughly $2.5 billion to host the FIFA World Cup this June — Arrowhead upgrades, the streetcar extension to the Berkley Riverfront, a new pedestrian and bicycle bridge, the CPKC Pavilion, and the Fan Festival at the World War I Museum. Deloitte projects roughly $105 million in incremental local activity from short-term lodging alone, with six matches — four group-stage games, a Round of 32, and a quarterfinal — putting KC on a global broadcast for the first time in most of our careers. The riverfront is being redrawn around Current Landing, the $1 billion mixed-use district anchored by CPKC Stadium, the first purpose-built venue for a women's professional sports team anywhere in the world. And in Riverside, the new $120 million, 16,000-seat Morton Amphitheater opens this June — a Live Nation flagship projected to draw 500,000 fans and roughly $70 million in annual economic impact, pulling national tours that used to skip the metro.
Layer in the long-cycle anchors. The Chiefs and the State of Kansas have agreed to a new $3 billion domed stadium in Wyandotte County, backed by $2.4 billion in state bonds and bids planned for the Super Bowl, Final Four, and College Football Playoff. The Royals announced a $3 billion downtown campus at Crown Center with Hallmark, projected to generate 20,000 construction jobs and reshape 85 acres of the urban core. None of these are tech projects on their face. All of them are tech projects underneath — ticketing, venue networks, identity and security systems, smart-building infrastructure, broadcast stacks, fan-experience apps, and the data plumbing that makes any of it work. That's a decade of digital workload landing inside our metro, in the laps of exactly the kind of mid-market firms and integrators that hire the people we place every day.
First, something plain. Behind every layoff statistic is a person, a family, a mortgage, a kid's tuition, a healthcare plan that just changed, and a career that took years to build. The people leaving Oracle Health right now are the engineers, project managers, analysts, and leaders many of us have worked alongside, hired, and learned from for the better part of two decades. They built a company that put Kansas City on the global health-IT map. What they're going through isn't a market dynamic — it's a hard season in good people's lives, and it deserves to be named that way.
The picture: Cerner once employed roughly 15,000 people in Kansas City. Since Oracle's $28.3 billion acquisition in 2022, that's collapsed to an estimated 6,500. Oracle filed a WARN notice on April 1 confirming 539 additional layoffs at the Hillcrest campus, with separations running through May and June. Affected titles span software developers, IT directors, program managers, systems analysts, and compliance — exactly the experienced talent KC's mid-market employers cannot easily recruit at coastal price points.
What's striking is what's happening around the contraction. Former Cerner executives are launching healthtech startups — CarePilot, Artera, Trially, and others (KC Business Journal). Children's Mercy, Saint Luke's, and HCA Midwest continue to hire steadily for clinical IT, EHR, cybersecurity, and data engineering — many of the same skills being released.
If you're a hiring manager at a KC mid-market employer, the next ninety days are the best window in a decade to bring senior, deeply experienced technologists onto your team. Treat these candidates with the dignity their experience earned — fast, respectful processes, real feedback, fair offers. They are not a discount talent pool.
If you're a Cerner alum reading this: demand for your skill set across this market is real and active, particularly in healthtech startups, the major health systems, and financial services. The next chapter takes longer to find than anyone wants, and the in-between is genuinely hard. Lean on the network this region built around you — it's bigger and more willing to help than it feels in the first few weeks. If TriCom can be useful, our door is open whether or not we're the right fit on a specific role. We've placed contractors with full medical, dental, and immediately-vested 401(k) for thirty years because people in transition shouldn't have to choose between paying the bills and finding the right next seat.
How KC absorbs this — with speed, with respect, and with imagination about where these skills go next — will say a lot about how the region handles its next chapter.
The 100%-remote era is over, but distributed and hybrid models are now structural. The kicker, from the 2026 Global Workforce Trends Report: 56% of technology organizations experienced identity-related candidate issues in the past year, and 82% encountered falsified employment statements. Both figures are the highest of any industry surveyed.
In a market where AI-only screening has become the front door at many firms, the discipline of verifying who you're actually hiring — references, work history, technical depth, cultural fit — has become more valuable, not less. Trust is the scarcest input in hiring right now. We've always interviewed candidates face-to-face, run independent reference checks, and stood behind every placement with a four-week guarantee — twice the industry standard. That used to read as old-fashioned. In 2026, with identity fraud at record levels, it reads as risk management. Build that discipline in-house, or work with partners who already have it. Either way, treat trust like the asset it has become.
A few observations as someone who has watched this market through the dot-com bust, the financial crisis, the pandemic, and now the AI transition.
For hiring managers and tech leaders. The KC talent pool right now — Oracle Health releases, T-Mobile post-Sprint cleanup, professionals leaving coastal markets — is the deepest it has been in years. KC's wage advantage of 12–21% versus national medians (KC Tech Specs) is a recruiting story, not an apology. Lead with quality of life, lead with stability, and don't undersell what you can build here.
For technologists. Demand for adaptable senior talent who pair AI fluency with domain depth has never been higher. Cybersecurity, cloud, data engineering, and applied AI are the durable hot zones, and KC employers reward generalists who can move between them. The coastal pay headlines are real, but so is the math on cost of living, school quality, and time you actually get to spend with your family.
For civic partners and educators. The supply gap is structural and demographic, and it isn't going to fix itself. KC TechBridge, LaunchKC, Great Jobs KC, the UMKC NSF ExLENT initiative, and the K–20 computer science work happening across the metro are not auxiliary efforts. They are the infrastructure. Every community college seat, apprenticeship slot, and re-skilling pathway we add now compounds for the next decade.
For all of us. Kansas City has been undersold relative to its actual tech depth for a long time. The macro environment is finally swinging in our direction — distributed talent, mid-market enterprise digitization, the rise of welcomer cities, AI adoption inside legacy industries. The work in front of us is to translate the moment into momentum. That happens through the boring, durable work of mentoring people, hiring locally, investing in pipelines, and treating each placement like a relationship rather than a transaction.
That's been the operating model at TriCom for thirty-plus years. It's also, I'd argue, the operating model that makes this market work.
Looking forward to the next chapter with all of you.
— Matt
Matt Sharples is the Founder and CEO of TriCom Technical Services, an IT staffing firm headquartered in Leawood, KS with a second office in Minneapolis–St. Paul. TriCom places IT professionals across 30+ states in contract, contract-to-hire, and direct placement engagements.
BCG — AI Will Reshape More Jobs Than It Replaces (2026) | CompTIA State of the Tech Workforce 2026 | ISC2 / Cybersecurity Guide — 2026 Skills Gap Report | Auxis — IT Salary Trends 2026 | Resume.org — 2026 Layoff & Hiring Survey | First Advantage — 2026 Global Workforce Trends Report | JLL / Yahoo — Talent Migration & Welcomer Cities | KC Tech Council — KC Tech Specs v8 (Nov 2025) | KC Chamber / KC TechBridge Data Dashboard | TriCom KC Tech Talent Trends Report 2026 | KC Business Journal — Oracle Health Layoffs (April 2026) | KC Business Journal — Cerner Alumni Healthtech Startups | Startland News — KC TechBridge Workforce Pipeline | EnterpriseKC — TalentSphere & Heartland Cyber Range | Inside Kansas City's $2.5B World Cup Makeover | Airbnb — KC FIFA World Cup 2026 Economic Impact ($105M) | Chiefs & Kansas Governor's Office — New Domed Stadium Agreement | KCUR — Royals Announce Crown Center as New Ballpark Site | The Pitch — Morton Amphitheater Announcement | H&R Block — AI-Powered Tax Platform | Per Scholas Kansas City | i.c.stars Kansas City | WeCode KC | Centriq Training Kansas City