The Josh Bersin Company

As AI experts leave Google and new startups emerge, engineers are consumed with Superintelligence: building models that can reason, learn, and capture “all the world’s knowledge.” While model evolution is important, I believe we’re going in a different direction: toward vertical, domain and company specific AI that exponentially builds proprietary (not general) knowledge.

In this podcast, I explain why the next wave of enterprise value will come from these specialized, domain-specific systems built on proprietary knowledge and experience. And this will take place within your company, as well as from experts like us.

Drawing...

The word of the decade is “Agency” – giving each of us the power, tools, and opportunity to do what we want with our life, jobs, and careers. This new buzzword, now one of the top memes in politics, has been coming for many years. In this podcast I discuss the 50+ year of history in the “decoupling” of workers from companies, and how our newfound AI-powered Agency brings benefits and risks.

As you’ll hear, young people see Agency and freedom as a foundational part of their long life ahead, while companies struggle with “how much freedom” to offer. And for f...

The word “intelligence” is a loaded word. Here’s what Elon Musk said to the Economist last week:

“I think AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence in around five years. There really won’t be anything that AI can’t do better than humans, apart from being human, perhaps.”

Well “being human” is what intelligence is all about. So I read up on how Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, James, and many of the eastern philosophers define the term. And what you find is that deep thinkers define intelligence far beyond the ability to recall and use facts, but...

New names: Kimi K3, Llama, Nemotron, Mistral, Cohere, Deepseek, Phi-4 – these are just a few of the fast-growing open source models from major AI providers. These systems threaten the business models and financial plans of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and X.ai. They perform at levels close to Frontier models and the can run up to five-times cheaper on a variety of hardware platforms.

What is the disruptive impact of these open source LLMs and how does this impact your AI investments? As you’ll hear in the podcast, Open Source unleashes the opportunity for lower cost AI solu...

SharkNinja is one of the most fascinating, innovative, high-performing companies I’ve seen. Elizabeth Norberg, the People and Culture leader, is also one of the most interesting CHROs I’ve met. So with that introduction, I urge you to take some time to listen.

There’s a lot to learn here, but overall this is a story about a company and set of people strategies that work together to accelerate growth, with a strong and vital focus on individual performance, innovation, problem-solving, and carefully designed organizational support.

Think about brands like Nike, L’Oreal, Apple, or other...

This week we learned of OpenAI’s Jailbreak security breach, which opens the door to many new issues with enterprise AI and HR 2030. This week, following up on the introduction of SHL’s Superworker AI assessment, I dig into the implications of this new AI behavior and discuss the five major “skills” or capabilities we need to build AI mastery among business users.

As you’ll hear, AI Agents are both powerful and useful, but our human skills in problem solving, collaboration, and risk awareness are now becoming critical for success. New research also shows that even AI forward...

SHL, one of the pioneers in industrial and psychological assessment, has now built a new instrument to assess an individual’s readiness for AI.

Sara Gutierrez, Chief Science Officer at SHL, explains how SHL is addressing this challenge.

Drawing on SHL’s 45-plus years of talent intelligence and behavioral science and a large study of millions of data points, Sara introduces a skills model built on four factors – AI literacy, analytical thinking, continuous learning, and AI promotion – that together define who is truly ready to become a superworker – any employee who uses AI to elevate their work...

It’s a strange time: the economy and capital markets are booming, yet worker engagement is as low as it was during the pandemic. It’s a strange combination of events: stock market at all time highs while affordability and trust are at all time lows. Have we over-inflated our economy or is it something more systemic.

As I discuss in my latest article, some of the challenges we face have been building for many years, while others are very recent. We live in a world of growing automation, fear of job loss, yet an extraordinary world of n...

Today Eightfold launched its AI Candidate Agent, so I wanted to explain how the multi-agent world of HR 2030 is coming together.

In this podcast I explain what Eightfold is up to and how multi-agent AI systems are now starting to sweep across talent acquisition, particularly in high-volume recruiting. And it’s more complex, interesting, and valuable than you may think.

This article explains the market and business case in more detail, and we encourage you to read about HR 2030 to see where this exciting world is going.

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The Talent Ac...

Over the last few years we’ve experienced a global affordability and income inequality problem and there are a myriad of policy issues at play. Yet at the same time something else is going on: wages and employee earnings have fallen way behind growth in GDP, profits, and productivity. What gives?

In this podcast, and the related article, I discuss how pay practices are changing and how we, as leaders or HR professionals, have a lot of agency to help address this situation. Without wading into politics, we have clear research on the way that pay operates as...

All organizations, whether they are profit-seeking companies, non-profits, or governments, have politics. And the issues of how we make decisions, the role of top-down vs. bottoms-up governance, and how we empower people to speak up… these are existential topics in any group of people.

As the USA celebrates its 250 year anniversary and we read so many articles about our history, I wanted to reflect on what our political history teaches us about business leadership, governance, and employee empowerment.

For those of you who study political science, I admire your craft and I think we have a...

What if every talent process you ran was AI-enabled — not to replace what you do, but to make you superhuman at it?

That’s exactly how Matt Hoffman, Head of Talent and Partner at venture capital firm M13, operates. In this episode Matt explains how his team uses AI to help early-stage founders build a talent-first culture from day one – across recruiting, compensation, coaching, and beyond.

The results are remarkable. Using tools like Findem for AI-powered sourcing, Matt’s team can pinpoint candidates who didn’t just work at the right company — they worked there at exactly t...

This week Korn Ferry announced the $1.1 Billion acquisition of AMS, one of the leading providers of enterprise recruitment outsourcing. As I overview in this podcast, this deal demonstrates several things:

First, the talent acquisition space has become enormously important and is rapidly changing with AI, demographic changes, and internal productivity initiatives. AMS has become a global leader in recruitment process outsourcing and TA advisory work, leading to the $1.1 Billion valuation. AMS’s product AMS One is one of the only tech platforms that integrates almost every recruiting technology into one operational view, enabling AMS and clients to mo...

Today I overview why the Frontier AI vendors are changing as they compete for revenue and how that opens new doors for corporate AI solutions. Remember, your personalization of the technology is more important than the model itself.

Then I discuss our new HR 2030 architectural research and how rules, policies, and security are so important in this new world of Agentic HR. It’s a new world and all focused on “Dynamic Enablement for Growth.”

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AI As Fuel For Organizational Change: The Biggest Market Of All

Are Frontier Models Becomi...

Sana Learning is a revolutionary product in the $400 Billion L&D market. Today I sat down with Rita Azevedo, Director of Client Engagement at Sana, to talk about everything. What is AI-native learning, how does Sana Learning fit into Workday’s strategy, and how do companies like Polestar, Rolls Royce, Travelers, and others revolutionize L&D with Sana.

And most of important of all, we get Rita’s perspective on the reinvention of L&D, which we call “Dynamic Enablement for Growth.”

As you’ll hear, AI-native learning platforms like Sana can totally transform training teams, tur...

As AI vendors hype “recursive self-improvement” and other scary features, we see more and more “mainstreaming” of AI technology in business. In other words, the AI does not solve problems by itself: we as HR and IT leaders need to clearly define our needs and then buy, build, and tune the technologies we buy.

Some AI vendors (ie. Paradox, Radancy, Sana, Maki, others) are laser focused on very specific use-cases, and they are delivering solution-first offerings that really add value. The frontier vendors, however, are struggling to do this and much of their revenue still comes from “enabling o...

We’re now a week past Irresistible 2026 and I want to recap what has been happening in enterprise AI and explain the HR 2030 program. First I discuss how the entire AI industry is over-inflated and what that means to enterprise users. Next I explain why the $1.5 Trillion invested in AI is leading to high prices and more focused projects. And third I explain what our HR 2030 program is all about and how you can join us.

Three big messages here: first AI is now a powerful, early-stage, but expensive technology – so taking an architectural, business-case approach is now...

As we prepare for these juggernauts to go public, I’m reminded of Yahoo, Excite, and AOL who dominated the first four years of the internet. Despite their lead, Google stole the market away. Could the same thing happen again?

The argument is not that these companies aren’t powerful, but rather that they’re so committed to their current path that they may miss the big opportunity in the future. If you look at HR 2030 and what we want to do with enterprise AI, the ability to generate code, graphics, and text may not be what we nee...

Here’s my brief recap of the amazing Irresistible 2026 (photos coming), and my discussion with clients about many things, including the new insane costs of AI. I just read a study that Ramp (credit card) did, discovering that the top AI users are spending $7500 per month per employee on AI. (Yikes!)

That aside, the conference was spectacular and we all learned a lot. Stay tuned for a more detailed article on the Pacesetters and other major research we unveiled. In the meantime here’s my update on economics and AI maturity (companies are maturing and learning about this...

Welcome to IRRESISTIBLE 2026 at USC in beautiful Los Angeles! Today we welcome 450 of our closest friends and introduce The Josh Bersin Institute Global HR Excellence Certification (GHRE). This is all focused on preparing you for HR 2030, which we also introduced today.

Additional Information

Josh Bersin Institute Launch Video

HR 2030 Launch Video

Details On Launch And New Galileo Capabilities

Chapters

As we prepare to launch the HR 2030 Initiative next week, I pose an important question. What IS the real role of Human Resources in a world of AI, automation, and business acceleration?

As you’ll hear, we believe HR is no longer the policy police, recruiting, training, or pay department. In a world of Agents, a new role has emerged: Dynamic Enablement for Growth.

Today I discuss the historic role HR has played over the years, why many people distrust or misunderstand HR, and how HR emerges with an even more important role in the fu...

This week was pretty exciting: Microsoft unveiled its Frontier Fine Tuning along with a new hardware stack and developer tools, while NVIDIA launched its foray into PC powered AI. Two big themes here: first is reducing computing cost as data centers start driving up all our AI cost, and second to make AI ever more personal for you and your company.

You’ll also see that we’ve optimized Galileo into the Microsoft Copilot and you can get early access below, with GA coming later this summer.

Even if you’re not an AI or PC gee...

I’ve decided that the biggest challenge we have in AI is now keeping track of the new words being created. Words like harness, layer, mesh, vector, orchestrator, tools, surface, memory – they all mean very special things. And engineers and marketing people keep dreaming up new ones (spine? pattern? control plane? MCP? LangChain? headless? MCP? mesh? ontology?).

In this podcast I do my best to explain what these words mean, and give you a non-technical understanding of how all this stuff works. If people like this I’ll keep you up to date on all these new words...

Here’s an update on Google’s Gemini Flash 3.5 (bad name) and how it impacts the enterprise market, an update on Google AI in Search, and an update on the HR 2030 architecture coming out at Irresistible. I also want to thank you as a listener, we discovered that this podcast now reaches 4 million HR and business professionals around the world.

I take that responsibility very seriously and we all work very hard to avoid advertisements or any kind of “blind opinions” in this format. You do get all my and our perspectives of course and I encourage you to g...

What if the biggest mistake companies make with AI transformation is treating it as a technology problem? Laurent Aufils, Chief People Officer at Orange Business, knows that it’s all about people.

In this episode, Kathi Enderes sits down with Laurent to explore how one of the world’s leading digital services companies transformed its entire 30,000-people workforce through a people-first approach to generative AI.

The results are concrete and striking. Orange Business’s AI-powered contract management tool slashed what previously took teams weeks of painstaking analysis to under three hours — fundamentally disrupting not just how peop...

The Pope’s Encyclical on AI is well worth reading. It’s not only about the perils and risks of technology, it’s really a manifesto about power. I found the essay extremely valuable to read so I wanted to share my perspectives on the topic and the fascinating analogy between AI and The Tower of Babel.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

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The Encyclical

Summary: Pope Leo’s ‘Magnifica humanitas’: AI must serve humanity not concentrate power

AI Prices Are Going Up, Up, Up – Maybe Workers Are More Produ...

This week I attended the Sana AI Summit in NYC, so I wanted to share the various conversations and new ideas that came from this multi-disciplinary meeting. I hope my summary helps you see some of the bigger issues at play here.

Will AI destroy the job market? What is the real economic value so far? What is the difference between AI and humans? How safe is AI in reality? And how can we use AI to really better our lives, careers, and companies?

I hope my summary gives you some new ideas to think...

Many of our clients are playing with Claude, building things, and telling us about their amazing new innovations. But there’s a strange misconception out there – the idea that you can just “buy an Agent” and turn it on immediately.

AI doesn’t quite work this way. These systems “become you” – which means you have to train, maintain, tune, and continuously monitor them. Here’s the story for a quick listen. Here is a brief background on “managing and maintaining” AI agents.

And remember, this is the power of AI – you want it to “learn” about your company!  But lik...

This week I’m in New York “Live!” and there are some exciting things happening: we launched our newest research on “The Five Types of Frontline Worker” which will help you dramatically improve that part of your business, and Cornerstone, the largest L&D tech provider, went BIG into AI.

Listen up for more details, and read the newest article for analysis.

Additional Information

Josh Bersin Company Defines New HR Taxonomy for Frontline Workers to Improve Hiring, Pay, Retention, and Management

Research: Understanding The Five Types of Frontline Workers

Cornerston...

This week I turn 70 so and we’re in college graduation season, so I took some time to give you my perspectives on “The Liberal Arts Education,” and why it matters so much.

Not only are liberal arts important to your personal understanding of the world, they give you career skills you’ll use forever. I explain today, using myself as an example, why and how liberal arts, science, history, politics, and learning to think and write are the most important skills you have.

As we read about college grads complaining about AI and struggling to find...

Frontline workforce hiring is important: these are the workers who deliver services, care for patients, and deliver the food or products that we rely on every day. Yet as we look at benchmarks for hiring and retention we see massive variations across companies. In fact the highest-performing companies hire 5-times quicker than others, and also find higher quality candidates! (Speed actually improves your quality of hire…)

Nehal Nangia, our lead analyst studying frontline work, explains the complexities. And as you’ll hear from Josh Secrest from Paradox, there are massive business implications in time to hire.

In...

I just attended the Eightfold user conference where they introduced TalentForge, a toolset to build agents, and the CEO Ashutosh Garg told us their HR team could build their own HRMS.

Gloat is offering much of the same toolset, with integrations into Microsoft Teams, Copilot, Gemini and Claude – and you can import all your business rules from SuccessFactors, Workday, and other tools.

And almost all HR vendors (Findem, Eightfold, our own Galileo) have MCP plugins so you can access them in any agent you choose.

So the big question looms: what should you bu...

We’re now at a stage where enterprise-class AI solutions are real, and suppliers are jockeying for position. Microsoft has consolidated its Copilot efforts into a more integrated offering, and also raised prices. Workday and ServiceNow have defined new consumption-based pricing models which shift from “buying seats” to “buying capacity.”

The Frontier model vendors like Anthropic and OpenAI are spending money massively, ready to go public soon, so we’ll understand their business models. And in the meantime both are investing in PE-backed joint ventures to build more engineering and implementation services to speed enterprise adoption.

The big st...

This week ServiceNow launched a massive set of new products to establish itself as the system that manages every AI agent in the enterprise. 

It’s a bold set of new products, including Otto (Moveworks), the Agent Fabric, the Context Engine, and the Autonomous AI Specialists. In reality the strategy is an expanded view of what Workday (Agent System of Record and Sana) and Microsoft (Agent 365 and Work IQ) are doing, but with a much deeper set of tools.

Not only is this a bold move to accelerate Agentic HR and Agentic business systems, it now...

I had an uplifting conversation with Jen Morgan, the CEO of UKG, a $5 billion global AI platform for HR, pay, and workforce management. In addition to talking about the company and her role as CEO, she actually has another mission: to put Frontline Workers first in our economy.

Frontline workers, the people who deliver groceries and food, care for patients in the hospital, work in hospitality, or maintain public safety, make up 72% of the US workforce and almost 80% of employees worldwide. These often hourly or shift workers form the backbone of our economy: making our lives better...

This week we saw some astounding GDP numbers, a modest 2% growth with an astounding 70% attributed to AI capital spending. The US economy is heavily AI centric, starving spending on housing which ultimately contributes to income inequality. At the same time companies are now reducing employee benefits, halting a two decade steady increase. It’s all about the shift from labor to machines, I guess.

I also talk about the role of legacy systems in the new world of Agentic HR, Agentic Finance, and Agentic ERP.

Lots going on, I hope this gives you some perspective on...

What does it take to bridge one of the most persistent translation problems in talent acquisition – getting a Fortune 500 recruiter to see why a Little Bird attack helicopter pilot from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment is the perfect candidate for their open role? Tim Best, CEO of RecruitMilitary and former active duty Army officer, gives us a mission-driven and practical answer: go beyond the resume.

Resumes and job descriptions flatten people. And for veterans, who enter the civilian workforce carrying hundreds of thousands of skills and attributes that don’t map to corporate job architectures, that flat...

This week I discuss Workday’s new AI announcements described at the Innovation Summit last week. These are sweeping new product, leadership, and organizational changes that effectively reposition from a “system of record” to a “platform of agents.”

As you’ll hear, not only is Workday clearly articulating their strategy to support and enable Agentic HR and Agentic Finance, the company has changed its organization, culture, and financial model. There’s a lot to unpack here, and I know all Workday customers, partners, and competitors will have opinions. In this podcast I try to explain this whole story and why...

This week I recap a busy week including corporate AI stories, Workday’s AI reinvention, more on tech Layoffs, and fears of AI-driven surveillance. The important story is that Enterprise AI is much more complex than most imagine yet the AI vendors like Anthropic and OpenAI make it sound deceptively simple.

In reality, as I explain, we are one year into the total reinvention of all business functions, with HR top on the list. And as I explain, the vision of enterprise success is now clear, but the vendor market is incredibly insecure. I think you’ll find...

In this episode, Kathi Enderes sits down with Rob McAuslan, Vice President for Artificial Intelligence at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), one of the world’s largest and most innovative online universities with more than 200,000 students.

Before leading SNHU’s AI strategy, Rob taught, worked, and volunteered across Africa, the Mediterranean, and East Asia, working with populations ranging from K-12 students to refugees to graduate scholars. That lived experience shapes everything about how SNHU thinks about AI: not as a tool for automation, but as a means of expanding access, amplifying human potential, and meeting learners exactly wher...