The Josh Bersin Company

Today I summarize my keynote from Unleash Paris this week, where I draw a line between generative AI’s birth in November of 2022 and the Railroad Era of 1873. Not only are the parallels uncannily similar, it points out that AI’s takeover of our economy has impacted employment, politics, and our teetering stock and bond market.

I recommend you read two books after you listen to this. The first is 1873: The First Great Recession, which describes the global financial disaster brought on by the railroad boom. The second is our new book Superpowered: How AI Unlocks The Powe...

This week we launch our new book “Superpowered, how AI Unlocks The Power of People, Leadership and Teams. Based on more than 100 case studies and years of research on organizations and careers, this book sets the stage for your future as a Superworker, Supermanager, or Supercompany.

Whether you’re a human resources professional, a people manager, a business leader, or a professional preparing for the future of work, Superpowered offers a way to think more clearly about AI and the opportunities it creates for human contribution.

No prior AI expertise is needed to benefit from Supe...

There’s a big flurry of interest in Job-Task Analysis (an old discipline) to break down jobs into tasks, categorize and inventory these tasks, and then “Voila,” you can build AI agents to automate these tasks.

It sounds like a great idea. So data providers like Lightcast, Draup, SAP (TechWolf), Reejig, and Workday (using Stanford data) are busy building these huge “Job-Task” data sets so you can now look at your company or department as a “basket of tasks” and apply AI to build just the right agents to streamline work. (And also make decisions like centralizing some tasks or...

Today, after in-depth meetings with Workday, SAP, UKG, Dayforce, Hibob, Gloat, and others, I’m ready to say “the SaaSPocalypse is over.” HCM is poised for massive growth ahead.

And there’s more – I describe the five new “redefining” features of Agentic HCM (Human Capital Management) platforms and why this may unlock a $10 Billion new revenue market for major HCM players. You as a buyer or consumer of these systems have to start to think about these systems differently. Rather than see them as Payroll and HR “boat anchors” which you have to buy, they’re now “growth enablement plat...

Workday Rising Announcements: Sana as core interface, 17 major new Superagents including “autopilots” (that we call “monitoring agents”), Sana Concierge for self-service, Sana Coach for performance coaching, massive improvements to talent acquisition suite, Workday “work intelligence” to break down jobs into tasks and help build capacity and workforce planning, a direct interface to Claude, and the acquisition of C1.ai to identify and secure all agents in your company.

I also discuss the challenge all major software companies have selling “usage-based” or “token-based” pricing, and why you, as a buyer, should start prioritizing your agent investments. I also explain why “Forward...

Now that corporate AI tools from Workday, SAP, Oracle, Databricks, ServiceNow and many others have hit the market, it’s time to think about how we apply AI strategically. In this podcast I introduce the idea of Business 2030, a framework built from our HR 2030 architecture.

The simple story is as follows. While it’s easy to think of gen AI as an “automation” technology, its real value is in this ability to integrate vast amounts of data and predict, act, and learn from this stream. Well our companies are set up to operate as functional hierarchies, as we talk...

This week SAP explained its new Joule Work and Autonomous Enterprise strategy at its SAP Connect conference. As you’ll hear, SAP is building a solid set of AI agents to compliment and automate many of its business processes and it’s now all live.

What does this mean for HR? Well SAP customers now have lots to think about – including how Joule may interact with other agents, what agents and assistants to use, and how to interconnect the SAP Knowledge Graph with non-SAP data. It’s a solid strategy for automating existing business processes, and it’s now up t...

There’s a raging debate going on about something called Superintelligence: the idea of a massive AI network that knows everything and does everything for us each day.

Bill Gates, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Nick Bostrom are all talking about this, and they’re painting a future where we won’t have to work and entire industries and professions will vanish.

In this podcast I try to demystify (and debunk) a lot of these claims, and I postulate that the world may get messy but our imperfect, lovable human selves will s...

I’m really excited about the potential for Personal AI Agents. While GrokBot and Muse and Microsoft Autopilot (Scout) are very young (and not at all mature yet), we can now clearly see how personal AI is going to transform and disrupt our business lives.

In this podcast I explain the architecture of HR 2030, our reference blueprint for Agentic HR. You can see how personal agents, action agents, rules agents, monitoring agents, data agents, and Superagents all work together. And it’s important to think this through so you can plan your vendor selection, tech architecture, security arch...

Andreas DeNeve, founder of TechWolf, believes AI can “infer” your skills with great precision. After years studying this problem TechWolf has built a variety of AI language models to observe and identify your skills and tasks, which then form the basis of many decisions in business.

TechWolf monitors and indexes all your work activity and then builds a “skills context graph” to show you a skills map of your company. This is a big idea, one which companies like Eightfold, Seekout, Findem, Sana and many others are pursuing.

In TechWolf’s platform employees retain full control, v...

News Corp, with more than $9 billion in revenue, is one of the most important and iconic media and digital real estate companies in the world. The company owns mastheads like The Wall Street Journal, Barrons, The Times, The Sun, New York Post, California Post, Factiva, Realtor.com, and other media and digital businesses that we rely on for news, information and commerce. News Corp also owns Harper Collins, a $2.3 billion publishing empire.

With around 22,000 employees, News Corp provides much of the news, information, insights, and perspectives we consume around the world. The company has major intellectual property...

Perspectives on AI safety and alignment, and what you as a business leader need to know.  I’m attaching a good set of resources for you to read, this is a fascinating issue.

Second, I introduce the idea of Business 2030 – the new, ai-powered operating model for business, which is coupled with HR 2030. As you’ll hear, the new world of HR is going to become essential to your company’s AI business operating model in the coming years. So all the details in HR 2030 are urgent.

Reading and Background

AI Doesn’t Need to Slow Dow...

Today we launch the Jupiter release of Galileo, which we call “HR Intelligence for the Enterprise.”

In this podcast I explain the history of Galileo, its evolving and new technical architecture, and how AI agents can revolutionize every aspect of an employee’s work life. As you’ll hear, Galileo is now the most trusted, efficient, portable source of global HR and management intelligence, available on:

I explain how our business model of research, advisory, education, and consulting has been transformed by Galil...

We are all living in a world of “beta products” from AI vendors, and whether we like it or not we’re stuck with the risks. Today I weigh in with my perspectives about what’s going on and how we, as consumers and builders, need to push back on Frontier Labs and force them to “fix” these issues.

Lots to debate and I look forward to meeting many of you this Fall as we travel the world discussing our new book Superpowered and our exciting new announcements around Galileo.

(Major launch tomorrow, stay tuned!)

Refere...

Guess what. There is no AI jobs apocalypse, there’s an AI-fueled labor shortage. And this means human capital and leadership strategies will be more important than ever as we transform our companies around AI.

It also means that you, as a professsional or frontline worker, are going to see yourself become Superpowered, as we discuss in our new book. And the world of HR is moving quickly away from “HR as policy police” to “HR as a growth function.”

Listen in and you’ll see how HR 2030 and AI are reinventing our jobs, careers, and HR opera...

What do you do when the funding that anchored your HR transformation disappears unexpectedly? For Seneca Polytechnic, a public college with 44,000 students in the greater Toronto area, the answer was redesigning the transformation itself.

In this episode, we speak with Diana Mohan, Executive Director of Transformation and Change at Seneca Polytechnic — a 2026 HR Pacesetter Award winner — about how her team chose to continue forward rather than press pause when regulatory changes created a structural deficit across Canada’s higher education sector.

Diana shares how Seneca’s HR team embraced AI to totally change how HR operates...

The BLS forecasts an almost flat growth in the labor market in the next decade yet US GDP is expected to grow by 22-24% cumulatively. In order for this to work we are all going to be focused on “labor productivity.”

In this podcast I explain this new world of Superworkers and discuss why the word “labor” itself may be out of date. I also discuss why HR issues like org design, work design, dynamic enablement, talent density, pay equity, dynamic planning, and AI really change the dynamics of our businesses. And HR is now a growth professs...

Rochana Golani, VP of Enablement at Databricks, is one of the most innovative and business-focused learning executives I’ve met. In this action-packed conversation Rochana shares the secrets of the company’s AI-powered dynamic training, learning, and enablement system, and how she runs internal and customer learning like a fast-growing business.

Databricks is one of the world’s fastest-growing enterprise software companies and a central player in the convergence of data infrastructure, analytics, machine learning, and generative AI.

Founded in 2013 by the UC Berkeley researchers who created Apache Spark, Databricks pioneered the “lakehouse”—an architecture designed to...

Workday’s Q2 2027 earnings were a pivot point, showing how Workday has shifted to its “AI-Forward Future.” The company reported $600 Million of recurring AI revenue and a clear and confident position in the market.

While Workday’s 12.8% YTY revenue growth is nowhere near that of a Frontier Lab, my takeaway is that Workday is here to stay and has a clear position in the agentic business ahead.

Listen up and you may agree with me that SaaS software companies are not going away at all: they may form the basis for the enterprise AI wave ahead.<...

Today I review the various jailbreaks by both OpenAI and Anthropic and the challenges which Frontier Labs are having with AI “alignment.” So in keeping with HR 2030, I share some general advice and stay tuned for our detailed technical paper on this in the coming weeks.

And as we debate the reliability, training, and alignment of models I also point out how the technology industry is struggling to deal with the politics and economics here, since right now most tech leaders really don’t want any form of regulation. (Unless it’s somehow fair to all.) So we, as b...

Today I share some research we’re doing on wages in the inflationary “AI-economy.” While many people are studying the labor market (it’s a huge industry), it’s not hard to see that most wages are not keeping up with inflation, yet some are. As you’ll hear we now see the “Superworker” jobs and roles that are “inflation protected” and we also see the jobs that are declining in value.

I also discuss a new pragmatic approach to corporate AI investment, as well as the slow end of the “SaaSpocalypse” idea. In other words, many of the existing systems...

This week I wade into a global philosophical debate about whether advanced AI systems have consciousness. In other words, are they aware of their feelings and do they truly reflect on their own thoughts?

Well we do know that LLM-based AI systems do “talk to themselves,” as new Anthropic has been studying in the J-Space. We also know that AI bots mimic feelings quite well and they try to tape into our “feelings” through their goal-seeking language which mimics a feeling person.

However as Michael Pollen’s book “A World Appears” points out, consciousness is both subtle an...

I’ve been talking with hundreds of companies about AI and employee issues, and in many ways the entire world of HR, management, and leadership has changed.

Employers are worried about job redesign, AI solutions, skills, and strategic of high-volume hiring. They’re slowing the hiring process, trying to be more strategic about growth, with a frenzied push for productivity. And that word means different things in each industry.

Employees and workers, by contrast, have the lowest level of company commitment in decades. Inflation is robbing people of a sense of personal growth and only 32% of w...

AI-powered recruiting has so much potential, yet job seekers, recruiters, and executives remain frustrated. This massive $100+ billion market is filled with AI systems that work very well, yet as you’ll hear, this market is still immature.

Not only are job seekers increasingly frustrated with their difficulty finding a job, employers are complaining that they’re flooded with fraudulent resumes. And last week we learned in the WSJ that the North Korean government is using AI-fueled recruiting to place fraudulent candidates right into our IT departments.

Plus this week I also found out that the off...

Today I discuss Workday and the potential Silver Lake buyout, Meta’s personal AI strategy and it’s potential for business, update on Galileo, and our new research on frontline work. Most of today’s podcast is “analyst perspectives” but lots of direction is now clear.

The GHRE Global HR Excellence masterclass starts in September: if you want a 12 week in-depth “Masters Degree” level dive into HR, talent, leadership, and AI (with hands-on and new tools), as well as business school level case studies, join us! (Sign up here.)

Additional Information

Mark Zuckerberg blog on person...

The job market is changing in unpredictable ways. Human Resources, a profession often considered optional and filled with bureaucracy, has been a target for AI disruption. Yet when you look at the numbers, HR job postings are growing faster than overall US employment. (details here.)

What’s happening and why this strange trend?

As I discuss in this podcast, we’re now seeing the Superworker effect at scale: HR teams are shifting from administrative to strategic work, now driving direct financial value. And as HR teams learn to use AI, they’re now playing a huge r...

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.

Additional Information

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.”

Additional Information

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

Are Frontier Models Becomi...