Josh Bersin

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 an “investment” not an expense, and how high performing companies actually reward their workers in exceptional ways. It’s a complex topic and one that’s about to become more “systemic” and real-time with AI, so consider this some background to give you food for thought as more and more employees demand raises and accommodations for the high cost of living. Additional Background Why Has Cost of Living Become The #1 Issue In The US? It’s More Complex Than Inflation The Rise of the Supermanager Benchmark Your Pay Practices With Galileo: The AI Superagent for HR

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 lot to share. Additional Information The World Is Accelerating: What Has Changed About Leadership? Organization Design: The Real Secret To Growth The Big Reset Playbook: Organizational Culture & Performance    

What if every talent process you ran was AI-enhanced — not to replace what you do, but to make decisions even smarter? 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 the right stage of company growth. That’s a level of targeting precision that data accuracy and explainability make possible, and that simply wasn’t achievable before AI. But here is where Matt’s perspective gets truly compelling. AI is often framed as a speed tool, a way to do things faster and more efficiently. Matt pushes back hard on that narrative: AI should make your hiring better, not just quicker. And in the startup world, that distinction is everything.  Every hire at a 10-person company changes the organization by 10% — so getting it right matters far more than getting it done. That is the essence of talent density: finding exactly the right people for where your company is and where it needs to go, rather than simply finding people fast. His advice to HR and talent leaders is as practical as it is powerful: fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Start with the outcome you need to achieve, then let technology enable it — never the other way around. If you have ever wondered what a truly AI-augmented talent strategy looks like when it is built with intention, depth, and relentless focus on talent density, this one’s for you. Related resources Podcast: Why AI Is A Massive Job Creation Technology. Automated Integration. Findem. And Thank You. Podcast: Understanding Talent Density And Ditching Integrated Talent Management Research: Insights-First AI: Better and Explainable People Decisions Research: The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI is Transforming Recruiting Research: How To Create Talent Density    

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 monitor, tune, and optimize all areas of recruiting in one place. Second, Korn Ferry, as a leader in executive search and talent management services (including training offerings), sees enormous synergies and can add AMS’s revenue and $1.5 Billion backlog to their financial strength. While KF was not growing much, this gives the company a new growth platform – including the opportunity to use AMS’s global service centers for other offerings. This podcast is an overview of the deal, we’ll publish more after we get a briefing from KF’s management team. Additional Information History of Korn Ferry Acquisitions The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI Is Transforming Recruitment The Josh Bersin Institute Global HR Excellence Certification (inaugural cohort starts in September) Understanding Agentic HR In Detail: The HR 2030 Vision and Architecture      

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 Becoming A Commodity? Satya Nadella Agrees That Frontier AI May Have Peaked HR 2030: The Reference Blueprint for Agentic HR (sign up for info) HR 2030 New Course in Galileo Learn The Global HR Excellence Certification (GHRE) Get Galileo: The AI Superagent for HR

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, turning them into “business enablement” functions working directly in the business. We discuss how Polestar has done this in detail. Rita is an experienced L&D leader (having lead training at Klarna) and has worked at Sana since the company had only 30 employees, so she has a wealth of knowledge and experience in AI transformation in L&D. PS: We are customers of Sana (Galileo Learn is built on Sana, and our new Global HR Excellence Certification is built on Sana), so we can speak to its features in detail if you’re interested. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to the Podcast and Guest 01:44 The Revolution in Learning and Development 03:30 Sana’s Position in the Learning Market 05:53 Understanding Sana Learning’s Unique Features 07:08 The Future of Learning: Proactive vs. Reactive 09:11 Case Study: Polestar’s Learning Approach 12:47 User Experience and Integration in Learning 14:07 The Role of AI Tutors in Learning 16:07 Dynamic Skills Assessment in Learning 18:42 The Shift in L&D Responsibilities 21:35 Empowering Subject Matter Experts 24:25 Managing Content Creation and Quality 27:18 The Future of Learning and Change Management 31:02 Advice for Organizations Exploring Learning Solutions   Additional Information The AI Native Revolution in Corporate Learning (research) Our new Corporate Learning Maturity Model HR 2030: The New Role, Operating Model, and Tech Stack for HR Get Galileo: Experience Sana Yourself!

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 others” to create solutions. And the new usage-based pricing is forcing this kind of pragmatic thinking. In this podcast I highlight this “commoditization” of core AI features and explain why your “problem identification” work is perhaps the biggest effort in the HR 2030 Agentic HR strategy. (Take our new HR 2030 course or sign up for our new Global HR Excellence Certification.) Additional Information Is AI A “Normal” Technology? The Rise of the Supermanager Our New Book Superpowered, Coming This Fall! New Course: Galileo Is Ready To Teach You What You Need to Know about HR 2030    

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 needed. (No more “playing around” in corporate systems.) Second, the market is exploding with innovation, forcing you to stay educated on the architectural and vendor issues. Third, your ongoing skills and education are critical to your new HR operating model, tools, and process decisions. Culture and leadership are more important than ever. Additional Information HR 2030 Blueprint and Vision (register here for ongoing updates) The New Global HR Excellence Certification by The Josh Bersin Institute Get Galileo: The Everything Superagent for HR (coming soon to MS copilot)  

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 need. And our new research on Galileo business modeling is starting to pan this out. Now that AI prices are high, we all have to look for bigger use-cases for agents. In this podcast I explain what “Dynamic Enablement for Growth” really means and how LLMs only take us so far, with a new frontier yet to come. As always I welcome opinions and feedback on this thesis. Additional Information To Come…. Get Galileo and see business modeling in action. The New Global HR Excellence Certification – Join the Inaugural Cohort! HR 2030: Time to Reinvent HR Around Agents  

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 stuff quickly), as well as my heartfelt thanks to everyone who participated. (PS a small set of data from our AI Excellence study, available to Galileo users.) Additional Information Announcements: The Josh Bersin Institute, HR 2030, And The Global HR Excellence Certification. HR 2030: Overview and Detailed Blueprint for clients and Galileo Users AI Prices Are Going Up, Up, Up – And What This Means For Enterprise AI

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      

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 future. And in a world where CEOs believe automation will eliminate many of their workers, HR’s job is not to fight the trend, but rather accelerate it. And the result will be business growth, new career opportunities, and plenty of new jobs. This coming week at Irresistible 2026 we launch HR 2030 and also The Josh Bersin Institute, a new education and credentialing business to prepare every HR professional, HR leader, consultant, and HR vendor to learn and thrive in this new world. All the details are coming this week. I welcome your comments on this topic and I look forward to seeing our 450+ attendees at Irresistible on Monday at USC in Los Angeles. Additional Information HR 2030: Program Details (video) HR 2030: Explained Why AI Is A Massive Job-Creation Technology, Despite What You Think The HR-Ification Of The Democratic Party (The Atlantic)

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 geek this information is important because the way you focus your attention on AI has to change. We launch HR 2030 and the Josh Bersin Institute next week, stay tuned! Additional Information AI Prices Are Going Up, Up, Up – And What This Means For Enterprise AI Satya Nadella Keynote at Build (go to 1:45 for Frontier Fine Tuning announcement) Jensen Huang DTC Keynote in Taiwan More on Microsoft Frontier Fine Tuning for Copilot    

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. Additional Information (Note that all our research and podcasts are in Galileo) AI Prices Are Going Up, Up, Up – And What This Means For Enterprise AI The Reinvention of Workday: From System of Record to Platform of Agents Could Microsoft Win The War For Enterprise AI? The AI vs. Labor Economy, Why Benefits Are Being Cut, The Role of Legacy Systems The Context Layer (Semantic Layer) In Enterprise AI (And Where Business Rules Go) Jensen Huang’s Taipei Speech (filled with this jargon) The Superagent for HR: Galileo Mars Release

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 get Galileo, our amazing AI platform, which serves as “me” – you can ask it any question and it answers, guides you, and helps you learn and solve problems. By the way we’re going to be demonstrating some groundbreaking new Galileo capabilities at Irresistible, including the ability to load your entire company model. This means you can model a reorganization, redeployment, upskilling, flattening, or AI transformation for your team, business, or company – even looking at pay inequities and more. Those of you coming will see this in action. (Galileo Suite is only $79 a month or $795 a year.) The “bag of doorknobs” phrase is one I learned as a software guy, it refers to the mess we create when we buy 140 employee systems and then add 500 new agents without an architectural strategy. Additional Information AI Prices Are Going Up, Up, Up – And What This Means For Enterprise AI HR 2030: The Vision for Agentic HR Hits Reality Get Galileo, The Everything HR AI Ready For You  

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 people work, but how they understand the value they bring.  Rather than letting 30,000 people go and rehiring AI specialists, Laurent and his team made a bold choice: there will always be a human in the loop. That principle became the foundation of everything — the cultural compass that kept employees from fearing the future and turned anxiety into engagement. The numbers tell the story. Among employees who went through Orange Business’s reskilling and upskilling programs, employee Net Promoter Scores shot from a modest +8 to a remarkable +41. Over 90% of the company’s workforce is now trained in generative AI, and more than 60% use it as a regular part of their daily work.  AI certifications became a business objective on par with financial targets, and the company won contracts specifically because clients knew their teams had the credentials to back up their pitch. But perhaps the most powerful insight Laurent shares is about learning. In the AI era, learning is no longer a one-time investment or a classroom event; it is a continuous business capability, and it must be embedded into the rhythm of everyday work. Orange Business’s YouTime initiative — dedicating three hours per month per employee to learning — changed the entire mindset of the organization. Paired with an 11,000-member internal generative AI community, it created the kind of grassroots momentum that no top-down mandate ever could. Laurent’s advice to CHROs and HR leaders: stay humble, keep experimenting, and never let technology outpace your people. Related resources Podcast: Why AI Is A Massive Job Creation Technology. Automated Integration. Findem. And Thank You.  The Superworker Organization: AI Goes Enterprise AI Pacesetters: Six Secrets Of The Superworker Company  The Age of the Superworker (and Supermanager) Get Galileo: The AI Superagent for HR  

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. Additional Information 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 Productive Than You Thought

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 about as this technology permeates our lives and businesses. (And I recommend Geoffrey Hinton’s discussion for a listen.) Speaker Role / affiliation listed Tyler Cowen Economist and author Geoffrey Hinton Computer scientist and “Godfather of AI” Anton Osika Co-Founder, Lovable Lauren Crichton Vice President, Sana Benjamín Labatut Writer Aneel Bhusri Co-founder, CEO and Chair, Workday Jasmine Sun Tech anthropologist Joel Hellermark Founder and CEO, Sana Sara Imari Walker Astrobiologist Ethan Mollick Professor of Entrepreneurship Anu Atluru Essayist and technologist

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 like a junior staff member, you have to coach and train it. Additional Information Introducing HR 2030: A Vision For Agentic Human Resources Agentic HR: Where Enterprise AI Is Going – Imperatives  Why AI Is A Massive Job-Creation Technology, Despite What You Think The Age of the Superworker (and Supermanager) Get Galileo: The AI Superagent for HR

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 Cornerstone Launches Its Reinvention, Helping to Redefine Corporate Learning Get Galileo: The Everything HR AI Agent for HR and Leaders  

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 jobs, I think you’ll find this inspiring and positive for the future. We’re living in a very disruptive time, and your perspectives on the “system of life” and “system of work” is one of the most valuable capabilities you build over time. I’ll be talking much more about this in New York this week, and I hope to see many of you there or at Irresistible in June. Have a wonderful weekend and I hope this podcast gives you new perspectives you can use in your life as a professional, HR leader, manager, or parent. Additional Information Irresistible 2026: The Global HR Conference for Leaders and their Teams – join us! Liberal Arts Colleges in Crisis: Long Live Liberal Arts (Bloomberg) Introducing HR 2030: A Vision For Agentic Human Resources Everything We Know About HR and Leadership: Get Galileo, the AI Superagent for HR  

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. Interestingly enough, well designed AI platforms for frontline hiring have a massive return on investment.  As Nehal explains, frontline hiring is very complicated, and fewer than 25% of companies have figured this out. Lots of room for innovation and AI tools to help! This podcast will open your eyes. Additional Information Powering the Frontline Workforce: How Frontline-First Companies Thrive The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI is Transforming Recruiting Why AI Is A Massive Job Creation Technology. Automated Integration. Findem. And Thank You. Insights-First AI: Better and Explainable People Decisions  

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 build and what should you buy? In this podcast I explain some of the considerations here and warn you that A) this is not as “easy” as it looks, and B) in a corporate setting you may want to think twice before you embark on a major replacement on your own. On the other hand, fire up Cowork or another tool and build your own personal agent, as long as your data security is in place. Lots of experimentation ahead and we will introduce you to companies that have built dozens of amazing HR agents at Irresistible 2026. Additional Information (Note that all our research and podcasts are at your fingertips in Galileo) The Reinvention of Workday: From System of Record to Platform of Agents ServiceNow Bets Big on Enterprise AI With Vision of Managing Everything Could Microsoft Win The War For Enterprise AI? The AI vs. Labor Economy, Why Benefits Are Being Cut, The Role of Legacy Systems The Context Layer (Semantic Layer) In Enterprise AI (And Where Business Rules Go) The Superagent for HR: Galileo Mars Release

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 story is clear to me: we’re in the early stage of a multi-trillion dollar redesign and reinvention of our companies, employee experiences, and customer experiences – all moving to a model we call “Dynamic Enablement.” Despite this direction, the products are new and immature, so there’s lots of risk-investment to undertake. In this podcast I give HR and IT buyers our experience with AI projects so far, and show you that a focus on near-term use-cases is the best way to proceed. As they say, you can only eat an elephant “one bite at a time.” Just as mainframe transformation took decades, so will AI transformation take time (albeit less time!). So invest wisely and you’ll see tremendously positive ROI quickly. Finally let me offer our help. We’ve already helped dozens of companies build high ROI AI solutions in recruiting, training, enablement, and employee experience. Watch for more in our HR 2030 program to stay in touch. Additional Information (Note that all our research and podcasts are at your fingertips in Galileo) The Reinvention of Workday: From System of Record to Platform of Agents Could Microsoft Win The War For Enterprise AI? ServiceNow Bets Big on Enterprise AI With Vision of Managing Everything The AI vs. Labor Economy, Why Benefits Are Being Cut, The Role of Legacy Systems The Superagent for HR: Galileo Mars Release

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 explains why enterprise software companies are far from dead. In fact, the monetization model here is for you to pay for AI credits (ServiceNow has different levels of usage) and that revenue, which helps ServiceNow grow, is offset by your reduction in labor cost. It’s all explained in this article and the podcast, and the implications are big for IT, HR software companies, and all of you trying to build AI solutions for your team. Additional Information (Note that all our research and podcasts are at your fingertips in Galileo) The Reinvention of Workday: From System of Record to Platform of Agents Could Microsoft Win The War For Enterprise AI? The AI vs. Labor Economy, Why Benefits Are Being Cut, The Role of Legacy Systems The Context Layer (Semantic Layer) In Enterprise AI (And Where Business Rules Go) The Superagent for HR: Galileo Mars Release

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, putting out fires, and keeping our streets safe. UKG’s mission is to make their work lives better through better scheduling, pay, benefits, hiring, and training systems – all in an integrated offering called “The Workforce Operating Platform.” Built through the merger of Kronos with Ultimate Software in 2020, UKG has pioneered this groundbreaking integrated solution. UKG has more than 80,000 customers and serves more than 65 million workers every day. And its software and tools support and monitor much of their daily lives at work, so Jen knows a lot about what it takes to run what we call a “Frontline First” company. I know you’ll enjoy this conversation, and stay tuned for our new research on the Dynamics Of The Frontline, coming this month. Additional Information UKG Stakes Out Leadership Position In $6.5 Trillion Market For Frontline Work Powering the Frontline Workforce: How Frontline-First Companies Thrive Josh Bersin Company Highlights Cost of Neglecting Frontline Workers Get Galileo, The AI Superagent for HR

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 the massive AI economic transformation we’re living in. It’s all good and one of the most exciting times in our careers. Additional Information Why AI Is A Massive Job-Creation Technology, Despite What You Think The Great Decoupling: How Employees Became Disconnected From Their Companies Introducing HR 2030: A Vision For Agentic Human Resources The Reinvention of Workday: From System of Record to Platform of Agents The Superagent for HR: Galileo Mars Release Irresistible 2026: The Global Conference for HR Leaders and their Teams (June 8-10, USC)

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 flatness is the enemy. The technology RecruitMilitary built with Findem, the Veteran Talent Source, solves this by giving recruiters a three-dimensional view of who a candidate actually is: not just what they did, but what they’ve continuously become. Because profiles are enriched in real time, the candidate in someone’s ATS today is not the candidate from 25 years ago – and the AI knows the difference. The results are outstanding. In 2025, RecruitMilitary created over 600,000 connections between employers and military community job seekers. The hyper-personalized outreach campaigns powered by the Veteran Talent Source are generating email open rates of 80–90% and click-through rates five times higher than industry norms. These aren’t just efficiency gains but create a fundamentally better experience for veterans, who have long lived with the frustration of applying and never hearing back. Tim’s vision is for veterans inundated with recruiters who understand them, not spam from algorithms that don’t. But Tim’s ambitions go further than better sourcing. He wants veteran hiring to stop being a special project that lives in a corner of the TA function and instead become a normal part of a recruiter’s everyday workflow, all made possible by AI. Looking ahead to the agentic AI era, Tim sees the next leap: intelligent job posting and agent-driven delivery that reduces friction between “here’s my job description” and “here are the right people to talk to” to (almost) nothing. This conversation is essential listening for anyone in talent acquisition who wants to understand how AI creates new business value, not just faster versions of the old model. Related resources Podcast: Why AI Is A Massive Job Creation Technology. Automated Integration. Findem. And Thank You. Research: Insights-First AI: Better and Explainable People Decisions Research: The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI is Transforming Recruiting