Josh Bersin

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

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)

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Economy and the Stock Market
(00:02:33) - Some Companies Are Reducing Employee Benefits
(00:08:17) - The Role of Managers
(00:12:59) - The Legacy of Salesforce, Workday
(00:18:54) - Want to pitch your AI Stories? Here!

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

Chapters

(00:00:03) - What Works: The Future of Talent
(00:00:40) - Interview: Tim Best on Recruit Military's AI
(00:03:27) - What Recruit Military Jobs?
(00:05:21) - David Furnace, Head of Veteran Talent at HR Tech
(00:08:32) - The Veteran Talent Source
(00:15:57) - Veteran Recruitment Tech
(00:17:04) - What's The Challenge of AI at Work?
(00:19:39) - What lessons learned would you share with employers about AI and the role
(00:22:03) - Machine Learning and the Veteran Talent Market
(00:24:26) - What Works With Recruit Military

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 it marks the beginning of a very new chapter for Workday as a business.

Additional Information

Experience Sana for Yourself: Galileo Mars Release

Irresistible 2026: The Global Conference for HR Leaders and their Teams (June 8-10, USC)

HR 2030: The Agentic Future of HR (detailed handbook coming!)

Detailed Article on Workday

 

Chapters

(00:00:00) - The Reinvention of Workday
(00:07:17) - The Future of Application Development with Generative AI
(00:10:33) - Agents and the AI future
(00:18:57) - Employee Experience: A Vision for the Future

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 Workday’s story compelling, but it’s not the only option out there.

On the news side, we saw the “pre-layoffs” of 10% of all Meta employees, elimination of family benefits at Deloitte and Zoom, and some amazingly creepy surveillance at Meta’s AI group. I review all this and try to give you some context.

As you listen I encourage you to read our 2026 Enterprise AI Imperatives and the preview of HR 2030, our in-depth look at where AI in HR is going. An in-depth review of Workday’s new AI strategy is coming this next week.

Additional Resources

Meta Employees React to Massive Layoffs to Come

Deloitte and Zoom Take the Lead in Slashing the Most Coveted Benefits

The week that Meta employees became training data

Why AI Is A Massive Job-Creation Technology, Despite What You Think

Workday and Sana Unveil A Bold New Strategy For AI

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Enterprise AI: Where we are?
(00:02:10) - Workday's AI push with Sana
(00:09:53) - WSJD Live: The Workday World
(00:11:10) - Agent Companies: What to Avoid
(00:13:36) - Microsoft's Layoffs, and More
(00:18:07) - Facebook's Surveillance of Employees

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 where they are.

SNHU is no ordinary university. As one of the largest and most innovative higher education institutions in the United States, it has built its reputation on making education accessible to learners who the traditional system has often left behind: working adults, career changers, veterans, and underserved communities. Rob’s role as VP for AI sits squarely at the intersection of that mission and the most consequential technological shift of our time.

Rob and Kathi discuss what it really means to deploy AI with humans at the center, and what that demands of institutions, leaders, and learners alike. The conversation moves through the practical and the philosophical: How do you design AI experiences that honor the dignity and complexity of every individual? What does skills-based, AI-enabled learning look like for someone who has never had access to it before? And what can higher education teach the corporate world about building AI that actually serves people rather than simply processing them?

If you’re a CHRO, CIO, learning leader, or business executive wondering how to move beyond pilots and hype, this conversation will show you what responsible, scalable AI adoption really looks like—and how to get started in your own organization.

Related resources

Podcast: The Rise Of The Supermanager – JOSH BERSIN

Research: AI Pacesetters: Six Secrets Of The Superworker Company – JOSH BERSIN

New Certificate Course in Galileo Learn: AI in L&D

Get Galileo: The AI Superagent for You

Chapters

(00:00:03) - What Works in the Future of Work
(00:00:40) - How Southern New Hampshire University Is Taking a Human Approach to AI
(00:02:58) - How to Apply AI at Southern New Hampshire University
(00:07:49) - Southern New Hampshire University's 4-Stage AI Adoption Model
(00:14:16) - One of the issues around AI governance
(00:19:13) - Employee Experience and AI in the People Team
(00:21:43) - WSJD Live: The AI Policy
(00:23:32) - In the Elevator With Provost Rob Ferguson
(00:24:06) - What Works In Education? With Rob McAuslan