The Josh Bersin Company

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!

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

 

Chapters

(00:00:03) - Time to Hire and Quality of Hire
(00:02:52) - The Longer Time to Hire
(00:07:29) - Time to Hire: The Business Case
(00:13:53) - How to Manage AI in Restaurants
(00:16:42) - The $64,000 Question
(00:18:54) - Is AI Affecting the Job Interview?
(00:21:40) - The Future of Managers
(00:24:46) - Management Technology: The Problem
(00:26:10) - Frontline Workers: Flexibility Is Key
(00:30:24) - Good Hires vs. Bad Hires
(00:32:05) - Employee retention and break-even points
(00:34:54) - Fooling around with React: Explained

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

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Building a Talent Portal in the Age of AI
(00:09:46) - Will Businesses Reboot Their Processes With RPA?
(00:10:47) - Build vs. Buy in the HR world

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

Chapters

(00:00:00) - AI and the Job Market
(00:07:43) - The future of IT spending on AI
(00:16:29) - The Future of Work and Human Talent

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

Chapters

(00:00:00) - ServiceNow's AI Announcement
(00:01:04) - ServiceNow's Sprawl of AI Agents
(00:03:42) - ServiceNow vs. Workday: The AI Control Tower
(00:13:10) - WSJD HR 2030: The Agent Roadmap