How HR Can Lead the AI Revolution (Before It’s Too Late)
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, Josh Bersin, Global Industry Analyst and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, breaks down the AI revolution transforming HR and the workforce.
Josh explains how AI is creating the era of the “Superworker” - empowering employees to do more, learn faster, and take on higher-value roles. He reveals why HR must lead the AI agenda, how to frame AI as a growth opportunity (not a threat), and what it takes to build a culture of continuous reinvention instead of one-time transformation.
From rethinking job structures to designing intelligent employee experiences with digital agents, this episode uncovers what forward-thinking CHROs are doing to turn fear into curiosity and shape the human future of AI at work.
🎓 In this episode, Josh discusses:
How AI is creating the Superworker era
How to build a culture of curiosity, not fear
Why HR must move from projects to continuous reinvention
The importance of framing AI as empowerment, not replacement
The impact of AI-driven agents like Galileo on employee experience
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Chris Rainey 0:00
You, Josh, welcome back to the show, my friend. How you doing? Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Yeah, great. Well, it's always good to see you. You've already been on stage, or you're going to close. You're closing the show. Just finish. Just finish. Yeah, pretty much closing the show. Then, yeah. What are you what are you hearing on the from everyone here at unleash? What's kind of Top
Josh Bersin 0:31
of Mind? I would say there's a massive amount of passion and energy and confusion about what to do in the AI agenda, because AI is such a reinvention type of technology that most HR departments are really struggling to figure out where to apply it and how to really get leverage. But it's picking up speed. And of course, the vendor market is filled with things, yeah. So lots and lots of opportunities for people to learn about
Chris Rainey 1:04
this stuff. It seems like there's a lot of fear around AI.
Josh Bersin 1:07
There is, you know, I had a big meeting yesterday with a bunch of companies. People are worried about losing their jobs. They're worried about the AI making mistakes, and they're worried about the impact of AI on the quality of their services. And you know what I say to them is certainly the way we see it is AI is an empowering technology to create what we call the Super worker. And so if we teach people how to use it and we let them explore, by the way, it takes time, you can't learn it by taking a course, yeah, and let them explore on the opportunity to add value. Then all of a sudden, everybody starts to realize this isn't eliminating my job. It's allowing me to do more and maybe have a new role or add more value in new ways. That's really where it's going. The problem is we have these job titles and job structures and traditional business processes that need to be reinvented. And then in terms of the fear of AI, you know, the event, for some reason, the AI tech people seem to like to talk about, you know, how AI is going to ruin the planet. I don't see that happening. I think it's about, you know, managing the data well and making sure that each company puts, you know, takes it, takes care of the training, the systems well, and that the vendors stay responsible and work closely with their clients. So I think we're going to get past that, but there's a lot of uncertainty in the workforce in general about it. Yeah, one
Chris Rainey 2:36
of the themes that's been coming up, I interviewed 15 CHROs yesterday, and a common theme was around how AI is reshaping the people strategy itself, and what does it take for HR to balance innovation with AI and humanity? So I'd love to get your thoughts on that.
Josh Bersin 2:55
Well, yeah. I mean, I really think if you, if you take the sort of message that we have of the super worker, if you think of AI as a way to improve the performance and engagement and Capacity and Productivity of each person, and that each person has now the capability of delivering 810, 15 times More, whatever that is, they're doing that is not threatening. If you go to your company and say, We want you all to improve your productivity by 30% because we're going to reduce head count, well, everybody's going to get nervous, and they're going to get scared. So a lot of this is how you frame it, and then allowing the organization to be more flexible. So as productivity is improved, people find themselves in new roles. That's, you know, kind of a cultural thing that some companies are good at and some companies are not, yeah, and I think, you know, getting making sure that not only the CHRO, but the CEO and the CFO communicates that message, then you build energy in the organization to find new applications of AI, as opposed to fear in the organization, where people are sort of afraid to touch it and they're not sure what's going to happen, and, yeah, they don't feel like there are experts and so forth.
Chris Rainey 4:13
Yeah, what does this mean for the employee experience, and how it's going to shape that?
Josh Bersin 4:18
Well, I mean, the big struggle in employee experience is finding the right information, getting answers to a question, solving a problem, getting hold of HR, getting the manager to help them. And you know, if you really build an agent strategy with a well designed agent for your employees, they can go to the agent and ask good questions. I mean, our agent, Galileo is basically a digital business partner, digital HR business partner. We just have to get to the point where we've deployed enough of those things. Yeah, and you know that from a cost saving standpoint, I've talked to companies that spend $100 million a year maintaining their HR portal for their employees. That number. Want to go down, that number is going to go down by a factor of 10.
Chris Rainey 5:03
Yeah, yeah. 100% what do you think that people aren't talking about enough, but they really should be.
Josh Bersin 5:11
I think the biggest, I mean, we've been doing it for two and a half years in our company. I think the biggest thing that maybe people don't understand yet is, this is a this is an exploring process. It's not you buy it and it does x, and you're done. The technology keeps getting better and doing more. So we have to be in the continuous reinvention mindset. And I think HR people are beginning to understand that. But the old model is I go out and I and I buy SAP or whatever, and I implement it, and I train people on it, and I'm done. And people you know, often say to me, we did our ERP, as if it's done. This is not like that.
Chris Rainey 6:00
Yeah, no worries. Where can people learn more about Galileo
Josh Bersin 6:05
connect with well, you can go to Galileo at get galileo.ai get galileo.ai as our main website. Or go to our website, joshperson.com we actually have a promotion for Galileo that if people sign up for next year's unleash, or if they get on the list for next year's unleash. They can get a 90 day free trial of Galileo. So we just started that today. And, you know, I'm pretty easy to find
Chris Rainey 6:30
before we let you go. Yeah. What advice would you give to all of the HR leaders listening that are going to be sitting in a chro seat very soon? There's a lot of a lot.
Josh Bersin 6:38
Well, for everybody that's, you know, moving into senior level leadership in HR, this, this AI issue, is going to bring together everything you've learned, engagement, skills development, culture, management, development, empowerment, data management, security, privacy, All of these independent domains of HR, in some sense, come together during this AI agenda. So and you have to sort of get rid of the imposter syndrome that you don't know how to do this. Nobody knows how to do it. That's a good everybody's learning.
Chris Rainey 7:17
Yeah, listen, I appreciate you coming as always. Thank you. Thanks so much. Appreciate you.
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Josh Bersin, Global Industry Analyst and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company.