The Josh Bersin Company

This has been a big week for the AI industry, NVIDIA, US politics, and our partnership with Workday. In this podcast I give you some bigger historic perspectives on Jensen Huang’s transition, and also explain why this kind of thing happens. I hope this helps you make sense of this exciting, over-hyped industry. Per my many meetings with clients this week, AI is just as transformational as you think – it’s just going to take longer than we hoped to see this technology play out in real-world corporate solutions. In HR, our HR2030® project now has 50+ companies joining in this process, let us know if you’d like to participate. And I could not be more excited about our important partnership with Workday. Read more about it in today’s news release (demo included) and my article with more details. If you want to understand the real business implications of AI on your job, company, and career, read our new book “Superpowered: How AI Unlocks the Superpower of People, Leadership, and Teams,” now available. More Information HR 2030: How AI Superagents Transform HR From Service Delivery to Dynamic Business Enablement The Leader’s Guide To Multi-Agent AI Architecture What is Galileo Jupiter Release And How Does it Integrate with Workday?

This week I give you my perspectives on the business lessons from the Blue Wave elections last week. As you’ll hear, the big message is all about what I call “Citizenship.” We are citizens within our companies, cities, states, and country. Citizens have responsibilities and important roles, seperate from “profit seeking.” And what I’ve learned from my book Irresistible, is that individuals always win at the end. Listen up – this is a series of lessons for us as leaders, workers, job seekers, and professionals. The Blue Wave shows us how individuals eventually rise up to do “the right thing,” and this same lesson applies to our companies. To understand the power of individuals in business, please read my book “Irresistible” and our new book explaining the role of AI in empowering people, “Superpowered.” Big announcement coming later this week. Additional Information Why The Blue Wave Will Be Good for Business, AI, and Tech US Workforce In 2035: A Few More Workers, A Lot More Output Corporate Citizenship Redefined: Trust, Inclusion, and Responsibility

Skills are changing faster than traditional learning models can keep up — especially as AI continuously reshapes jobs and work. For Cisco, a global technology company with more than 80,000 employees, that reality demanded a more agile, strategy-aligned, and unified approach to development. Enter Edge Up: the brand behind Cisco’s bold learning transformation. In this episode, we speak with Marci Paino, Chief Learning Officer at Cisco — a 2026 HR Pacesetter Award winner — about how her team moved from fragmented legacy learning to a unified, AI-powered skilling ecosystem. Marci walks through four key pillars of Cisco’s learning transformation: AI-powered lifelong learning mindset, Cisco’s strategic capabilities, always-on modern learning, and a unified skilling environment. She also shares the results Cisco has seen: from replacing a 20-year-old tech stack three times faster than the industry average to a culture where employees embrace continuous learning. Marci Paino is Cisco’s Chief Learning Officer, driving AI-era workforce readiness for 80,000+ employees and leading the cross-industry AI Workforce Consortium, backed by 20+ years shaping talent development and digital transformation at companies like American Express, Accenture, and Western Digital. We awarded Marci a JBC Pacesetter award in 2026 for her leadership and strong AI-centric focus. If you have an innovative solution you’d like to share, join our Pacesetters Program. Additional Information Download the Pacesetter Research Irresistible 2027: The Global HR Conference for Leaders and Teams (Sign up now: May 17-19, 2027) Research: From Training to Dynamic Enablement Your Learning: The Global HR Excellence Certification Galileo goes Enterprise: The Jupiter Release

More than 70% of US workers are frontline workers and most of our workforce is worried about AI. How do we as a country and we as employers help our people reskill, upskill, and educate themselves as adults? Well Guild, which started its life as a tuition reimbursement management company, has pioneered a new model. By working with employers and credentialed education institutions, Guild gives employers a set of solutions to train, educate, certify, and license people for new, higher paying jobs. For companies in manufacturing, healthcare, airlines, and other regulated sectors Guild also helps “up-license” the technicians and specialists we need. The solution to this problem is complex, and Guild took on this entire problem. The company works with many types of training and learning providers and also provides coaching, career pathways, and their own learning programs to help. For any company looking to fill critical talent gaps with new skills or new licensed workers, Guild is an amazing solution. Guild also focuses on giving employees a new sense of engagement and opportunity. Clients include Amazon, Pepsico, Lowes, and many other large organizations. Bijal explains the market and solution in a comprehensive way, this is a good conversation to help you understand the entire scale of this challenge. She also unlocks some of the secrets of broad reskilling and behavior change programs, including AI transformation. Additional Information Guild Jumps Headfirst Into The Corporate Learning Market The Capability Academy: Where Corporate Training Is Going What Is Task or Work Intelligence And Can We Decompose Every Job For AI? The Global HR Excellence Certification: Learn to be an AI HR Expert

Vijay Swaminathan, co-founder and CEO of Draup, believes the future of workforce planning is not about studying people; it’s about studying work itself. After nearly a decade pioneering talent intelligence, Draup has pivoted toward the most urgent question every enterprise faces: how do you redesign work for the age of AI? In this episode, we sit down with Vijay to find out exactly how this works and why it’s more important today than ever. The centerpiece of this evolution is a new product called Etter — named from Norwegian mythology, meaning “always in pursuit of” — because AI transformation is never finished. Insights from Etter help companies model their workforce not around job titles and skills taxonomies, but around processes, workflows, and tasks, then simulate what AI automation would actually mean for each one — quantifying the opportunity in dollar terms for the CFO. For one hospital client, Draup sized the AI opportunity at $2.6–2.8 billion. The interesting part of this story is that Draup reveals a data problem lurking inside most enterprises: HCM systems are disconnected from where work happens — in ERP, Salesforce, Jira, and other operational systems. Draup closes that gap by integrating across HCMs, operational systems, and an evidence layer built on Microsoft WorkIQ, which captures how people actually spend their time. But all of this is not just a technology exercise: Vijay and his team take a consultative approach to solving customer problems, supported by technology. Vijay argues you cannot redesign work if you only know the skills people have, you have to start with understanding the work itself and then redesigning workflows and processes with the outcomes in mind. We call this dynamic work design. Work intelligence platforms like Etter are becoming a critical part of the HR 2030 architecture, and this new market is growing quickly. It’s important to learn about solutions like Draup as you build your AI transformation strategy. Additional Information What Is Task or Work Intelligence And Can We Decompose Every Job For AI? Introducing HR 2030: A Vision For Agentic Human Resources How To Take A Pragmatic (and winning) Approach To Skills AI Transformation From the Frontlines (pod)