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Organizations are racing to become AI-native, but many of the changes now described as AI transformation have very little to do with AI. Customer centricity, outcome-based work, fluid talent, faster decision-making, continuous planning, and flatter organizational structures were already characteristics of high-performing companies. Leaders knew these changes mattered long before generative AI arrived.

In Episode 9 of The Edge of Now, Jason Averbook and Jess Von Bank examine what AI has actually changed. It has created urgency. It has exposed management practices that are more than a century old. It has made it harder for organizations to defend annual planning cycles, rigid hierarchies, static roles, and technology decisions that begin with a vendor announcement rather than a business outcome.

Jason and Jess also look ahead to conference season, when technology announcements arrive faster than most leaders can evaluate them. They offer a practical filter: determine whether an announcement represents a real product or merely market direction, look for customer-zero evidence, and return to the organization’s own business strategy before changing the roadmap.

AI did not create the need to transform. It removed many of the excuses for waiting.

Episode Highlights

• Why many “AI-native” work practices were already essential to high-performing organizations
• What prevented companies from transforming before AI created a new sense of urgency
• Why change accelerates when people and institutions feel forced against a wall
• How century-old management practices continue to shape modern organizations
• Why annual budgeting, static succession planning, and rigid spans of control deserve renewed scrutiny
• What leaders should measure instead of tool usage and adoption
• Why AI will struggle inside organizations that preserve outdated ways of working
• How HR, IT, and business leaders can stop competing for ownership of the moment
• How to separate a real product from a conference-season press release
• Why a vendor roadmap should never become the starting point for business strategy
• What customer-zero and early-mover evidence can teach organizations about what is already possible

About Jason & Jess

Jason Averbook

Jason Averbook has spent more than 30 years shaping HR technology and workforce transformation. His career includes leadership roles at PeopleSoft and Ceridian, co-founding and leading Knowledge Infusion from 2005 to 2012, serving as CEO of The Marcus Buckingham Company, and co-founding and leading Leapgen from 2018 to 2023. After serving as Mercer’s Global HR Transformation Leader, he co-founded Now to Next to help leaders prepare people and organizations for an AI-shaped world.

Jess Von Bank

Jess Von Bank brings more than 20 years of experience across recruiting, talent strategy, employer branding, HR technology, and workforce transformation. She began as a recruiting practitioner before moving into leadership roles focused on bringing workforce solutions to market, including global HR transformation and technology advisory work at Mercer. She is now co-founder of Now to Next, where she combines industry expertise, community building, storytelling, and a human-centered perspective on change.

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Jason Averbook
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonaverbook/
X: https://x.com/jasonaverbook
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Most organizations are preparing to apply new intelligence to old processes, old roles, and old organizational structures. That may produce faster work, but it will not necessarily produce better work.

In Episode 8 of The Edge of Now, Jason Averbook and Jess Von Bank examine why this moment demands more than another round of upgrades. Talent acquisition, learning, talent management, and workforce planning have spent years operating as separate functions, often because the technology and data required those divisions. Now that people can access intelligence more directly, the technology is no longer the only constraint. The operating model, organizational mindset, and willingness to let go may be the larger barriers.

Jason asks whether some HR functions have become too old for another app update and need a new phone instead. Jess introduces a sharper mandate: do not automatically rip and replace. Rip and retire. Before automating a workflow, protecting a job, or buying another platform, leaders should ruthlessly question whether it still belongs in the organization they are trying to build.

This is a conversation about the difference between protecting jobs and protecting people, why interruption is a leadership capability, and what organizations must be willing to leave behind before AI accelerates everything they have already built.

Episode Highlights

• Why talent acquisition’s early exposure to AI created both fear of job loss and new optimism about a more strategic talent role
• Why labels such as talent acquisition, talent management, and talent development may reinforce the silos leaders say they want to eliminate
• How direct access to workforce data can change who produces insights and who is empowered to act on them
• Why technology has caught up, but organizational structures and mindsets still stand in the way
• Whether established HR functions can keep updating old systems or need to start with a clean operating model
• Why meaningful transformation can require closing the kitchen while continuing to serve the business
• The difference between incremental upgrades and exponential change
• Why leaders should retire obsolete work before replacing systems or automating workflows
• Why protecting people does not mean preserving every job exactly as it exists today
• How leaders can create a culture in which questioning an established process is expected, not punished
• Why 2027 could become the year organizations stop buying and start interrogating what they already have

About Jason & Jess

Jason Averbook

Jason Averbook has spent more than 30 years shaping HR technology and workforce transformation. His career includes leadership roles at PeopleSoft and Ceridian, co-founding and leading Knowledge Infusion from 2005 to 2012, serving as CEO of The Marcus Buckingham Company, and co-founding and leading Leapgen from 2018 to 2023. After serving as Mercer’s Global HR Transformation Leader, he co-founded Now to Next to help leaders prepare people and organizations for an AI-shaped world.

Jess Von Bank

Jess Von Bank brings more than 20 years of experience across recruiting, talent strategy, employer branding, HR technology, and workforce transformation. She began as a recruiting practitioner before moving into leadership roles focused on bringing workforce solutions to market, including global HR transformation and technology advisory work at Mercer. She is now co-founder of Now to Next, where she combines industry expertise, community building, storytelling, and a human-centered perspective on change.

Stay Connected:

Jason Averbook
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonaverbook/
X: https://x.com/jasonaverbook
Substack: https://jasonaverbook.substac...

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AI leaders are debating whether development should slow down, but most organizations have barely begun to absorb the capabilities that already exist. The real enterprise problem may not be an adoption gap. It may be an adaptability gap.

In Episode 7 of The Edge of Now, Jason Averbook and Jess Von Bank examine why individual productivity gains are not reaching the P&L, what a pause in frontier development should mean for business leaders, and why agents need accountable human managers before they need names or places on the org chart.

The episode asks leaders to stop chasing headlines and start redesigning work around their own outcomes. AI may be the most powerful amplifier organizations have encountered, but humans must remain responsible for deciding what it should do, how it is governed, and where it stops.

Episode Highlights

• Why the familiar “adoption gap” is better understood as an adaptability gap.
• Why individual AI productivity gains are not automatically producing enterprise value.
• What organizations should do if frontier AI development pauses.
• Why stopping AI advancement today would still leave businesses years behind existing capability.
• How leaders can distinguish AI at work from the risks associated with superintelligence.
• Why work redesign and operating-model change matter more than chasing the latest model.
• What “twilight organizations” could look like when AI performs most tasks and humans supervise critical work.
• Why every AI agent needs an accountable human manager before it needs a name.
• Who should be responsible for an agent’s performance, learning, quality, and outputs.
• Why humans must remain at the helm, not merely somewhere in the loop.

About Jason & Jess

Jason Averbook

Jason Averbook has spent more than 30 years shaping HR technology and workforce transformation. His career includes leadership roles at PeopleSoft and Ceridian, co-founding and leading Knowledge Infusion from 2005 to 2012, serving as CEO of The Marcus Buckingham Company, and co-founding and leading Leapgen from 2018 to 2023. After serving as Mercer’s Global HR Transformation Leader, he co-founded Now to Next to help leaders prepare people and organizations for an AI-shaped world.

Jess Von Bank

Jess Von Bank brings more than 20 years of experience across recruiting, talent strategy, employer branding, HR technology, and workforce transformation. She began as a recruiting practitioner before moving into leadership roles focused on bringing workforce solutions to market, including global HR transformation and technology advisory work at Mercer. She is now co-founder of Now to Next, where she combines industry expertise, community building, storytelling, and a human-centered perspective on change.

Stay Connected:

Jason Averbook
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonaverbook/
X: https://x.com/jasonaverbook
Substack: https://jasonaverbook.substac...