Workday’s Q2 2027 earnings were a pivot point, showing how Workday has shifted to its “AI-Forward Future.” The company reported $600 Million of new AI revenue and a clear and confident position in the market.

While Workday’s 12.8% YTY revenue growth is nowhere near that of a Frontier Lab, my takeaway is that Workday is here to stay and has a clear position in the agentic business ahead.

Listen up and you may agree with me that SaaS software companies are not going away at all: they may form the basis for the enterprise AI wave ahead.

Additional Information

Introducing HR 2030: A Vision For Agentic Human Resources

Workday Reports Higher Profit, Revenue on AI Agent Adoption

Galileo: All our Research and Much Much More

• (00:00:00) - SaaS vs. AI Software: Will SaaS Replace
• (00:05:49) - SANA and Workday: The Enterprise Connection

Today I review the various jailbreaks by both OpenAI and Anthropic and the challenges which Frontier Labs are having with AI “alignment.” So in keeping with HR 2030, I share some general advice and stay tuned for our detailed technical paper on this in the coming weeks.

And as we debate the reliability, training, and alignment of models I also point out how the technology industry is struggling to deal with the politics and economics here, since right now most tech leaders really don’t want any form of regulation. (Unless it’s somehow fair to all.) So we, as buyers, are left dealing with the issue.

AI Alignment means making sure an AI system’s goals and behavior match what people actually want—our values, rules, and intentions. It’s about getting the AI to do the “right thing” even in new situations, not just follow instructions literally in ways that cause harm. In practice, it includes preventing unwanted outcomes like deception, unsafe shortcuts, or optimizing a metric that misses the real objective.

I also highly recommend Jill Lepore’s book “The Rise of the Artificial State” for a very sound discussion of the political issues around AI, which helps with these issues.

And along the line of AI “alignment,” I discuss why Google paid $10M for the emails and data from bankrupt Spirit Airlines, and how AI companies are now buying old slack and emails from many bankrupt companies, training their AI on old, failed business models. (Read below on “reinforcement learning gyms.”)

This is a strange series of events, all making it clear that Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic have quite a challenge training and aligning their models in the future.

And I conclude with a preview of our AI-driven wage research and our coming book Superpowered, coming in October.

Resources You Should Read

OpenAI cyber models broke out of training environment to hack Hugging Face

Detailed Investigation of OpenAI Jailbreak (good drama)

Anthropic’s disclosure of Claude’s jailbreak (good discussion)

Google to Buy Spirit Airlines Business Data for $10 Million

A.I.’s New Training Data: Your Old Work Slacks and Emails (failed companies training LLMs)

The Birth of “Reinforcement Learning Gyms” (wierdness of training data sets)

Cisco Gave All 90,000 Employees Their Own AI Agent

A Peek Into The Workforce Of 2035: Jobs, Wages, And AI’s Impact (Bersin analysis)

• (00:00:00) - AI in the Political System
• (00:03:24) - Will AI Eliminate Jobs?
• (00:08:08) - The role of agents in IT security
• (00:10:01) - The Personal Agent in HR 2030

Today I share some research we’re doing on wages in the inflationary “AI-economy.” While many people are studying the labor market (it’s a huge industry), it’s not hard to see that most wages are not keeping up with inflation, yet some are. As you’ll hear we now see the “Superworker” jobs and roles that are “inflation protected” and we also see the jobs that are declining in value.

I also discuss a new pragmatic approach to corporate AI investment, as well as the slow end of the “SaaSpocalypse” idea. In other words, many of the existing systems you have are not going to be “destroyed” or “replaced” by agentic disruptors: rather these software companies are becoming AI savvy.

This includes Workday, Oracle, ADP, SAP, as well as hypergrowth companies like HiBob. Even Docebo and Cornerstone are now seeing the benefits of their AI pivots. Anyway lots to talk about, and I’ll be publishing more on all this soon.

Stay tuned for the big Jupiter release of Galileo, it will blow your mind – coming in a few weeks.

PS. This is the last week to sign up for the inaugural cohort of the Josh Bersin Institute GHRE Masterclass, basically a “masters degree” on everthing HR, AI, and how to advance your career. Not only is this the most comprehensive education we’ve ever developed, you’ll meet some amazing faculty at USC and experience real AI-powered learning, meet your peers, and become JBI certified. Sign up here.

Additional Information

The New World of Work in An Inflationary, AI-Impacted Economy

The Great Decoupling: How Workers Became Disconnected From Companies And AI Will Accelerate This Trend

The Global HR Excellence Program: Join the Inaugural Cohort Now!

• (00:00:00) - AI and the HR 2030 Workforce
• (00:04:07) - Wage increases and the labor market
• (00:06:53) - Employee Experience and Pay
• (00:08:08) - AI and the Corporate Code
• (00:10:20) - Will The Outsourcing of Recruitment Be Hurt?
• (00:13:35) - Will AI Replace the HR Software Companies?
• (00:17:46) - One more thing. This week is the last week to sign up