All organizations, whether they are profit-seeking companies, non-profits, or governments, have politics. And the issues of how we make decisions, the role of top-down vs. bottoms-up governance, and how we empower people to speak up… these are existential topics in any group of people.

As the USA celebrates its 250 year anniversary and we read so many articles about our history, I wanted to reflect on what our political history teaches us about business leadership, governance, and employee empowerment.

For those of you who study political science, I admire your craft and I think we have a lot to share.

Additional Information

The World Is Accelerating: What Has Changed About Leadership?

Organization Design: The Real Secret To Growth

The Big Reset Playbook: Organizational Culture & Performance

• (00:00:00) - Lessons from the United States
• (00:10:33) - The American culture of accountability and forgiveness

What if every talent process you ran was AI-enabled — not to replace what you do, but to make you superhuman at it?

That’s exactly how Matt Hoffman, Head of Talent and Partner at venture capital firm M13, operates. In this episode Matt explains how his team uses AI to help early-stage founders build a talent-first culture from day one – across recruiting, compensation, coaching, and beyond.

The results are remarkable. Using tools like Findem for AI-powered sourcing, Matt’s team can pinpoint candidates who didn’t just work at the right company — they worked there at exactly the right stage of company growth. That’s a level of targeting precision that data accuracy and explainability make possible, and that simply wasn’t achievable before AI.

But here is where Matt’s perspective gets truly compelling. AI is often framed as a speed tool, a way to do things faster and more efficiently. Matt pushes back hard on that narrative: AI should make your hiring better, not just quicker. And in the startup world, that distinction is everything. Every hire at a 10-person company changes the organization by 10% — so getting it right matters far more than getting it done.

That is the essence of talent density: finding exactly the right people for where your company is and where it needs to go, rather than simply finding people fast.

His advice to HR and talent leaders is as practical as it is powerful: fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Start with the outcome you need to achieve, then let technology enable it — never the other way around.

If you have ever wondered what a truly AI-augmented talent strategy looks like when it is built with intention, depth, and relentless focus on talent density, this one’s for you.

Related resources

Podcast: Why AI Is A Massive Job Creation Technology. Automated Integration. Findem. And Thank You.

Podcast: Understanding Talent Density And Ditching Integrated Talent Management

Research: Insights-First AI: Better and Explainable People Decisions

Research: The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI is Transforming Recruiting

Research: How To Create Talent Density

• (00:00:04) - What Works: The Future of Talent
• (00:00:55) - What is the role of Head of Talent at Talented M13
• (00:03:11) - How to Leverage AI in Your Portfolio Companies
• (00:09:45) - Finding the Right Talent for a Startup
• (00:14:18) - Talent First: How to Use AI in Companies
• (00:16:56) - What's AI Impact on Talent Practices?
• (00:18:35) - WSJDLive: Using AI in HR
• (00:20:02) - How AI can help HR in the Talent Life Cycle
• (00:23:01) - What Works With Talent: Matt Hoffman

This week Korn Ferry announced the $1.1 Billion acquisition of AMS, one of the leading providers of enterprise recruitment outsourcing. As I overview in this podcast, this deal demonstrates several things:

First, the talent acquisition space has become enormously important and is rapidly changing with AI, demographic changes, and internal productivity initiatives. AMS has become a global leader in recruitment process outsourcing and TA advisory work, leading to the $1.1 Billion valuation. AMS’s product AMS One is one of the only tech platforms that integrates almost every recruiting technology into one operational view, enabling AMS and clients to monitor, tune, and optimize all areas of recruiting in one place.

Second, Korn Ferry, as a leader in executive search and talent management services (including training offerings), sees enormous synergies and can add AMS’s revenue and $1.5 Billion backlog to their financial strength. While KF was not growing much, this now gives the company a new growth platform – including the opportunity to use AMS’s global service centers for other offerings.

This podcast is an overview of the deal, we’ll publish more after we get a briefing from KF’s management team.

Additional Information

History of Korn Ferry Acquisitions

The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI Is Transforming Recruitment

The Josh Bersin Institute Global HR Excellence Certification (inaugural cohort starts in September)

Understanding Agentic HR In Detail: The HR 2030 Vision and Architecture

• (00:00:00) - Korn Ferry vs AMS Merger Explained

Today I overview why the Frontier AI vendors are changing as they compete for revenue and how that opens new doors for corporate AI solutions. Remember, your personalization of the technology is more important than the model itself.

Then I discuss our new HR 2030 architectural research and how rules, policies, and security are so important in this new world of Agentic HR. It’s a new world and all focused on “Dynamic Enablement for Growth.”

Additional Information

AI As Fuel For Organizational Change: The Biggest Market Of All

Are Frontier Models Becoming A Commodity?

HR 2030: The Reference Blueprint for Agentic HR (sign up for info)

HR 2030 New Course in Galileo Learn

The Global HR Excellence Certification (GHRE)

Get Galileo: The AI Superagent for HR

• (00:00:00) - HR 2030: The AI Marketplace
• (00:04:33) - The AI That Will Be Embedded in Your Glasses
• (00:07:41) - HR 2030: A reference architecture for the technology
• (00:09:37) - An Agent's role in the Company
• (00:18:38) - The third layer of an AI agent
• (00:21:16) - The Purpose of AI: Why Are We Here?
• (00:23:58) - Employers' HR Vision 2030

Sana Learning is a revolutionary product in the $400 Billion L&D market. Today I sat down with Rita Azevedo, Director of Client Engagement at Sana, to talk about everything. What is AI-native learning, how does Sana Learning fit into Workday’s strategy, and how do companies like Polestar, Rolls Royce, Travelers, and others revolutionize L&D with Sana.

And most of important of all, we get Rita’s perspective on the reinvention of L&D, which we call “Dynamic Enablement for Growth.”

As you’ll hear, AI-native learning platforms like Sana can totally transform training teams, turning them into “business enablement” functions working directly in the business. We discuss how Polestar has done this in detail.

Rita is an experienced L&D leader (having lead training at Klarna) and has worked at Sana since the company had only 30 employees, so she has a wealth of knowledge and experience in AI transformation in L&D.

PS: We are customers of Sana (Galileo Learn is built on Sana, and our new Global HR Excellence Certification is built on Sana), so we can speak to its features in detail if you’re interested.

Chapters

Additional Information

The AI Native Revolution in Corporate Learning (research)

Our new Corporate Learning Maturity Model

HR 2030: The New Role, Operating Model, and Tech Stack for HR

Get Galileo: Experience Sana Yourself!

• (00:00:00) - Meet Rita Azevedo from sana
• (00:02:16) - SANAA's Take on Learning & Development
• (00:04:26) - Sauna Learning: Workday Learning Powered by Sauna
• (00:06:34) - Sana Learning's AI-based Learning Platform
• (00:10:12) - Sales Training: The Future of Learning at Sana
• (00:13:33) - L&D 2.8: User Experience
• (00:14:44) - L&D: The Tutor, the Editor and the Admin
• (00:17:04) - The L&D paradigm shift
• (00:19:22) - How Skills are Being Rated in the Future
• (00:22:30) - L&D: The Future of Content Management
• (00:27:56) - Learning vs. Agents: Can Microsoft Win with Both?
• (00:30:46) - How to move legacy courses to Scrum
• (00:31:50) - A New Way to Start with Workday's AI in 2020

As AI vendors hype “recursive self-improvement” and other scary features, we see more and more “mainstreaming” of AI technology in business. In other words, the AI does not solve problems by itself: we as HR and IT leaders need to clearly define our needs and then buy, build, and tune the technologies we buy.

Some AI vendors (ie. Paradox, Radancy, Sana, Maki, others) are laser focused on very specific use-cases, and they are delivering solution-first offerings that really add value. The frontier vendors, however, are struggling to do this and much of their revenue still comes from “enabling others” to create solutions. And the new usage-based pricing is forcing this kind of pragmatic thinking.

In this podcast I highlight this “commoditization” of core AI features and explain why your “problem identification” work is perhaps the biggest effort in the HR 2030 Agentic HR strategy.

(Take our new HR 2030 course or sign up for our new Global HR Excellence Certification.)

Additional Information

Is AI A “Normal” Technology?

The Rise of the Supermanager

Our New Book Superpowered, Coming This Fall!

New Course: Galileo Is Ready To Teach You What You Need to Know about HR 2030

• (00:00:00) - A Lesson on AI in Software Engineering
• (00:09:44) - Bill Gates on the Need for People in AI

We’re now a week past Irresistible 2026 and I want to recap what has been happening in enterprise AI and explain the HR 2030 program. First I discuss how the entire AI industry is over-inflated and what that means to enterprise users. Next I explain why the $1.5 Trillion invested in AI is leading to high prices and more focused projects. And third I explain what our HR 2030 program is all about and how you can join us.

Three big messages here: first AI is now a powerful, early-stage, but expensive technology – so taking an architectural, business-case approach is now needed. (No more “playing around” in corporate systems.) Second, the market is exploding with innovation, forcing you to stay educated on the architectural and vendor issues. Third, your ongoing skills and education are critical to your new HR operating model, tools, and process decisions. Culture and leadership are more important than ever.

Additional Information

HR 2030 Blueprint and Vision (register here for ongoing updates)

The New Global HR Excellence Certification by The Josh Bersin Institute

Get Galileo: The Everything Superagent for HR (coming soon to MS copilot)

• (00:00:00) - The Future of AI and HR Technology
• (00:03:43) - The AI Technology Market: Overhyped?
• (00:10:50) - HR 2030: Your Own Education and Skills

As we prepare for these juggernauts to go public, I’m reminded of Yahoo, Excite, and AOL who dominated the first four years of the internet. Despite their lead, Google stole the market away. Could the same thing happen again?

The argument is not that these companies aren’t powerful, but rather that they’re so committed to their current path that they may miss the big opportunity in the future. If you look at HR 2030 and what we want to do with enterprise AI, the ability to generate code, graphics, and text may not be what we need. And our new research on Galileo business modeling is starting to pan this out.

Now that AI prices are high, we all have to look for bigger use-cases for agents. In this podcast I explain what “Dynamic Enablement for Growth” really means and how LLMs only take us so far, with a new frontier yet to come. As always I welcome opinions and feedback on this thesis.

Additional Information To Come….

Get Galileo and see business modeling in action.

The New Global HR Excellence Certification – Join the Inaugural Cohort!

HR 2030: Time to Reinvent HR Around Agents

• (00:00:00) - AI Hype Has Some Limits
• (00:00:45) - In the Elevation of Large Language Models
• (00:03:57) - A Hackers Bought a Hacker's Card
• (00:05:25) - Beyond the Frontier: The Business Value of AI
• (00:09:52) - What HR 2030 Agents Need to Do
• (00:14:41) - What Does This Mean for AI in HR?