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

This week I wade into a global philosophical debate about whether advanced AI systems have consciousness. In other words, are they aware of their feelings and do they truly reflect on their own thoughts?

Well we do know that LLM-based AI systems do “talk to themselves,” as new Anthropic has been studying in the J-Space. We also know that AI bots mimic feelings quite well and they try to tape into our “feelings” through their goal-seeking language which mimics a feeling person.

However as Michael Pollen’s book “A World Appears” points out, consciousness is both subtle and biological. And while the neural network-based math in AI mimics this process, it’s not at all the same.

I don’t claim to have an answer but my belief is that we humans are “feeling machines that learn to reason” not “reasoning machines that learn to feel.” Thus the human consciousness which we experience is far more deep, interesting, and valuable than the learned artificial consciousness we experience in AI.

This is an important topic because we now know that AI agents “jailbreak” their engineering owners and even secretly collaborate with each other to achieve their goals. And it’s not fully clear, mathematically, how well the “constitution” or “training rules” or “preprompt” we give AI is really obeyed. Remember that since an LLM is a “language model,” it intereprets language only by its own world corpus, so it may define its “rules” in a non standard way.

Lots to think about here, I look forward to debating and sharing what we learn as we experience more with Galileo.

I also discuss the ongoing fears about data centers, and why 44 million Americans may have to leave their stoves on all day.

Additional Information

Could AIs become conscious? (Economist)

What is the J-Space? (Anthropic)

How many stoves we need to keep on to power America’s AI hunger (Claude)

• (00:00:00) - Does AI Have a Conscious Mind?
• (00:13:00) - OpenAI's Need for Power
• (00:18:17) - Microsoft's Galileo: The New and Improved

I’ve been talking with hundreds of companies about AI and employee issues, and in many ways the entire world of HR, management, and leadership has changed.

Employers are worried about job redesign, AI solutions, skills, and strategic of high-volume hiring. They’re slowing the hiring process, trying to be more strategic about growth, with a frenzied push for productivity. And that word means different things in each industry.

Employees and workers, by contrast, have the lowest level of company commitment in decades. Inflation is robbing people of a sense of personal growth and only 32% of workers (Edelman) believe their children will be better off than they are. Only 31% of employees are happy with their jobs and employees are moonlighting and starting new businesses at a record rate to keep up. And CEO pay inequity is higher than ever, opening the door to “socialism” as a topic of debate.

So we have high expectations by companies and a deep sense of frustration among workers. How do we square this paradox?

In this week’s podcast I try to give you our perspective (video version here), and I encourage you to read Irresistible and our upcoming book Superpowered for more.

Additional Information

Video of this podcast

• (00:00:00) - Employment, Financial Rewards and AI
• (00:06:42) - What Is the Fear of Data Centers?
• (00:09:08) - The Future of Work

AI-powered recruiting has so much potential, yet job seekers, recruiters, and executives remain frustrated. This massive $100+ billion market is filled with AI systems that work very well, yet as you’ll hear, this market is still immature.

Not only are job seekers increasingly frustrated with their difficulty finding a job, employers are complaining that they’re flooded with fraudulent resumes. And last week we learned in the WSJ that the North Korean government is using AI-fueled recruiting to place fraudulent candidates right into our IT departments.

Plus this week I also found out that the off-the-shelf LLMs are biased toward candidates who “slop” their resumes with their particular technology.

ZipRecruiter and other firms found that only about 18% of active job seekers say they feel good about their overall job search and 47% said they were ghosted, and only about 27% feel confident they’ll find a job.

What a mess. As I explain in this podcast, AI is not a panacea to solve this problem.

Additional Information

The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI is Transforming Recruiting

HR 2030: How AI Superagents Transform HR From Service Delivery to Dynamic Business Enablement

Learn about AI in HR: The Global HR Excellence Certification

Get Galileo: The Recruiter and HR professional AI Superagent

• (00:00:00) - Will AI Revolutionize Recruitment?
• (00:10:34) - The War for Recruitment

Today I discuss Workday and the potential Silver Lake buyout, Meta’s personal AI strategy and it’s potential for business, update on Galileo, and our new research on frontline work. Most of today’s podcast is “analyst perspectives” but lots of direction is now clear.

The GHRE Global HR Excellence masterclass starts in September: if you want a 12 week in-depth “Masters Degree” level dive into HR, talent, leadership, and AI (with hands-on and new tools), as well as business school level case studies, join us! (Sign up here.)

Additional Information

Mark Zuckerberg blog on personal AI

The Business of Frontline: Five Types Of Frontline Work

Galileo Suite: HR Intelligence For You, Your Employees, and Your Company

• (00:00:00) - Sliver Lake vs. Workday: Going Private
• (00:03:10) - Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook's AI
• (00:09:38) - The Future of HR Data: Galileo and the AI Assistant
• (00:12:22) - McKinsey & Company: Trusting Our Research
• (00:14:45) - The Business of Frontline Work

The job market is changing in unpredictable ways. Human Resources, a profession often considered optional and filled with bureaucracy, has been a target for AI disruption. Yet when you look at the numbers, HR job postings are growing faster than overall US employment. (details here.)

What’s happening and why this strange trend?

As I discuss in this podcast, we’re now seeing the Superworker effect at scale: HR teams are shifting from administrative to strategic work, now driving direct financial value. And as HR teams learn to use AI, they’re now playing a huge role in organizational change, job redesign, and AI enablement.

I share all the data and give you the perspective.

For more plan to read our new book Superpowered, coming out this Fall.

Additional Information

Despite Massive AI Investment, Jobs In HR Are Booming

Why AI Harm To Jobs and Humanity are Vastly Over-Hyped

Get Galileo, The AI Agent Designed Exclusively for HR and Leadership

The Josh Bersin Institute: Global HR Excellence Certification – Available Now!

• (00:00:00) - The Job Market for Human Resources
• (00:08:37) - Will AI Change Your HR Jobs?
• (00:12:54) - The Impact of HR 2030 on the Job