AI has been the main character in every conversation across every layer of business. This year, industry analyst Josh Bersin proposes a shift in AI’s role: from an individual productivity tool to a tool for problem assessment.
In this episode, Eric Chemi sits down with Josh to discuss the evolution of the $400B corporate learning segment of the HR industry, the relationship between analysts and startup companies, and how to assess business health through corporate leadership.
Dig into Josh’s latest research and advisory work with his newly released HR and Leadership Imperatives for 2026 report: https://joshbersin.com/imperatives/
Click To Read Transcript
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I’m Eric Chemi. And this is Politely Pushy. Welcome to Politely Pushy. I’m your host, as always, Eric Chemi. Today, I’m really excited to have
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Josh Bersin here of the Josh Bersin company. We’re the global leaders in industry analysis and research about the HR industry, corporate leadership and development, corporate training, executive leadership, everything that we think about. How are they running this
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company and why are they running it this way? Mr. Bersin has a has a take on it and has some probably data and reasons why you’ve been doing this for a long time for over 20 years here. Josh, thanks so much for joining me today. >> Sure. Thank you, Eric. I know it’s been
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it took us a little while to get this schedule. You’ve been traveling. You’ve been doing some conferences. You’ve been being doing very busy things. We’re here recording Friday in December. Tell me, what have you done since Thanksgiving to keep you busy?
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since Thanksgiving. Mostly writing on my big report in for January on the imperatives for 2026 to be honest. >> Anything you can leak to us today? >> Yeah, I I’ll tell you a little bit about it. Sure. Yeah. You want me to start now? >> Yeah, why not?
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>> Big. Okay. So, so in the world of HR, there’s two there’s two things that have happened. Number one, over the last decade, the HR function and profession has grown and grown and grown and grown. Um there was an interesting article in the economist about a month ago that
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shows that the number of people doing HR work or the number of HR professionals has grown 60% faster than the number of workers in the world which is you know kind of insane but it makes sense because we had the pandemic and we had mental health issues and then we had DEI
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and we have skill shortages and labor shortages and organizational transformations and new technologies And but the but the business world is saying including the HR leaders are saying why do we have so many people in HR why is it so big why is it so bureaucratic why
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is the software so hard to use etc in parallel with that of course we have this massive adoption of AI and the AI vendors selling everything to everybody and every HR leader saying what should we be doing to adopt AI to improve scale and productivity in HR and what is our
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role in reorganizing and deploying technology in the rest of the company. And so what the report is about and I won’t give you the secret is the 12 mandates that come out of all that. And the thing that’s the most interesting from an economic standpoint is that all
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of the AI vendors are now suddenly under the pressure to make money because they’ve spent a trillion dollars on data centers. and we’re not going to get AI for free. We’re probably going to end up having to pay for it by the token. And so we have to shift from a focus on
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individual productivity and tools for individuals to workflow super agents, I call them. And uh so anyway, there’s a lot of interesting things to talk about along those lines. I don’t want to take over your whole podcast with this, but >> No, I love it. I I you know, you know, I
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normally would have interrupted you because you said five amazing things that I wanted to, you know, dig deeper on, but but I thought today I’m going to try to be more patient and be >> you can interrupt me all you want >> and and not interrupt, but the 60%
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number is fascinating to me. It reminds me a little bit about what we think of health and I know you’ve written about I know you’ve written about healthcare on your site, how it feels like, like you said, like healthcare is the number one industry in America. this HR thing. It
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feels like HR is going to take over and be like, “Oh, what does this company do?” Nothing. It just does HR that we don’t have any regular employees. The whole company’s just HR. Well, actually, it’s not that bad because if you look at the actual spending on HR, not that not HR
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technology and payroll, but the actual HR function, it’s about 1% of revenue. Sometimes 3/4 of a pence, sometimes one and a quarter. It’s not that much money but it’s become very complex with many many roles and jobs. We have 94 skills or capabilities in HR and our model. Um
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so AI is coming along at a good time to try to help companies streamline a lot of this and integrate it in a more um scalable way. It’s not very scalable because if you keep hiring more HR people every time you hire more humans, you know, you end up with this big
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sprawling bureaucracy of HR stuff, >> right? Then you’re spending time just managing the HR department when HR is supposed to be there as the help of the company. >> Exactly. And and you know HR professionals are very hardworking, well-meaning, very very mission driven
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people and they don’t like being stuck in little jobs where they can’t add more value because they’re being, you know, thrown into these little tactical jobs. So um all all of the pressure is towards integrating what we call systemic HR and adding more AI into this um domain.
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>> Do you think that a regular rank and file HR worker should generally be afraid of AI because it means hey well AI can do a lot of the stuff we don’t need to hire as many people. >> They well many of them are afraid. I’ve been around the world this year and a
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lot of them are worried, but I think they’re going to be less worried as they get their hands on this stuff because we we think of it as a super tool to turn you into a super worker. The things the things that you spend a lot of time on in HR, interviewing candidates, creating
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job descriptions, developing training plans, diagnosing performance, writing performance reviews, etc. All those things are getting automated and improved by AI. And that frees you to spend more time learning about the business and the problems and working on
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more strategic issues than the paperwork or the the writing or the numbers that everybody’s stuck doing. Um, but you know, if you’re an interview scheduler and that’s all you do all day or if all you do is load data into the LMS and you know, tag the LMS content so people can
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find stuff, yeah, that job’s not going to be there. When you’re talking about AI technologies, all the AI vendors, right? You said they got to make their money. You must get bombarded with companies that say, “Hey, could you talk about us in your next report? Could you mention
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us in your next?” You must get >> 10 to 15 a day. And I can’t talk to all of them, but I want to. I mean, I don’t have a problem. I don’t know how other analysts feel about their jobs, but all of the good ideas come from small companies first. And so a lot of these smaller companies
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have brilliant ideas. So I try to listen to as many of them as I can. We have a team of people that talks to them and we ask them for customers and we ask them for what their target market. We ask them to tell us about what they’re trying to accomplish and who do they
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believe their competitors are. And we ask them a lot of tough questions that sometimes they don’t get asked by other people. and and we we don’t try to create magic quadrants because it’s very it’s unfair to just put them on a 2 by 2, you know, a two-dimensional grid. We we
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don’t believe in that. But um sometimes, you know, I would say 1 out of 5, 1 out of 10 that get through to me, I’m like, “Oh my god, you know, this is a brilliant idea. Let me show you how to really get bring this to market in a big way.” And sometimes, you know, you know,
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that’s where they come from. I like what you said. All the good ideas come from small companies first. >> Well, I don’t mean I mean there’s good ideas in big companies, too, but the big companies usually can’t execute as quickly. And a lot of small The other
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thing that’s interesting about HR tech is virtually everybody on the planet who’s ever had a frustrating experience either getting a job or dealing with their manager or dealing with HR has decided that they should build their own tool that’s better than everything that
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anybody ever had. So, a lot of the new ideas come from consumers of HR, not people that have done HR. Um, I mean, I was just on just this week, I was on I went through 6 startup pitches by Stanford MBA students who are basically building businesses as
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part of their MBA from Stanford. And one or two of them were very cool. Some of they were all interesting but some of them I don’t think are going to fly >> beyond HR though this is just general general entrepreneurship right >> yeah this is but this course is sort of
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focused on human capital related tools >> yeah stuff >> so you know go back to you said 10 to 15 a day are are reaching out saying hey talk to us we want to hear >> how how should companies you know before we go into other topics how should companies best engage
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>> with a good question I I know there’s a lot of PR people that listen to you. So, when I get an email from a PR firm with some, you know, weird email address like JBC, ABC, communications, the best in the world.com. I rarely spend a lot of time on it
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because they’re usually just pitching me to get me to write about it in a blog or something. And you know, and I can’t do that until I’ve talked to the company, until I’ve talked to their customers. I mean, it takes a fair amount of time for me to to reach a point where I’m going
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to write about somebody because we’re we’re we’re not an advertising driven business. Our business is based on the quality of what we do. So, we actually spend a lot of time with vendors. So, you know, the the what the ones that break through are where they’re from the
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entrepreneur or the executives themselves. they’ve they’ve done a little bit of research in in terms of who we are and they have something specific that attracts my attention as opposed to hey we we’re the you know world’s best recruiting tool we’d like to show it to
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you and you know and then we’ll we’ll call them and we’ll definitely talk to them. >> Interesting. So you’d rather hear from the founder themselves than the intermediary. >> I don’t I the PR firm is not giving me any added value. I mean, it’s okay if
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they help the entrepreneur understand who we are because what we do, you know, we’re not a journalist. We really are analysts. So, we want to really get to know the company and their ideas and what their customers are doing. Then we’ll go nuts with the communications
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about it. Um, as opposed to, you know, maybe a a general beat reporter who might just want to know, oh, that’s cool. Well, I want to write a, you know, I need to write a story today anyway. So, I’ll mention these guys. >> You make a good point. Not journalists,
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you’re analysts, but a lot of analysts have come from journalism or they they go from being analyst to journalists. Your your background was all corporate and sales and tech. >> Well, there’s Yeah, I don’t want to criticize other analysts. There are analysts that are less comprehensive
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than us. Um, and they make money through, like I said, publishing magic quadrants or writing articles and advertising and stuff. Um, we’re very solutiondriven. You know, most of the people that work for us come from consulting backgrounds. And so, uh, you know, we don’t want to
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put if if I write something about a vendor and it turns out they’re kind of flaky, I’m going to get I’m going to get hammered by a customer. And I don’t want that because my rep I mean, our reputation is the most important thing we have. and we don’t mind spending the time with
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people. >> How is your business model set up? Because because I’ve talked to other analysts and they say, “Look, every analyst is different because every analyst background is different. every analyst business. >> I would say um 75% of our revenue is from corporate um HR people
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>> like paying for research or paying >> they’re buy yeah they’re buying either Galileo which is our AI that has all our content and our all our intelligence in it or or they’re buying joining our corporate membership or they’re hiring us to do some advisory work and then the
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remainder comes from vendors themselves and we do have packages of services for vendors because you know sometimes They want us to do product road mapaps, connect them to other companies for M&A, give them feedback on marketing. I mean, one of the things that I think maybe the
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most valuable thing that we provide to the to the uh technology community is in a very short period of time, we can help them position themselves so they don’t sound like everybody else. Because we talked to so many vendors, it’s really easy to inadvertently come up with
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something that you think is brilliant but actually means nothing to HR people because they just heard that same story 25 times from someone else. So, um, those we do that kind of stuff, too. But that’s that’s a more of a smaller part of our business than the corporate part.
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>> I do find that to be very common, right? You talk to someone who’s got a big great idea and it’s like, “Oh, no. I’ve I’ve heard that a bunch of times already from other people.” >> Yeah. Yeah. And what I usually say to them, I mean, the way I see the market, it’s so big.
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There’s room for everybody if you’re willing to find your niche. But if you’re trying to be the world’s best talent intelligence platform or whatever word you come up with, nobody’s going to hear you because they’ve heard that they’re going to go, you go to a trade show, my you
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know, you go to these trade shows. I I was with my wife the other day at one of the tech shows. I was just showing her around. She goes, “All these people do the same thing.” And that’s unfortunately the challenge. Whereas if you say we’re really big in
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retail or we’re really good at financial services or our target market is sales executives or you know all of a sudden you can break through really quickly. >> Yeah. So that that’s a good point. I think about your wife there and was she accurate that everyone does the same
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thing or was it her impression because they just didn’t clarify? If you look at the words, the word talent, the word skills, the word intelligence, I mean, they’re all just different combinations of the same words and pretty soon you’re like everybody sort of looks the same.
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>> So they just failed they were all failing to communicate their difference among >> well and and the really and it gets into really the you know the fundamentals of business strategy. Um and I you know I go back to sort of the very beginnings of why we start
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companies in the first place. The reason we start companies is to solve a problem. And if you know the problem you’re trying to solve really, really well, then you’re going to find people who have that problem. But if it’s a generic problem and you kind of know a
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lot about it, you’re sort of not there yet. And the more specific you get into which part of the because the training listen the HR and human capital industry is billions and billions, every company has employees every company does hiring every company does promotion
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every company does pay every company does benefits >> regardless of their geography there’s plenty of there’s plenty of billion dollar niches is >> yeah it’s funny because you make a good point like it’s the only in a way it’s the only industry that applies
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>> industry it’s it’s the training industry alone is 400 billion >> talk about training >> training >> what have you been like what’s a what’s what’s a storyline in training going on right now because I assume everyone wants to talk about we need AI to train
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people or we need to train people to use AI >> no the That’s a little bit it’s more is let me give you a little bit better co story around it. So what we’re really going through is a paradigm shift. The training industry for most of my career has been you get trained by a a trainer
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or a course developed by an instructional designer. So it’s been a publishing industry. Yeah. >> Publish a bunch of courses. >> Tell people they need to take them. Track whether they take them. Send them a hundred emails to make sure they tried to take it. see if they ever finished
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it, see if they learned anything, rinse, repeat, and then go back and do a few webinars and and some courses and eventually say, “You guys have to come to New York for 3 days because you’re not getting this, and we’re going to sit down and talk about it.” Um, and that is
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a it’s an instructor-led sort of uh publishing model of training and it comes from education in the education industry. >> It looks like a classroom. It looks like >> just like a classroom. Yeah. Now the the AI world is completely different. In AI, you can dynamically generate
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instructional content based on your needs. You look at the consumption of ChatGPT. The 800 million people a week that use ChatGPT, 60% of them are learning things. They’re asking questions to learn something. So that’s how big AI could be in corporate
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training. So, we’re going to wipe out all of that instructional design, content development stuff over time and replace it with dynamically developed content from AI, which we do. By the way, Galileo does this. And it’s so interestingly different. Imagine you’re
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a salesperson. You run into a customer who’s got a competitive product and you’re like, “Oops, I don’t know who these who these guys are. I don’t know what to say.” You blow it and the customer doesn’t want to call you back. You could go to the AI and you could
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say, “Has anybody ever dealt with these guys before?” Send an email out. Or the AI could actually send an email to a bunch of people. They could record a conversation of somebody that knows this competitor, send you a an instructional program or a video or some intervention
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of some kind to teach you, and boom, you’ve got the answer to what you need. The old way of doing it is, oh, we’re going to do a sales training program. give us a couple of months, we’ll come back to you and give you a competitive analysis course. And by the time they
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give you the course, the competitors have all changed. So, it’s going to be very it’s going to be dynamic. It’s going to be available in every language. You’re not going to have to take a course if you don’t want to. You can take a course if you want to, or you can
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just ask. We have a super tutor in Galileo. You just ask supertutor questions and the supertutor will teach you stuff. You could ask the supertutor, can you give me an example of that in this particular situation? Can you give me a case study of this? I mean, it’s way different.
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>> It it makes me wonder about with my own kids, right? You think about education going forward and and what should they be learning because what are they going to be hiring for? Like my kids are, you know, first grade and under. So, they got a long time before,
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let’s say, they get hired for job maybe 15 years or so. But what? >> Well, I think there’s going to be >> Yeah. I mean, there’s going to be much more. See, the way I work because I’m kind of an information professional. Um I I read all the time. I’m always
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consuming information, but I but I know that it’s so easy to find things now that I can mentally say this is worth an hour of my time. I’m going to go through this YouTube in detail or I only need five minutes of this because I can always go back and get more information
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if I need it. But in the old model, I had to go through a whole dog on course every single time and it was taught by an instructor who maybe I didn’t really like anyway for some reason. So, you know, I’m sort of stuck in this experience. It’s going to be way better. In fact, it
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already is because I think about the way you’re describing the old version of corporate training, right? the instructorled, the publishing version, the the education industry version of it, right? It’s it’s books and an instructor versus, let’s say, the
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ChatGPT AI version, which is, hey, well, you and I might be in the same class, but you and I might be at very different starting levels of knowledge. So, we should probably get a dynamically different pace. >> You’re going to get a different because, you know, may maybe I don’t understand
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this part and you don’t understand that part and I I’d like to skip the part that you don’t understand because I already got that part and and that we’re still going to have instructors, we’re still going to have teachers. Um, and maybe the teachers are more there to ask
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questions and to guide you along the process as opposed to lecture to you all day. But what about companies? Let’s say they’re they’re in this space, right? Hey, I’m a new startup in in AI based training. I’m going to do everything that you just said, but I I want you to talk about me,
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but I don’t have any customers yet because if they hear about me, then I’ll have a customer. You must get that chicken and egg all the time. If you write about me, I’ll get the customer. >> No, if if you’re a startup and you’ve got a great idea, I don’t mind talking
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to you if we have time. Um, but I am going to, you know, definitely ask, you know, who is your target customer and do you have a prototype or an advisor to help you? I I think it’s a little bit dangerous to build something in a vacuum, frankly, because there are so many
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people that have tried so many things. Many times the thing that you’re trying to do, 100 people have already tried it and some parts of it worked and some parts of it didn’t. And I hate to see you go through the learning curve that other people have already gone through.
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Um, but we would, you know, we’re going to help you. We’ll help you find a customer if we think what you’re doing is really, really amazing. I agree. I feel like there’s too much of the field of dreams. If you build it, they will come. And and like you said,
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like you shouldn’t just build it out of thin air hoping that happen. It’s it’s it’s funny. I mean, it is actually kind of funny because the market is so big. You might find an HR person that’s willing to buy something from a vendor that has no customers just because they
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like it. And good for you. If you’re able to do that, that gets your business off the ground and now you’re solving a real problem and you’re beginning to figure out what they really need. Um there is a because the market is so big, you know, some a especially in smaller
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companies, uh they don’t want to buy things from big vendors because sometimes they’re too expensive and they’re more willing to take a risk on a startup. There are there are a lot of companies that love buying things from startups because they can get a good deal. Um
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so like I said it’s a giant market. >> How did you even get into this? Because you know if I look at your background you worked at IBM, you worked at Sybase like you were in a kind of normal technology sales product development marketing track. How did you get so
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interested in HR corporate leadership? >> Complete complete accident and it was you know one of the most lucky accidents I’ve ever had. So I was I was at IBM for 10 years. I worked at Sybase. Sybase had fallen apart. I was sort of stuck there for a while. I was kind of bored. And a
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um head hunter came along and said, “Hey, we have a job to be the VP of marketing at an online training company.” This was in 1998 before the internet kind of existed. I was like, “Well, I don’t know anything about online training, but I’ll go check it
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out.” So, I go meet these guys. There’s this really cool sort of gamified online learning thing. I was sick of working at Sybase. So, I quit and I went over to work there. the the the first day I was there, I realized I don’t know anything about this at all. And >> I had a friend
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>> Oh, shoot. >> I had a friend I had a friend from Sybase. I won’t mention his name, but he knows who he is, who had who had left Sybase earlier, who had gone to work for Lotus Learning Space, which is an online learning company. And I said, “Hey, Chris, help me. I don’t know what’s
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going on.” So, he came over and joined me. And he got excited about it. And we worked on this little company. And then that company unfortunately um ran out of money during the .com explosion and we sold it to a bigger company and then I became the head of marketing or product
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marketing for a uh a bigger company called Digital Think and I really got to know the training industry and then I got laid off from them during 911. Oh wow. because there was a big recession right at that point in time and I always wanted to do do analyst
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work and I found a project at Saba at the time and for IDC to start doing some analyst work and I wrote a book on blended learning and that was the beginning of me getting involved in training and then leadership development and then all the other just aspects of
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HR and it’s that that was in around 2000 – 2001 so 24 years ago >> that’s crazy and do Do you ever get that? Do you ever get confused because there’s the there’s that Bersun firm that used to be the Bersun Marstellar. Do people just hear Bersin and just think
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are you that like that must must people up. >> Most people don’t know who aren’t in PR don’t know them. >> Maybe just maybe it’s just my little world that my my world that intersects with yours and that one, right? Like I know both. >> They’re un and I’m in.
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>> Yeah, I know. I know it’s spelled differently. I just think they hear that, right? >> Yeah. Um, yeah, that’s that’s that’s a fascinating way because there’s no way there’s no way that anyone who’s a kid thinks, you know, I’m going to be an analyst.
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>> You know what happened? You know, Eric, it was funny when I was at IBM a long time ago. I used to read um PC week. Did you ever read PC Week? You weren’t in tech. It was a It was the rag about PCs. >> I was I have a computer science degree, I’m an MIT engineer, I know all about PC week. >> Okay, so you remember Spencer the Cat?
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There was a guy who wrote a column. I loved reading this stuff and I used to read it at IBM and I’m thinking, you know, someday I’d like to do what they do. So I was thinking very early in my career that that that there was something in publishing and analyst work
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that I just wanted to do because I was almost an English major in college. So I don’t know, it just sort of worked out this way. Yeah, I get that because I was a I was a very good math, computer science student, but I was always interested in media, television,
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broadcasting. So, so you know, I found a way to combine that. But I know what you’re saying is as a kid is, okay, I’m doing all my math work and my computer work and I’m doing, you know, very quant driven type of work, but this interest of like, but I see these kinds of people
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>> see, I mean, it’s really fun. You know what this is like? You get to see you. It’s what I love the most is the pattern matching, seeing the big picture, understanding the market. It’s so interesting to do the kind of things that we do. >> Yeah. Yeah. It’s Yeah. That’s
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fascinating. So, what else what else is exciting for you? You know, before I say, >> no, I’m more specifically I think about with corporate leadership. >> Mhm. >> It it must be such a minefield these days. I feel like every time I open the journal, it’s just, you know, this
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problem at the top, this problem at the top. Like, how can anyone even run a company these days, especially with all the changes? >> Well, I was just listening to Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, and just flabbergasted by what he was saying. Um, >> what did he say this time? I can’t
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>> Well, I don’t want to get in trouble on your podcast. Um what what I was observing that’s so interesting to me because I’ve been involved in so many companies is the way leadership’s leaders personalities and egos and uh pride um manifests itself in the success or
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failure of their businesses. I mean it is it is I mean I this isn’t my specialty but you know I tend to know we do a lot of work on corporate culture and corporate leadership process and stuff and you can see so easily when you go into a big company why they’re
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performing well or not because based on their culture and so much of that has to do with the top executives and and you read these articles in the Wall Street Journal all the time what happened to Boeing what happened to Nike what happened to Starbucks. I mean,
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they’re fascinating stories and the guy that helps me with my books is a is a business writer and we always sit around and talk about executives. Um, it’s one of the most interesting parts of the world. I I find the business community in the business world in general just
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fascinating, but you know, being a senior leader is so difficult and so nuanced in the situation that you’re in. Um, and sometimes the people that you don’t think are the most attractive people to be friends with are very, very, very successful in the business
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community. And, you know, I’m always torn in the middle because I spend so much time with HR. I’m always thinking about engagement and culture and diversity and stuff. Um, you know, sometimes those things are not necessarily the right attributes in leaders. There is there’s a weird uh
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set of of attributes that you see like oh this kind of person gets to this kind of spot right like it requires this kind of personality and skill set and it is not it’s not a >> but you know I did write I did write a book on it called irresistible and I and
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I still maintain that over the long run and I mean you know decades great companies are led by great people who are literally literally good people. There are periods of time when you can be kind of a jerk and you can kind of push things around and do all whatever
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you want and really thrive. But over the long run, every company is is to some degree dependent on the skills and the engagement and the um innovation of the individuals in the company. So leadership is is very much about human capital stuff um over the long run. You
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know, you mentioned Starbucks and I think about Brian Nickel and and Chipotle and Taco Bell and Starbucks and I think some of the ideas that it’s like, oh, you know, he’s doing all these innovative things and I’m like, I mean, a lot of this is stuff that if you and I
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just walked into a store, we’d say, well, they should just do X, Y, and Z. So, I don’t understand with, let’s say, a job like that. Is it really that this one person figured out all these things that nobody else there seemed to have figured out? Common sense?
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>> Actually, it is. It is hard to It sounds easy as a customer. >> Yeah. But when you’re the CEO, it’s not easy because you got a hundred people coming to you with a hundred ideas like you know for example you know I I’ve we visited we did some work with
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Starbucks and um they were trying to diversify their product portfolio to generate more revenue during the pandemic and it got more and more and more complicated and more and more and more unproductive and the customer experience was getting worse and worse and it took a new CEO
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to come in and say, “Hey guys, we got to simplify this and go back to the basics.” I think it’s very easy to get distracted if you’ve been in a company a long time and you sort of miss what’s really happening because you’ve been involved in so many of the other things
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that have happened over time. I don’t think it’s as easy as it looks. >> I can see that because I know the experience of when you’re a new employee somewhere, you’ve got all these ideas and the people who have been there for >> two years later, you’re thinking those
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were stupid ideas. They never would have worked. It’s more like or the people who’ve been there for a while. They’re just like and then maybe you’re there for a couple
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years then a new guy comes in and he’s got a bunch of good ideas that are new and you’re like no no I said the same thing two years ago. They you’re right. >> You know Eric the other thing that I’ve learned about leadership and you know I get a lot of coaching from my business
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partner on this stuff but is you have to focus. You can’t do 10 things. you got to do a couple of really important things that are going to pay off um as a CEO at least >> and then everybody everybody on down the track has to do the same exercise.
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>> I think about that too like I think about the human beings have a limited amount of time so there might be a hundred good ideas but they can’t do all of them. They have to just pick and choose this is what we’re going to focus on. >> Well and they get completely confused if
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you give them five things to do. They don’t know where to spend their time. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, so then you know that being said, what what else what is kind of the most exciting thing that you see that could be different this year? I feel like the last two, three years in a
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way have all been the same. Like AI came and we’ve been talking about AI, but we’re kind of the same this year from last year. >> Okay. The big thing we’re writing about for 2026, it’s in this new report that’s coming out in January, is moving from AI
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as an individual productivity tool to AI as a way to rethink the problem. And the analogy that I’ve been telling people, and I’ll just go through it really quick. >> Yeah. >> Is the self-driving car. The beginning of the self-driving car was power steering in the 1960s and
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power brakes and anti-colision detection and lane change control and you know there’s somebody in the right lane, the little window goes off. All of those little assistants made the driver’s experience better. And that’s what we’re doing with AI. We’re trying to make the
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driver or the individual’s experience better. But the purpose of the car is not to take care of the driver. The purpose of the car is to take care of the passenger and to move the passenger from point A to point B. The driver maybe we don’t need a driver because if
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we didn’t have a driver, the passenger experience might be a lot better. They might get there faster. It might be safer. So if you look at what what happened in AI is all of these individual agents that we saw as the power steering and the power brakes, right?
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>> Got replaced with a super agent >> which I called it self-driving car. The same thing’s gonna happen all over business. We can’t just have a bunch of co-pilots in each person’s desk and suddenly the company becomes more productive. We’re gonna have to stitch
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these things together into multifunctional agents. And and we’re we’re literally going through HR departments right now and showing them a blueprint on how to do this in different domains. And I’m not doing it for the rest of the businesses, you know,
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because different functional areas have different opportunities. But you kind of got to take a step back and realize that all of these job families we have should be squashed together in a horizontal way because the agents are going to go across them. So, you know, that to me is the big
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new thing in 2026 that’s going to start to hit the market. >> Yeah. It’s I like the way you said instead of all these individual little pieces, it’s like what is the point of all this? Why are we doing all this? How can we make this one big system that works?
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>> You know, the other problem, the other reason we have that problem is that no, no companies don’t want 50 agents from 50 vendors. They can’t manage that. No, no, they’re going to they got to they got to simplify. Josh, this was fascinating. I I appreciate the time. I
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look forward to the report coming out. I appreciate you sharing some of the insights about how you guys are working, how you want to work with other companies, and and sort of the things you’re excited about for next year. >> Thank you, Eric. >> Appreciate it, Josh.
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Thank you to my guest and thanks for listening. Subscribe to get the latest episodes each week and we’ll see you next time.