The Josh Bersin Company

The word of the decade is “Agency” – giving each of us the power, tools, and opportunity to do what we want with our life, jobs, and careers. This new buzzword, now one of the top memes in politics, has been coming for many years. In this podcast I discuss the 50+ year of history in the “decoupling” of workers from companies, and how our newfound AI-powered Agency brings benefits and risks.

As you’ll hear, young people see Agency and freedom as a foundational part of their long life ahead, while companies struggle with “how much freedom” to offer. And for frontline employers, the ability to attract and retain our highly “agent” workers is now a source of competitive advantage.

This podcast begins the discussion, and we’ll be talking much more about this as we launch our new Business of Frontline research and upcoming book Superpowered this Fall. I welcome your feedback and stories on how your newfound AI-fueled Agency has changed your life, career, and talent strategy.

Background Information

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

The Worker-Company Bond Is Breaking In The ‘Great Decoupling’ (Forbes)

Our New Book: Superpowered, Launching in Fall

All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be ‘High Agency’ (NYT opinion)

Are you High-Agency or Low Agency?  (ChatGPT)

The word “intelligence” is a loaded word. Here’s what Elon Musk said to the Economist last week:

“I think AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence in around five years. There really won’t be anything that AI can’t do better than humans, apart from being human, perhaps.”

Well “being human” is what intelligence is all about. So I read up on how Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, James, and many of the eastern philosophers define the term. And what you find is that deep thinkers define intelligence far beyond the ability to recall and use facts, but focus heavily on judgement, problem solving, and dealing with uncertainties in life. So after thinking about this for a few years, I decided to posit my ideas, and also reflect on the intelligence of trees, as described in “The Hidden Life of Trees.”

What I came up with is four parts to this puzzling idea: horsepower, information, judgement, and wisdom. And as you’ll hear, we all have various levels of intelligence in each area, and AI may lack quite a bit. As we all grapple with the exaggerated claims from AI engineers and the real use of these tools, I hope this discussion gives you some perspective, and also calms your fears that AI is going to steal your job.

Our new book, Superpowered, is coming out in November, so sign up for early preview – it’s all about how AI Superpowers us all, in our work, careers, businesses, and life.

Additional Information

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from A Secret World

The full-length interview with Elon Musk | The Economist

Are Frontier Models Becoming A Commodity?

Galileo: The AI Superintelligence for HR

Chapters

(00:00:00) - What is Intelligence?
(00:10:02) - Does an AI Have Enough Intelligence to Plan?

New names: Kimi K3, Llama, Nemotron, Mistral, Cohere, Deepseek, Phi-4 – these are just a few of the fast-growing open source models from major AI providers. These systems threaten the business models and financial plans of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and X.ai. They perform at levels close to Frontier models and the can run up to five-times cheaper on a variety of hardware platforms.

What is the disruptive impact of these open source LLMs and how does this impact your AI investments? As you’ll hear in the podcast, Open Source unleashes the opportunity for lower cost AI solutions and more vertical, specialized, application-focused solutions we need. And the business model for these systems moves away from the massive investments of the Frontier providers.

The result is more complicated than “open means control.” Model tuning, performance, and optimization could be in your future – as AI moves from a platform to a true layered product set we can use as we need.

Lots to learn about here, let us know if you have any questions.

Additional Information

What’s the difference between closed, open source, and open-weight AI? A researcher explains

What Is Open-Weights A.I.?

Comparison of Open Source Models

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Open Source and the AI Industry
(00:11:46) - The Future of AI Is Fully Integrated
(00:15:35) - HR 2030

SharkNinja is one of the most fascinating, innovative, high-performing companies I’ve seen. Elizabeth Norberg, the People and Culture leader, is also one of the most interesting CHROs I’ve met. So with that introduction, I urge you to take some time to listen.

There’s a lot to learn here, but overall this is a story about a company and set of people strategies that work together to accelerate growth, with a strong and vital focus on individual performance, innovation, problem-solving, and carefully designed organizational support.

Think about brands like Nike, L’Oreal, Apple, or others you love. It’s very difficult for a consumer products company to grow quickly and stay relevant as market, trends, and technologies change.

Well as you’ll hear, SharkNinja is both a marketing, problem-solving, and engineering company, and the people and culture strategy accelerates this formula.

I know everyone will learn a lot from Elizabeth’s narrative, and please stay to the end – in the last five minutes Elizabeth details the company’s AI innovation process, which every company is facing.

Finally, as you’ll hear, Elizabeth is a seasoned HR leader but she is still learning and demonstrates humility and creativity in her challenge to accelerate growth in a rocket-ship company with over $5 billion in revenue and very ambitious plans for the future.

Additional Information

SharkNinja YouTube Page – you’ll see what they do.

CEO Mark Barrocas Describes SharkNinja’s Strategy

Why Are Some Companies More Dynamic Than Others?

Irresistible: The Seven Secrets To The World’s Most Enduring Companies

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Meet Elizabeth Norberg, Head of HR at Shark Ninja
(00:04:55) - What Is the People Strategy at Honeywell?
(00:06:20) - Describing the Company's outrageously extraordinary culture
(00:13:29) - The People Strategy
(00:14:59) - The culture of speed
(00:21:40) - Exploring the culture at Sharknage
(00:26:54) - In the Elevator With Mark Cuban
(00:30:52) - Top Executives: The Culture of Microsoft
(00:34:42) - A Few Words from Shark Ninja's CHRO
(00:37:14) - A Masterclass in Partnership with Shark Ninja
(00:38:25) - Shark Ninja's 5 Key Priorities for AI Transformation

This week we learned of OpenAI’s Jailbreak security breach, which opens the door to many new issues with enterprise AI and HR 2030. This week, following up on the introduction of SHL’s Superworker AI assessment, I dig into the implications of this new AI behavior and discuss the five major “skills” or capabilities we need to build AI mastery among business users.

As you’ll hear, AI Agents are both powerful and useful, but our human skills in problem solving, collaboration, and risk awareness are now becoming critical for success. New research also shows that even AI forward deployed engineers need deeper skills in business, stakeholder management, and risk analysis than we ever realized.

As you listen to this if you need help with our own AI business capabilities please contact us. Galileo and the new GHRE masterclass certification program are designed to quickly give you and your team the experience and skills you need to flourish in this new world of AI, agents, and Superwork.

Additional Information

OpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched ‘unprecedented’ cyber-attack

The Josh Bersin Institute, HR 2030, And The Global HR Excellence Certification

Our New Book: Superpowered®, coming this Fall.

 

 

Chapters

(00:00:00) - The Need for AI Safety
(00:03:22) - What are the Skills required to Excel in the AI Era?
(00:12:09) - Agile AI and its Agentic HR
(00:15:47) - Galileo: New version coming soon, and more