Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning, everyone.
[00:00:01] Today, in the interest of advancing your knowledge and expertise in all different aspects of human capital and AI, we are launching the 2026 Imperatives for Enterprise AI in Human Resources and Human Capital.
[00:00:17] And what you'll see in this research is 11 critical issues that you need to learn about and think about and plan for in the year and years ahead.
[00:00:28] And behind this trend of enterprise AI, and we're going to differentiate clearly between personal AI and personal productivity and corporate and business productivity is the redefinition of what HR does and how HR operates. So we're going through a period for the next four or five years of the world's largest transformation of this particular profession that we are all a part of. So it's a very interesting, exciting and important time. Now, I'm not going to repeat the imperatives on this podcast because I'll probably talk about them a lot in the coming weeks, but I want to talk about the bigger picture of what's happening. AI has now become an infrastructure in our lives.
[00:01:17] And although we may think of it as a chatbot or an LLM, there's really multiple layers. There's the energy and power that supports the infrastructure, that builds the tokens and does the computing.
[00:01:30] There's chips and technology to run the computers to analyze the data. There's the cloud infrastructure that connects these systems together. There's the large language models, and then there's the applications. And because AI is so easy to use and so approachable, but by all of you, and we're going to talk in the webinar I'm doing this morning about how easy it is to build things with AI, and Galileo is designed for that. For example, we are all going to use this infrastructure. So the demand for AI is just beginning. It's early, early days. I think we're in the first or second inning of this technology revolution. If you looked back to the 1910s, 1920s, when electricity became common in business and manufacturing, we had no idea all the things that were going to be used by electricity, everything from microwave ovens to mobile phones, same thing here. We cannot possibly imagine the number of things AI will do. And what's unique about AI that is completely different from any computing technology we've ever had in the past is that AI does not require you to stick data into a database to analyze it or use it. It can interpret and create and understand highly unstructured data. It can understand your voice. It can make sense of your instructions. It can understand images. It can understand videos. It can understand complex multi Related data.
[00:03:01] So for us in HR, with more than 95 different practices of HR and data about people all over the company, and I'm not talking about pay data or job position data, but data about somebody's approach to a problem, or their skills, or their experiences, or their strengths and weaknesses. All of that data, much of which we can't really interpret very well now without a psychologist, is going to become available to AI.
[00:03:33] So we're going to have HR systems or people systems, or human capital systems that are incredibly intelligent, useful, productive and strategic in thinking about how to deploy people in our organizations. Now, as part of the launch of this massive amount of research, what we've decided to do is a couple things. There is a report that summarizes these 11 things available for those of you who license Galileo. We're not producing the report for non Galileo users because all of the information in the report is loaded into Galileo. And Galileo is trained to help you assess your capabilities and readiness and maturity in all of these 11 things. So you can go through both Galileo, the agent, and our learning platform and ask it questions about these topics and it will literally help you think through what you want to do as an individual, as a professional, as an organization. In the world of enterprise AI, we're also coining the phrase super agent. And you'll see that in the webinar that I'm doing today. A super agent is an agent that collects information from multiple agents. The example that people can understand the best is a self driving car. The self driving car is not a bunch of power steering and power brakes and automatic parking features just collected together into one bucket. It's a system that sits on top of those multiple agents and uses them to solve a problem which is getting the passenger from point A to point B. You have the opportunity now to architect the super agents which will bring together the multiple agents that you either build or buy. And I do believe a lot of you are going to be building agents and there'll be a lot less buying of agents. And that is changing, of course, the HR technology stack and the enterprise software industry. And if you've noticed the enterprise software market on the stock market, it's declined a lot in the last three or four weeks because people are starting to realize that AI really does give you, as a corporate user, buyer or professional, tools to build the applications you need.
[00:05:41] We also talk a lot in the imperatives about the people side of this. And despite all of these articles that are written about unemployment and possible job loss, we are going to see lots and lots of new jobs created in the HR domain itself. We have done analysis in Galileo and you can do this yourself to show you that about a third to 40% of the roles and job titles in HR today are going to go away. That doesn't mean the people are going to go away. It means those job descriptions are going away. Going to go away. Those people are going to find new opportunities to do new things, manage agents, build agents, clean and curate data, or do other tasks in the company, including consulting and high level support tasks, which today most business partners don't have time to do because they're too busy looking for reports. So the future of HR is not going to be no people, it's going to be much higher level people in a systemic HR model. And we have organization structures and models to help you think that through. The second part of the people equipment equation is support of people. And it's interesting to me, as I'm doing a lot of thinking about the future at the moment, is that over the last multiple decades we've had an extraordinarily positive outcome in longevity, in health, in all sorts of support systems, in our lives.
[00:07:03] Yet employee engagement and economic satisfaction and economic security are at a very low level. People are worried, people are concerned. We have wars going on again, we have tariffs, we have political debates, political anger. And so we as business people, moving beyond the politics of the particular situation we be in at any moment, have to take care of the people we have. It's interesting to me, as I've been looking back over the last 50 years, how the early days of my career in the 70s, companies really took care of their people. You worked for a company for basically most of your career. We had labor unions, we had pensions, we had benefits, and the company was your career. In a sense, the biggest change that's happened over the last five decades is the separation or decoupling of you as a worker from your company. It started with, in some sense, Reagan laying off the air traffic controllers. The 401k in a sense moved federal money away from pensions towards self directed retirement plans. NAFTA freed up the global outsourcing market and then the Internet basically democratized job seeking and job posting. So it was easier and easier to find jobs. Then along came Uber, then along came the pandemic, and the next thing you know, our employers are only one part of our careers. And in fact, people change employers much more than they ever did before. A lot of people have multiple employers and most young people would prefer to be their own boss and either be an influencer, build their own companies, or contract themselves to multiple companies. So if you want your company to thrive and grow and transform, form and be a dynamic company, you're going to have to find a way to continuously care for, attract, train, develop and support the people in your company because it is easier and easier for them to leave than ever before. And that leaves me to maybe my final point for this brief podcast. The era of superworkers and super Worker organizations. If you just think deeply about what AI is going to do and we're all going to have personal AI on our phones, on our computers, in our watches, in our glasses, our phones, in our clothes, et cetera, we are all going to have the opportunity to supercharge our work and our outcomes and our output and our productivity. And that means that some of us in some domains are going to be exceedingly productive and exceedingly powerful as professionals. Some maybe less than others. And so the differentiation between the high, high super performers and people that perhaps don't know how or don't want to learn how to use these tools is going to be extremely high.
[00:09:51] And so as an organization or an organizational leader, you're going to have to think about how you raise the talent density of all of your people, because the opportunity we have as individuals to improve our capabilities are almost limitless as this AI comes to market. So we're going to have to rethink talent management, succession, leadership development, career, all of those things inside of our companies if we want to keep people inside of our thriving organizations. Revenue scale, customer service, employee experience. These are the benefits of AI not reducing headcount, not reducing labor cost. I think labor costs in some sense may go up because people will be producing much, much more outcome, but the result of that will be companies that can grow faster, make more money and compete even better, and deliver better products and services. Anyway, let me stop here. Please take a look at the imperatives. It is well worth your time and money to license Galileo so you get all the intellectual property behind it. We've also buil entire learning program that will step you through step by step, all of the 11 imperatives in this research. And you have a super tutor that you can keep at your side to ask questions and have it customize what you need to understand for your company and your career as part of the experience. Join us in this journey throughout 2026. We have lots more to come. I'll talk about our new HRAI blueprint in the webinar today. And our conference in June, Irresistible is going to be better than ever. Thanks, everybody. Talk to you again soon.
