Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning everyone from Los Angeles at the USC campus. Irresistible 2026.
[00:00:07] Some big announcements and new information as of this morning.
[00:00:11] First of all, there's a large article in Bloomberg about the layoffs potentially taking place in the banking industry, which flies in the face of last week's announcement from the Bureau of Labor statistics that 175,000 new jobs were created in the United States and the unemployment rate remains low at 4.3%. And what the research essentially shows, and I've written about this, is that the jobs that are being eliminated are bureaucratic back office jobs that probably shouldn't have been created in the first place. And I know this in most of the banks we meet with. So what we're basically seeing is more use of AI as an excuse to redeploy resources that were probably poorly planned during the hiring process. I think Jamie Dimon put it the best when he said, we're not slowing down hiring, we're increasing hiring, but we're probably going to hire fewer bankers and more AI people. And that's the reality in HR too.
[00:01:09] Even though the HR profession as a functional job family may get smaller, there are new job families in HR being created to manage and use and train and, and architect all our new HR2030 Agentix systems. And I'm going to be talking about that in the keynote today in great detail.
[00:01:29] Second thing, today we launched the HR 2030 initiative. This is a very, very big research program from us. It's one of the biggest projects we've ever embarked on because what we're basically doing here is building for you case studies, vendor information, technical research and a blueprint and detailed functional architecture of what agentic AI is going to look like in human resources. We've already made a lot of progress on this. The blueprint is available now to our corporate members and we are doing workshops for clients and for those of you that are either implementing various AI solutions in your companies or if you're a vendor and you're building something really cool and exciting and you want to run it by us, please let us know and talk to us. We'll talk to you on the phone and we'll interview you and you'll see more and more come out on this. This is only the very, very beginning of this program.
[00:02:27] As I discussed in the podcast I did last weekend, it's very clear to me that this is a complete reinvention going on over the next decade. And the sooner we get with the new program and let go of the past, the better for our Companies for our jobs, for our careers and for the profession as a whole. And that leads me to the third big announcement we're making at the conference this week and that is the launch of the Josh Burson Institute. The Josh Berson Institute is a new entity that we've created to create certified professional development skills for all levels of HR professionals. The first program we're launching is called the Global HR Excellence Program. G H R E. This is a 12 week, 350 hour education cohort based learning simulation and AI based education program developed in partnership with the University of Southern California for all of you at all levels of hr, including senior people, to get versed in the details of the systemic HR model, the maturity models and industry case studies and solutions in all different domains of HR and learn how to apply the principles and practices and new consulting skills in all aspects of human resources, from recruiting to development to onboarding, to succession, to leadership to technology to AI to data management, to engagement to employee experience. All of those things in a real world simulated company. And at the end of the program you will meet many of your peers, you will be assessed based on a real business simulation that we've developed. So those of you that go through the GHRE will get a GHRE certification which we will be standing behind and promoting in the market. And you will feel confident to go back to your company and take on bigger and better projects to drive value in this new world of Agentic HR and HR 2030. So this is something I've wanted to do for a long time. We obviously started all this when we built our Academy back in 2012 and it has extended and gone further and we've had many, many more things to it and it embraces the reality of that this is a complex profession that has learned over time that every company and every industry and every organization has different needs and different cultural practices and different talent issues and different philosophies really about human capital. And that all of this is being challenged and debated in a sense in the world of AI. And we want to get you ahead of this. And so I am willing to put my reputation on this that all of you that take this program and go through the process of being certified are going to find yourselves in a much more advanced opportunity space for your career, your company and the projects that you work in. And you will be part of an alumni network. We're going to be promoting the certificate to employers, all sorts of really cool things we're going to be doing here. There's a 450 packed group of people here in LA. We're very excited to be starting in a little while. So I hope those of you that are here have a chance to participate and see all of this. We're going to have lots of new demos of capabilities in Galileo. We're launching new platforms for Galileo as well as preview of Galileo on the Microsoft Copilot. And I hope you all can benefit from these announcements. And those of you that are here, I look forward to meeting each one of you during the next couple of days. That's it for today.
