Here’s an update on Google’s Gemini Flash 3.5 (bad name) and how it impacts the enterprise market, an update on Google AI in Search, and an update on the HR 2030 architecture coming out at Irresistible. I also want to thank you as a listener, we discovered that this podcast now reaches 4 million HR and business professionals around the world.

I take that responsibility very seriously and we all work very hard to avoid advertisements or any kind of “blind opinions” in this format. You do get all my and our perspectives of course and I encourage you to get Galileo, our amazing AI platform, which serves as “me” – you can ask it any question and it answers, guides you, and helps you learn and solve problems.

By the way we’re going to be demonstrating some groundbreaking new Galileo capabilities at Irresistible, including the ability to load your entire company model. This means you can model a reorganization, redeployment, upskilling, flattening, or AI transformation for your team, business, or company – even looking at pay inequities and more. Those of you coming will see this in action. (Galileo Suite is only $79 a month or $795 a year.)

The “bag of doorknobs” phrase is one I learned as a software guy, it refers to the mess we create when we buy 140 employee systems and then add 500 new agents without an architectural strategy.

Additional Information

AI Prices Are Going Up, Up, Up – And What This Means For Enterprise AI

HR 2030: The Vision for Agentic HR Hits Reality

Get Galileo, The Everything HR AI Ready For You

 

What if the biggest mistake companies make with AI transformation is treating it as a technology problem? Laurent Aufils, Chief People Officer at Orange Business, knows that it’s all about people.

In this episode, Kathi Enderes sits down with Laurent to explore how one of the world’s leading digital services companies transformed its entire 30,000-people workforce through a people-first approach to generative AI.

The results are concrete and striking. Orange Business’s AI-powered contract management tool slashed what previously took teams weeks of painstaking analysis to under three hours — fundamentally disrupting not just how people work, but how they understand the value they bring.  Rather than letting 30,000 people go and rehiring AI specialists, Laurent and his team made a bold choice: there will always be a human in the loop. That principle became the foundation of everything — the cultural compass that kept employees from fearing the future and turned anxiety into engagement.

The numbers tell the story. Among employees who went through Orange Business’s reskilling and upskilling programs, employee Net Promoter Scores shot from a modest +8 to a remarkable +41. Over 90% of the company’s workforce is now trained in generative AI, and more than 60% use it as a regular part of their daily work.  AI certifications became a business objective on par with financial targets, and the company won contracts specifically because clients knew their teams had the credentials to back up their pitch.

But perhaps the most powerful insight Laurent shares is about learning. In the AI era, learning is no longer a one-time investment or a classroom event; it is a continuous business capability, and it must be embedded into the rhythm of everyday work.

Orange Business’s YouTime initiative — dedicating three hours per month per employee to learning — changed the entire mindset of the organization. Paired with an 11,000-member internal generative AI community, it created the kind of grassroots momentum that no top-down mandate ever could. Laurent’s advice to CHROs and HR leaders: stay humble, keep experimenting, and never let technology outpace your people.

Related resources

Podcast: Why AI Is A Massive Job Creation Technology. Automated Integration. Findem. And Thank You. 

The Superworker Organization: AI Goes Enterprise

AI Pacesetters: Six Secrets Of The Superworker Company 

The Age of the Superworker (and Supermanager)

Get Galileo: The AI Superagent for HR

 

The Pope’s Encyclical on AI is well worth reading. It’s not only about the perils and risks of technology, it’s really a manifesto about power. I found the essay extremely valuable to read so I wanted to share my perspectives on the topic and the fascinating analogy between AI and The Tower of Babel.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Additional Information

The Encyclical

Summary: Pope Leo’s ‘Magnifica humanitas’: AI must serve humanity not concentrate power

AI Prices Are Going Up, Up, Up – Maybe Workers Are More Productive Than You Thought

This week I attended the Sana AI Summit in NYC, so I wanted to share the various conversations and new ideas that came from this multi-disciplinary meeting. I hope my summary helps you see some of the bigger issues at play here.

Will AI destroy the job market? What is the real economic value so far? What is the difference between AI and humans? How safe is AI in reality? And how can we use AI to really better our lives, careers, and companies?

I hope my summary gives you some new ideas to think about as this technology permeates our lives and businesses. (And I recommend Geoffrey Hinton’s discussion for a listen.)

Speaker Role / affiliation listed Tyler Cowen Economist and author Geoffrey Hinton Computer scientist and “Godfather of AI” Anton Osika Co-Founder, Lovable Lauren Crichton Vice President, Sana Benjamín Labatut Writer Aneel Bhusri Co-founder, CEO and Chair, Workday Jasmine Sun Tech anthropologist Joel Hellermark Founder and CEO, Sana Sara Imari Walker Astrobiologist Ethan Mollick Professor of Entrepreneurship Anu Atluru Essayist and technologist

Many of our clients are playing with Claude, building things, and telling us about their amazing new innovations. But there’s a strange misconception out there – the idea that you can just “buy an Agent” and turn it on immediately.

AI doesn’t quite work this way. These systems “become you” – which means you have to train, maintain, tune, and continuously monitor them. Here’s the story for a quick listen. Here is a brief background on “managing and maintaining” AI agents.

And remember, this is the power of AI – you want it to “learn” about your company!  But like a junior staff member, you have to coach and train it.

Additional Information

Introducing HR 2030: A Vision For Agentic Human Resources

Agentic HR: Where Enterprise AI Is Going – Imperatives 

Why AI Is A Massive Job-Creation Technology, Despite What You Think

The Age of the Superworker (and Supermanager)

Get Galileo: The AI Superagent for HR

This week I’m in New York “Live!” and there are some exciting things happening: we launched our newest research on “The Five Types of Frontline Worker” which will help you dramatically improve that part of your business, and Cornerstone, the largest L&D tech provider, went BIG into AI.

Listen up for more details, and read the newest article for analysis.

Additional Information

Josh Bersin Company Defines New HR Taxonomy for Frontline Workers to Improve Hiring, Pay, Retention, and Management

Research: Understanding The Five Types of Frontline Workers

Cornerstone Launches Its Reinvention, Helping to Redefine Corporate Learning

Get Galileo: The Everything HR AI Agent for HR and Leaders

 

This week I turn 70 so and we’re in college graduation season, so I took some time to give you my perspectives on “The Liberal Arts Education,” and why it matters so much.

Not only are liberal arts important to your personal understanding of the world, they give you career skills you’ll use forever. I explain today, using myself as an example, why and how liberal arts, science, history, politics, and learning to think and write are the most important skills you have.

As we read about college grads complaining about AI and struggling to find jobs, I think you’ll find this inspiring and positive for the future. We’re living in a very disruptive time, and your perspectives on the “system of life” and “system of work” is one of the most valuable capabilities you build over time.

I’ll be talking much more about this in New York this week, and I hope to see many of you there or at Irresistible in June. Have a wonderful weekend and I hope this podcast gives you new perspectives you can use in your life as a professional, HR leader, manager, or parent.

Additional Information

Irresistible 2026: The Global HR Conference for Leaders and their Teams – join us!

Liberal Arts Colleges in Crisis: Long Live Liberal Arts (Bloomberg)

Introducing HR 2030: A Vision For Agentic Human Resources

Everything We Know About HR and Leadership: Get Galileo, the AI Superagent for HR

 

Frontline workforce hiring is important: these are the workers who deliver services, care for patients, and deliver the food or products that we rely on every day. Yet as we look at benchmarks for hiring and retention we see massive variations across companies. In fact the highest-performing companies hire 5-times quicker than others, and also find higher quality candidates! (Speed actually improves your quality of hire…)

Nehal Nangia, our lead analyst studying frontline work, explains the complexities. And as you’ll hear from Josh Secrest from Paradox, there are massive business implications in time to hire.

Interestingly enough, well designed AI platforms for frontline hiring have a massive return on investment.  As Nehal explains, frontline hiring is very complicated, and fewer than 25% of companies have figured this out. Lots of room for innovation and AI tools to help!

This podcast will open your eyes.

Additional Information

Powering the Frontline Workforce: How Frontline-First Companies Thrive

The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI is Transforming Recruiting

Why AI Is A Massive Job Creation Technology. Automated Integration. Findem. And Thank You.

Insights-First AI: Better and Explainable People Decisions

 

I just attended the Eightfold user conference where they introduced TalentForge, a toolset to build agents, and the CEO Ashutosh Garg told us their HR team could build their own HRMS.

Gloat is offering much of the same toolset, with integrations into Microsoft Teams, Copilot, Gemini and Claude – and you can import all your business rules from SuccessFactors, Workday, and other tools.

And almost all HR vendors (Findem, Eightfold, our own Galileo) have MCP plugins so you can access them in any agent you choose.

So the big question looms: what should you build and what should you buy? In this podcast I explain some of the considerations here and warn you that A) this is not as “easy” as it looks, and B) in a corporate setting you may want to think twice before you embark on a major replacement on your own.

On the other hand, fire up Cowork or another tool and build your own personal agent, as long as your data security is in place. Lots of experimentation ahead and we will introduce you to companies that have built dozens of amazing HR agents at Irresistible 2026.

Additional Information (Note that all our research and podcasts are at your fingertips in Galileo)

The Reinvention of Workday: From System of Record to Platform of Agents

ServiceNow Bets Big on Enterprise AI With Vision of Managing Everything

Could Microsoft Win The War For Enterprise AI?

The AI vs. Labor Economy, Why Benefits Are Being Cut, The Role of Legacy Systems

The Context Layer (Semantic Layer) In Enterprise AI (And Where Business Rules Go)

The Superagent for HR: Galileo Mars Release

We’re now at a stage where enterprise-class AI solutions are real, and suppliers are jockeying for position. Microsoft has consolidated its Copilot efforts into a more integrated offering, and also raised prices. Workday and ServiceNow have defined new consumption-based pricing models which shift from “buying seats” to “buying capacity.”

The Frontier model vendors like Anthropic and OpenAI are spending money massively, ready to go public soon, so we’ll understand their business models. And in the meantime both are investing in PE-backed joint ventures to build more engineering and implementation services to speed enterprise adoption.

The big story is clear to me: we’re in the early stage of a multi-trillion dollar redesign and reinvention of our companies, employee experiences, and customer experiences – all moving to a model we call “Dynamic Enablement.” Despite this direction, the products are new and immature, so there’s lots of risk-investment to undertake.

In this podcast I give HR and IT buyers our experience with AI projects so far, and show you that a focus on near-term use-cases is the best way to proceed. As they say, you can only eat an elephant “one bite at a time.” Just as mainframe transformation took decades, so will AI transformation take time (albeit less time!). So invest wisely and you’ll see tremendously positive ROI quickly.

Finally let me offer our help. We’ve already helped dozens of companies build high ROI AI solutions in recruiting, training, enablement, and employee experience. Watch for more in our HR 2030 program to stay in touch.

Additional Information (Note that all our research and podcasts are at your fingertips in Galileo)

The Reinvention of Workday: From System of Record to Platform of Agents

Could Microsoft Win The War For Enterprise AI?

ServiceNow Bets Big on Enterprise AI With Vision of Managing Everything

The AI vs. Labor Economy, Why Benefits Are Being Cut, The Role of Legacy Systems

The Superagent for HR: Galileo Mars Release

This week ServiceNow launched a massive set of new products to establish itself as the system that manages every AI agent in the enterprise. 

It’s a bold set of new products, including Otto (Moveworks), the Agent Fabric, the Context Engine, and the Autonomous AI Specialists. In reality the strategy is an expanded view of what Workday (Agent System of Record and Sana) and Microsoft (Agent 365 and Work IQ) are doing, but with a much deeper set of tools.

Not only is this a bold move to accelerate Agentic HR and Agentic business systems, it now explains why enterprise software companies are far from dead. In fact, the monetization model here is for you to pay for AI credits (ServiceNow has different levels of usage) and that revenue, which helps ServiceNow grow, is offset by your reduction in labor cost.

It’s all explained in this article and the podcast, and the implications are big for IT, HR software companies, and all of you trying to build AI solutions for your team.

Additional Information (Note that all our research and podcasts are at your fingertips in Galileo)

The Reinvention of Workday: From System of Record to Platform of Agents

Could Microsoft Win The War For Enterprise AI?

The AI vs. Labor Economy, Why Benefits Are Being Cut, The Role of Legacy Systems

The Context Layer (Semantic Layer) In Enterprise AI (And Where Business Rules Go)

The Superagent for HR: Galileo Mars Release