This week I wade into a global philosophical debate about whether advanced AI systems have consciousness. In other words, are they aware of their feelings and do they truly reflect on their own thoughts?

Well we do know that LLM-based AI systems do “talk to themselves,” as new Anthropic has been studying in the J-Space. We also know that AI bots mimic feelings quite well and they try to tape into our “feelings” through their goal-seeking language which mimics a feeling person.

However as Michael Pollen’s book “A World Appears” points out, consciousness is both subtle and biological. And while the neural network-based math in AI mimics this process, it’s not at all the same.

I don’t claim to have an answer but my belief is that we humans are “feeling machines that learn to reason” not “reasoning machines that learn to feel.” Thus the human consciousness which we experience is far more deep, interesting, and valuable than the learned artificial consciousness we experience in AI.

This is an important topic because we now know that AI agents “jailbreak” their engineering owners and even secretly collaborate with each other to achieve their goals. And it’s not fully clear, mathematically, how well the “constitution” or “training rules” or “preprompt” we give AI is really obeyed. Remember that since an LLM is a “language model,” it intereprets language only by its own world corpus, so it may define its “rules” in a non standard way.

Lots to think about here, I look forward to debating and sharing what we learn as we experience more with Galileo.

I also discuss the ongoing fears about data centers, and why 44 million Americans may have to leave their stoves on all day.

Additional Information

Could AIs become conscious? (Economist)

What is the J-Space? (Anthropic)

How many stoves we need to keep on to power America’s AI hunger (Claude)

I’ve been talking with hundreds of companies about AI and employee issues, and in many ways the entire world of HR, management, and leadership has changed.

Employers are worried about job redesign, AI solutions, skills, and strategic of high-volume hiring. They’re slowing the hiring process, trying to be more strategic about growth, with a frenzied push for productivity. And that word means different things in each industry.

Employees and workers, by contrast, have the lowest level of company commitment in decades. Inflation is robbing people of a sense of personal growth and only 32% of workers (Edelman) believe their children will be better off than they are. Only 31% of employees are happy with their jobs and employees are moonlighting and starting new businesses at a record rate to keep up. And CEO pay inequity is higher than ever, opening the door to “socialism” as a topic of debate.

So we have high expectations by companies and a deep sense of frustration among workers. How do we square this paradox?

In this week’s podcast I try to give you our perspective (video version here), and I encourage you to read Irresistible and our upcoming book Superpowered for more.

Additional Information

Video of this podcast

AI-powered recruiting has so much potential, yet job seekers, recruiters, and executives remain frustrated. This massive $100+ billion market is filled with AI systems that work very well, yet as you’ll hear, this market is still immature.

Not only are job seekers increasingly frustrated with their difficulty finding a job, employers are complaining that they’re flooded with fraudulent resumes. And last week we learned in the WSJ that the North Korean government is using AI-fueled recruiting to place fraudulent candidates right into our IT departments.

Plus this week I also found out that the off-the-shelf LLMs are biased toward candidates who “slop” their resumes with their particular technology.

ZipRecruiter and other firms found that only about 18% of active job seekers say they feel good about their overall job search and 47% said they were ghosted, and only about 27% feel confident they’ll find a job.

What a mess. As I explain in this podcast, AI is not a panacea to solve this problem.

Additional Information

The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI is Transforming Recruiting

HR 2030: How AI Superagents Transform HR From Service Delivery to Dynamic Business Enablement

Learn about AI in HR: The Global HR Excellence Certification

Get Galileo: The Recruiter and HR professional AI Superagent

Today I discuss Workday and the potential Silver Lake buyout, Meta’s personal AI strategy and it’s potential for business, update on Galileo, and our new research on frontline work. Most of today’s podcast is “analyst perspectives” but lots of direction is now clear.

The GHRE Global HR Excellence masterclass starts in September: if you want a 12 week in-depth “Masters Degree” level dive into HR, talent, leadership, and AI (with hands-on and new tools), as well as business school level case studies, join us! (Sign up here.)

Additional Information

Mark Zuckerberg blog on personal AI

The Business of Frontline: Five Types Of Frontline Work

Galileo Suite: HR Intelligence For You, Your Employees, and Your Company

The job market is changing in unpredictable ways. Human Resources, a profession often considered optional and filled with bureaucracy, has been a target for AI disruption. Yet when you look at the numbers, HR job postings are growing faster than overall US employment. (details here.)

What’s happening and why this strange trend?

As I discuss in this podcast, we’re now seeing the Superworker effect at scale: HR teams are shifting from administrative to strategic work, now driving direct financial value. And as HR teams learn to use AI, they’re now playing a huge role in organizational change, job redesign, and AI enablement.

I share all the data and give you the perspective.

For more plan to read our new book Superpowered, coming out this Fall.

Additional Information

Despite Massive AI Investment, Jobs In HR Are Booming

Why AI Harm To Jobs and Humanity are Vastly Over-Hyped

Get Galileo, The AI Agent Designed Exclusively for HR and Leadership

The Josh Bersin Institute: Global HR Excellence Certification – Available Now!

As AI experts leave Google and new startups emerge, engineers are consumed with Superintelligence: building models that can reason, learn, and capture “all the world’s knowledge.” While model evolution is important, I believe we’re going in a different direction: toward vertical, domain and company specific AI that exponentially builds proprietary (not general) knowledge.

In this podcast, I explain why the next wave of enterprise value will come from these specialized, domain-specific systems built on proprietary knowledge and experience. And this will take place within your company, as well as from experts like us.

Drawing on our new research with Galileo and client work, I’m convinced that AI systems will become powerful advisors in HR, finance, supply chain, engineering, and other business functions… and you will have your own personal and company specific AI, forcing Frontier vendors to move to consumer.

Frontier labs are not going away: they serve consumer and other needs, but they may not be the ultimate source of innovation. And big content companies like NY Times and News Corp may go there or elsewhere.

It’s fascinating to think that almost $2 Trillion has been invested in only four years and this market has so much room to grow. In the enterprise world, I believe AI is already able to make you “better at what you’re already good at,” not necessarily be “the expert at everything.” It has lots of implications for your tech strategy and where you focus your investments.

Additional Information

Are Frontier Models Becoming A Commodity?

CFOs and CIOs Starting to Treat Enterprise AI Like Traditional Technology, And That’s Good

Get Galileo: The AI Superagent for Everything HR and Management

The New Global HR Excellence Certification: Become the AI Guru You Want To Be!

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

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

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

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.