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.

SHL, one of the pioneers in industrial and psychological assessment, has now built a new instrument to assess an individual’s readiness for AI.

Sara Gutierrez, Chief Science Officer at SHL, explains how SHL is addressing this challenge.

Drawing on SHL’s 45-plus years of talent intelligence and behavioral science and a large study of millions of data points, Sara introduces a skills model built on four factors – AI literacy, analytical thinking, continuous learning, and AI promotion – that together define who is truly ready to become a superworker – any employee who uses AI to elevate their work to create more impact and have more meaningful work.

The conversation is full of grounding data. Across more than one million assessments, SHL found that graduates and early career workers know how to use AI tools but not necessarily how to use them well, while seasoned professionals show strong contextual judgment but struggle to reimagine solutions from scratch. Neither generation arrives superworker-ready and each needs help to develop the superworker readiness. And it’s not technical skills that differentiate superworkers from the rest. Powerskills – those durable human skills, like adaptability, critical thinking, and learning orientation – predict who will thrive as AI reshapes every role, and every worker can develop them.

The proof is in a real case: a media and telecommunications company used SHL’s AI readiness model to de-risk an AI transformation. Enthusiasm for AI was high, but gaps in applying it responsibly – using guardrails, exercising judgment on outputs – were putting success at risk. The assessment gave leaders something they rarely have: a data-backed, actionable development plan to help all employees thrive.

Employees welcomed the personalized recommendations. The lesson, as Sara puts it, is that leaders must frame the assessment not as evaluative but as developmental and supportive – because with 70% of employees not trusting that their employer knows how to use AI responsibly, trust is the whole game.

Related Resources

Let’s Stop Talking About Soft Skills: They’re PowerSkills

Podcast: How To Become An AI Pacesetter: Superworker Explained – article

Galileo Learn: The Superworker Organization: AI Goes Enterprise (certificate course)

Research: The Superworker Organization: AI Goes Enterprise

Research: AI Pacesetters: Six Secrets of the Superworker Company

New book: Superpowered, coming this Fall

It’s a strange time: the economy and capital markets are booming, yet worker engagement is as low as it was during the pandemic. It’s a strange combination of events: stock market at all time highs while affordability and trust are at all time lows. Have we over-inflated our economy or is it something more systemic.

As I discuss in my latest article, some of the challenges we face have been building for many years, while others are very recent. We live in a world of growing automation, fear of job loss, yet an extraordinary world of new health, business, and creative opportunities. And young people are the most pessimistic of all.

Is it just the “chaos of change” that’s causing the issue?

In today’s podcast I explain the factors and give you, as a business or HR leader, some advice on what to do.

Additional Background

Affordability Is Not Just Inflation: It’s Time For A Historic Shift In Wages.

Worker engagement just hit a decade low — and new data from 88 million employees shows why managers are the problem

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

Conflicts are on the rise globally, at the highest level since WWII, data shows

There’s Another Reason Gen Z Can’t Find Work

Today Eightfold launched its AI Candidate Agent, so I wanted to explain how the multi-agent world of HR 2030 is coming together.

In this podcast I explain what Eightfold is up to and how multi-agent AI systems are now starting to sweep across talent acquisition, particularly in high-volume recruiting. And it’s more complex, interesting, and valuable than you may think.

This article explains the market and business case in more detail, and we encourage you to read about HR 2030 to see where this exciting world is going.

Additional Information

The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI is Transforming Recruiting

Interview with Ashutosh Garg, Co-Founder & CEO of Eightfold.ai and Viven.ai

HR 2030, The Josh Bersin Institute, And Galileo

Over the last few years we’ve experienced a global affordability and income inequality problem and there are a myriad of policy issues at play. Yet at the same time something else is going on: wages and employee earnings have fallen way behind growth in GDP, profits, and productivity. What gives?

In this podcast, and the related article, I discuss how pay practices are changing and how we, as leaders or HR professionals, have a lot of agency to help address this situation. Without wading into politics, we have clear research on the way that pay operates as an “investment” not an expense, and how high performing companies actually reward their workers in exceptional ways.

It’s a complex topic and one that’s about to become more “systemic” and real-time with AI, so consider this some background to give you food for thought as more and more employees demand raises and accommodations for the high cost of living.

Additional Background

Why Has Cost of Living Become The #1 Issue In The US? It’s More Complex Than Inflation

The Rise of the Supermanager

Benchmark Your Pay Practices With Galileo: The AI Superagent for HR

All organizations, whether they are profit-seeking companies, non-profits, or governments, have politics. And the issues of how we make decisions, the role of top-down vs. bottoms-up governance, and how we empower people to speak up… these are existential topics in any group of people.

As the USA celebrates its 250 year anniversary and we read so many articles about our history, I wanted to reflect on what our political history teaches us about business leadership, governance, and employee empowerment.

For those of you who study political science, I admire your craft and I think we have a lot to share.

Additional Information

The World Is Accelerating: What Has Changed About Leadership?

Organization Design: The Real Secret To Growth

The Big Reset Playbook: Organizational Culture & Performance

What if every talent process you ran was AI-enabled — not to replace what you do, but to make you superhuman at it?

That’s exactly how Matt Hoffman, Head of Talent and Partner at venture capital firm M13, operates. In this episode Matt explains how his team uses AI to help early-stage founders build a talent-first culture from day one – across recruiting, compensation, coaching, and beyond.

The results are remarkable. Using tools like Findem for AI-powered sourcing, Matt’s team can pinpoint candidates who didn’t just work at the right company — they worked there at exactly the right stage of company growth. That’s a level of targeting precision that data accuracy and explainability make possible, and that simply wasn’t achievable before AI.

But here is where Matt’s perspective gets truly compelling. AI is often framed as a speed tool, a way to do things faster and more efficiently. Matt pushes back hard on that narrative: AI should make your hiring better, not just quicker. And in the startup world, that distinction is everything.  Every hire at a 10-person company changes the organization by 10% — so getting it right matters far more than getting it done.

That is the essence of talent density: finding exactly the right people for where your company is and where it needs to go, rather than simply finding people fast.

His advice to HR and talent leaders is as practical as it is powerful: fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Start with the outcome you need to achieve, then let technology enable it — never the other way around.

If you have ever wondered what a truly AI-augmented talent strategy looks like when it is built with intention, depth, and relentless focus on talent density, this one’s for you.

Related resources

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

Podcast: Understanding Talent Density And Ditching Integrated Talent Management

Research: Insights-First AI: Better and Explainable People Decisions

Research: The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI is Transforming Recruiting

Research: How To Create Talent Density

This week Korn Ferry announced the $1.1 Billion acquisition of AMS, one of the leading providers of enterprise recruitment outsourcing. As I overview in this podcast, this deal demonstrates several things:

First, the talent acquisition space has become enormously important and is rapidly changing with AI, demographic changes, and internal productivity initiatives. AMS has become a global leader in recruitment process outsourcing and TA advisory work, leading to the $1.1 Billion valuation. AMS’s product AMS One is one of the only tech platforms that integrates almost every recruiting technology into one operational view, enabling AMS and clients to monitor, tune, and optimize all areas of recruiting in one place.

Second, Korn Ferry, as a leader in executive search and talent management services (including training offerings), sees enormous synergies and can add AMS’s revenue and $1.5 Billion backlog to their financial strength. While KF was not growing much, this now gives the company a new growth platform – including the opportunity to use AMS’s global service centers for other offerings.

This podcast is an overview of the deal, we’ll publish more after we get a briefing from KF’s management team.

Additional Information

History of Korn Ferry Acquisitions

The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI Is Transforming Recruitment

The Josh Bersin Institute Global HR Excellence Certification (inaugural cohort starts in September)

Understanding Agentic HR In Detail: The HR 2030 Vision and Architecture