AI-driven recruiting is on the hot seat and it’s only getting hotter.

Most job seekers now experience AI-interviewers, AI-based screening, and even chatbots that can automate the entire process. And as this market grows, two new lawsuits (one against Workday, one against Eightfold) have emerged, indicating the “fear” job seekers have about this technology.

In the meantime, vendors are gobbling up these tools.

This includes Workday’s $1 billion acquisition of Paradox (and Hiredscore), SAP’s acquisition of Smartrecruiters, Outmatch’s acquisition of Pymetrics (renamed Harver), UKG’s acquisition of Chattr (renamed Rapid Hire), Radancy’s acquisition of myInterview, Hirevue’s acquisition of Modern Hire, Cornerstone’s acquisition of Skyhive (following acquisition of Clustree), Lightcast’s acquisition of Rhetorik, and more.

Where is all this going?

As I discuss, this is an enormous ($840 billion) market and there’s a lot yet to come. As I discuss, we are entering a whole new set of demands, demands for quality, explainability, skills verification, and bias-detection.

One of the big new trends is what we call “vertical data labeling” to increase transparency and quality. (The pioneer here is a company called Findem.) So for you as a buyer or user, it’s a time to focus on data and AI accuracy and completeness.

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Additional Information

The Great Reinvention of Human Resources Has Begun

People Data For Sale: How The Talent Intelligence Market Really Works

The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI is Transforming Recruiting

Imperatives for 2026: What’s Ahead for Enterprise AI, HR, Jobs, And Organizations

Get Galileo: The World’s AI Agent For Everything HR

David Hughes, the Global People Leader for Costa Coffee (now at HSBC), discusses the company’s innovative approach to hiring using AI. Costa Coffee, a global brand with over 2,000 stores in the UK, faces significant hiring challenges due to high turnover rates and the need to hire thousands of baristas annually.

David explains how Costa has shifted its focus from hiring the “best” talent to finding the “best fit” talent that aligns with the company’s values and culture.

Using Sapia’s AI chat-based assessment, Costa has built a simple 5-question open chat survey that lets Costa identify the culture, behavioral, and work skills for best fit. This process not only scales to 350,000+ candidates, it also gives each candidate a personalized assessment and is rated 9 out of 10 on netpromoter score. In other words, candidates love it!

David emphasizes the importance of patience and bravery in adopting AI, highlighting the positive impact on both recruitment efficiency and candidate satisfaction.

Like this podcast? Rate us on Spotify or Apple or YouTube.

Additional Information

The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI is Transforming Recruiting (research)

The Great Reinvention of Human Resources Has Begun

The Art, Science, And Magic Of Recruiting In The World of AI (podcast)

In this podcast I talk with Nathan Perrott, VP of Innovation at Radancy. Radancy is a major provider of integrated recruiting tools, all integrated in what’s called the Radancy Talent Acquisition Cloud.

You may not recognize the name, but Radancy is actually one of the pioneers in talent acquisition, originally started as TMP Worldwide. Over the last 40 years the company has been involved in all aspects of technology-enabled recruitment, (including Monster.com), so they understand job advertising, social media, candidate experience, branding, automated screening, and now AI-powered interviewing. The company’s integrated platform is one of the most end-to-end recruitment systems in the market (handles everything except the ATS) and more than 700 large corporations rely on Radancy.

Nathan has been in this space for many years so I ask him to explain how the market has changed, what their new AI copilot is all about, and how companies can save money and get ahead of the massive AI-fueled candidate and job posting market today.

Additional Information

The Great Reinvention of Human Resources Has Begun

Yes, AI Is Really Impacting The Job Market. Here’s What To Do.

Imperatives for 2026: What’s Ahead for Enterprise AI, HR, Jobs, And Organizations

The Collapse And Rebirth Of Online Learning And Professional Development

Get Galileo: The World’s AI Agent For Everything HR and Leadership

The HR profession is about to go through its biggest transformation in decades. To use a new phrase, this is a “rupture” from the past as we shift to new world of AI agents and superagents automating much of what we do.

In this podcast I explain how 30-40% of AI jobs and roles will change, and how HR will become even more strategic as a result. And this is not a story of layoffs or cost reduction: rather we see AI helping to transform HR into a business function that accelerates scale, time to market, customer value, and both employee and customer experience.

I also discuss why and how AI accuracy and trust is going to become enormously more important overnight as agents speed up and automate our human capital work.

I’m very inspired by what’s about to happen and I want you, as a business or HR professional, to understand and thrive in this new world. This is why we’ve loaded our AI Blueprint and all our analysis of HR roles and operations into Galileo, which serves as a consulting tool, learning tool, and problem solving agent.

If you’re inspired by this transformation agenda I hope you reach out to us so we can help you and your company build your own AI agenda for the years ahead.

Additional Information

Additional Information

Imperatives for 2026: What’s Ahead for Enterprise AI, HR, Jobs, And Organizations

The Collapse And Rebirth Of Online Learning And Professional Development

Yes, AI Is Really Impacting The Job Market. Here’s What To Do.

Get Galileo: The World’s AI Agent For Everything HR and Leadership

This week we launch our Imperatives for 2026, and I discuss the 11 top issues you face and how HR, as we know it, is going to radically change. Our research shows that 30-40% of today’s HR roles will go away, soon to be automated by AI agents and Superagents.

Read today’s news release for more details.

This podcast explains the transformative impact of enterprise AI on human resources, emphasizing the redefinition of HR roles, the emergence of super agents, and the future of work. It highlights the need for organizations to adapt to these changes by focusing on employee engagement and the development of super workers, ultimately leading to enhanced productivity and organizational growth.

Major Messages

• AI is redefining what HR does and how it operates.
• We are in the early stages of a technology revolution with AI.
• AI can analyze unstructured data, making HR more strategic.
• The concept of superagents will change HR technology.
• Many HR roles will evolve rather than disappear due to AI.
• Employee engagement is at a low despite advancements in health and longevity.
• Organizations must continuously care for and support their employees.
• The workforce is becoming more independent and less tied to a single employer.
• AI will create opportunities for super workers who leverage technology effectively.
• Companies must rethink talent management to retain top talent.

Your Personal Transformation

Each of these 11 topics represent a learning opportunity for business and HR professionals. We’ve built an entire AI-powered learning experience and Supertutor in Galileo to help. We encourage you to get Galileo to dig in and apply these topics to your job, your company, and your career.

Additional Information

Imperatives for 2026: What’s Ahead for Enterprise AI, HR, Jobs, And Organizations

The Collapse And Rebirth Of Online Learning And Professional Development

Yes, AI Is Really Impacting The Job Market. Here’s What To Do.

Get Galileo: The World’s AI Agent For Everything HR and Leadership

This week, as part of our 2026 Imperatives launch, I discuss the explosive new world of agents and superagents, and explain why and how you, as an HR or business person, will be “building apps” and “building agents” at work.

I also explain why the Superagent architecture, which is explained in our Imperatives research, is going to replace traditional monolithic HR and other applications at a speedy rate.

Yes, we’re all going to be “Citizen Developers” and we won’t necessarily need Vibe Coding apps to do this. Galileo is an app-builder today and the upcoming Mars release is going to take it even further.

This important topic is a big and very important shift in your thinking about how you run HR and also how you select, purchase, and implement HR technology of all kinds. Listen in, join in our webinar next week, and get Galileo to learn more and get started.

Galileo will show you how to start building solutions today.

All this information and much more is part of our 2026 Imperatives and will be embedded into Galileo, so get Galileo and ask Galileo to give you specific examples of how you can apply AI to HR in your particular company. This research includes 30+ prompts to help you understand enterprise AI in detail.

Join me in my 2026 Imperatives webinar on January 21 for more details.

Like this podcast? Rate us on Spotify or Apple or YouTube.

Additional Information

Is Oracle’s Debt Level Getting Crazy? There’s A Method To This Madness.

Yes, AI Is Really Impacting The Job Market. Here’s What To Do.

The Collapse And Rebirth Of Online Learning And Professional Development

Imperatives for 2026: What’s Ahead for Enterprise AI, HR, Jobs, And Organizations

As AI transforms our jobs, careers, and lives what happens to our sense of self? If an AI agent can do my job, what happens to me?

In this podcast I discuss the topic of purpose, identity, and mission and how we, as human agents, can keep ourselves happy and purposeful as more and more of our work becomes automated. Yes, these tools are amazing to see and use, but what happens when the career we spent decades building no longer really exists?

Reinventing yourself is scary but we all have to do it. In this podcast I discuss how profound this change is becoming and what you, as a leader or HR professional, can do to help.

All this information and much more is part of our 2026 Imperatives and will be embedded into Galileo, so get Galileo and ask Galileo to give you specific examples of how companies build purpose and identity all around the world.

Join me in my 2026 Imperatives webinar on January 21 for more details.

Like this podcast? Rate us on Spotify or Apple or YouTube.

Additional Reading (recommended)

Irresistible: The Seven Secrets of the World’s Most Enduring, Employee-Focused Organizations

Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

The Healthy Organization: Next Big Thing In Employee Wellbeing

We are entering the year of Enterprise AI, and one of the imperatives we’re introducing is the need to think about your AI Architecture.

While much of our AI journey has been focused on individual productivity tools, now we have a much bigger opportunity: using AI to rethink how our HR, talent, leadership, and human capital processes are designed. As you’ll hear our new Systemic HR® AI Blueprint defines a new set of “Superagents” that help us think through the new workflow automations we can deploy.

In this podcast I explain the new AI architecture for HR at a high level and give you a sense of the explosive vendor market, the role of “citizen developers,” and the business case and process for prioritizing where to focus.

All this information and much more is part of our 2026 Imperatives launch and will be embedded into Galileo, so get Galileo and ask Galileo to apply these architectural issues to your HR department. Not only do we have massive opportunities to build a more integrated HR department, these new AI architectures enable our companies to scale, grow, and add customer value faster and more profitably than ever.

Join me in my 2026 Imperatives webinar on January 21 for more details.

Like this podcast? Rate us on Spotify or Apple or YouTube.

Additional Information

Yes, AI Is Really Impacting The Job Market. Here’s What To Do.

Imperatives for 2026: What’s Ahead for Enterprise AI, HR, Jobs, And Organizations

The Collapse And Rebirth Of Online Learning And Professional Development

Get Galileo: The World’s AI Agent For Everything HR and Leadership

Welcome to our new research on the Frontline Workforce.

In this introductory podcast I explain the importance and complexities of these jobs, and why the people in these roles take on enormous responsibilities in our companies and our economy. More than 70% of US workers are employed in frontline roles, generating more than $6 Trillion in wages and value.

While many business and HR leaders support the frontline, our research points out that the issues are far more complex than you may realize. In this podcast I detail some of these important management topics and I also describe how the HR Technology market has struggled to meet their needs.

Then I discuss UKG the $5 Billion software company dedicated to this space and give you some insights on their pioneering and unique solutions.

No matter what you do as a leader, HR professional, or manager, you likely know how critical our frontline workforce has become.

Today frontline jobs in healthcare, transportation, construction, energy, airlines, and entertainment are the fastest growing segment of the workforce and also the roles least impacted negatively by AI. In fact AI is going to make these jobs even better.

I hope you enjoy the discussion: stay tuned for a detailed article describing some of the frontline-work innovations recently announced by UKG and more on our research roadmap.

If you would like to share your innovative solutions for frontline work, please contact us.

Additional Information

Powering the Frontline Workforce: How Frontline-First Companies Thrive (Research)

The UKG Product Strategy

An Exploration into the Frontline Workforce with Josh Bersin (YouTube Video with Josh Secrest of Paradox)

The Age of The Superworker: Four Stages of AI Explainer Video

AI adoption is accelerating and it feels harder and harder to keep up. I know many senior leaders feel confused by the rapid pace and college grads are worried about their careers.

What skills do we need to stay relevant in this new “All-AI” world?

Well there’s an answer to all this change, and it gets back to the five fundamental principles of your own professional learning.

In this episode, I unpack the five fundamental things to “learn” as the AI world accelerates at a quickening pace.

I do believe we’re barely in the first inning of this bold new world, so it won’t be your “skills” but rather your mindset, approach, and attitudes that keep you ahead and valued in the AI world ahead.

Stay tuned for out big 2026 Imperatives launch on January 21 where we’ll unpack the mandates for our companies and careers in the coming year.

Additional Information

Yes, AI Is Really Impacting The Job Market. Here’s What To Do.

The Collapse And Rebirth Of Online Learning And Professional Development

Get Galileo: The AI Superagent To Keep HR and Leaders Ahead in 2026

Welcome to 2026, a year I coin “The Year of Enterprise AI.” As you’ll read about (and hear about) in our 2026 Imperatives launch, the coming year is all about AI moving from “assistants” to “agents” to “solutions.” And there are three big considerations to ponder.

First, the cost of AI is skyrocketing, so we’re going to have to focus on high-value use-cases and business-specific solutions. That’s not to say AI assistants and meeting summaries are not valuable, but once you start paying by the token you’re going to want to go deeper. As we discuss in our new Systemic HR AI Framework, we’re sitting on billions of dollars of real business opportunities now, and they go far beyond individual assistants. (We call these Superagents.) And the cost of AI will accelerate this focus.

Second, the data center buildout, energy costs, and political issues with data centers will matter. For corporate users this means understanding the underlying “costs” of AI usage (creating a single high powered image uses as much as 25% of the battery in your phone). I point this out to make you aware that these AI chatbots are not “free” – there are acres of computing campuses being built behind the scenes. And that means your “software providers” are turning into capital intensive companies. (And a new industry of data center companies may take over.)

(For those of you in the energy industry, it’s a wild time – almost as exciting as I’ve seen since my early days as an energy engineer during the OPEC Arab Oil Embargo in the late 1970s.)

Third is the fast-changing issue of AI’s accuracy, trust, and voracious appetite for data. As I discuss, the real opportunity for corporate AI is to take this problem head-on, and focus on your company’s data quality, governance, human feedback, and data labeling. The big AI labs are struggling to reduce the “Jaggedness” of AI (it’s strange ability to be really good at some things and totally dumb about others), and that encourages us to focus on narrow, domain-specific AI applications. And we all need to learn about RLHF (reinforcement learning with human feedback).

Our experience with Galileo proves that an AI solution that focuses on a vertical domain can be infinitely more reliable and intelligent than a general purpose AI. But don’t let me argue with Sam Altman, you’ll have to figure this out yourself :-).

We are launching our 2026 Imperatives research on the third week of January, and there will be a special release of Galileo to accompany the study. Our goal is not to give you a bunch of pithy predictions, but rather to give you a dozen hard-hitting “Must Do’s” for the year ahead.

I look forward to talking with many of your this coming year as we travel around the world, join us in January for the launch of our 2026 Imperatives research.

Like this podcast? Rate us on Spotify or Apple or YouTube.

Additional Information

Imperatives for 2026: What’s Ahead for Enterprise AI, HR, Jobs, And Organizations

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (NYT bestseller, highly recommended)

From Assistants to Agents to SuperAgents: Where AI Is Going Next (podcast)

Galileo: The World’s Expert AI for HR and Leaders