Talent Acquisition is perhaps the most important but also complex part of business. In this podcast I explain the intricate details of this $750 billion market, which is now being transformed by AI.

As you’ll hear, recruitment is far more nuanced than you may think, so “experts” in HR can do some pretty amazing things. I hope this podcast helps you see the entire landscape and also understand where and why AI can have such an impact.

Many tech companies have tried and failed to transform the market (Google Jobs failed, Facebook Jobs failed), yet some thrive and deliver tremendous value. As you listen to this podcast I hope you get a better sense of where this market is going and I encourage you to get Galileo and ask Galileo to explain the vendor market in detail (it is updated almost daily).

As always I welcome your feedback and if you have an amazing or interesting story to share, please reach out to us.

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

Additional Information

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

AI-First TA Transformation: Join the Revolution! (certificate course)

Talent Acquisition Factbook (Benchmark your TA team).

Tristram Gray, Chief People and Corporate Affairs Officer at Kmart Group in Australia, explains how the retail giant is revolutionizing high-volume hiring with AI. Managing 55,000 employees across 450 stores, Kmart recruits 12,000 people annually while processing hundreds of thousands of applications.

Tristram shares how the company uses Sapia.ai to create a mobile-first, simulation-based AI assessment process that evaluates candidates on culture, values, and behaviors rather than traditional resumes, previous experience, or technical skills.

The results are remarkable: 73% reduction in time-to-hire (from 44 days to 11 days), 2.5 times longer retention, enhanced diversity, significant cost savings, and 9 out of 10 candidate satisfaction – which translates to a better brand and customer perception of the retail company.

Tristram discusses the importance of providing personalized feedback to every candidate, the transformation of recruiter roles from reactive hiring to proactive talent planning, the need for change agility with operations and HR, and his philosophy that AI, when used ethically and responsibly, can create deeply human impact. This conversation offers powerful insights for anyone navigating the introduction of AI in HR.

Additional Information

Powering the Frontline Workforce: How Frontline-First Companies Thrive

The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI is Transforming Recruiting

New Galileo Certificate Program: Elevating Talent Acquisition with AI

Today I discuss the leadership theme of Arrogance vs. Humility. It’s a big topic and covers many parts of a company’s cycle of growth and variations in styles of leadership. Without judgement, I wanted to discuss the topic in this era of massive AI investment, huge bets on the future, and many ongoing layoffs. There are good reasons for arrogance and it also has its problems, so I decided to share my thoughts.

I also discuss our upcoming 2026 Imperatives research coming in January and give you some insights on the new features in Galileo to help transform the way we assess, coach, and develop our leaders. (And we’re all leaders now.)

Additional Information

Palantir CEO Alex Karp Interview w/NYT Andrew Sorkin

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Interview w/NYT Andrew Sorkin

Gavin Newsom California Governor Interview w/NYT Andrew Sorkin

In this podcast I describe our newest CHRO Insights research, based on 25,000 CHRO profiles and detailed analysis of their job history by Findem. What you see is that CHRO tenure has dropped by 20% in the last five years, the role is still primarily held by women, and the pay levels of CHROs have not kept pace with the pay of other C-level officers.

Despite these challenges, the scope, role, and importance of the CHRO has rapidly increased, leaving many CHROs to take on roles a Chief Transformation Officers, Chief Strategy Officers, and even Chief AI Enablement Officers. And the career path to CHRO and from CHRO is changing.

Listen here to understand more. You can download the overview here.

You can get access to the detailed research by licensing Galileo, the essential AI Agent for HR, or by joining our corporate membership.

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

Additional Information

Josh Bersin Company Launches Research and Advisory Service for CHROs, a Role Under Increasing Pressure

Understanding the Path to CHRO (research report)

The Pivotal Role Of Chief HR Officer in AI Transformation

This podcast is one I’ve been working on for months. Jane Hoskisson, Director of Talent, Learning, and Diversity for IATA (the world’s advocacy, support, and training provider for 300+ airlines). Jane is joined by Alina Aronberga, HR Aviation Leader (former SVP of HR for Air Baltic), who partnered with IATA and others in GAAST, The Global Aviation and Aerospace Skills Taskforce. (You will hear Jane and Alina discuss GAAST in the podcast.)

Jane and Alina discuss many things, including the rapid growth in airlines, the critical need for talent, skills, and diversity, and their comprehensive Future of Work Aerospace Industry Skills Matrix.

This industry skills model, which defines skills at four competency levels, details the industry-wide skills for the major job roles in an airline. It also describes the way these skills will change with AI. And this entire model, which integrates detailed product and operation plans from Boeing, Airbus, and many airlines and service providers, was developed with Galileo®

As Jane explains in the discussion, Galileo was the thought partner, AI consultant, and analyst that directly helped IATA develop this model.

This means that any airline, airline provider, or aerospace manufacturer, can get the model from IATA and GAAST, and use Galileo to understand how these new roles and skills impact their operations, product plans, services, and internal talent strategies. Galileo, loaded with this data, is now available for thousands of aviation HR professionals to help with recruiting, job design, pay and benefits analysis, and training.

And there’s more. Through Jane and Alina’s relationships with airlines and other sources of business and economic data, the model describes how aviation talent needs vary by geography.

Aviation skills in demand in the US, for example, are tilted toward space travel and aeronautics. In the middle east, where airlines are doubling in size in 4-5 years, the critical skills are in pilots, crew, and front-office staff.

You can download the latest version of the skills matrix here, and there’s lots to learn by simply reading it. You can see how this authoritative, highly researched model can be used for training, hiring, succession, pay, and all the critical decisions airlines must face in this unprecedented period of growth.

Interested in the topics and stories shared here? Join us at our annual conference Irresistible 2026, on June 8-10 at USC in Los Angeles!

For those of you who are in other industries, let me assure you that airlines have precisely the same talent, hiring, leadership, and training problems you have – but with a safety and regulatory-driven urgency not seen in any other industry. So these are complex, highly skilled HR teams and we can all learn a lot from their experiences and stories.

I want to thank Jane, Alina, and all our airline clients and partners for supporting this work. We have much more to talk about in this fascinating industry, so please listen, learn, and join us at Irresistible.

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

Additional Information

All About IATA The International Air Transport Association

Airline Industry Statistics

Galileo: The World’s Trusted Agent for Everything HR

Everyone: one of the big existential changes in management and leadership is a whole new model for talent.

Today, for the first time in human history, we’ve agreed to pay one person a $Trillion dollars for his skills (Elon Musk). And this trend is growing.

Google paid $2.7 Billion to hire Noam Shazeer, the co-founder of Character AI. Mark Zuckerberg paid around $100 Million to hire Jiahui You, a top OpenAI researcher. And others, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov & Xiaohua Zhai, were rumored to receive $100 M signing bonuses to join Meta.

What’s going on? What happened to our belief in the “bell curve” of performance, forced rankings, salary bands, and all the traditional ideas of talent management?

Well it’s time to throw that stuff out the window and think differently. As many researchers have pointed out, including Boris Groyberg from Harvard, these “hyperperformers” can deliver 100 to 1000 times higher outcomes than an “average” employee and their utility and value is very hard to reproduce.

Groyberg’s studies show that hyper-performers in one company turn into middling performers in another. And this is borne out by our research, which shows that individuals who fit the culture and behaviors of a company well can absolutely deliver 10-fold higher performance than those who “grind the gears.”

All this said, the traditional talent management model has not worked out well, and I want to encourage you to ditch it. Even the job market itself bears this out: some “10x engineers” make 5 times as much money as engineers sitting next to them, and the same is true for sales people, consultants, politicians, and athletes. (The top ten NBA players make 7X more pay than the “average” NBA player.)

So why do we try to “commoditize” this into a bell-curve based talent system?

Integrated Talent Management, as defined by HR, leads to over-hiring, layoffs, and all sorts of “performance commoditizing” effects. If you use the Talent Density philosophy, by contrast, you wind up with a smaller company which performs at a much higher level.

Listen to this podcast and I’ll explain all that needs to be addressed. Suffice it to say that in a world of AI-powered Superworkers, it’s your talent system (as a whole) that’s going to drive extraordinary growth and competitive advantage, not fitting people into the bell curve.

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

Additional Information

The Myth Of The Bell Curve: Look For The Hyper-Performers

How To Create Talent Density

We Wasted Ten Years Talking About Performance Ratings. Seven Things We’ve Learned.

Galileo: The World’s Trusted Agent for Everything HR

This week I discuss AI economics and explain the details behind the AI “Bubble” we read about.

Where is all this money for data centers coming from and where is it going? What are the business and economic risks of all this hyper-investment? Which vendors are likely to survive? And what’s going to happen to price we pay for AI chatbots, compute resources, and apps?

As you’ll hear, this is a big topic for the year ahead and you’ll understand why it’s time to sharpen your pencil as you plan and build you big AI solutions for the year ahead.

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

Additional Information

Here’s why concerns about an AI bubble are bigger than ever (NPR)

Gen AI Is Going Mainstream: Here’s What’s Coming Next

The Josh Bersin Company Partners with Microsoft on Copilot Tuning for HR Experts

Galileo: The World’s Trusted Agent for Everything HR

In this podcast I discuss the evolution of AI in the enterprise and how we shift from a focus on individual productivity to a focus on multi-functional Superagents. In HR, where I focus, the idea of Superagents lets us rethink our HR practices from the ground up and vastly simplify the way our company works. And Superagents bring autonomy to business.

Think about it this way in the world of autos. An “Assistant” is power steering or power brakes, helping the driver do their job. An “Agent” is like automatic lane control or collision detection, “taking over” the car under certain conditions. A self-driving car like Waymo or Zoox is a Superagent, shifting to the big goal: getting from point A to point B.

In a self-driving car there’s no need for a steering wheel or even driver’s seat. Likely in a Superagent for recruitment the job of “recruiter” is vastly changed and in a Superagent for L&D an instructional designer may go away.

Similarly a “digital twin” does not assist an expert, it literally recreates and expert, enabling that person to free up to do more.

Listen to this carefully, it sets you up for some exciting new ideas in your corporate AI solutions in 2026.

Additional Information

The Road To AI-Driven Productivity: Four Stages of Transformation

Digital Twins, Digital Employees, And Agents Everywhere

Galileo , The Essential AI Assistant for Everything HR

This is exciting news: soon you will be able to embed Galileo® into your own version of the Microsoft Copilot with Copilot Fine Tuning and turn your company’s AI agent into an HR, management, and leadership guru.

In this podcast I explain the new Microsoft Copilot Fine-Tuning feature, which lets you build your own customized Copilot, trained in management, leadership, and HR. I also explain the difference between the fine-tuning option and RAG (retrieval augmented generation), the way the Copilot and other agents access typical corporate documents and data.

To my knowledge this unique feature is only available in the Microsoft Copilot, and the company is highlighting many unique use-cases. In the case of HR, management, pay, leadership, performance management, and other HR-related topics, the Galileo fine tuning turns the Copilot into a world-class HR consultant, advisor, and educator.

Stay tuned for more information on this exciting product direction and click here to watch the demonstration released at Microsoft Ignite this week.

If you would like to be one of our early customers for Galileo for Microsoft Copilot, please register here.

More Information

The Josh Bersin Company Partners with Microsoft on Copilot Tuning for HR Experts (article)

Fine-Tuning vs. RAG Video Explanation

Gen AI Is Going Mainstream: Here’s What’s Coming Next

Galileo: The World’s Trusted Agent for Everything HR

I’m excited to publish my recent discussion with Jacqui Canney, CHRO of ServiceNow (previously CHRO of Walmart & WPP).

Jacqui describes her career and her vital role as Chief People and AI Enablement Officer at one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies in the world, and also explains her mission to enable AI for more than 3 million of ServiceNow’s customers.

Jacqui also describes how their HR team developed more than 1,000 HR use-cases and later refined these to 27 by building a rubric to evaluate AI opportunities.

This is an inspirational conversation which will help you understand the role of the CHRO in AI transformation and the AI Playbook you can follow in your own company’s journey.

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

Additional Information

The Pivotal Role Of Chief HR Officer in AI Transformations

CHRO Insights: Understanding The Path to the CHRO

How To Make AI Work For People: ServiceNow AI Playbook

Introducing Galileo for Managers, The Leadership Guru At Your Fingertips

This week I tell you about how the new world of corporate learning has rapidly evolved, and how AI-native learning, digital twins, and coaching all come together. It feels like a tornado has begun and all these standalone technologies are colliding, giving you the most exciting new business and career opportunity for L&D in many decades.

And for vendors and investors, I explain why I believe this is the trillion dollar opportunity of the decade.

I hope you learn a lot from this podcast and get your hands on the Galileo Suite to get started.

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

Additional Information

2025 Market Trends Webcast Replay (with promo code for Galileo at end)

The AI-Native Corporate Learning Revolution (research)

Arriving Now….. The Digital Twin.

Gen AI Is Going Mainstream: Here’s What’s Coming Next