Josh Bersin: Co-Founder & CEO of The Josh Bersin Company

Episode 770

On today’s episode, Kara welcomes Josh Bersin, CEO and Co-Founder of The Josh Bersin Company — and one of the world’s most influential voices shaping the future of work, leadership, and HR.
For more than two decades, Josh has advised hundreds of global organizations on how to build stronger, more human-centered workplaces. Known for coining concepts like “learning in the flow of work,” he’s helped redefine how leaders think about talent, culture, and organizational growth.
Now, Josh is leading the next transformation with Galileo, an AI co-pilot for HR that’s helping professionals work smarter, faster, and with more confidence. In this episode, he shares what inspired his pivot from advisory to technology, how AI is reshaping HR and leadership, and what the future of work really looks like.
It’s a fascinating conversation about innovation, adaptation, and the human side of technology — one that every leader, founder, and builder will take something from.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up, that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control, control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. Today’s guest is someone who has profoundly shaped how the world thinks about work, leadership and HR. Josh Bersin is the CEO and co founder of The Josh Bersin Company, and he is one of the most respected voices in the HR and and workplace space, advising hundreds of global organizations all over the world on how to build stronger, more human, centered companies, and now he’s leading the way with Galileo. Galileo Leo Leo, Galileo an AI copilot for HR that’s helping professionals work smarter, faster and with greater confidence. And I’m excited to dive into the evolution of work with him. And the rise of AI in HR, of course, is something that pretty much everyone is encountering, no matter what side of the fence you’re on, and Josh continues to guide leaders on this topic and organizations to thrive in this world. So Josh, welcome to the Kara Goldin show. So excited to meet you and have you on.

Josh Bersin 1:52
Thank you, Kara. I’m very excited to be here,

Kara Goldin 1:55
absolutely. So let’s start with I want to hear kind of, how did you get into HR, and how did you, how did you decide this, this version of work for yourself?

Josh Bersin 2:08
It was completely an accident. I was, I’m an engineer, and I worked in the oil industry for two years, and I worked in, I worked in the technology industry for 15, 1617, years. Worked for IBM for 10 years, another company for eight or nine years. And as you know, in the tech industry, things come and go all the time. And the company that I was the that I was with at the second company was company called Sybase. It was a very hot company, and then not a very hot company. And I got bored, and there was a startup building an online learning platform in 1998 before the internet actually existed, it was kind of new, and they wanted a head of marketing. So I was so fed up with my other company, I went there and started working in this startup, and we built this little company that became a pretty successful little company in online learning. Sold that company to a bigger company that had been publicly traded at the time, a.com publicly traded online learning company. I became the head of product there, and then they fell apart during 911 I got laid off. I came home was actually right around 911 when I got laid off, and I said to my wife, you know, I always wanted to be an industry analyst. To hell with this in working for these other companies, let me see if I can do some research that will help people, because I learned a lot about online learning and technology, and that began a new career. And so originally, for the first couple years, I did a lot of research on training and training technology, and it was very exciting in the early days of the Internet, which then became this massive online learning industry. And then as we talked to more and more clients about it, they said, Well, can you do tell us about what to do in leadership development, tell us what to do in succession management. And I realized I needed to get involved in all these other HR domains. So, you know, in the last 30 years, we’ve done research after research after research and all these other domains. And what you find in HR, and it’s changed enormously, is that many of the old fashioned principles are hanging around being used, but nobody really knows why they do it the way they do it, performance appraisals, leadership models, recruiting, all these things. And we do a lot of, you know, ground based research to try to figure out what is the best new practice of doing this. The other big part of what we do is talk to all the technology vendors that support HR, because there’s just hundreds, there’s billions of dollars spent on HR, technology, recruiting, systems, payroll, etc, and they’re in it, and they influence what companies do also. So over those years, by the way, in the middle of. Of all that, I sold the first company to Deloitte, then spent almost seven years as a partner at Deloitte, flying around, meeting all sorts of senior execs about this stuff, and then left Deloitte about seven or eight years ago. So it’s turned into a career that’s been completely unpredictable, but wonderful and just a joyful career. Because, you know, basically, what I what we do is we help companies learn how to take better care of their people and run their businesses better. So it’s who would have known. You know, when I went to school as a mechanical engineer,

Kara Goldin 5:36
that’s, that’s awesome. I have to say that I have friends who have gone into HR for companies after being attorneys and engineers, product people. And I actually, if I think about it, those are some of the best people running those divisions, because they’re thinking differently about it. They understand, maybe how they need to figure out that HR stuff, right? But then they also start to think differently, including being some of the better at at AI and and kind of reaching out to what else is, what’s next, and thinking differently about things.

Josh Bersin 6:17
Well, it’s everybody who’s ever worked has opinions on management and thinks they know what to do better when you actually have to make decisions on behalf of the whole company. It’s much more complicated.

Kara Goldin 6:31
Yeah, it’s, it’s so true. So you’re running a business, you’re an entrepreneur, right? You’re, you’re running your own business, Burson and Associates, but, or I guess that was your first company, Burson and associate.

Josh Bersin 6:46
That was, that was a company we sold to Deloitte. Yeah. Anyways, the same sort of company, same

Kara Goldin 6:50
sort of company, the Josh Burson company, but then you got acquired with person and Associates by Deloitte, as you mentioned, what did you see was kind of the the big aha moment when you were at Deloitte?

Josh Bersin 7:05
Yeah, I have a lot of advice for people that are thinking about selling their company or buying a company. So we were a we weren’t very big. I mean, we were maybe a 12, $15 million company, and we were very, very well known. And so Deloitte bought us for our brand and our knowledge and tried to use us to build out their human capital consulting business and and in fact, we did help them a lot. I think the human capital consulting business went from 500 million to 2 billion while I was there, so we had a lot of impact on that. But what we what we did for a living changed. We sold research and advisory services to HR departments. Deloitte actually didn’t want to do that, because they were selling gigantic consulting projects so very quickly, within a year or two, it became clear to me that we were a marketing arm of Deloitte. We were no longer a product company, so a lot of the people that joined us to solve problems for large organizations left because they didn’t want to be the marketing department of a consulting company. And, you know, that’s okay. I was, you know, I didn’t realize it at the time that this was going to happen. But, you know, the lesson, I guess, that I learned from that is, if you do sell your company, the company that acquires you is going to try to fit you into their business model in most cases. And if your business model is different, you’re going to have a bit of a fight on your hands on which direction you want the company to go. But what I loved about Deloitte is, at least for me and us, we suddenly were catapulted into these very, very senior relationships that we didn’t have a lot of before. So and I got a chance to see what a very, very big, agile, fast moving consulting company is like. And I had never had that experience in my career, so we now have a lot of ex Deloitte people in our company. So it was a great it worked out great for me. And then, you know, I got to, you know, learn a lot about how professional services firms work, and they how their business models work, and what their, you know, operations are like and and professional services organizations, in some ways, are the template of every other company, because every company is trying to be more agile and flexible like they are. So anyway, that’s kind of my story, interesting.

Kara Goldin 9:36
So you’ve been in the advisory services, and you’re now shifting to the technology, or you have shifted to technology with Galileo. So can you talk a bit about what exactly is Galileo, and how does it work?

Josh Bersin 9:54
Okay, so this is, this is the most spectacular thing that’s ever happened to me, and I think everybody is. And. Any related business to mine, whether loyal law, financial services, professional services, whatever. So we had all this IP years and years and years of very, very carefully developed maturity models, assessments, training, materials, videos, now, podcasts, things like that. And we go to a client and they say, we’re, you know, say, a semiconductor firm. We’re trying to hire more production engineers, and we’re having a problem. Can you help us? Okay, yes, we can help you. So we do a project, we assess what their problems are, we give them a bunch of advice. They say, thank you very much. We leave. We’re done our we may, maybe we charge 234, $100,000 for that, and that’s the end of it. Well, what we’d like to do is have an ongoing relationship with them, but we give them a website. They don’t want to pay for a website, they don’t want to download stuff from the website. Nobody wants to read it. So how do we stay in touch with them and educate them on all the things we didn’t have time to do when we were with them. So once we put all our material into the Galileo. LLM, it took us a little while to build it, but it was much easier than I thought. All of a sudden, anybody who wants to do business with us can go to Galileo and talk to it as if they’re talking to me. Galileo knows everything that I know, plus everything that every other analyst we ever hired knows, and it’s up to date every day with new information. So for people like me that are either in advisory services or consulting or professor or maybe even customer support. When you take these kinds of assets and you put them into an agent, you can leverage yourself and extend your you know your product or your service in a much, much more effective way. And it is a product that embodies our service and our intellectual property as a product. So somebody can buy it. They don’t ever have to call us, ever if they don’t want to. We have 5000 people using it. Now. It’s only about a year and a half old, and we don’t talk to all of them, whereas in the past, everybody wanted to talk to us every time they wanted to do business with us, and we couldn’t possibly talk to everybody. So and then what happened is, once we got it off the ground, and people started saying, well, we’d like to use it for compensation benchmarking. We’d like to use it for, you know, legal compliance regulation, and by country, we found that if we added more data to it from third parties, we could make it orders of magnitude better, because we had our best practices, plus other data, so we now have content partners who want to reach our network that can license their content to us, so that Galileo can get smarter and smarter and smarter. And now, going into next year, most HR departments are going through this massive transformation to reduce the number of staff to create more agents to automate things. So Galileo is becoming a digital HR business partner, or a digital coach for managers to allow HR departments to scale. So we inadvertently became a product company without even realizing us.

Kara Goldin 13:21
So, so interesting. So how is this different? I guess, obviously it’s, it’s a licensed product, and you’ve got, you’re feeding into it. But if somebody is thinking, well, they’re just using AI, I can go on and use AI. How is your How is your product and platform different? The

Josh Bersin 13:40
big difference. So if you go to, if you go to chat GPT, and you ask it a question like, how do I hire a production engineer and semiconductor in Salt Lake City? I mean, it’ll tell you something. It’ll make stuff up, and it’ll find things in blogs, and it’ll find things in podcasts, and, you know, maybe it’ll give you some good advice, but you can’t validate if it’s actually correct, if it’s giving you good information or just one person’s information. So in the in the case of what we do, the decisions people are making are very big decisions, how to hire, who to promote, how much to pay somebody, and even though they may think they can get the answer from any any AI, the quality of the answer is dependent on the quality of the data that trained it, and when we trained it, we don’t put any public domain data in it. So every answer it gives you, it gives you a reference to exactly why it gave you that answer, so you can figure out the source and the logic behind it. There was a study that just came out two weeks ago that I think is really fascinating. The BBC did an analysis of eight or 9000 queries of open AI, and they found that 45% of the news queries about the news things like who’s in the EU or. Is there a bird flu? 45% of them were erroneous. Because the way the AI works is, if you have a giant corpus of knowledge and only 2% of it is wrong, 50% of the queries might use that 2% that’s wrong, so 50% of the questions could have flawed answers. So I think public domain AI is great for certain things, but if you’re doing making really important business decisions, you would kind of like to have data that you can really rely on. Plus you’d like to call the people who have the data, in case you don’t understand it or you want more into it. So we’re not having any problems with people buying it. You know, one of our large clients, large entertainment company in LA they said, Look, we use open, we use chat, GPT for a lot of things, but we use Galileo for HR because we can trust it. So it’s, I think the, I think the AI market, which is so new, is going to be much more specialized. There’ll be specialized AIS for legal things, there’ll be specialized AI for HR, there’ll be specialized things for finance, for, you know, manufacturing, all these different areas where the quality of the answer is more important than the confidence. See, the interesting thing I learned about chat GPT is it’s programmed to answer every question, so even if it doesn’t know the answer, it will answer the question, and it will sound very confident. It never says, I don’t know.

Kara Goldin 16:32
So so interesting. I found, too that I have to when I’m sort of questioning something, and it’s not all the time, but if I’m questioning something, I’ll go back and say, Are you sure? And they’re like, good point. Kara, yeah. And

Josh Bersin 16:48
then it says, it says, No, I’m not sure. And then you’re like, Well, wait a minute, why didn’t you tell me you weren’t sure the first time I asked

Kara Goldin 16:55
exactly, exactly. And I think about that like all the times that I didn’t actually say, Are you sure, right? It just, it sounded slightly

Josh Bersin 17:04
off. Well, I just realized I think people have to be careful. It depends on the like, like, even booking a hotel. I don’t even know how accurate that is. Yeah, you know, like you ask it for a list of hotels in Napa that are with so and so features. I’m not even sure if that’s correct.

Kara Goldin 17:20
So, so, so interesting. So, HR, as as you touched on, is is changing, right? It’s one of many roles in in our world that we live in now that’s changing, and AI will transform. I think HR in many ways. How do you see AI today transforming HR for maybe those who are running, you know, a startup, and are trying to figure out, do I hire a head of HR? I’m up to 25 people now or

Josh Bersin 17:58
so. There’s two I would answer the question in two ways. The first is, HR in general, is playing a much more strategic role than in the past. So you may think the only reason you have an HR person is to do hiring, but actually your HR person should be helping you with leadership assessment, leadership development, performance, productivity or design. I mean, especially when you’re a small company, you can make little mistakes and they’re they hold you back a lot. So a great HR person will really see the people in the company and help you organize things and align people and reward people in the in the best possible way. Take that aside many, many of the administrative, bureaucratic payroll hiring, things that you used to have HR people do by hand, they should be able to do by AI. So you know, a good HR person will know about tools like Galileo, and they’ll know about how AI can make things better, and they’ll help you automate all that HR stuff so you’re not getting bogged down with people filling out tax forms and checking with compliance and making training programs by hand. I mean, you can do things in AI that we can never do before. You know, we talked about AI based interviewing and hiring. You know, you’re competing against some very sophisticated companies who are trying to hire people when you’re hiring, and if you don’t have access to good AI tools, your hiring is going to be slower or more difficult or more expensive. Training can be done with AI so you don’t have to build these giant training portals and spend a fortune on third party content, employee relations, you know, employees want to call an HR person and say, How much vacation time do I have? We just had a new baby. I’d like to change my medical you know, or, you know, I’m not getting along with my boss. What should I do? Those kinds of things would bog somebody down by hand. So a great HR person will understand how to. Automate more and more of those things and still keep them really high value solutions. So it’s very because it’s a support function of the company, there’s a lot of pressure on cost to keep the HR cost down. So you can’t just have 10 people sitting around filling out forms. Nobody’s you know the CFO is going to get upset. So totally. So the HR people have to be savvy on this stuff, and I spent a lot of time with bigger HR, bigger companies, and they’re spending a lot of time digging in now and finding ways to apply AI to all of these people, practices

Kara Goldin 20:37
and compliance as well. I mean, I think that is, that is such,

Josh Bersin 20:43
you know, Kara in the future. I mean, very future, maybe in the next year or two, the AI is going to be able to watch and monitor an employee’s performance and give them feedback and coaching directly. So interesting, instead of the manager doing it when they have time. So, I mean, I think AI is going to be a very, very big help to everybody in HR, because so much of what happens in HR is judgmental. Well, you know, why is this person underperforming? Well, I think it’s because they do this. No, I think it’s because they do that. Well, the AI is going to be able to make better decisions about who to hire and who to promote and what skills people are missing. It’s good at that kind of stuff

Kara Goldin 21:24
so interesting. You and I were touching base before we hit record on the process of recruitment these days, and I have some Gen Z’s around me, not just my own family, but their friends, and you know, they’re all talking about the AI and how it’s being used to look at resumes and even interview some candidates to where there’s no human interaction at all. It’s just, it’s just done through AI. So I’m curious, kind of where you see that ultimately going, where it is now in your view, and where do you think it’s headed?

Josh Bersin 22:09
Well, I mean, the employers are very serious about this, and they don’t want to reject great candidates, and they don’t want the systems to be biased at all. They’re not trying to make it hard on candidates. If you So, the problem most job seekers have is they submit a resume and they never hear a thing, no response, no and maybe an email, and that’s it. I think 40, 50% of job seekers don’t hear anything back at all. So the benefit of an AI interviewer is, if the AI interviewer is well trained, you could apply for a job at 10 o’clock at night. Suppose you’re a night owl and you’re busy working during the day, and you could do an interview at 1030 with an AI, and at 11 the client, the corporation, could say you’re a great fit. We want to talk to you on the phone, or, you know what, you’re a good fit, but not for this job. We recommend you apply to this job. Or Unfortunately, it seems like you’re not qualified. Okay, you’re done in an hour, instead of waiting a week and hearing nothing back. So there are really a lot of very pragmatic benefits to using AI and recruiting, most companies are not relying on any form of AI recruiting for everything, unless it’s a very high volume job like McDonald’s or FedEx or very easy to assess job. You’re still going to talk to a manager eventually, but the screening process and the process of deciding whether this is a good fit goes way faster. I would hate to be looking I mean, I’m in a different situation in my life. But I mean, when I was young, we used to have to mail resumes in the mail, and you actually did hear back. But now, I mean, and because the the employers are getting hundreds and hundreds of fake resumes for every job they post. So they got to filter through all the AI generated revenue resumes and figure out which ones are real. So, you know, I would not be too intimidated by it if you’re a job seeker. The second thing that I would say to people looking for a job is do as much homework as you can and really decide if the organization you’re talking to really is a place you want to work. Is there something about it that really turns you on and seems like a really good fit? And if so, do you know anybody who works there? Or do you have friends who know somebody else who works there? That’s the best way to get in any way than applying cold and just go at it. I mean, it’s funny when I know as an as a hiring person, when somebody really wants to work for us, I can tell I see it in their behavior. And then I’m then I want to talk to them, but if I, but if I get a resume, and I don’t know anything about the person, and they’re kind of like. You know, whatever b minus fit, I may not even get a chance to respond. So the human element as a job seeker is still really important.

Kara Goldin 25:10
Yeah, definitely. So I hear from a lot of my contemporaries the technology they’re worried about technology replacing people and and maybe even some of them are just not allowing AI to be in companies which, which, I think is definitely happening, even for people who are the Gen Z and millennials, that there are companies that aren’t allowing it, or they’re only allowing it when you’re on closed network or closed platform. So there’s a lot of different things going on right now. But what’s your advice to to people, to leaders who fear technology is going to replace people and they’re just gonna ignore it for now,

Josh Bersin 26:04
okay, well, first of all, I don’t think you can ignore it, because everybody who comes to work for you is already using it at home. So So there, it’s too late that That cat is out of the bag. You have to have some AI solutions in your company, because they really are good productivity tools. And you know, you can use the Microsoft copilot, or you can use Galileo, and you don’t have to connect it to the public internet and deal with all sorts of bad data going in and out of your company, as far as eliminating jobs. I mean, I mean, I’m almost 70, so I was working at IBM when the IBM PC was launched in 1981 and it was funny, the first year or two of the PC, a lot of senior leaders would say, I don’t touch that stuff. I’ll let my secretary use it. I’m an executive. I make decisions. I don’t use tools. Well, those guys have all are all dinosaurs. Now everybody has to learn how to use this. So we call this the rise of the super worker. If you’re not willing to learn how to use these tools for whatever job you’re in, and there’s so many of them being created all the time, you are going to be falling behind, because every single job is affected by this, and there will be jobs that will disappear and new jobs that will be created. For example, in recruiting, there is a job called an interview scheduler. This is a human being who gets on the phone and calls people up and says, What time would you like to do an interview? When are you available? And I’ll set up an interview for you. I mean, come on, do you really want to do that job for the next 10 years? Probably not. There are jobs in call centers. There are jobs, as you know, and data analysts who clean up data that comes out of mainframe systems to try to make it available for other people to make decisions. There’s a lot of work that can be quickly automated by AI that allows you to do higher value work. So the super worker effect, and we have a whole report on this, you can read on our website, means that if you’re just willing to learn how to use these tools reasonably well, and you don’t have to be and by the way, they speak English, so you don’t have to learn programming language to learn how to use AI. You’re basically speaking in English. You will superpower your career, and your boss will come to you and say, wow, how did you do that? Can you show me how to do it? And you look at you look at the creative professions, you look at Tiktok, and all of the you know people that are influencers or creators, they’re learning how to use these things. So there’s no reason any other business person can’t if the company is reluctant to use AI. I think you as an employee should go to your boss and say, Come on, you guys. We can’t be left out of this revolution this. This is a revolution going on in business, and the organizations that learn how to use this technology are going to outpace the others very quickly. Even though it’s imperfect and it’s it is imperfect, but we have a in just an HR, we have a document that has 300 use cases for HR, that we’ve proven 300 300 things that you could do by hand, or 10 times faster and more accurately in an AI like Galileo. So unfortunately, it’s the another analogy that I use sometimes is Microsoft Excel. If you were afraid of Microsoft excel in the early days for you knew what it was you were, you know you were using your calculator by hand, and you know everybody else was just blown by you. So just like you can write macros in Excel, and you can create pivot tables and whatever you want to learn how to do, you learn how to use this thing. And it’s just an incredible. Tool. It is a tool. It is not a living entity. It has no intelligence. It’s statistics. It’s putting together fragments of words in a statistical manner that make it look like it’s human. It’s not really human. It’s just a big statistical model analyzing lots and lots of textual data, and so it’s very it’s very useful, and I wouldn’t be afraid of it.

Kara Goldin 30:25
I love it Well, Josh, thank you so much for joining us today. Your insights into the future of work and leadership and technology are invaluable, and I cannot wait to see all you do with Galileo, and it’s really you guys are doing awesome. You also have a podcast as well. You’re on all over LinkedIn too. So anyone who wants to see more about what you’re doing can go and and listen or or go to LinkedIn as well, but really appreciate you coming on and thanks everyone for listening. Thank you, Kara, thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast, just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book. Undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening, and goodbye for now.

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