UNLEASH World 2024: Josh Bersin on ‘the most disruptive period for HR’

“There’s going to be more vendors. There’s going to be more innovation. There’s going to be more and more new ideas, and you’re going to have to figure out what to do about it,” Josh Bersin, CEO and Founder of The Josh Bersin Company said as he opens Day Two of UNLEASH World 2024. 

“I am pretty convinced that we are in the most disruptive period of time for HR in general, not just for tech – but that we’ve ever seen”. 

Supporting this, he turned his attention to societies, stating that unemployment, birth, fertility, and marriage rates are low, while developed economies are “more or less flat in the size of their workforce”. However, GDP is going up in every country. 

Where are we going to get these people from?,” he asked. “They’re just not going to be there.”

As a result, we’ve found ourselves living in a world where the gap between the GDP and the number of workers is getting greater – however, there are multiple ways of filling this gap, including productivity, skills, employee engagement, flexible work, or better scheduling, for example. 

Bersin continued to explain that a lot of the business growth issues that were once covered by hiring now have to be managed and solved through HR. This is where AI comes into play.

This low unemployment rate is meaning that employees have become much more active, empowered, fluid, and mobile than ever before – meaning businesses actually have to take better care of their people. 

“A third of them [the workforce] are unhappy,” Bersin stated.

“These numbers don’t really change, but a significant part of the workforce, especially the younger workers, are saying, ‘if I don’t like what you’re offering me, I’m just not going to come. Or, I’ll come and I’ll check out’.

The pace of demand and the level of scrutiny that’s being placed upon everything that we do in HR is getting higher and higher. This is great for your career and for your business.”

Bersin continued to highlight that management is key, expressing that if it’s done correctly, “smaller companies will outperform bigger companies” – especially if they use technology effectively. 

Moving on, he discussed the tech market, expressing “it’s a bit like the kitchen drawer, there’s too many things, too many tools in there.

“There are dozens and dozens of tools,” he added, “so the market is doing great. 

“I mean, I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I have rarely seen so many vendors go from zero to billion dollar market caps so quickly. 

“Lot of these companies reach billion dollar market caps in less than a decade, some five or six years, because it’s so easy to build technology and bring it to market using the cloud, especially with AI.”

Although it’s amazing that there are so many simple solutions for provides, Bersin reiterated that it makes the job of HR leaders much more difficult.

He also highlighted that AI is not a feature or technology added to the core systems – it’s a different way of thinking about software.

AI needs data, and once it has data, it gets smarter and smarter and smarter.”

After discussing the market in much greater detail, Bersin highlighted some of the key applications and trends of HR leaders to look out for. 

“Don’t go and buy an AI tool because it’s really cool and you think it’s going to be nice,” he then warned. 

“You’re going to have to get an ROI for this tool because you’re going to have to pay for it.”

Revolutionizing the future with AI

Touching upon Elon Musk’s claim that everyone will have at least three robots in their lives over the next decade, Bersin admitted that he also believes this could be our reality, particularly with intelligent systems helping us work. 

“We’re going to have a data system in our companies that we call talent intelligence,” he said.

“It teaches us things about our organization, our staff, our talent, our leadership, and our skills that we just didn’t have before. And that’s really the whole idea of talent intelligence.” 

He continued to explain that talent intelligence means to bring together all the “weird pieces of data” that have been collected on people to make better decisions on who to hire and promote. 

Likening this to agents such as Galileo, he explained that tools can now not only answer questions, but also ask users relevant questions and anticipate their needs, such as scheduling vacations, drafting job descriptions, and conducting complex processes. 

What’s more, employee experience (EX) is also expected to be transformed as traditional apps are being replaced by AI-driven agents that customize content, reduce reliance on LMSs, and provide instant learning and training updates.

EX is going to be revolutionized by AI,” he noted, before showing a depiction of what it looked like last year, what it looks like now, and a prediction of what it will look like in the future.

“Most of the EX projects, systems and tools that you’ve been buying are going to turn into agents and bots,” he explains.

“It’s pretty obvious to me that it’s not going to happen overnight, because there’s probably a trillion dollars of employee portals that have been built, and those things are very complex.”

In his final 10 seconds, Bersin concluded: “The bottom line is that you really need to perfect your technology strategy. 

“Some of these tools are going to be added – they’re going to improve productivity of some, whereas others may replace incumbent systems.

“You’re going to have to work with it because there’s a lot of scrutiny about AI, and companies are going to have standards.

“You’re going to want to talk to vendors that have experience in your size company, and in your industry.”