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

• (00:00:00) - Claude Code and You as a Citizen Developer
• (00:05:24) - Building a self-contained AI-enabled HR Software
• (00:11:41) - Machine Learning and the Software Industry

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

• (00:00:00) - Workforce Management in Ukg
• (00:11:18) - Kronos' Dynamic Labor Market System
• (00:13:16) - UKG's 'Unified Work Experience' for Workers
• (00:14:38) - UKG's Frontline Worker Network
• (00:17:58) - UKG's AI Architecture and Industry Solutions

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

• (00:00:00) - Three Challenges to AI in 2026
• (00:01:06) - The Cost of AI Infrastructure
• (00:06:03) - Sustainability in the AI Era
• (00:12:57) - The Big Story for Human Resources in 2026

In this podcast I reflect on five big things we didn’t talk about much this year, and each falling into the “Human Capital” agenda. We spent much of our year worrying about AI, agents, productivity, and jobs, largely putting the “Human Capital” agenda on the back burner.

While AI is certainly the defining technology of our times, there are human capital issues to consider. As I discuss, these “soft” issues help us address the “socio-technological” impacts of AI. There’s no question that AI is amazing and it will change our lives. As business people, however, we need to remind ourselves of the human capital issues that matter too.

PS: The impact of AI on the job market is already taking a toll. Younger workers are now experiencing much higher unemployment rate than tenured workers, largely because companies believe AI can replace apprenticeships. I’m not a fan of this strategy but you can listen to this analysis to understand.

Our big 2026 Imperatives report comes out in January, stay tuned.

Additional Information

The Dynamic Organization (the human capital strategies that matter during change)

The Collapse And Rebirth Of Online Learning And Professional Development

Human Centered Leadership (Galileo Learn program)

The Healthy Organization (research)

• (00:00:00) - The Business Agenda for 2025
• (00:09:57) - Human Capital Issues for 2021
• (00:13:57) - The Future of Jobs Is Uncertain