The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership podcast for leaders who solve big problems and build better futures. · Andrea Petrone

226 - Rethinking Your AI Strategy: What Josh Bersin Knows Most CEOs Don’t

·38 min·2 clips

Josh says his team "squashed the publishing group into the product group" to rebuild Galileo around AI.

1. The World Class Leaders Show episode centers on Josh Bersin's view that AI strategy needs a reset for CEOs and HR leaders. 2. Andrea Petrone hosts Josh Bersin, who leads the Josh Bersin Company and the Josh Bersin Academy and has spent more than two decades on work, HR, and the future of work. 3. The episode asks what AI is really for when it moves beyond assistants into agents, super agents, and company redesign. 4. Josh says the AI era is "only three years old" and has already moved from exploration to assistants to agents. 5. He uses the self-driving car analogy to explain how AI is shifting from tools that help one driver to systems that move a passenger from point A to point B. 6. Josh argues that business functions such as sales, marketing, product management, engineering, support, and consulting were designed as silos from the industrial age. 7. He says AI can connect those silos and re-engineer the company instead of just automating individual jobs. 8. Josh gives recruiting as a concrete HR example, describing job requisitions, title debates, sourcing, ads, screening, and interviews as a single complex flow. 9. He says an AI system can already look for internal candidates first and suggest better locations based on labor availability. 10. A client example from a 110,000-employee ad agency shows almost 85,000 job titles, which Josh uses to illustrate organizational fragmentation. 11. Josh explains that his own career moved from sales, marketing, and product management into HR through online learning and startup work. 12. He says many HR teams used to copy GE and relied on conference ideas rather than rigorous analysis. 13. He describes how skills shortages, demographic change, the pandemic, and the 2008 recession forced HR to become more creative. 14. Josh says his company first sold research subscriptions, then built an academy, then sold the first business to Deloitte, and later returned to build again. 15. He says Galileo began when he asked what would happen if thousands of reports and case studies were put into an AI system. 16. Josh says Galileo became smarter than a search engine because it answers questions, updates itself, and helps users find examples, benchmarks, and case studies. 17. He explains that Galileo changed the company structure by combining publishing and product work and by using research to develop prompts. 18. Josh says the next step is learning from the 5,000 to 6,000 users already working inside different companies. 19. The conversation stays practical and interview-driven, with Andrea pressing on CEO behavior and Josh answering with examples from L'Oreal, UKG, Boeing, Airbus, and Deloitte. 20. Leaders focused on AI, HR, and operating model change will get the most value, while listeners wanting a general AI overview may skip it.

As heard by us

A grounded look at how AI moves from concept to product.

Josh Bersin keeps the focus on the real move here: taking deep HR expertise and turning it into something product-shaped and scalable. The episode tracks how an AI strategy can grow out of research and publishing, then start answering questions by blending company content with…

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You want to see AI stop being a shiny toy and start acting like a growth engine.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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