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

0:00Kara Goldin:I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where 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. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can 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. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to The Carol Golden Show.

0:44Kara Goldin:Today's guest is someone who has profoundly shaped how the world thinks about work, leadership and HR. Josh Burson is the CEO and co-founder of the Josh Burson Company, and he is one of the most respected voices in the HR 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, an AI co-pilot 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.

1:41Kara Goldin:And Josh continues to guide leaders on this topic and organizations to thrive in this world. So Josh, welcome to the Kara Golden Show. So excited to meet you and have you on. Thank you, Kara. I'm very excited to be here. Absolutely. So let's start with, I want to hear kind of how did you get into HR? And how did you decide this version of work for yourself? It was completely an accident. I'm an engineer, and I worked in the oil industry for two years, and I worked in the technology industry for 15, 16, 17 years. I 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.

2:30And the company that I was with at the second company was a company called Sybase. It was a very hot company and then not a very hot company. 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 dot-com publicly traded online learning company.

3:14I became the head of product there. And then they fell apart during 9-11. I got laid off. I came home. It was actually right around 9-11 when I got laid off. And I said to my wife, you know, I always wanted to be an industry analyst. The 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 of 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.

3:51And then as we talked to more and more clients about it, they said, well, can you 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 in 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.

4:32And 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, et cetera. And they influence what companies do also. So over those years, by the way, in the middle 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.

5:14So it's turned into a career that's been completely unpredictable, but wonderful and just a joyful career because, you know, basically 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.

5:35Kara Goldin: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 the HR stuff, right? But then they also start to think differently, including being some of the better at AI and kind of reaching out to what else is, what's next and thinking differently about things. Well, everybody who's ever worked has opinions on management and thinks they know what to do better.

6:25When you actually have to make decisions on behalf of the whole company, it's much more complicated.

6:31Kara Goldin:Yeah, it's so true. So you're running a business. You're an entrepreneur, right? You're running your own business, Burson and Associates. Or I guess that was your first company, Burson and Associates. That was the company we sold to Deloitte, yeah. Anyway, it's the same sort of company. Same sort of company, the Josh Burson company. but then you got acquired with Burson & Associates by Deloitte, as you mentioned. What did you see was kind of the big aha moment when you were at Deloitte? Yeah, I have a lot of advice for people that are thinking about selling their company or buying a company. So we weren't very big.

7:14I 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 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 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.

8:01We 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 didn't realize it at the time that this was going to happen, but 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.

8:39But 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. 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 worked out great for me. And then, you know, I got to, you know, learn a lot about how professional services firms work and how their business models work and what their operations are like. 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.

9:32So anyway, that's kind of my story.

9:35Kara Goldin:Interesting. 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? Okay, so this is the most spectacular thing that's ever happened to me. And I think everybody is any related business to mine, whether it's 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.

10:26We'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. Maybe we charge$200 ,000,$300 ,000,$400 ,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?

11:05So 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 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 product or your service in a much, much more effective way.

11:54and 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 5 ,000 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. 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 legal compliance regulation and by country.

12:33We 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.

13:21Kara Goldin:So, so interesting. So how is this different? I guess, obviously, 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 product and platform different? The big difference, so 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.

14:09Um, 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, 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.

14:45The BBC did an analysis of 8 ,000 or 9 ,000 queries of open AI and they found that 45 % of the news queries about the news, things like who's in the EU, 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 we want more into it.

15:36So 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 ChatGPT 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. They'll be We specialize things for finance, for manufacturing, all these different areas where the quality of the answer is more important than the confidence. See, the interesting thing I learned about ChatGPT is it's programmed to answer every question.

16:20So 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.

16:32Kara Goldin: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 then 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? 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 a little slightly off well i i just realized i think people have to be careful it depends on the quote like like even booking a hotel i don't even know how accurate that is yeah you know like you ask if we're a list of hotels in napa that are with so-and-so features I'm not even sure if that's correct.

17:21Kara Goldin:So, so, so interesting. So HR, as you touched on, is changing, right? It's one of many roles 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 a startup and are trying to figure out, do I hire a head of HR? I'm up to 25 people now. So 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.

18:20I mean, especially when you're a small company, you can make little mistakes and 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 best possible way. But 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.

19:12I 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 um 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.

19:47I'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 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.

20:38Kara Goldin:And compliance as well. I mean, I think that is such a key. 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.

21:22It's good at that kind of stuff. So interesting.

21:25Kara Goldin:You and I were touching base before we hit record on the process of recruitment these days. And I have some Gen Zs around me, not just my own family, but their friends. and they're all talking about the AI and how it's being used to look at resumes and even interview some candidates too where there's no human interaction at all. 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? 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.

22:18They're not trying to make it hard on candidates. So the problem most job seekers have is they submit a resume, and they never hear a thing. No response, 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 corporation could say, you're a great fit. We want to talk to you on the phone. Or, you know what?

23:02You'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 in 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, you know, 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.

23:44I 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, because 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 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.

24:27Is 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?

24:34Kara Goldin:That's what I was going to say. Or do you have friends who know somebody else who works there? That's the best way to get in anyway than applying cold. And just go at it. I mean, it's funny. I know as a hiring person, when somebody really wants to work for us, I can tell. I see it in their behavior. And then I want to talk to them. 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. Yeah, definitely. So I hear from a lot of my contemporaries, the technology, they're worried about technology replacing people.

25:23Kara Goldin:And maybe even some of them are just not allowing AI to be in companies, 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 a closed network or closed platform. So there's a lot of different things going on right now. But what's your advice to people, to leaders who fear technology is going to replace people and they're just going to ignore it for now? 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.

26:09So it's too late. 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'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.