Josh Bersin

I had an uplifting conversation with Jen Morgan, the CEO of UKG, a $5 billion global AI platform for HR, pay, and workforce management. In addition to talking about the company and her role as CEO, she actually has another mission: to put Frontline Workers first in our economy.

Frontline workers, the people who deliver groceries and food, care for patients in the hospital, work in hospitality, or maintain public safety, make up 72% of the US workforce and almost 80% of employees worldwide. These often hourly or shift workers form the backbone of our economy: making our lives better, putting out fires, and keeping our streets safe.

UKG’s mission is to make their work lives better through better scheduling, pay, benefits, hiring, and training systems – all in an integrated offering called “The Workforce Operating Platform.” Built through the merger of Kronos with Ultimate Software in 2020, UKG has pioneered this groundbreaking integrated solution.

UKG has more than 80,000 customers and serves more than 65 million workers every day. And its software and tools support and monitor much of their daily lives at work, so Jen knows a lot about what it takes to run what we call a “Frontline First” company.

I know you’ll enjoy this conversation, and stay tuned for our new research on the Dynamics Of The Frontline, coming this month.

Additional Information

UKG Stakes Out Leadership Position In $6.5 Trillion Market For Frontline Work

Powering the Frontline Workforce: How Frontline-First Companies Thrive

Josh Bersin Company Highlights Cost of Neglecting Frontline Workers

Get Galileo, The AI Superagent for HR

This week we saw some astounding GDP numbers, a modest 2% growth with an astounding 70% attributed to AI capital spending. The US economy is heavily AI centric, starving spending on housing which ultimately contributes to income inequality. At the same time companies are now reducing employee benefits, halting a two decade steady increase. It’s all about the shift from labor to machines, I guess.

I also talk about the role of legacy systems in the new world of Agentic HR, Agentic Finance, and Agentic ERP.

Lots going on, I hope this gives you some perspective on the massive AI economic transformation we’re living in. It’s all good and one of the most exciting times in our careers.

Additional Information

Why AI Is A Massive Job-Creation Technology, Despite What You Think

Introducing HR 2030: A Vision For Agentic Human Resources

The Reinvention of Workday: From System of Record to Platform of Agents

The Superagent for HR: Galileo Mars Release

Irresistible 2026: The Global Conference for HR Leaders and their Teams (June 8-10, USC)

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Economy and the Stock Market
(00:02:33) - Some Companies Are Reducing Employee Benefits
(00:08:17) - The Role of Managers
(00:12:59) - The Legacy of Salesforce, Workday
(00:18:54) - Want to pitch your AI Stories? Here!

What does it take to bridge one of the most persistent translation problems in talent acquisition – getting a Fortune 500 recruiter to see why a Little Bird attack helicopter pilot from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment is the perfect candidate for their open role? Tim Best, CEO of RecruitMilitary and former active duty Army officer, gives us a mission-driven and practical answer: go beyond the resume.

Resumes and job descriptions flatten people. And for veterans, who enter the civilian workforce carrying hundreds of thousands of skills and attributes that don’t map to corporate job architectures, that flatness is the enemy. The technology RecruitMilitary built with Findem, the Veteran Talent Source, solves this by giving recruiters a three-dimensional view of who a candidate actually is: not just what they did, but what they’ve continuously become. Because profiles are enriched in real time, the candidate in someone’s ATS today is not the candidate from 25 years ago – and the AI knows the difference.

The results are outstanding. In 2025, RecruitMilitary created over 600,000 connections between employers and military community job seekers. The hyper-personalized outreach campaigns powered by the Veteran Talent Source are generating email open rates of 80–90% and click-through rates five times higher than industry norms. These aren’t just efficiency gains but create a fundamentally better experience for veterans, who have long lived with the frustration of applying and never hearing back. Tim’s vision is for veterans inundated with recruiters who understand them, not spam from algorithms that don’t.

But Tim’s ambitions go further than better sourcing. He wants veteran hiring to stop being a special project that lives in a corner of the TA function and instead become a normal part of a recruiter’s everyday workflow, all made possible by AI. Looking ahead to the agentic AI era, Tim sees the next leap: intelligent job posting and agent-driven delivery that reduces friction between “here’s my job description” and “here are the right people to talk to” to (almost) nothing.

This conversation is essential listening for anyone in talent acquisition who wants to understand how AI creates new business value, not just faster versions of the old model.

Related resources

Podcast: Why AI Is A Massive Job Creation Technology. Automated Integration. Findem. And Thank You.

Research: Insights-First AI: Better and Explainable People Decisions

Research: The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI is Transforming Recruiting

Chapters

(00:00:03) - What Works: The Future of Talent
(00:00:40) - Interview: Tim Best on Recruit Military's AI
(00:03:27) - What Recruit Military Jobs?
(00:05:21) - David Furnace, Head of Veteran Talent at HR Tech
(00:08:32) - The Veteran Talent Source
(00:15:57) - Veteran Recruitment Tech
(00:17:04) - What's The Challenge of AI at Work?
(00:19:39) - What lessons learned would you share with employers about AI and the role
(00:22:03) - Machine Learning and the Veteran Talent Market
(00:24:26) - What Works With Recruit Military

This week I discuss Workday’s new AI announcements described at the Innovation Summit last week. These are sweeping new product, leadership, and organizational changes that effectively reposition from a “system of record” to a “platform of agents.”

As you’ll hear, not only is Workday clearly articulating their strategy to support and enable Agentic HR and Agentic Finance, the company has changed its organization, culture, and financial model. There’s a lot to unpack here, and I know all Workday customers, partners, and competitors will have opinions. In this podcast I try to explain this whole story and why it marks the beginning of a very new chapter for Workday as a business.

Additional Information

Experience Sana for Yourself: Galileo Mars Release

Irresistible 2026: The Global Conference for HR Leaders and their Teams (June 8-10, USC)

HR 2030: The Agentic Future of HR (detailed handbook coming!)

Detailed Article on Workday

 

Chapters

(00:00:00) - The Reinvention of Workday
(00:07:17) - The Future of Application Development with Generative AI
(00:10:33) - Agents and the AI future
(00:18:57) - Employee Experience: A Vision for the Future

This week I recap a busy week including corporate AI stories, Workday’s AI reinvention, more on tech Layoffs, and fears of AI-driven surveillance. The important story is that Enterprise AI is much more complex than most imagine yet the AI vendors like Anthropic and OpenAI make it sound deceptively simple.

In reality, as I explain, we are one year into the total reinvention of all business functions, with HR top on the list. And as I explain, the vision of enterprise success is now clear, but the vendor market is incredibly insecure. I think you’ll find Workday’s story compelling, but it’s not the only option out there.

On the news side, we saw the “pre-layoffs” of 10% of all Meta employees, elimination of family benefits at Deloitte and Zoom, and some amazingly creepy surveillance at Meta’s AI group. I review all this and try to give you some context.

As you listen I encourage you to read our 2026 Enterprise AI Imperatives and the preview of HR 2030, our in-depth look at where AI in HR is going. An in-depth review of Workday’s new AI strategy is coming this next week.

Additional Resources

Meta Employees React to Massive Layoffs to Come

Deloitte and Zoom Take the Lead in Slashing the Most Coveted Benefits

The week that Meta employees became training data

Why AI Is A Massive Job-Creation Technology, Despite What You Think

Workday and Sana Unveil A Bold New Strategy For AI

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Enterprise AI: Where we are?
(00:02:10) - Workday's AI push with Sana
(00:09:53) - WSJD Live: The Workday World
(00:11:10) - Agent Companies: What to Avoid
(00:13:36) - Microsoft's Layoffs, and More
(00:18:07) - Facebook's Surveillance of Employees