6 Things Josh Bersin Says Leaders Need To Understand About AI And Work

If you have read Forbes for as long as I have, you have probably come across Josh Bersin’s work more than once. From building Bersin & Associates and selling it to Deloitte to creating Galileo, an AI-powered platform for HR, he has become one of the best-known voices in the field. I recently had a chance to sit down with him to talk about what he sees coming next for the future of work and how AI is changing what organizations expect from people. We covered a lot of ground, but six ideas stood out because they challenge some of the assumptions leaders are making about jobs, expertise, productivity and what people will need to contribute as AI becomes more capable.

AI And Work May Not Mean Fewer People

For the first couple of years, generative AI was mostly viewed as an assistant. Then, as it became more agentic, companies started asking how many people they could eliminate. What Bersin is seeing now is more complicated because AI still needs people to train it, manage it, improve it and step in when the technology does not have enough context or judgment.

He described a global bank that wanted to use AI to train wealth management professionals across many countries and eventually reduce the need for hundreds of people in a call center. The problem was that much of what those employees knew had never been written down. The company discovered that the people it thought it might replace were also the people the AI needed in order to learn how the work was actually done.

AI And Work Could Make Expertise More Valuable

That same idea came up when he talked about Rolls-Royce. New engineers can take a long time to become productive because there is so much specialized knowledge to absorb, so the company began breaking that expertise into smaller domains and making it accessible through AI. Younger engineers could then ask questions and learn from knowledge that might otherwise take years to encounter.