Wages play a huge role in frontline work. The 70%+ of employees who work in these roles often jump from job to job, employer to employer, just to make a few more dollars per hour. Here’s the dynamic: a typical restaurant, retail, service, or transportation job requires no deep pre-requisite skill (Type 1 and Type 2 in our frontline worker model below), so each applicant who applies is likely applying to 40-50 other jobs. If you get back to them fast enough it’s largely about pay. Employers receive hundreds of applicants, then try to screen them, interview, and background check quickly (otherwise store managers are bogged down) and speedily offer them a job. The job candidate accepts a job on Friday and starts on Monday. Suddenly on Monday they don’t show up because on Saturday they found a position that paid $5 an hour more in a peer or competitor....

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New names: Kimi K3, Llama, Nemotron, Mistral, Cohere, Deepseek, Phi-4 – these are just a few of the fast-growing open source models from major AI providers. These systems threaten the business models and financial plans of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and X.ai. They perform at levels close to Frontier models and the can run up to five-times cheaper on a variety of hardware platforms. What is the disruptive impact of these open source LLMs and how does this impact your AI investments? As you’ll hear in the podcast, Open Source unleashes the opportunity for lower cost AI solutions and more vertical, specialized, application-focused solutions we need. And the business model for these systems moves away from the massive investments of the Frontier providers. The result is more complicated than “open means control.” Model tuning, performance, and optimization could be in your future – as AI moves from a platform to a...

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SharkNinja is one of the most fascinating, innovative, high-performing companies I’ve seen. Elizabeth Norberg, the People and Culture leader, is also one of the most interesting CHROs I’ve met. So with that introduction, I urge you to take some time to listen. There’s a lot to learn here, but overall this is a story about a company and set of people strategies that work together to accelerate growth, with a strong and vital focus on individual performance, innovation, problem-solving, and carefully designed organizational support. Think about brands like Nike, L’Oreal, Apple, or others you love. It’s very difficult for a consumer products company to grow quickly and stay relevant as market, trends, and technologies change. Well as you’ll hear, SharkNinja is both a marketing, problem-solving, and engineering company, and the people and culture strategy accelerates this formula. I know everyone will learn a lot from Elizabeth’s narrative, and please stay...

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This week we learned of OpenAI’s Jailbreak security breach, which opens the door to many new issues with enterprise AI and HR 2030. This week, following up on the introduction of SHL’s Superworker AI assessment, I dig into the implications of this new AI behavior and discuss the five major “skills” or capabilities we need to build AI mastery among business users. As you’ll hear, AI Agents are both powerful and useful, but our human skills in problem solving, collaboration, and risk awareness are now becoming critical for success. New research also shows that even AI forward deployed engineers need deeper skills in business, stakeholder management, and risk analysis than we ever realized. As you listen to this if you need help with our own AI business capabilities please contact us. Galileo and the new GHRE masterclass certification program are designed to quickly give you and your team the experience...

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SHL, one of the pioneers in industrial and psychological assessment, has now built a new instrument to assess an individual’s readiness for AI. Sara Gutierrez, Chief Science Officer at SHL, explains how SHL is addressing this challenge. Drawing on SHL’s 45-plus years of talent intelligence and behavioral science and a large study of millions of data points, Sara introduces a skills model built on four factors – AI literacy, analytical thinking, continuous learning, and AI promotion – that together define who is truly ready to become a superworker – any employee who uses AI to elevate their work to create more impact and have more meaningful work. The conversation is full of grounding data. Across more than one million assessments, SHL found that graduates and early career workers know how to use AI tools but not necessarily how to use them well, while seasoned professionals show strong contextual judgment but...

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It’s a strange time: the economy and capital markets are booming, yet worker engagement is as low as it was during the pandemic. It’s a strange combination of events: stock market at all time highs while affordability and trust are at all time lows. Have we over-inflated our economy or is it something more systemic. As I discuss in my latest article, some of the challenges we face have been building for many years, while others are very recent. We live in a world of growing automation, fear of job loss, yet an extraordinary world of new health, business, and creative opportunities. And young people are the most pessimistic of all. Is it just the “chaos of change” that’s causing the issue? In today’s podcast I explain the factors and give you, as a business or HR leader, some advice on what to do. Additional Background Affordability Is Not Just...

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