Amy Farner Podcast Transcript
Amy Farner joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Amy Farner. Amy Farner is the executive vice president and head of research and product at The Josh Bersin Company. In this role, she leads the vision and integration of the firm’s research and product portfolio to shape how HR organizations operate in the age of AI.
These capabilities are delivered through the company’s agentic HR assistant, Galileo, a platform that from a standing start less than three years ago now accounts for more than one-third of the firm’s revenue. Well, good afternoon, Amy. Welcome to the show.
Amy Farner: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. I know you’re hailing out of the Phoenix area. I’m in Kansas City, so appreciate it. Today, we’ve got a hot one like you typically do in Phoenix. I, I’ve got a lot of friends down there. So, I just appreciate you making the time and traversing the time zones. So Amy, if you don’t mind jumping into your first question, you’ve spent over 25 years moving across HR advisory, consulting at Deloitte, product innovation at CEB, and now leading research and product at the Josh Bersin company.
What through line connects all those chapters, and what brought you to this particular role at this particular moment in HR’s evolution?
Amy Farner: It’s a great question, Brian, and I really feel like my career is kind of like the Island of Misfit Toys. I’ve moved around a lot and worked in, a series of different roles, but I really feel like the thing that connects those roles is that across the last 25 years, I have a real passion for helping HR professionals and practitioners use the latest tools and technology to really elevate their craft.
And so back in the early 2000s when I was with CEB, I was helping to think about, what are some of the innovative tools and technologies we can use to drive better employee engagement? At the time, we were really focused on retention, by the way, the dotcom boom. But you know, that was really a, really an exciting opportunity to shape how HR could affect the employee experience very early in the evolution of that particular concept.
Similarly, I remember back in the day when we were trying to figure out, how do we unlock all of the data that we have in transactional systems and use that to help us drive better decision-making for the organization and really create a more strategic approach to how we’re solving people problems? We were able to do that in revolutionary ways using Cognos cubes delivered over the internet in early days when that was a little painful and slow.
Now of course, we’re in the, at the forefront of the AI revolution, and we’re really thinking about, how do we continue to use these new tools to push forward how we’re able to strategically manage our people and solve our people problems in service to the business strategy and goals? So that’s really kind of what I’ve been passionate about, and it’s really been exciting to see how the different technologies have enabled different facets of that journey.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Appreciate that, the background. Obviously you have a diverse background in roles across a couple decades there. But what I really heard is you had a passion for HR and how you can help HR professionals, which is just amazing. And some things you did highlight or all this re-highlight is things like employee engagement, which are always number one in, in companies and culture, data-driven decisions, connecting all those disparate systems.
I think that’s me working in tech for a lot of– a long time. I get that, and that, that’s just amazing what you, what you did there. And of course, you’re at the forefront of AI now, which again things are evolving and especially at this time in, in this day and age here with AI technology. So thank you.
Amy, you’ve helped shape the evolution of Galileo from a research assistant into an intelligent work-workflow platform now used by over eleven hundred companies. How do you think about the difference between AI that surfaces insights and AI that actually changes how work gets done, and how does Galileo navigate that gap?
Amy Farner: I, I think it’s really interesting the journey that we’ve been on at the Josh Bersin company with Galileo and the journey that I think all of us have been on in the last couple of years as we’ve navigated the AI revolution. So, when we first started experimenting with AI in our organization, taking a step back, we’ve always been an insights company.
So we found we were sitting on a pile of really, powerful insights that we knew were helping organizations, but we weren’t able to scale that. So when we first started experimenting with Galileo, we thought, “Hey, we’re solving this problem. We can now surface these insights at scale for so many more organizations, for so many more professionals within those organizations.
We’re democratizing access to insights. Great. Problem solved. We did it,” right ? But the reality is that that was only a small fraction of the power that we’ve been able to introduce through Galileo. So as we’ve continued on this learning journey, as so many have, we’re continually surprised by what the AI is able to do and how it is able to enhance the value of the insights that our researchers put together every day.
That’s how AI changes how work gets done. So within Galileo, I think of I really think of Galileo as kind of the connective tissue between great insights at the broad macro level and how you apply and operationalize those insights within your organization. So our research team, they write powerful papers and, and powerful research based on quantitative and qualitative studies, but that’s one piece of research.
We put that research in Galileo. It talks to all of the other research that’s in there, and we begin to draw those lines across that. Then when an end user logs into Galileo, they now can say, “I really love the insights that you have around how to bring HR into the AI era and the agentic era in our HR 2030 report.
Help me build a roadmap for my company. This is what my company looks like today. This is what our tech stack looks like today. This is what the technical maturity of our people look like today. So help us to personalize and operationalize these great ideas for our company specifically.” That one piece of research is now thousands of pieces of research, depending on how it be- how it is shaped for the situation and the use case of each individual user who’s accessing it.
That’s how we change how work gets done within Galileo, and it’s, it’s really cool and powerful The other piece though, is when we’re able to blend Galileo with the agentic agenda of that organization. So, Galileo is very powerful as a tool for navigating our own content, but as we’re looking at the way that the agentic landscape is changing, everyone’s saying, “We now need all these things to show, to show up.
I don’t want an agent to give me HR best practices, and an agent to help me write job descriptions, and an agent to help me do all of these other things. I want a single super agent that can connect all of these pieces and help me to, really function as an integrated and systemic whole.” So that’s really kind of that second way that we can bring Galileo to life for, for really truly changing the, the way that work is done because now we can reinvent those work processes, incorporating those super agents as, as really a, a key part of those workflows.
Brian Thomas: That’s so awesome. Thank you. And you talked about that early on, your company’s always been an insights company, but you talked about a problem or a gap that we, initially asked, and in order to scale it, you said and bring value to your clients, you needed to develop your Galileo platform, which you’ve done successfully.
And with so much data, just to highlight a couple things, Galileo is able to convert, as you said, one use case into 1,000 use cases because it has access to all this data and provide better insights and decision-making for your clients. And additionally, I liked how you said, you don’t have a multi-agent platform, you really have a super agent, one that can kind of bring it all together into one amazing agent that can serve your cut- customers efficiently and successfully really.
So, thank you. Amy, you’ve engaged publicly with the question of whether AI is displacing middle management. What does your research actually, actually show about how AI is reshaping managerial roles, and is the end of middle management narrative accurate or maybe overstated?
Amy Farner: Yeah, I would say that middle management and managers in general, they’re not going away.
I truly believe that managers are here, but the role of the manager is changing. We call the role of the manager in the age of AI a super manager. So this is a human-centered, AI-powered leader who’s no longer managing just people, but is orchestrating the collaboration between humans and AI. That sounds so exciting, right?
It sounds really, really highbrow. So but what does that look like? So the first thing is that the manager is actually now able to access tools that take a lot of that transactional manage- those transactional management tasks out of their flow of work. So we’re helping managers with what’s often been the heaviest and sometimes least value-added part of their job.
I’m scheduling, I’m finding information. We’re able to automate those tasks, and we’re able to use agents to provide better support to managers in those tasks. Second thing is we’re using agents to help managers do their job better. Because we are, again, using AI to democratize access to advice and support, now every manager can have an AI-powered coach who’s saying, “Hey, you need to help coach your employee on their performance.
Let me help you with that. Let me give you tips on that.” So, we couldn’t scale that with HR providing that one-on-one coaching to every single manager in most organizations. But with AI coaching, we can actually support and empower and enable managers more. The third thing though is that the manager’s role, is really now no longer about routine supervision, but it’s about helping employees navigate this huge transition.
So they still need to be able to prioritize, they need to build culture, they need to align teams, they need to develop tra- talent, but they also need to help their teams adjust to how their roles are changing in the age of AI. So we are calling on super managers to champion the use of AI to help their teams think through how they’re reinventing work, to experiment, to, really help them navigate that uncertainty of the transformation as well.
So it’s really a, a huge opportunity. But what we’re finding is that, almost 80% of organizations aren’t there yet. They’re still working towards that transition. They haven’t clearly defined, clearly communicated to managers what that’s gonna look like. So, I don’t think managers are going anywhere, but I do think we have a lot of kind of, a lot of runway ahead of us where we need to help define what are those revised and revamped expectations for managers, and how do they support their teams using new tools that are available to them, and then in turn helping their team do the…
use new tools that are available to reinvent their workflows and and adjust to what does work look like in an agent-fueled environment
Brian Thomas: Awesome. Thank you. I, I like what you said about the middle management. The person isn’t gonna be obsolete, but the role is gonna completely change, and I would agree with you there.
These managers are able to obviously move these repetitive, mundane ta- tasks off their plate, leveraging AI, of course. So their, their whole workday, their workflow is gonna completely change, and they now can be provided coaching, right, as a manager or leader with the power of AI. And with … in this world of AI that we’re moving into very rapidly, they also need to be able to help their team reinvent their work and adopt AI, those sorts of things.
So I appreciate your insights. And Amy, the last question of the day, the Josh Bersin Company’s research points towards an agentic HR model as the 2030 horizon. What does that future state actually look like in practice, how HR is structured, how decisions get made, how the role of HR professional fundamentally changes as AI agents become embedded in the workforce?
Amy Farner: That’s a huge question. You know, and I, and I think that the, the answer is really similar to the answer on managers as well. So, just as the role of the manager is being reinvented and shifting, so is the role of HR. And in a, in an agentic HR model that we see us moving towards, we call it HR 2030, a- it’s not simply, you know, your father’s or your mother’s old HR system with agents layered on top.
This is a fundamentally new operating model for HR. We’re able to automate, streamline, personalize the work experience of employees, managers, leaders, and also HR professionals themselves. So we truly believe that most organizations will operate with around 100 inter-operating agents. Each one of them is able to support the work that the organization is doing, informed by the company’s context, their people, their skills, their business priorities.
It’s a really exciting feature but it’s going to absolutely shift the way that HR is structured, how decisions are made, and the work that HR is doing. So first off, we think that based on research across nearly 1,000 HR organizations, there’s gonna be around a 30 to 50% reduction in total HR headcount based on this agentic future.
But that’s not gonna be uniformly dis- distributed. What we find is that there are roles that will be disproportionately impacted. So for example, the HR service center, most HR organizations, that’s currently the largest proportion of their HR workforce. We think that’s gonna shrink by roughly 60%, and it makes sense.
That’s a role that’s very ripe for agentic reinvention. But meanwhile, on the other hand, HR business partners, those have always been a critical role in the advisory and strategic support of the business. That population, we think, is actually gonna grow proportional to the overall size of HR. We don’t think that very many roles in, in, in that particular function will go away because they’re actually going to become even more important so we absolutely think that, there will be shifts in the head count, and we also think that that structural model itself will move from centralized to federated.
So now we’re looking at a small, highly specialized set of central teams that support a larger network of business-aligned resources. So absolutely changes to the org model. Now, in terms of decisions, this is where it gets really exciting because in an agentic future decision-making is much more data-driven and contextually intelligent because we now are able to unlock the power of all of the information that’s in the organization in…
locked in our systems, connect it all together, just like we talked about in Galileo, and start to use that information to drive continuous intelligent decision-making that supports the business strategy. So that’s where it gets really exciting. And then finally, we think that the actual role, the, the sheer function that HR plays is fundamentally changing, and this is what’s really, really exciting and, and frankly, profound.
The goal of all of this is that HR’s role is about dynamic enablement for growth. HR really becomes the engine that is fueling the people development and the evolution of our people to facilitate growth in the organization and growth in their own careers. So this is, really a total departure from if you think about the original rationale for HR where, you know, initially it was found many, many years ago around compliance, administration, service delivery, get people paid, keep us out of jail.
It really allows HR to evolve into that strategic function that we’ve been striving towards for years. So, you know, it’s a really exciting opportunity for, for HR, and we really are beginning to see organizations moving towards this future now, which is very exciting.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Thank you so much.
Just like, in a previous question I’d asked you about the middle management, right? And just like those examples and that shift HR needs to be reinvented, as you mentioned. There’s lots of ways that we will be doing them. We’re starting to do it now. But in the future, automate, streamline, and personalize everything in HR for the, the people that they’re supporting.
Obviously, we’re gonna leverage dozens of AI agents, and a stat that you mentioned I thought that was important is about thirty to fifty percent of HR organizations will shrink in some way due to that power of agentic AI, but there will be some shifts, obviously, in that head count, and you talked about moving from centralized to federalized, and I think that’s important.
And I definitely think having HR being more agile is gonna be a, a game changer for the organizations that they support, so thank you. Amy, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Amy Farner: Thank you. It was great to speak with you.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Amy Farner Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
