The Josh Bersin Company

What do you do when the funding that anchored your HR transformation disappears unexpectedly? For Seneca Polytechnic, a public college with 44,000 students in the greater Toronto area, the answer was redesigning the transformation itself.

In this episode, we speak with Diana Mohan, Executive Director of Transformation and Change at Seneca Polytechnic — a 2026 HR Pacesetter Award winner — about how her team chose to continue forward rather than press pause when regulatory changes created a structural deficit across Canada’s higher education sector.

Diana shares how Seneca’s HR team embraced AI to totally change how HR operates and scale HR services. Their approach began with listening, building trust and capability across the team, and empowering people at every level to create new AI use cases. The result has not only been more efficient service delivery and a better employee experience—it’s been a strategic shift to an insight-driven, advisory HR function.

Diana Mohan is a transformation specialist and trusted advisor specializing in over a decade of organizational strategy, AI adoption, and the future of work. With a career spanning Deloitte, Kearney, and executive leadership roles, she has helped many organizations translate bold ideas into practical transformation programs, enabling leaders to navigate uncertainty, accelerate change, and prepare for what’s next.

Additional Information

New Research: How AI Transforms $400 Billion Of Corporate Learning

US Workforce In 2035: A Few More Workers, A Lot More Output

The Great Decoupling: How Workers Became Disconnected From Companies And AI Will Accelerate This Trend

Get Galileo: How Seneca Transformed HR

Chapters

(00:00:00) - What Works: The Future of Work
(00:00:41) - HR Pacesetter Award Winners: Diana Mouhand
(00:01:52) - In the Know: The HR Team at Seneca Polytechnic
(00:02:47) - How HR is on a transformation journey
(00:05:13) - How Cognizant Went From Transformation to a Pivot
(00:06:59) - How To Build Trust in AI at Seneca
(00:12:19) - The HR org chart: AI Agents
(00:16:10) - What Makes an HR Team Flexible in the Age of AI
(00:18:10) - WSJD Live: The AI Transformation

The BLS forecasts an almost flat growth in the labor market in the next decade yet US GDP is expected to grow by 22-24% cumulatively. In order for this to work we are all going to be focused on “labor productivity.”

In this podcast I explain this new world of Superworkers and discuss why the word “labor” itself may be out of date. I also discuss why HR issues like org design, work design, dynamic enablement, talent density, pay equity, dynamic planning, and AI really change the dynamics of our businesses. And HR is now a growth professsion, growing faster than the GDP and increasing in economic value.

Additional Information

Our new book Superpowered, launching in October

US Workforce In 2035: A Few More Workers, A Lot More Output

Galileo will teach you how to drive productivity

 

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Labor Market: The super worker
(00:04:17) - Employee mobility and job and org redesign
(00:06:44) - Beyond HR: The Role of AI in Business

Rochana Golani, VP of Enablement at Databricks, is one of the most innovative and business-focused learning executives I’ve met. In this action-packed conversation Rochana shares the secrets of the company’s AI-powered dynamic training, learning, and enablement system, and how she runs internal and customer learning like a fast-growing business.

Databricks is one of the world’s fastest-growing enterprise software companies and a central player in the convergence of data infrastructure, analytics, machine learning, and generative AI.

Founded in 2013 by the UC Berkeley researchers who created Apache Spark, Databricks pioneered the “lakehouse”—an architecture designed to combine the scalability of a data lake with the management, reliability, and analytical capabilities of a data warehouse. Its platform now supports data engineering, business intelligence, AI development, governance, databases, and enterprise AI agents across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Databricks company overview

This amazing private company reports:

More than 20,000 customers

Approximately 70% of the Fortune 500

More than 10,000 employees

More than 8,000 cloud, software, and consulting partners.

As of August 2026, Databricks says it has exceeded a $7 billion annualized revenue run rate, growing by more than 80% year over year during its second quarter.

Additional Information

Corporate Learning: From Static Training to Dynamic Enablement

Galileo Learn: Experience Dynamic Learning Yourself

The Josh Bersin Institute: Masterclass in HR Excellence

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Interview With Databricks's Roshana Golani
(00:00:24) - Databricks CEO on the Disruptive Technology
(00:01:36) - How to Get Empowerment at Databricks
(00:03:16) - WSJD Live: Data & Machine Learning Lead the Way
(00:08:09) - Teaching and Enablement: The New Paradigm
(00:11:01) - How to Build a Better Solution with Databricks
(00:14:52) - WSJD Live: The Skills Taxonomy
(00:15:22) - What do you think happens to course content?
(00:17:13) - The source of content in the Learning Infrastructure
(00:22:52) - Databricks: The go-to training solution for business users
(00:24:25) - In the Era of AI, Who Will Lead the Transformation?
(00:26:57) - Subject Matter Experts and the Learning Infrastructure
(00:28:20) - A Day in the Life of Leadership Development

Workday’s Q2 2027 earnings were a pivot point, showing how Workday has shifted to its “AI-Forward Future.” The company reported $600 Million of recurring AI revenue and a clear and confident position in the market.

While Workday’s 12.8% YTY revenue growth is nowhere near that of a Frontier Lab, my takeaway is that Workday is here to stay and has a clear position in the agentic business ahead.

Listen up and you may agree with me that SaaS software companies are not going away at all: they may form the basis for the enterprise AI wave ahead.

Additional Information

Introducing HR 2030: A Vision For Agentic Human Resources

Workday Reports Higher Profit, Revenue on AI Agent Adoption

Galileo: All our Research and Much Much More

Chapters

(00:00:00) - SaaS vs. AI Software: Will SaaS Replace
(00:05:49) - SANA and Workday: The Enterprise Connection

Today I review the various jailbreaks by both OpenAI and Anthropic and the challenges which Frontier Labs are having with AI “alignment.” So in keeping with HR 2030, I share some general advice and stay tuned for our detailed technical paper on this in the coming weeks.

And as we debate the reliability, training, and alignment of models I also point out how the technology industry is struggling to deal with the politics and economics here, since right now most tech leaders really don’t want any form of regulation. (Unless it’s somehow fair to all.) So we, as buyers, are left dealing with the issue.

AI Alignment means making sure an AI system’s goals and behavior match what people actually want—our values, rules, and intentions. It’s about getting the AI to do the “right thing” even in new situations, not just follow instructions literally in ways that cause harm. In practice, it includes preventing unwanted outcomes like deception, unsafe shortcuts, or optimizing a metric that misses the real objective.

I also highly recommend Jill Lepore’s book “The Rise of the Artificial State” for a very sound discussion of the political issues around AI, which helps with these issues.

And along the line of AI “alignment,” I discuss why Google paid $10M for the emails and data from bankrupt Spirit Airlines, and how AI companies are now buying old slack and emails from many bankrupt companies, training their AI on old, failed business models. (Read below on “reinforcement learning gyms.”)

This is a strange series of events, all making it clear that Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic have quite a challenge training and aligning their models in the future.

And I conclude with a preview of our AI-driven wage research and our coming book Superpowered, coming in October.

Resources You Should Read

OpenAI cyber models broke out of training environment to hack Hugging Face

Detailed Investigation of OpenAI Jailbreak (good drama)

Anthropic’s disclosure of Claude’s jailbreak (good discussion)

Google to Buy Spirit Airlines Business Data for $10 Million

A.I.’s New Training Data: Your Old Work Slacks and Emails (failed companies training LLMs)

The Birth of “Reinforcement Learning Gyms” (wierdness of training data sets)

Cisco Gave All 90,000 Employees Their Own AI Agent

A Peek Into The Workforce Of 2035: Jobs, Wages, And AI’s Impact  (Bersin analysis)

Chapters

(00:00:00) - AI in the Political System
(00:03:24) - Will AI Eliminate Jobs?
(00:08:08) - The role of agents in IT security
(00:10:01) - The Personal Agent in HR 2030