Josh Bersin: ‘We’re not going to lose the HR department’ because of agentic AI

“The value of HR is how much productivity and growth you can create for the rest of the company, not how much can you ring out the cost of HR itself.”

As a result, HR technology isn’t just about HR anymore; the aim of these tools is to enable “employees to be more productive”.

Those are the words of industry analyst Josh Bersin in his UNLEASH America 2026 keynote.

The CEO & Founder of The Josh Bersin Company is clear that HR technology tools are being re-energized by AI – incumbent vendors are reinventing as fast as possible, including launching agentic AI capabilities into their platforms.

However, in his keynote, Bersin noted that these big vendor agents are “not necessarily as transformational as you may think.”

While vendor agents are making the current environment and workflows more functional, but they aren’t redesigning how work gets done in organizations, which is where real AI success comes from.

One analogy that Bersin made during his keynote was “automating the way the driver drives isn’t the same thing as building a self-driving car.”

Speaking directly to the HR leaders in the audience, Bersin noted: “Our opinion is that if you’re not re-engineering the process, you’re probably not going to get the value of that you want.”

You have to think about the architectural issues and focus on the big problems where you can see a real return on investment,” he continued.

UNLEASH sat down with Bersin at UNLEASH America to exclusively dig deeper into how CHROs and HR teams need to think and action differently to reap the rewards of agentic AI.

Josh Bersin speaking on the UNLEASH America Main Stage.

HR jobs are going nowhere, but CHROs need to focus on the most transformative ways AI will drive growth

Agentic AI may be a “radically different” technology that previous HR tools, but it will not steal HR jobs.

As Bersin exclusively tells UNLEASH, “we’re not going to lose the HR department.”

In his keynote, Bersin noted that “the reason that AI is so powerful is not because we’re eliminating a whole bunch of jobs and reducing payroll,” but because everyone can do more.

Ultimately, Bersin shares that because of agentic AI, “workers in HR are going to be doing different things”, and that’s exciting.

HR teams will need to be the managers and caretakers of AI agents. This means supervising agents designing to support specific HR functional areas – whether that’s compensation, benefits or recruitment – but also super agents that oversee the entire HR process.

For Bersin, it’s time for HR to “get over” their fear and intimidation over AI – they have no choice but to use these tools, and they will realize the tools are not just productive, but also fun and empowering.

Agents can “stich” together all “the domains of expertise that we have in HR” so that they can truly solve the business problems. This means that AI will “bring you into a higher value role in your company,” concluded Bersin in the keynote.

Bersin believes “we’re past of the point of a million experiments”; that’s been a focus for the past few years, but “individuals cannot reinvent their jobs.”

Therefore, top of the CHRO to-do list in 2026 must be “to find a few big projects that are really going to transform the company in a positive way, and focus on them,” Bersin tells UNLEASH.

CHROs need to think carefully about “which parts of HR do you think are going to be most transformational for the company?”

Success also requires HR to conduct a radical rethink of leadership within their organizations.

In most organizations, many leaders have never been asked to transform what they do before; to achieve “cultural adoption” of AI, it cannot just be about “coming up with a great idea and giving people a bunch of tools, but bringing leaders along with you.”

The good news is that vendors are desperate to not get left behind with AI; they are here to support CHROs and their teams.

Bersin’s advice in his keynote is that “the most important thing for you to do as HR people is to find companies that you enjoy working with” and “teach them how to build the products that you need because they don’t know what to build either.”

He called for vendors to get on board with not just domain-specific agents, but also these super agents that orchestrate big processes, if organizations are going to be truly optimized for the world of agentic AI.

Want to hear more from Josh Bersin on agentic AI and HR reinvention? UNLEASH partnered with The Josh Bersin Company on an exclusive webinar on this very topic, which featured Bersin, his Co-Founder Bill Pelster and Microsoft’s Prerna Ajmera – you can watch on-demand now.