The rise of the "super worker"

Josh Bersin's thoughts

Excerpt: "We are entering a year of political change, economic disruption, and changing labor markets. As I discussed recently (The Tumultuous Year Ahead), the world is experiencing talent shortages in front-line and blue collar work (US unemployment remains at 4.1%) while white-collar employment is softening.

CEOs are investing in AI in a quest for productivity and workers are asking to be retrained. And many core values (diversity and inclusion, pay equity, remote work) remain challenging.

Companies believe that AI will transform their business, so investment in technology is exploding. Yet as history tells us, this “trillian dollar AI-based re-engineering” effort is about people, not technology. As the research points out, the AI revolution, as exciting as it feels, is all about redesigning the way we get things done. And that lands in the laps of HR: how we redesign, reskill, and redeploy people in a world of highly intelligent systems.

Understanding The Superworker and The Superworker Company

Let’s start with the basics. Companies are filled with business processes, tools, and job models designed around traditional people-centric work. Every job function, from sales to marketing to manufacturing, has been designed around the old-fashioned job families of the past.

In other words, we’ve run our companies as “people machines.” We design a set of jobs and job families, then hire, train, and promote people to grow. This model creates a sprawling company filled with skills challenges, people wanting promotion, and fragility as the business goes through change.

The digital revolution, which defines the last 27 years of transformation, did speed things up. It automated many processes and opened up the ideas of self-service, e-commerce, and direct consumer transactions. But it didn’t fundamentally change how companies are organized: rather it accelerated the processes we had.

Suddenly, with AI everything is different. As the most intelligent and data hungry technology ever, AI stands to integrate and redefine every business process and “superpower” every employee. And this shift, toward copilots, agents, digital twins, and intelligent platforms, forces us to rethink how we’re organized, what we do, and what we define as a “job.”