Jason Averbook's Recent LinkedIn Posts

I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be serving as a judge for the inaugural HR Tech Europe Pitchfest in Amsterdam this April. This is exactly what our industry needs right now. Too often we see innovation theater instead of actual innovation. Companies layering new technology on top of broken processes, solving problems nobody actually has, or worse, automating dysfunction and calling it transformation. Pitchfest cuts through all of that. Early-stage HR tech companies will have just three minutes to prove they're building something that matters. No hiding behind buzzwords. No death by PowerPoint. Just founders who believe they can change how work actually works, standing in front of judges and an audience ready to challenge every assumption. We'll be looking for the startups that understand a fundamental truth: technology doesn't transform anything. People do. The best HR tech doesn't just automate tasks, it unlocks human potential by removing friction from the moments that matter most. If you're building something bold in the HR tech space, this is your shot. Up to €20,000 in cash and prizes, plus the chance to pitch to investors, customers, and industry leaders who can actually move the needle. Applications are open now. Deadline is March 13th. Who's got what it takes to be HR tech's next big thing? See you in Amsterdam. https://lnkd.in/eN6JtxiE #HRTech #HRTechEurope #Innovation #FutureOfWork #Pitchfest

Most organizations think they have an AI strategy. They have a chatbot strategy. There's a difference, and that difference is exactly why jobs are going to change in ways most people aren't prepared for. Right now, as you read this, I have fifteen to twenty agents running simultaneously. One is researching. One is drafting. One is monitoring. One is following up on things I would have forgotten. I am not a more productive version of a knowledge worker. I am a different kind of worker entirely. That's not the future. That's today, Wednesday. Here's the thing nobody is saying out loud: when people only experience AI as a chatbot, they genuinely cannot see how it's going to change or replace their job. The chatbot gives them a little more light in the room, so they think that's what electricity does. They have no frame of reference for the electrical grid. A chatbot talks. An agent works. A chatbot asks you what to do next. An agent decides what to do next. And when one person with twenty agents can do what previously required a team, the math of employment, performance management, compensation, and what we even call "a job" changes in ways most organizations haven't begun to grapple with. Jobs aren't going to be transformed by chatbots. They're going to be transformed by agents. And most people can't see it coming because they've never experienced anything beyond the chat window. I wrote the full piece on what this actually means for leaders, for individuals, and for society. I hope helpful and please reshare to your networks if so. It takes a community to transform in the world we live in today! https://lnkd.in/gcbi7dTr

Three things happened this week that tell the same story. 1) Vibe coding turned one. 2) The jobs report showed a labor market splitting in two. 3) $285 billion evaporated from software stocks in what bankers are calling the "SaaS-pocalypse." Everyone's talking about these as separate headlines. They're not. They're all symptoms of the same thing: a K-shaped knowledge economy that's forming inside your organization right now, and your performance management systems will never see it. I watched it happen in my own company. One colleague got serious about using AI as a thinking partner 18 months ago. Last quarter she did 5X the sales calls, 5X the proposals, 5X the responses of any of her peers. Same role. Same access to tools. Same comp. The difference? She never asked for permission to start running. Here's what keeps me up at night: the skills that compound have a cruelty to them. The earlier someone starts, the more impossible it becomes for others to catch up. That gap isn't closing. It's widening every day, every month, and your engagement surveys aren't going to catch it. The question isn't whether your people use AI anymore. The question is whether AI has changed how they think. That's the difference between adoption and embodiment, and most organizations are still stuck measuring logins when they should be measuring rewiring. Within 18 months, companies will stop hiring anyone who doesn't demonstrate AI fluency in the interview. Not 18 months from now as a plan. Now. The future already happened and we're still building training programs for it. I broke all of this down in this week's podcast. Which arm of the K are you on? https://lnkd.in/e72fwjGc

I asked a room full of CHROs last week how many had actually redesigned their entry-level roles to match what AI now does, and I got zero hands. I sat down with Heather Jerrehian, founder of H22.ai, and she said something I haven't been able to stop thinking about: Gen Z unemployment is over 10%, and underemployment is above 40%, which means we have bartenders, baristas and dog walkers with college degrees who don't even show up in the unemployment number. What scares me each day is that we are automating the bottom rung of the career ladder without rebuilding the ladder. The work that felt unglamorous, the stuff we handed to new hires, was actually the training ground that built our future leaders, and when you kill the entry point, you wake up five years from now with a talent gap and no clear explanation for how it happened. Heather put it plainly: we are unintentionally breaking the talent pipeline that built our own careers. I teach, and I see students every single day who did everything right, went to good schools, studied tech, and still can't land an internship. A Stanford CS student Heather brought in as her intern couldn't give herself away for free, and that's not a data point, that's a person. What has to change is that entry-level roles need to be redesigned as human-AI apprenticeships rather than eliminated, skills-based hiring needs to replace resume screening, and AI fluency needs to be built into every curriculum rather than offered as an elective. Business leaders also need to stop treating workforce decisions as pure cost levers while the talent pipeline quietly collapses underneath them. If you're a Gen Z-er reading this, don't wait to be chosen. Network like your career depends on it, publish your thinking, show your work, and make your voice visible, because your digital footprint is your resume now. If you're a leader reading this, the window to get this right is shorter than you think. https://lnkd.in/gzdMmyU9 How many of you know a Gen Z-er who can't find work right now? I'd love to hear what you're seeing.

Just stepped out of an incredible keynote with Peter Hinssen yesterday, and I’ll be honest, I couldn’t sleep last night in Vegas because my mind was racing with his ideas. I have heard Peter before, this time was different. A few of Peter’s key messages we should all be taking away: We’re not going “back to normal.” We’ve entered the Never Normal, a world where shocks, crises, and disruption are not storms to wait out, but the permanent climate we live in. Digital was never the destination. Digital was the appetizer. AI is the main course and it’s coming faster, bigger, and with more investment than any technology wave we’ve seen before. Capex numbers from the big tech players aren’t just tech stats, they’re a signal: we’re in a new era of extreme capitalism and talent singularity, where a small group of highly capable people (and organizations) will pull away from the rest. The cost of doing is going to zero; the cost of waiting is going to infinity. Timing and speed aren’t optional anymore and speed is the strategy. Most organizations are drowning in data but starving for insight. The winners will be the ones that stop just collecting data and start truly connecting dots. AI-first does not mean people-last. “Yesterday’s work” is real: all the legacy processes, meetings, reports, and rituals we keep alive out of habit. If we don’t ruthlessly remove yesterday’s work, we won’t have the capacity to build tomorrow’s. Peter also laid down a powerful leadership challenge in the Never Normal: Anticipate: spend more time on the “day after tomorrow,” not just surviving today and budgeting for tomorrow. Adapt: build the ability to course-correct quickly when signal is still weak not when obvious and the options are gone. Build resilience: you will get things wrong; the differentiator is how fast you rebound, reset, and recover. “The future of work isn’t in 2030, it’s in the decisions we make on today.” “Technology changes at the speed of light; HR changes at the speed of trust.” “If we keep designing work for a world that no longer exists, we shouldn’t be surprised when people check out.” “Our job isn’t to admire the disruption; it’s to operationalize the future.” Uncertainty isn’t a bug in the system; it’s the raw material for opportunity. Thank you, Marc Coleman and UNLEASH along with JESS VON BANK, for a keynote that didn’t just inform but it agitated, provoked, and made it impossible to sleep. Exactly what I (and hopefully we) need in the Never Normal!

Every company I talk to says they're "all in on AI." New data from Harvard Business Review and Cloudera says otherwise. Only 7% of enterprises say their data is completely ready for AI. Seven percent. That means 93% of organizations investing in AI right now are building on a foundation that can't support what they're building. It gets worse: → 73% admit they should be prioritizing data quality for AI more than they are. They know it's a problem. They're just not fixing it. → 56% say siloed data is their #1 obstacle. Not talent. Not budget. Not technology. Data that can't talk to other data. → 44% don't even have a clear data strategy. Almost half. In 2026. → Only 23% have an established data strategy for AI. The rest are still "developing" one. Which is corporate speak for "we haven't started." But here's the stat that I was a bit floored by! 47% believe agentic AI will solve their data quality problems. Read that again. Almost half of enterprises are betting that AI will fix the data problem… that is currently preventing their AI from working. That's not a strategy. That's a prayer. We are in the middle of the largest technology spending cycle in enterprise history and the vast majority of organizations are spending on the wrong layer. You don't have an AI problem. You have a data problem you've been ignoring for a decade that AI just made impossible to keep ignoring. The 7% who actually got their data house in order? They're not just ready for AI. They're pulling away from everyone else. And 65% expect agentic AI to augment or replace their business processes within two years. Two years, with data that isn't ready. Fascinating times! Full report: https://lnkd.in/gF3ZYTvm #AI #Data #FutureOfWork #DigitalTransformation #Leadership

Starting something new: Tuesday Thought! Every Tuesday, I'm publishing a brief on the ideas that are shaping how we work, how organizations transform, and what it actually takes to move from now to next. These aren't long essays. They're sharp, actionable insights wrapped around one big idea. Designed to make you think differently about your work by Wednesday morning. This week: The Flip Point Most people think the challenge with AI is when it gets good enough to replace work. I think the real flip point is much earlier, much more personal. It's the moment you have to answer: What would I do with my time if I got it back? That question is going to define the next decade for individuals and organizations. Read on if you're thinking about your future differently. Uber Dara Khosrowshahi The Diary Of A CEO #NowToNext #AI #FutureOfWork #Transformation #Leadership Tuesday Thought drops every week. Subscribe to make sure you don't miss it.

93% building on bad data and half of them think the AI will just figure it out. Hope is not a data strategy.

The January jobs report isn't about jobs. It's about paralysis. Private employers added just 22,000 positions last month. That number would have been negative without a surge of 74,000 hires in healthcare and education. Meanwhile: → Professional and business services lost 57,000 jobs → Manufacturing lost another 8,000 (monthly losses since March 2024) → Large employers shed 18,000 positions → Mid-sized companies carried the entire burden of growth ADP's chief economist Nela Richardson, one of my favorite people, called it a "low-hire, low-fire environment" where employers are "very reticent to hire." Reticent is a polite word for frozen. This isn't an economic problem. It's a leadership problem. Look at what's hitting organizations all at once: → Tariff whiplash. Rates swinging wildly while one manufacturing executive said conditions are "more trying than during the coronavirus pandemic in terms of supply chain uncertainty." → Policy chaos. The rules change daily. 65% of supply chain managers report cost increases of 10-15%, and double the percentage are reporting layoffs compared to last spring. → Technology disruption. AI is reshaping every job description while leaders debate whether to invest in their people or wait and see. → Legal limbo. A Supreme Court case could invalidate major tariffs, but nobody knows when, so companies sit on their hands. The result is less a freeze than slow-motion paralysis. The cost and risk of making big commitments keeps rising, so firms adopt a "wait-and-see" posture that leaves the economy in limbo. The common thread isn't any single disruption. It's the inability to lead through uncertainty. When you don't know what tariffs will cost next quarter, you stop hiring. When you don't know if AI will reshape your workforce, you stop developing people. When you don't know if the rules will change tomorrow, you stop making decisions today. Three things to do this week: → Stop waiting for clarity that isn't coming. The organizations winning right now aren't the ones with better forecasts. They're the ones building the muscle to operate inside continuous change. Changefulness beats prediction. → Audit your frozen decisions. List every initiative, hire, or investment that's been "on hold" waiting for more certainty. Then ask: what would we do if we knew this uncertainty was permanent? → Separate the controllables from the noise. You can't control tariff policy or court rulings. You can control whether your people have the skills and mindset to adapt. Invest there. Here's the hard truth: uncertainty isn't the problem. It's the excuse. And while you're waiting for things to stabilize, someone else is building the future you're too hesitant to create. ADP

On March 17th, JESS and I are leading the UNLEASH AI Summit in Las Vegas, powered by UKG, and it's going to be unlike most sessions you've sat through at a conference. This isn't a "watch us present slides for three hours" situation. It's a hands-on workshop designed to give #HR leaders a real framework for AI-enabled digital transformation, one they can actually take home and put to work. Here's what we're tackling: 1) the different types and applications of AI in workforce technologies 2) how to deploy them 3) how to measure success 4) how to scale the value across your organization If you've been wondering where to start with AI or how to move from pilot to something meaningful, this is the room you want to be in. Jess and I have been working together on this exact problem set, and bringing UKG into the conversation makes it even stronger. The combination of strategy, real-world experience, and technology perspective is exactly what leaders need right now. The session runs from 12:30 PM to 4:00 PM at Caesars Forum, kicking off UNLEASH America 2026. If you're going to be in Vegas for the event, come join us on Day 1 and let's build something together. Register here and see you in Vegas! - https://lnkd.in/e4f-ZwjK #UNLEASH #AI #DigitalTransformation #HRTechnology #UKG #FutureOfWork

Thank you so much ⛳️ John Schneider alone with UKG UNLEASH Marc Coleman Jennifer Brafman Staffen for the continued support to educate the world on the future and NOW of work!

1 in 50. That's the number of AI initiatives actually delivering what researchers are calling transformative value. Not spell check. Not faster emails. Real, structural change that shows up in the P&L and in how decisions get made. I spent most of February in back-to-back conversations with CHROs, CXOs, transformation leads, and vendors trying to figure out why their AI investments weren't showing up in the numbers. Then I spent a weekend in the research: McKinsey & Company, Forrester, Harvard Business Review, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Gartner, Journal of Accountancy. All published within the last few weeks. Here's what I keep coming back to. 62% of people use AI regularly at home. 26% use it at work. Same people. Same tools. Completely different behavior. And the reason most organizations give for that gap is almost always wrong. We've been chasing adoption when the goal was always embodiment. Adoption is using AI. Embodiment is becoming better because of it. Those aren't points on the same spectrum. They're completely different destinations, and most organizations are measuring one while thinking they're building the other. We are automating dysfunction and calling it transformation. And here's what makes this urgent right now: the agentic shift doesn't wait for you to be ready. Gartner projects 40% of enterprise applications will embed AI agents by end of 2026, up from less than 5% last year. If your people haven't built trust with the technology yet, if the psychological safety isn't there, if your leaders aren't visibly using these tools themselves, deploying agents doesn't stall transformation. It accelerates the wrong kind. Faster decisions with worse judgment is not a win. I recorded a new episode of Now to Next this week that gets into all of it: the psychology behind why rollouts stall, what the embodiment gap actually costs, and why the companies that look back on 2026 as their inflection point won't be the ones that deployed the most tools. The question worth asking in your organization right now isn't "are we adopting AI?" It's "are AI and human judgment making each other better, and do we have the internal capability to know when they're not?" That's a much harder question. It's also the only one that matters. 30 minutes - I hope worth it! Now to Next Podcast, Ep. 22: The Embodiment Gap https://lnkd.in/gsVWJvKM

This morning I got a text from a young man I know. He didn't get called back for his second interview. He'd done everything right, and the door closed anyway. He wasn't angry. He was just quiet in the way people get when they're trying to figure out what a setback means about them. Today I am walking onto a stage at the College of Charleston to speak to a room full of students about the future of work, and I realized I wanted to say the same thing to all of them that I wanted to say to him. Your degree, your certifications, your experience, they all matter. And they all have an expiration date printed in invisible ink. Your curiosity never expires. I wrote the piece I wish someone had handed both of them today. It's for the 21-year-old figuring out where to start, the 45-year-old leading through more change than they signed up for, and the 75-year-old wondering what this all means for the people they love. If someone in your life got a door closed on them recently, send it to them. https://lnkd.in/eK2iaNt8

The Atlantic published a piece today that every executive, HR leader, and workforce strategist should read carefully. Josh Tyrangiel's "How Soon Will AI Take Your Job?" lays out the full tension between economists who say "we'll be fine" and the CEOs who are quietly planning mass layoffs while their PR teams tell reporters they have nothing to say. A few things worth calling out. 1) The silence. After a brief window where CEOs were openly talking about AI replacing half of white-collar jobs, they all went quiet at roughly the same time. Tyrangiel frames it perfectly: "Anyone who has seen a shark fin break the water and then disappear knows this is not reassuring." The decisions are being made. The announcements just aren't. 2) The speed question. Economists like Acemoglu and Autor keep pointing to the rearview mirror, reminding us that previous technologies took decades to reshape work. But Anton Korinek makes the counterargument I've been feeling in my bones: these machines aren't dumb like every tool that came before them. Smart machines can roll themselves out. That changes every historical comparison we've been leaning on for comfort. 3) I think the article misses an opportunity, there's almost no discussion of what happens inside organizations right now, before the layoffs, before the policy debates. The piece focuses on economists, politicians, and CEOs, but the real story is playing out in the middle of the org chart, where managers and teams are either building the muscle for continuous change or waiting to be told what to do. That gap between those two groups will determine who survives this. Reid Hoffman told Tyrangiel that CEOs cutting headcount represents "a failure of the imagination." I agree, but I'd push it further. The failure isn't just imagination. It's belief. Most organizations still don't believe AI applies to their specific situation, their specific work, their specific people. They're treating this like a technology project when it's a human transformation project, and the humans haven't been invited to participate yet. Gina Raimondo said something the whole piece orbits around: "I'm telling you it's the end of America as we know it if we don't use this moment to do things differently." She's right. And "doing things differently" starts long before Washington figures out policy. It starts with how you lead your team today! Read the full piece here:

I am so thrilled to be a mentor and judge for this amazing event in Europe. There are still a few weeks to submit your application. I am so looking forward to seeing you in Amsterdam and hope to get to work with some amazing new vendors building the future of our space! Rebecca McKenna Debbie French

Most companies are adding AI and calling it transformation. Anna Gullstrand calls that out for what it is, and this Friday she's joining JESS VON BANK and me live to talk about what actually moves the needle. Anna is Chief People & Culture Officer at Mentimeter, SaaS Leader of the Year, and author of the HR Book of the Year "Facilitera!" She's built human-centered organizations at scale, and she has a perspective on learning, leadership, and human intelligence that I haven't heard anyone frame quite the way she does. I'm not going to give it away here. That's the point of showing up live. This Friday, March 6, 2026 - 12 PM CT / 7:00 PM Stockholm. Click here to join us! - https://lnkd.in/dd2SjTaK If you believe work should be more human and more effective at the same time, this is your Friday.

Just heard Amy Edmondson at UNLEASH 2026 and LOVED IT! We keep saying we want “innovation” and “high performance” but most organizations are still running an industrial-era playbook: 1) Failure is treated as a defect to eliminate, not data to learn from 2) People are rewarded for looking right, not for surfacing what’s wrong 3) We obsess over perks and policies, but underinvest in purpose, growth and community Amy broke it down: Not all failures are equal: 1) Basic failures: preventable mistakes in well-known work 2) Complex failures: many small factors colliding into disaster 3) Intelligent failures: thoughtful bets in genuinely new territory Only the last kind moves us forward. Yet it’s the one most cultures quietly punish. Her recipe for excellence in an uncertain world: 1) Aim high on ambitious, meaningful goals 2) Team up across disciplines 3) Fail well: lots of small, smart experiments 4) Learn fast, share the lessons 5) Repeat — endlessly And none of this works without psychological safety. If people can’t say “I might be wrong” or “this is failing” without fear, you don’t have a performance culture, you have a compliance culture. The other big unlock: rethink the employee value proposition as a system, not a list of perks: *(Material rewards (pay, flexibility) *Growth and development *Connection and community *Meaning and purpose When those four are integrated, you see higher performance, engagement, psychological safety and lower burnout and turnover. My takeaway for leaders (including myself): If we’re not actively designing for intelligent failure and integrated employee value, we’re designing for mediocrity by default. Thank you Amy Edmondson Joyous Marc Coleman JESS VON BANK Michael Carden for bringing Amy to this amazing event!

The January 2026 Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. Report just dropped and the numbers should be a wake-up call for every HR and business leader. ** 108,435 job cuts announced in January. That's the highest January total since 2009. ** 5,306 hiring plans announced. The lowest January on record since tracking began. Read those two numbers together. The gap between cutting and hiring tells you everything about employer confidence heading into 2026. Some specifics that jumped out: 1) UPS alone cut 30,000 jobs after severing ties with Amazon 2) Amazon cut 16,000, framed as "reducing layers" (not AI, despite what Jassy says publicly) 3) Healthcare cuts hit 17,107, the worst since April 2020 4) AI was cited for 7% of January's cuts, but 79,449 total since 2023 "These decisions were made in Q4 2025. Leadership looked at the year ahead and said 'no thanks.'" "When hiring plans hit record lows and cuts hit 17-year highs in the same month, that's not noise. That's signal." "The AI number is interesting but probably undercounted. Companies cite 'restructuring' when they really mean 'we automated your job.'" What this means for you: If you're in HR, workforce planning just became your most strategic function. If you're a job seeker, the competition for fewer roles just intensified. If you're a leader, the playbook from 2021-2022 is officially dead. The labor market isn't softening. It's recalibrating and its happening NOW! https://lnkd.in/e_hqAJ9e The Daily Upside

Thank you Santo. Such an exciting time to be alive yet so many scared.

Thank you so much Christy Marble. We are in the top of the first inning and it is about to get exciting!

Quick reminder -- JESS VON BANK and I are leading a hands-on workshop at UNLEASH America in Las Vegas on March 17th, powered by UKG and it is nearly SOLD OUT! This isn't a sit-and-listen session. We're building a real framework for AI-enabled digital transformation in HR, one you can actually take back and put to work. We will be building with apps, insights and new tools for HR in this session. If you haven't registered yet, now's the time. Register here: https://lnkd.in/e4f-ZwjK

Such a fascinating time to be alive combining economics with technology to create the new operating model of work!

Thank you Bertrand Dussert. So appreciate who you are and what you do for our industry. Miss you sir.

Thank you Marquam Piros. This is becoming more and more true and clear by the day. AI as a ChatBot vs AI as a CoWorker

Thank you Jake Nesteruk. This plays itself out each day.