The Josh Bersin Company, have announced a partnership with Workday to build a new HR playbook that takes full advantage of AI technology and advances in the HR function. Bersin has said that by 2030 HR will look less like a service function and more like the operating system for business growth and he believes the playbook will be key to achieving this.
“In the quest for growth and productivity, we can’t just apply AI as an automation tool to the existing org chart,” says Bersin, “we need to redesign the org chart around what agents can do. And we also need to learn to build agents, manage agents, align agents – and train them.”
Bersin claims their studies have shown that companies who get this right can double revenue per employee within five to seven years. “Get it wrong,” he adds, “and they build a faster, more expensive version of the bureaucracy they have today.”
The Workday playbook comes on the back of recent research from The Bersin Company released as part of their HR 2030™ initiative. That research, The HR Leader's Guide to Multiagent HR Architecture, provides a practical CHRO and CIO guide on how to best orchestrate the ever-growing range of increasingly capable AI agents coming onto the market, prioritise data governance, and understand the critical role of the ‘superagent’ family architecture.
The research shows the complexity of HR and management requires specialised agents, each trained and aligned to a specific role. These trusted agents deliver the most value, the analysis says, when continuously monitored, optimised and coordinated by groups of agents organised as ‘superagents’.
Managing a multiagent HR architecture should be a business, not purely technology, decision,
Combined with data, governance and agent-monitoring tools, the company believes this architecture offers the strongest foundation for high-value AI returns in HR. The research identifies at least 151 AI agents currently of active interest to CHROs. Despite this proliferation, it is their coordination, training, and continuous alignment that drive the highest returns.
The study advocates for a structured approach – rather than continuing to add agents to individual HR workflows, organisations should design how multiple agents operate together at a higher level. The report recommends grouping individual agents into functional HR families, or “superagents”, centred on eight core areas. This system of agents helps organisations hire, manage, pay, retain, and mobilise their people, with the potential to eliminate up to 40% of task-oriented HR work.
The study warns managing a multiagent HR architecture should be a business, not purely technology, decision, focused on data governance, design and where humans remain in the loop.
The Guide lays out six key implementation decisions HR leaders must make. It also sets out the core multiagent foundations CHROs need, from the right orchestration and context layers and data fabric to monitoring systems and a shared skills library.
Getting these decisions right is critical to managing the risks of rapidly evolving AI, from agents going out of bounds to the unpredictable outputs of AI agents. The result is a practical, timely, and technically sound guidebook for moving ahead with multiagent HR, not simply what agents to buy, says the analysis.
“HR 2030 is a practical, step-by-step blueprint for getting to multiagent AI efficiency in HR,” says Bersin. “This is a system of agents designed for business growth, precision, and scale, not simply automation.
“Critically, getting these decisions right, given the rapid evolution of AI and agentic solutions, is the only way to avoid the potential risks your organisation may face – from the recent, well-publicised problems of agents going rogue to the fact that they do not always produce predictable answers.”
