Six months can now make an AI idea go from sounding years ahead of its time to something people are already using every day. That compression creates a difficult question for executives: how do you make durable decisions when the technology, tools, and ways of working may change before a traditional planning cycle is finished?

In Episode 2 of Now to Next: The Signal, the new season of Jason Averbook’s Now to Next podcast, Jason reconnects with Johannes Sundlo, a longtime HR practitioner who spent roughly 15 years inside organizations, including Spotify and Avalanche Studios Group, before focusing his work on AI, people, and organizations.

Their conversation starts with agents but quickly becomes much bigger. Jason and Johannes explore what happens when employees bring personal agents into work, whether organizations are prepared for knowledge that moves with those agents, why long technology bets are becoming harder to make, and why data becomes even more important as the interface between employees and enterprise systems changes.

They also confront a harder question for HR. If the workforce increasingly includes both people and machines, does it still make sense to organize HR and IT as separate worlds? Is another round of HR transformation enough, or is the function itself approaching a more fundamental redesign?

This is a conversation about making decisions without pretending the environment is stable. The signals are already here. The question is whether executives are willing to redesign around them.

Highlights

• How quickly agents moved from an emerging idea to something individuals are already using as part of everyday work.
• Why personal agents stop being purely personal the moment employees begin using them to perform work.
• What happens when an employee’s agent develops knowledge about the company and the employee eventually leaves.
• Why Jason believes organizations need to build a coordinated context layer so people can benefit from what the organization collectively knows.
• Why traditional long-term technology planning becomes harder when capabilities can change materially within months.
• Why Jason believes organizations should pay much more attention to signals than predictions right now.
• Why good data becomes more important as agents increasingly sit between employees and enterprise systems.
• How years of vendor lock-in, fragmented systems, and weak data practices create new constraints for HR.
• Whether the traditional separation between HR and IT still makes sense when organizations are managing both people resources and machine resources.
• Why another round of incremental HR transformation may not address the magnitude of the change now underway.
• Why leadership investment and psychological safety become more important, not less, when the technology is moving quickly.
• The difference between asking what AI could do and deciding what it should do inside a specific organization.
• Why practical experimentation matters more than claiming expertise in a field that changes almost daily.
• Jason’s argument that this is not another client-server-to-cloud transition, but a fight for relevance at the company, function, role, and individual level.
• Why the next employee experience may be defined less by navigating enterprise applications and more by agents acting across them.

About Jason Averbook

Jason Averbook has spent thirty years watching the gap between where organizations say they are with technology and where work is actually happening. He has a name for it. He has a framework for closing it. And he built Now to Next to do exactly that.

Now to Next is the AI studio Jason co-founded with Jess Von Bank in 2026, built on practitioner intelligence, original research, and the conviction that human transformation precedes digital transformation. Always has. Always will.

Before Now to Next, Jason co-founded Leapgen, acquired by Mercer in 2023, where he led global HR transformation strategy and the firm’s generative AI practice. Earlier he served as CEO of The Marcus Buckingham Company, co-founded Knowledge Infusion through its acquisition by Appirio, and held senior roles at PeopleSoft and Ceridian. He has advised hundreds of Fortune 1000 companies, authored two books on the future of HR and workforce technology, delivered more than 1000 keynote presentations globally, and teaches as an adjunct professor at universities worldwide.

He is consistently recognized as one of the top three thought leaders globally on the future of work.

About Johannes Sundlo

Johannes Sundlo describes himself as a recovering HR person who spent roughly 15 years working inside organizations before turning his focus to AI and its implications for people and organizations.

His HR career has included HR business partner and HR director roles, with experience at Spotify and as VP of HR for Avalanche Studios Group. Today, his work focuses on making sense of how AI is changing people, organizations, work, and the decisions companies need to make as these technologies develop.

Stay Connected

Johannes Sundlo

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jsundlo

Jason Averbook

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonaverbook/

X: https://x.com/jasonaverbook

Substack: https://jasonaverbook.substack.com/

Now to Next

Website: https://nowtonext.ai/

Podcast: https://podcast.nowtonext.ai/episodes

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/now-to-next-ai/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nowtonext.ai/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nowtonextai

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