Answer extracted from The Josh Bersin Company podcast — listen to the full episode below.
Why did the strategy shift from building a specialized AI agent to creating a portable intelligence layer across multiple platforms?
Customers already owned AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot—they wanted Galileo integrated there rather than as a separate tool. This insight sparked partnerships with ServiceNow, SAP, and Workday, revealing that Galileo's real power came from embedding intelligence directly into existing workflows and combining it with company policies and employee data, not from operating in isolation.
The initial vision was to build Galileo as a standalone AI agent. However, customer feedback fundamentally reshaped the strategy. Organizations did not want to add yet another platform to their stack; they wanted to leverage the intelligence Galileo offered within the tools they already used daily.
This shift revealed a critical insight about where AI value actually lives. As discussed in the Jupiter Release episode, the constraint was not Galileo's capabilities—it was that embedding intelligence into isolated platforms limited its potential. The breakthrough came from understanding that interleaving Galileo's knowledge with enterprise data sources created exponentially more value.
The architectural redesign for this portability was substantial. As Bersin explains in the podcast, the team "essentially built a new architecture that takes the essence of Galileo and carefully indexed it and tagged it in eight different dimensions so that the LLM can read it extremely well and does not have to hallucinate." This technical foundation enabled Galileo to operate effectively across ServiceNow, SAP, Workday, and other enterprise systems without losing accuracy or context.
"We essentially built a new architecture that takes the essence of Galileo and carefully indexed it and tagged it in eight different dimensions so that the LLM can read it extremely well and does not have to hallucinate."
Josh Bersin — Founder and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company. For nearly 30 years, Bersin has studied human capital management practices and built a corpus of nearly 1,800 case studies across 95 functional capability areas in HR and organizational management. His research foundation—combined with AI—now powers Galileo, which serves over 2,000 companies seeking intelligence that bridges employee data, company policies, and strategic talent decisions.
The deals that followed with major enterprise vendors were not cosmetic integrations. Each partnership required Galileo to function as a genuine intelligence layer—combining the depth of human capital research with live organizational data. Listen to the full episode to understand how 18 months of collaboration with Microsoft on Copilot optimization shaped this new architecture and what the Jupiter Release means for the future of embedded AI in enterprise software.
Portability as the Path to Real Enterprise Value
What the strategy shift exposed is that platform-agnostic intelligence scales faster than proprietary agents. When Galileo lived only in its own interface, it competed for attention and required new user behavior. Integrated into ServiceNow, SAP, and Workday—systems where HR teams and managers already spend their day—Galileo became invisible infrastructure, not another tool to learn.
This shift also opened a path to richer data. In a standalone agent, Galileo could only reference published research and case studies. Embedded in enterprise systems with permission to access organizational hierarchies, compensation data, and talent pipelines, it became capable of answering questions like "How does our succession planning compare to similar companies in our geography?" rather than generic advice. The episode details how this combination of curated research intelligence with live organizational context transformed Galileo from a reference tool into a decision support system.
Key takeaways
- Customers preferred integrating AI intelligence into existing platforms rather than adopting new standalone tools, forcing a fundamental architecture redesign.
- The new strategy positioned Galileo as a portable intelligence layer capable of operating across ServiceNow, SAP, Workday, and Microsoft Copilot.
- Platform portability required indexing and tagging Galileo's knowledge across eight dimensions to enable accurate, hallucination-free operation across different systems.
- Embedding intelligence directly into workflows where users already work proved more valuable than operating as an isolated agent with its own interface.
See also
What opportunity did the emergence of large language models like ChatGPT create for HR research organizations?
When ChatGPT came out, Bersin saw an opportunity to build a search engine where users could query an entire corpus of knowledge and get answers, then find supporting research and case studies to back those answers.
How has the business model for monetizing human capital research evolved over the past decade?
The Josh Bersin Company initially used a research membership model similar to Gartner, selling access to a library of reports, models, and frameworks. Over time, this evolved to integrate AI-powered search and embedding capabilities into enterprise platforms.
What is the foundational approach to conducting human capital research across different company sizes and industries?
The research focuses on providing actionable solutions to problems specific to your industry, location, and company size rather than generic best practices from large enterprises or well-known companies.