Meet your newest employee: the superworker

There’s Superman, Superwoman, Supernova girls (at least there were in the Disney Channel original movie Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century), supermodels, super foods, and even Supercuts. When something is super, it’s above; it’s beyond or exceeding the normal noun it precedes. We like Superman and super foods, and Zenon really loved Supernova Girl singer-songwriter Proto Zoa.

According to HR industry analyst Josh Bersin, the world of business is emerging on the cusp of a new “super”—the superworker.

“Rather than thinking of our companies as large collections of human beings, with all the management issues, of course, that we have to deal with, we need to think about our companies as collections of digital agents and digital assistants, with people operating as superworkers on top of this AI level of intelligence,” Bersin said this month on his eponymous podcast. “Of course, nobody’s there yet…but there’s no question now, given the rapid maturity and the huge amounts of investment that are going into this, that this is going to change the nature of every job in the company.”

Bersin coined the term “superworker” to describe employees who apply AI tools to “dramatically enhance their productivity, performance, and creativity.”

From AI copilots to the new tools powered by agentic AI, as routine work becomes more automated, everyone in an organization has the potential to grow, according to Bersin. Though, he noted, some roles will face elimination, while others will dramatically transform.

Bersin is encouraging HR pros and businesses to pursue strategies to enable their superworkers to become a “superworker company.” Companies that embrace AI transformation, building agility into their organization’s culture and creating space for individual contributors to reinvent themselves, will outperform their competitors, according to Bersin’s research.

“The idea of the super worker is that all over the company, we’re going to be thinking about not only the process of work redesign, which we need to be deeply involved in as HR professionals, but also the new jobs, the new skills, the new pay levels, the new cultural attributes or standards that we have to create to enable the company to embrace and adapt and use and leverage AI,” Bersin said.

Companies that do that—rather than focus their AI efforts on simply reducing headcount and automating human-led roles—will come out on top amid this global reconfiguration, according to Bersin.