The Mercury Release of Galileo™ Signals a New Era for Intelligent Agents

Introducing the Mercury release of Galileo™, the world’s most powerful AI agent for HR. This upgrade adds reasoning power and new data to Galileo, increasing its power by an order of magnitude. Galileo is more than an AI assistant: it has become a consultant, now delivering world-class benchmarking and talent intelligence at your fingertips.

Here’s what’s new.

The New Reasoning Model: Galileo Becomes A Consultant

This new release, which is available to all Galileo users, includes a major upgrade to the AI engine, turning Galileo into a reasoning agent, using “chain of thought” technology.

The Mercury release goes beyond first generation LLM (large language model) capabilities and turns Galileo into a reasoning, thinking agent. (Often called a Large Reasoning Model.)

This means you can ask Galileo complex questions and it will analyze the question, build its research plan, and examine dozens of data sources to build a solution.

You could upload your company’s recruiting process, for example (in a document, PowerPoint slides, or audio narrative) and Galileo can analyze your process, benchmark you against best-practices, and give you a 12-month roadmap to move to an AI-based talent acquisition process.

Galileo could then help you identify vendor solutions, redefine roles, and even build an ROI model to cost-justify change. And this is only the beginning.

Galileo can directly access recorded conversations, PowerPoint slides, and any other form of content for analysis. And as a “consultant,” it will ask you questions to make sure you’re fully solving your problem.

We are also introducing “Intelligent Benchmarking” against our maturity models. Now Galileo will ask you personalized questions to assess your level of maturity in dozens of HR practices, evaluate your level of maturity, and give you detailed action plans for improvement.

And this is just a fraction of the use-cases. Galileo can benchmark salaries, analyze job candidates, build tailored development plans, and even assess leaders. And as it answers it “converses with you” to help you get to the complete answer to your question, just like a consultant.

(Read our 100 Use-Cases report for more ideas. You can view a demo of the Mercury release here.)

Major New Data Sets Make Galileo Even Smarter

The second part of Mercury is the addition of two new trusted data sources. In addition to our current data partners, we’ve now added the entire job, salary, and skills library from Lightcast as well as the 90+ level comprehensive Universal Competency Framework from SHL. Let me explain.

This expansion of our Lightcast data means that Galileo can now do salary benchmarking (by job title, city, tenure) – giving you real-time data on average pay levels that refresh every week. You can ask Galileo to identify critical or complete skills models for hundreds of jobs, and you can use Galileo to study market skills by location. This means Galileo is a talent intelligence system, powered by the world’s leading data provider on jobs, skills, salaries, and labor market demand.

The SHL Universal Competency Model is the most comprehensive “soft-skills” model we’ve seen, developed through millions of assessments in hundreds of jobs. This data set teaches Galileo to understand, assess, and utilize 90+ in-depth human skills, making it a true leadership coach, assessor, and recruiter. This data compliments the Heidrick senior leadership framework already in Galileo, so now Galileo understands all levels of leadership, management, and teamwork in detail.

These major data sources add to our current data: global employment practices by Oyster, turnover and retention benchmarks by Visier, and the entire corpus of Josh Bersin Company research, maturity models, vendor analysis, case studies, and industry skills research (automotive, healthcare, consumer goods, pharmaceutical, financial services, and insurance).

And this information is updated daily. Each and every day we update vendor information, benchmarks, labor market insights, and new case studies so you can go to Galileo and ask it current questions about the impact of tariffs, legislative changes or general work trends.

You can also listen to our podcasts, all our Insights webinars, and special presentations on management, HR, and technology topics.

The Galileo Meeting Assistant

The third feature in Mercury is the Meeting Assistant. This tool, which we have been using for months, lets you “invite” Galileo to your meetings in Teams, Zoom, Webex, or Google Meet. Galileo records the meeting, summarizes the results, and sends you a summary and action plan. It’s enormously valuable to recap meetings you missed, help you remember what happened, or even analyze the discussion in detail.

Best of all, the Meeting Assistant recordings go into your personal corpus. So you can go back and look at all the meetings you had for a given project and assess project status, activities by person, and detail obstacles or challenges.

And it’s even more powerful for recruiting and internal interviews. Once these meetings are recorded you can then ask Galileo to compare candidates based on skills or experience, help you sort candidates by various criteria, and build personalized development plans for employees who want to grow into leadership or other roles.

We’re helping a large energy company assess more than 200 senior engineers to build in-depth development plans for each, all based on interviews and each employees’ job history and biographical background. You can use the meeting assistant for dozens of high value use-cases, and at its best it’s just the best note-taker you’ve ever seen. No need to take notes any more so you remember what action items you have!

Galileo Intelligent Benchmarking For Bersin Maturity Models: Consultant Mode

The final feature is the new Intelligent Benchmarking feature.

Using the reasoning model at the core, we’re now developing intelligent agents that you can “wake up” through the task library to assess and benchmark your HR programs or other investments against The Josh Bersin Company maturity models.

The first agent available will benchmark you against our Systemic HR® model. The agent asks you a series of randomized questions, then more information about your organization, and then shows you where you fit in our four-level maturity model. It then asks you more information and gives you a detailed action plan for improvement.

From there you can use Galileo as a consultant and ask it questions to dig more into your next steps in HR organization design, operations, tech strategy, or any of the other 70+ dimensions.

This makes Galileo your own highly-skilled HR consultant.

Intelligent Benchmarking for Systemic HR is available now and the others are coming this quarter. Remember each of these maturity models was built from many months of in-depth interviews, surveys, and analysis of 70-80 factors, making them highly actionable as tools for improvement.

• Systemic HR® (HR operating model) – available now
• Talent Acquisition
• Employee Experience
• Health and Wellbeing
• Learning & Development
• Leadership Development
• Performance Management
• Organization Design
• Business Resilience
• Dynamic Organization
• Diversity and Inclusion
• HCM Systems Implementation.

Each of these models are built from millions of data points, case studies, and statistical analysis reaching thousands of companies. So you, as an HR person, now have a consultant to help you with almost any major HR or leadership issue you face.

Get Galileo Today

Galileo is only $39 per month or $400 per year, making it one of the best investments you could make in your HR career.

More than 300 companies use Galileo every day, enabling their HR teams to learn, solve problems, assess candidates, select vendors, and more. One of our major clients just used Galileo to reinvent their entire wellbeing and employee experience strategy and will be sharing their experience at Irresistible 2025.

Galileo users get full access to all the Josh Bersin Company research, the Galileo Success Center, and a weekly bulletin of best-practices and new features. Starting at the Unleash Conference we will also be conducting Galileo User’s Groups around the world, so sign up and you’ll be invited.

This is only the beginning. Join us on your journey to becoming a Superworker HR team, we welcome you to the Galileo family!

Watch Josh Bersin Walk You Through A Demo of Mercury