Mental Health in the AI Era: Easing Fears About the Future of Work

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Greetings everyone. Welcome to this week's coffee with Digital Trailblazers. Just giving it a second to see that people are joining. Here comes everybody. Welcome to this week's episode, episode 172. Hi, I'm Isaac Sokolik. I lead a company called Star CIO and been thrilled to be hosting this coffee with Digital Trailblazers. Now for, I think it's about three years. I think this is losing track of the numbers, but it's been a lot of fun. Every year in May, we have an episode around mental health. May is Mental Health Awareness month in I think uk. It's also Mental Health Awareness week next week. And so it's time to take stock of your personal situation, your, your situation with your teams. There's a lot going on in the world right now. There's a lot of pressure to be transforming with technology and using AI. Last year when we did this subject, we talked about burnout in the security organizations. A lot of pressure on them. Last year, a lot of research in terms of the types of issues facing security professionals. And this week I wanted to cover AI. And it's, you know, this paradoxical issue facing people where we're trying to embrace AI, learn AI, figure out how to excel at using agents and gen AI capabilities. There's pressure in many organizations to find ways to use AI. And there's also at the same time layoffs being announced by many, many companies, some of them in very transparent, open ways with their organizations before they do such things. A lot of times without a whole lot of notice when, who and how. And that's creating a lot of stress among the digital trailblazers that I know. And so we're going to talk about it today. Just have a very open conversation around some of the issues that we're all facing. If you are here, say hello on the Common stream. Hello, Kristen, it's good to see you. Hi Jeanette. Hi, Tony. Good to see you again. I'm going to kick off with so some data points here to help root our conversation. It wasn't easy, it wasn't that hard to find. These 69% of employees believe AI will lead to layoffs in their company over the next three years. [00:02:38] Speaker B: Half of your employees think that AI might impact their jobs. [00:02:43] Speaker A: 83% of executives believe a company culture that prioritizes psychological safety measurably improves the [00:02:51] Speaker B: success of AI initiatives. [00:02:53] Speaker A: You'll see. One of our questions today will cover psychology, ecological safety. [00:02:58] Speaker B: It's a very well used concept, but I'm not sure we have a real strong definition in terms of how it's applied. 82% of workers report their organizations have not provided training on using Gen AI. That to me is crazy. I just came from the Atlassian Conference where I learned a lot of really interesting insights on how they train their workforce on AI. I might jump in and share some of those details later. With structured AI wellness programs reported a 35% reduction in stress absenteeism and a 50% increase in employees experience positive work life balance so for those of you who are leaders in your organization, two things to follow up on learning programs and wellness programs and I got a couple quotes here. One from the Global Wellness Institute around the importance of elevating well being as a leadership imperative and this very interesting one from Nature. If anybody wants to jump in around ethical leadership, it enables transparent communication about AI capabilities and its limitations, fair treatment during technological transitions, and the cultivation of trusting human AI relationships. All the links are shown below. If you go to starcio.com coffee episode-172, you'll get access to this slide and can click into any of these links. Again, this is Mental Health Awareness Month. If you can click on the banner there, you'll find out some more information from the national alliance on Mental Illness, some more information about this month, and just a lot of things to just be aware of for yourself, for your teams, and for your organization. So glad that we're tackling this difficult subject. [00:05:01] Speaker A: It's not uncommon for us at the coffee with digital trailblazers to take on things that are both timely, impactful and things that are not the easiest subjects to cover when it gets personal and when we cover our soft skills and how important that is. I want to welcome our special guest today, Eileen Cahill. Eileen, you'll do quick intro for us and I just want to jump into our first question around how do you communicate honestly about AI's impact on roles without either sugarcoating it or unnecessarily alarming people? Let me explain what I mean by this Eileen. [00:05:42] Speaker B: We want, you know, you'll hear a [00:05:44] Speaker A: lot of executives push evangelize their organization and their people to use AI. And you know somewhere up there there should be some indicators to the organization that yes, at some point it may likely lead to changes in their organization restructuring, potentially some layoffs, job changes, workflow changes and of course as soon as you say that, people start getting scared. So how do you actually communicate this? [00:06:15] Speaker B: I can't wait to hear Joe Joe's [00:06:18] Speaker A: comments around this are communications expert but Eileen, welcome to the floor welcome to the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers. [00:06:24] Speaker B: Just do a brief intro and love [00:06:26] Speaker A: to hear your thoughts on this subject. [00:06:28] Speaker C: Thank you. Thank you, Isaac. I'm a behavioral scientist by training, gone marketer and I have been leading digital transformations since the day Al Gore invented the Internet. And right now I am focused on AI transformation. So very timely. So the, the question is how do you, how do you communicate AI's impact on roles? And I think I've got an optimistic view. So in, in my view, first of all the leaders don't know what's come coming. So let's be a hundred trans, 100% transparent. Nobody actually knows how this is going to play out and to pretend otherwise would be foolish. What I like to do is call AI augmented intelligence. It's about the humans in the room. Humans understand the context, the nuance, the institutional memory, have creativity. There's lots of studies, check out Ethan Mollick. But there's all the data in the world that shows AI by itself doesn't work as well as AI with humans. Humans without AI don't work. Teams with AI are brilliant. So I, my optimism is about I can unshackle me from the boring, drudgery, dreary, horrible parts of my job if I never had to fill out another timesheet or expense report because I could easily do that, I would be a very happy camper. [00:08:04] Speaker A: You know Eileen, I just been on a tour the last, I don't know, five weeks going to different conferences and mostly technology oriented ones. And there's been a kind of a divide in the language just from the tech vendors who have obviously all have to have an AI story. Some of them are embracing this agentic future where you know, really focusing on the automation, talking about agents in such a way that agents are designed to be automated and will be peeled back to more human in the loop, only to develop trust. And there's that future that some of our tech vendors are portraying and there are others that are very much in this world of AI augmented intelligence that this is, and there's their tools are starting to show that, you know, people are doing different things, they're triggering work being done by the AIs. But it's a very human centric approach with AI augmenting it. Tell me, put yourself in a leader. Imagine you're in the marketing group. I'm going to ask Joe to talk about working with the IT group and maybe Derek will talk about the security group. Talk about how you might define the future as best as you can. And you know, You've stated that you feel it's AI augmented intelligence. I'll let Joe and Derek and Joanne talk through how they see their future and how they would communicate it. But let me, let's, let's just give you the 32nd pitch you're going to give your organization why they should get involved with the AI and what it's meaning for them without alarming them. [00:09:56] Speaker C: Work is going to change. Learn how to use AI so that you can be your best self and bring your most creative self to work. So from a marketing standpoint, the human creative should come up with the advertising and the campaign. But for the love of God, no human should be putting it into the 20 to 6 different sizes and formats that you need for every media platform that you advertise on. [00:10:27] Speaker A: Excellent. Let's start going around the room. I do want to go to Joe first, Joe, our communications expert. And this is a communications challenge. So I want to give you the mic first and you know, pretend you're talking to your team and pretend there's all that board pressure to find efficiencies and find productivity out of AI and, and now you're trying to share with them how to, you know, what it means for them and how to go about doing that. What are you saying to your team, Joe? [00:10:57] Speaker D: I think you're spot on in terms of communication being the key element of how to handle this. I had three points that I wanted to walk through. The first, and I think we've already heard it and seen it on your chart. Transparency, combination of honesty and empathy. We, we need to be straight with the group. It is in fact very likely that some of the people in the department today may not be in the department tomorrow. And that could happen in a number of ways. And we have to be, all of us prepared for that. People who have clearly demonstrated the aptitude or the interest should be given an opportunity to learn the new tools and leverage those tools to become more valuable members of the department. People who perhaps don't have the inclination or don't have the interest in pursuing this sort of technical track. Well, there may be opportunities in other parts of the organization. Maybe you've been a liaison to the marketing department for so many years that you might want to go, you know, try your hand at being an assistant to the brand manager or take up a product role or move into operations. A lot of opportunities. One thing I want to stress all the time in communicating this to the employees and to the entire organization is that it's not a problem AI showing up is not a problem. It's an opportunity. It's an opportunity to reinvent the organization and to make it better and create new opportunities for the folks who work here. So that, that's kind of point one and actually point two, I got into the, you know, what do you do with the folks? The last, the third point is be realistic. Every POC is not going to be a glowing success. You're not going to generate a few agents and suddenly your department is decimated. You're not going to generate a new platform and all of a sudden entire departments are rendered useless. These things are going to take time to prove out, not only in terms of reliability internally, but with your customer base, people that you're serving. What's the adoption rate going to be like? You know, we've talked a number of times, Isaac, on your show about how hard it is to manage change and to foster adoption of new technologies. So this thing could, you know, this thing could crawl through the organization. It's not going to burn the barn down. It's just going to maybe heat a corner for a little while. And I think we have to be realistic about the expectations. [00:13:33] Speaker A: Joe, what are you saying to your team? What's your tagline that's going to like, get them? You'll say more than this. You'll go into your three points. But what's going to be the first thing you say to your team to get them to embrace the future? [00:13:47] Speaker D: I would change the word problem to threat. I would say, folks, this is not a threat, this is an opportunity. [00:13:54] Speaker A: Thank you, Joe, go ahead. Derek, same question for you. Your thoughts and then how you communicating to your security team? [00:14:01] Speaker D: Yeah, good morning. [00:14:02] Speaker E: Yeah, I would approach it from more like a cyber risk perspective. So I would. I clarity over comfort and also look at context over fear. You know, if you look at the. As Eileen mentioned, yeah, there are going to be some changes going to take place, but AI is going to help change some roles. But we're not going to sugarcoat that, as you mentioned earlier. So we need to let people know this is not something to fear. It's something to orient yourself and redirect yourself. As Joe mentioned, this creates new opportunities. I think we should be explicit and about the change and let them know, yes, some tasks will definitely be automated, but at the same time a few will disappear, but new roles will evolve and helping the employee base or the workforce see that from that perspective as opposed to, we look at, a lot of times, a lot of companies, people fear AI and I don't think it should be feared, but a lot of times they fear it because they feel WLF behind. They don't understand it, they don't get it. But if we can show them where the new jobs will evolve and where they can fit in, I think will help ease the impact as far as what AI is going to do and how they can be part of it as opposed to being left behind. [00:15:07] Speaker A: And what's your tagline, Derek? What are you walking into the room saying? [00:15:13] Speaker E: Let's. Let's get over the fear and let's look at the opportunities and let's see where you can best fit in to move forward. I don't think anybody should be left behind, but they have to be willing to engage in it to make it happen for themselves. [00:15:26] Speaker A: Awesome. Hey Joanne, how's it going? I hope it's not snowing in Toronto anymore. [00:15:31] Speaker F: It was earlier this morning actually. [00:15:34] Speaker A: That's why I'm saying that [00:15:37] Speaker F: everybody who knows me knows my happy places in my garden and that's my biggest stress reliever. So for bleep BLEEP sake, stop snowing and let me go play in my garden because I really need it and happy your date, everyone. I I took a slightly different approach and I just put a post up with regard to some interesting factoids because I've been working on a piece for this because I have an upcoming thing NIST about AI human teaming. And so I've been starting to do the research for what I'm going to say and I find it very interesting as the conversation has been flowing, that as of May 2026, 80% of CEOs believe their jobs are at risk if their AI strategies fail to deliver. Which means that it's permeating from the top down. And it's not just about their fear, it's about how they're ranking AI with respect to business risk. It is the top of the business risk. It surpasses geopolitical turmoil, economic instability and so forth. And how they're breaking it down 74% in the US and Europe fear losing their job within two years if they fail to show measurable value. So without, you know, anybody can read the post, but basically what I looked at was if culture is directly related to the C suite and it permeates downward through the organization, what should we be looking at to mitigate the risk not only for the CEO, but to not create a groundswell of fear? And part of that is to be very, very focused on designating ownership of various tasks in AI. And that's about assigning Tracking and monitoring AI with clear ownership, establishing the guardrails. As you know, we have everything from, you know, beginning to end is governed execution. And it's the governance piece that a lot of people are writing and talking about. And then the focus on prioritizing trust and trustworthiness. So when I would walk into a room and talk to customers or clients or anybody else, I would look at how are they prioritizing how much they're being trusted by the organization at all levels, members of the organization, I should say, and how much are they prioritizing their authority and accuracy around the AI question versus Just don't worry about it. We'll. We'll find a way around this. You know, a purely optimistic point of view, it is taking jobs away. If you looked at the US job numbers that came out earlier this morning, 11,000 in tech were laid off, 2,000 in manufacturing, and I forget the actual number, but I think it was 7,000 in financial services. So the fear is real. It's being groundswelled from media and from other sources. But if you are prioritizing how trusted you are as a leader, whether you're a cio, CEO, etc, or one level down from that, that's going to help mitigate the risk of a groundswell of fear. [00:19:10] Speaker A: Joanne, do you have that research handy that you can paste the link somewhere? [00:19:14] Speaker F: Because that is a post. It's a post, yeah. Okay. [00:19:19] Speaker A: If you can. [00:19:20] Speaker F: Because too many to start rattling off one after another. [00:19:24] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. If you can find it and share it even after the event. I think this, that's a really interesting data point and I think your read on it is exactly right. As soon as an executive, like a CEO has that fear, it's very hard for that not to propagate back down. And reaching the staff and having sort of that, that reaction to it like this is a defensive approach rather than an opportunistic approach. And I think that's, you know, a very simple measure. AI is an opportunity from Joe. I think that's a really smart way to position it because quite frankly, everybody is still learning, right? [00:20:08] Speaker F: This. [00:20:09] Speaker A: Everybody is still learning, right? And everybody's trying to figure out what it means for them and their jobs and their departments. And guess what? What we're learning right now will change in six months, right? Absolutely. You know, pragmatic approach. Yeah. So there's a lot, you know, move past the fear. I mean, the fact is, 17,000 people in the airline industry lost their jobs this week. Not nothing to do with AI. I mean, job loss is job Loss. It's just a fact that we deal with in this generation. And now you have an opportunity. Go do something, learn something, teach something in an area that everybody is learning in. Let's keep going around the room. John, your thoughts on how do you really communicate AI's opportunity? [00:20:58] Speaker G: And the first thing that I think is really important to do is, is really make sure that the people in your organization really understand how transformative the technology is. One of the quotes from Father Bonatti, he is an advisor to the Pope, is that he views this really like AI is like in what we're having right now is basically as transformative as electricity or the Internet. And so I mean, this technology is going to fundamentally change almost every way we do work and many aspects probably of our society is trickle down effect of it. And so I just, I think if, if you can make sure that the people in your organization really see the context of how transformative this is, I think it can, can really help out and then they can really have the right mindset for, for adopting it. And then the other, the other quote that I think is, that goes really well with this and there's, there's so many variations of this quote. You know, Gates had one and Arthur C. Clarke had one and Amara had kind of the original one. But all of them are basically saying that like when new technologies come out, a lot of times the impact that you see over the first couple years is maybe slower than you would have thought it would come out, but the impact over a longer time frame is a lot more impactive. And I think this is going to be the case with this technology. And so I think it was one of the fastest technologies that's ever been adopted. When you look at ChatGPT adoption and the other AI tools adoption and how fast it got used by such an incredible percentage of the worldwide population that I just, I think we're still learning how to use this thing. And so I think if you can set the context for people on how transformative it can be, then that can really help them change their mindset of adopting it and using it. [00:22:42] Speaker A: I'm going to give you a picture of how transformative it can be in a little bit. I want to respond to that, John, but I want to hear from Liz first and then I'll use that as my prop for our second question. Go. Hi, Liz, haven't seen you in a bit. [00:22:58] Speaker H: Yeah, vacation and family things. So, yeah, I apologize. [00:23:04] Speaker A: That's a mental health break. Congratulations. [00:23:07] Speaker H: It's been amazing and amazing, so. But I Did miss you guys. So I wanted to jump on a couple of things. First of all, what John just said about transformation, obviously, I mean, enough, not enough can be said about how transformative this is going to be. And the word transformation, like the word change, is one that people fear and also embrace. Right. It's a huge opportunity, but there's also fear associated with it. And I, I love what A Ling was talking about in terms of, think about all the work that goes into a campaign or all the work that goes into a project, or all the work, blah, blah, blah, blah, fill in the blank. Some huge endeavor you're trying to do, and how much of it requires your personal creativity and structure and drive and how much of it can just be handled. Like, if you could snap your fingers and get it handled, wouldn't it be amazing and try to get rid of the copying and the formatting and the, you know, blah, blah, fill in the blank. So in terms of a tagline for a team, it's, let's see what else we can do. [00:24:26] Speaker A: Wow. You have to watch the intonation on how you say that because there's a positive intonation and an inviting one and one that says almost like you haven't done enough. [00:24:43] Speaker H: And I think more like what, what else we can accomplish together as a team. [00:24:47] Speaker A: That's better. I like that better, especially as a team. I, I got some metrics this week that, that basically say, and I'll try to dig them out for everybody here, but basically say the aggregate of teams using AI, you know, and you start seeing numbers like anywhere from 5 to 30% productivity improvements doesn't actually translate to that aggregate at a team level. It's much, much smaller at a team level because we just haven't fully figured out how. We're just idea of AI augmenting intelligence. How does a team behave when you're working with AI? I was at the Atlassian conference this week and if there's any company that's going to figure out AI, augmented intelligence and teamwork and collaboration, it's going to be a company like Atlassian, because that's essentially what they've been doing for 20 years. And so I asked their head of product, I said, what does this look like inside Atlassian? You know, using all this AI that is available to you within your platforms, you tend to have lead, you know, early adopters, inside technology companies. What does it look like that we can all infer from? And her answer is very interesting. She said, look what you see going on with developers, with product owners, with program managers is they're sitting and firing off four, five, sometimes six agents in parallel. [00:26:29] Speaker B: Right. [00:26:29] Speaker A: So think of like your browser. And I used to measure people in terms of their ability to multitask based on how many tabs they have open and how they effectively can juggle lots of different things going on in their workday. And instead of doing a lot of work across 5, 10, 15, 20 tabs, they're firing off agents which don't have an instantaneous response. So they're firing a five, six, seven different agents. And that's how they're doing their work now. So talk about a transition, which, you know, I want to jump into this next question about how do you create the psychological safety on a team that knows AI is changing their jobs and possibly eliminating some of them, but they [00:27:17] Speaker B: need to embrace doing things differently. I want to do my very quick break, folks. [00:27:21] Speaker A: We're doing our coffee with digital trailblazers [00:27:24] Speaker B: this week talking about mental health in the AI era, raising fears about the future of work. [00:27:31] Speaker A: We're talking about AI as an opportunity, AI augmenting intelligence at the same time [00:27:37] Speaker B: that our people and teams are going home and reading the news and hearing about the latest set of layoffs and not sureing that whether, you know, sharing their subject matter expertise, changing their jobs, being a force of change in their organizations, whether that's going to land them a place that they're happy with and that they're doing. And that's, you know, we're taking on that subject. This is Mental Health Week and Mental Health Month. If you are facing an issue yourself, please use the number 988 to get some help for yourself. That's what this week is all about. Make sure you have these conversations with your teams. And we're going to continue with our conversation around mental health in the AI era, folks. Next week we'll be talking about global teams, cultural diversity and building AI products for everyone. That's May 15th topic. On the 22nd, we will take a break from Memorial Day and then we'll be back on the 29th talking about from Idea to Impact, Shrinking innovation cycles with AI. You can find our next [email protected] Coffee that's a redirect to the LinkedIn page that is hosting the next event. And if you want to listen to previous episodes that you missed, if you want to sign up and listen to them as a podcast, do visit drive.starcio.com Coffee that is our homepage. There's a button there for adding it to your calendar. There's links to previous events. And there's links to the Apple and Spotify podcast where I broadcast. Let's get back. Thank you, Liz, for that. I want to go back to Eileen and talk about how do we create psychological safety in our teams? [00:29:24] Speaker C: Well, first of all, psychological safety is a fat word, so I wanted to define it. So Dr. Amy Edmondson from Harvard said it's a shared belief amongst a team that it's safe to take interpersonal risk, which I agree with. So Dr. Edmondson has a really great. So you know, I'm a management consultant, so of course everything is a two by two matrix, right? And so she has a matrix with accountability and safety. So if you think of a low accountability and a low safety, what you have is apathy. If you have high safety and low accountability, you have comfort and cruising, right? But where you really want to be is high safety and high accountability. And that's where learning happens. And that's why I'm so excited about this. Because the way to create psychological safety is not just the things we talked about about transparency, but it's also having a learning curve that never ends and having a learning agenda and figuring out what is the ongoing knowledge gap and what are you have to take a scientific approach to it and what are our hypotheses and what are we learning and make that institutional knowledge that can be shared rather than individual knowledge or, you know, and it's okay to fail. That's the most important thing of psychological safety is it's okay to fail. And admitting mistakes visibly and sharing lessons learned is, is what works. And then the last comment I'll make on that is harness your skeptics as co creators, especially your smartest skeptics, they can be co creators. And when you get the skeptics on board, guess what? You have the, you know, the majority in the early adopters. [00:31:28] Speaker A: Well, we're getting some really good one liners here, real takeaways. Harness your skeptics as co creators. I think that's really smart in this space. I do. You know, the ones that are sitting in the back of the rooms with their arms folded and you know, their expression is what's in this for me? And we've seen this rodeo before and, and you know, quite frankly, some of them fit Joe's, you know, box of, you know, it's not going to fit for everybody. There's an article in the Times a few weeks ago, they interviewed someone, just said, you know what, I've been doing the same thing for 22 years and I don't want to do the same thing again for the next five years. Now with AI Augmenting everything we've been doing, I'm going to go move on and do something else and we'll talk about reinvention at a future episode. But for now, we want to engage our teams. Joe, how do you create psychological safety with your teams? [00:32:27] Speaker D: Well, it goes back to my golden rules, Isaac. I've cited them numerous times on your show. The first one is if there's something gone wrong, I want to be the first to know. I don't want to learn about it from any other department or any other person. And, you know, that extends to personal crises. Anyone that's ever worked for me or has been, you know, under my direction knows that my door is always open. And we've also talked about trust. Trust is earned. You don't, you don't just advertise it, you know, you have to earn it. So your behavior as a leader is, is essential in making sure that your team trust you, the other people in the company trust you. Not only your team, but your peers and your management team. So once you have trust and people understand that your door is open, you can encourage them to share their concerns with you. Let's talk it through. You just talked about someone who's been in a role for 20, you know, 20 some odd years and is not up to the challenge of taking on new technologies or changing the way they work. Okay, well, let's have a conversation about where else in the organization you can go, what else you might be able to do, or how do we gracefully structure an exit where both you and I can be comfortable on the day you depart. So I think those are sort of the, you know, golden rules I've lived by and managed by for my whole career. [00:33:55] Speaker A: Thanks, Joe. Joe and Derek, I'm hoping you both comment on this question from Jeanette in the comments stream. She says companies are increasingly signaling replacing entry level jobs with AI. What's our view on how this impacts the future world of work overall? Joe, we've covered this in a previous episode, but let's cover it in a sense of, you know, putting ourselves in the shoes of somebody who's come into the organization in the last year is probably very thankful for that because we know that it's very hard to get entry level jobs right now. And now you're trying to create trust, learning, ability to participate in a safe way on top of everything else that they're trying to understand tools, relationships, business acumen. You know, how do you handle that when, when how are you communicating to the folks who are one year into the job about being able to be a part of this AI augmented workforce? Joe, give us your thoughts on that and we'll jump to Derek after that. [00:35:01] Speaker D: It's, it's a hard one because what the, what they came in to do might in fact be partially displaced or completely displaced by some agentic entity that we've, we've ginned up. But I, I want to fall back on what I said earlier. Not every POC is going to be successful. These things do take time. And so someone who's only been with the organization in an entry level role for six, eight, 10 months, you know, they're probably still safe. The sad part is we may not be able to backfill them as they move up because senior management is going to say we don't need that entry level anymore. I'm not sure I fully subscribe to that, but it'll be a challenge. [00:35:45] Speaker A: Joe, I think this is a really good point for people to take away. What they came in to do may not be what they are doing. And I'm thinking of that college grad software developer who may never get the chance to be a hands on coder, or that UX designer who's, you know, spent six years learning Photoshop and Illustrator and now a lot of that can be, you know, gotten 60, 80% of the way there by using prompts. And that's a hurdle, right? You've, it's a hurdle for them to realize, hey, the job disappeared before I even got to do it. [00:36:24] Speaker D: Yeah, but you know, I'm skeptical of the need for the sort of critical thinking skills that you develop when you write code. How do you know when that AI engine is spitting out good code or solid code? Yeah, you're going to have agents checking agents, you're going to have code generators checking the code that was generated by other agents. But I still think there's a need for people to have experienced what's under the hood before they can trust it. [00:36:59] Speaker A: We were going to cover that in another subject, Joe. You know, we've been talking about AI coding competencies and our friend Dave Bachman told the story of how he put a spec in and got 10,000 lines of code out. And you know, if that's an experiment in a poc, that's one thing, but if you're trying to send that to production and you know you're going to need people who have that skill set, you know, what's happening underneath the hood. Let's go to Derek. We got everybody's hands ready, so let's go to Derek. Your thoughts on creating psychological safety? [00:37:35] Speaker E: Yeah, I think when you look at that, it's really looking at, you know, moving away from the job elimination and look at more of a people enable it enablement type transition of mindset. If you look at, you know, the comment that Mohammed made in the chat here was looking at how to use AI as automation to reduce the burnout that would take place and increase the quality of life. It's going to introduce things you want to do is introduce things like reskilling, make that real, make it look like these AI is coming. But here's an opportunity for you to learn a new technology, learn a new craft, learn a new way of looking at things, fund it, schedule it, reward people for doing it, but also normalize the conversation about the impact. Look at the, let the people ask the questions, the hard ones, and be uncomfortable with it, but also let them know that, you know, we want you to be around but you're going to have to invest in this and it's going to be a people investment as well as people enable it, they're going to have to grab the bull by the horns and say, yes, I want to be part of this and, and you won't be left behind as long as you engage. But I think if we look at it from a point of view that people really need to redefine what they really want to do. As Joe mentioned earlier, what are the things that you think you're good at if you're not going to adopt the AI? Human skills are important. We want to make sure we can keep increasing those human skills. We want to make sure they evolve. And the other thing to go back to your question about these entry level positions, as Joe mentioned also, you're still going to need people in the loop, human in the loop type transactions. Even though you've got bots watching bots and trying to validate and verify that they're doing things correctly. The human in the loop part of it still doesn't go away just yet. There's still things that need to be learned. It's going to take time to get to that point where we can be comfortable with machines doing, checking, verifying and validating everything that we're doing. We're not there yet. And the good thing is a lot of colleges and universities are offering courses now where they're training the students about artificial intelligence and the recognition and the risk and the enablement of looking at how do you look at an enterprise, the way the coding's done to how AI is going to affect a larger company versus a smaller company. So again, put it in perspective based on the tasks being done. But also look at there are jobs there, but people are going to have to go after them or upskill to actually obtain them. [00:39:55] Speaker A: I think your point around asking the hard questions is a really good one. And the reality is in this information age, the bar for employment has constantly been raised and that's what we're dealing with right now. It's just raised a lot harder, higher and faster than we ever anticipated. John, your thoughts on psychological safety? [00:40:18] Speaker G: I think one thing that you can do is make sure that when you're having people work on projects, you're having them work on the most meaningful projects. And so now's the time to make sure that people are doing things that are good uses of their time, that are using good technology that are relevant in the future. So like everything, you can try to make sure that everyone's working on stuff that's relevant in the future, make sure that their training's relevant in the future. And when you're hiring people, make sure that they're going to fit in the future world so that you're not hiring people that won't fit in the future world. And I think if you, if at everything, every decision you make, you're trying to use people with the absolute, you know, best use and have it relevant in the future. Every project, everything that's built, every poc, every, you know, change to a system, every improvement to a system. If, if you're trying to make everything with a few future looking compatibility for, for what you have visibility to, I think it, it protects your org, it helps people see the future and it, it sets it up so that, that they're going to be a lot safer in the future too. [00:41:23] Speaker A: John, you see the comment I wrote here about wasting people's time chasing non meaning for work. I think that's really important. I don't think it's said enough. I mean if you send your employees down a rabbit hole that has no chance. I mean there's one thing to POC and fail, as Joe has been pointing out, not every POC will succeed. But don't sign someone up for a POC that's they don't believe in because you haven't explained it to them what the business value is or you're sending them down a place to that, you know, right up front isn't going to be something of value. And they start Seeing that right away, I mean, people read through these things. [00:42:04] Speaker G: That's a quote I took out of the Lean Startup by Eric Ries and the amount of lifetimes of people's effort that are sent on things that should have never been built or never been worked on. And so that's a book that was really impactful to me. And that quote was one of the most haunting quotes I've ever read. Just kind of thinking back on, like 20 years of all the things we've been building, it's like, like, it's like, yeah, some of those things we should have built. And so, yeah, everything. Everything you can do to have your people working on good stuff in the future, you know, not. Not chasing bad money after bad things. [00:42:34] Speaker A: Excellent. If you could share a link to that in the comment stream, I think people would appreciate it because it's. It's probably worth the read. Hi, Liz. Psychological safety. This is in your playbook. How do you do? [00:42:46] Speaker H: This is. This is totally in my wheelhouse. So on the one hand, I sort of wanted to start it out with sort of a fact. The fact is that everyone is replaceable, and everyone has always been replaceable. And even though that sounds like doom and gloom, it's something to be sort of cognizant of in that, you know, just because we have the pace of change going faster than we expected. Isaac, you're spot on like that. It's just racing at our face. But this is not new. Like, since the creation of electricity right there, people, you know, we've. We've moved away from the air, pop popcorn to the microwave. Like there's things that we. That everything gets replaced over time. Now, as long as we're still here on this earth, living and breathing, nothing's wrong. Nothing's wrong. Problems are only opportunities. That's all they are. It's an opportunity to lean in and move with the AI wave that's hitting us in the face. It's an opportunity to pivot and move away from it. Problems are only ever opportunities. And if you approach it as nothing's wrong and let's just figure out what to do, that's the space that you can create for someone to truly invent what's next for them. Is it really learning more about this new technology? Is it, you know, moving into nursing because that's something they wanted to do since they were 12 or painting or whatever this is, there's really, really nothing wrong. We're all living, we're all breathing, we're all here on this planet. Figure out what's the right next thing? [00:44:41] Speaker A: Liz, I'm going to go straight to Joanne to finish your thought. Joanne, I'm sure you have something to add but here's the thing right? Yes, we haven't everyone's replaceable. In fact the top innovators I know always are trying to work themselves out of their current job so they can move into something else that interests them or that delivers more value. It's a very healthy way to look at your customers career at a current companies to continuously do that. But then there's you know, the folks that are closest to the economics of AI at a macro level basically saying that we have to prepare ourselves for a future where there's going to be significant unemployment and that whether, you know, if your CEO is portraying a negative outlook on job and a defensive outlook, there's those of us who read these publications are reading these things and it's hard to separate this idea of augmented intelligence with you know, no matter what I do, I might not be able to survive what AI is doing in my company or in my industry or what I do for a living. So I'm wondering if you have a thought around that. [00:45:56] Speaker H: Yeah, well so first of all that's absolutely true and that's part of looking at reality in the face. However, again it's what do you want to do about that? You cannot let what's going on so on a grand basis, sure we can talk about unemployment trends and blah blah, blah, blah, blah. But if that's where your focus is, you're not actually executing for your own life and as an individual, it's important that you decide for yourself what it is you want to do next because that's the only place you're going to find power. Besides Elon Musk said, you know, in a few years we don't even have to be saving for retirement because AI is going to make it so that we don't need money anymore. [00:46:46] Speaker A: Says the largest billionaires, says multi billionaire. I'm not going to throw darts on that one. [00:46:54] Speaker H: I'm going to be. I was being flip. But the point being is that while there's fear, while there might be truth in those trends, it is not an empowering place to live. The place to live is what you can do with your life and what actually is in front of you in terms of choices you can make. [00:47:12] Speaker A: Let's go to Joanne. Joanne, same question for you and your overall thoughts on psychological safety. [00:47:19] Speaker F: Well, I will repeat the comment. I put this in your board and I will repeat it. Verbally because I said this to several people over the last couple of weeks at speaking gigs and whatever. The rule is this. Remember that AI cannot think for you, which means it cannot think for the overall organization. It has a way to reason through a problem and it can be very valuable in helping you problem solve because we are busy people and we tend to overlook the minutiae of the details that usually are the cause of a failure. So it's very good for that. But focus on two things. Humans have creativity that AI does not, and humans have critical thinking skills that AI does not. And those are the two areas that you need to focus on to future proof any job, to future proof yourself for any role. Because everybody has an area of critical thinking and of creativity that the two combined make them differentiable and very, very valuable to organizations. Look at AI as a tool. It is a tool. It's a thing. It's not another human. You're not competing against it. You harness it to take its power to help propel you forward. [00:48:54] Speaker A: Joanne Safety. I'm of the camp that AI won't become creative and won't really exhibit creative thinking, but I've been wrong before, you know, and I think I have a post from 5 years ago only that said AI would never learn to code. And obviously I'm dead wrong about this. But for the here and now, I think that's a good set of directions. [00:49:21] Speaker F: Well, to your point about creativity, it does have creative capabilities. It can now read CAD drawings, it can design houses, it can, you know, differentiate spatial recognition and, and areas that we never thought it was going to be possible to do because basically AI sucks at math there. You know, it's physics AI that can do stuff like that. But Generally speaking, your ChatGPT does not do math very well. So where I come from is yes, it can be creative, but it's taking a memory or an image that, that somehow it scraped off the net or someone else created and it's adding its spin and your words, your prompt to make that image be the image you think is the be all and end all. It doesn't mean that that's its creativity. That means it's using a skill that it has and your creativity. So this is why I'm a firm believer that no, it's not going to ever be as creative or as ingenious as humans will be. [00:50:35] Speaker A: Well, that's what I believe in. And I know for a fact that AI can't write novels yet. It can create art and it can create imagery, but it is aggregating other people's work to get there, you know, and so, and I'm saying that loosely so you know, we're not there yet. Let's go to Eileen. Let's talk about this last question here around healthy AI adoption. This is quote I picked up from Sajant on the commentary. By the way, there's a really cool comment stream going on today. Thank you everybody for that. We're getting into the Star Trek realm over there, which is really cool. I did get angry at my AI last week, which I would have never done with a colleague or team member. But I guess I was wrong. Entrusting in AI with the intelligence of a 5 year old with complex tasks. We don't want people getting angry at AI. And so let's talk about what healthy AI adoption looks like for yourself and in the organization. What are the objectives and success factors? How do you go about doing this? [00:51:43] Speaker C: Well, as an individual and as an organization are two different answers. Right? So healthy AI adoption as an organization is, you know, when was your job description ever what you did? I mean we've been at this a long time. My job description has always been about 30% accurate. Right? You see an opportunity, you seize it and that doesn't change with or without AI. And you need to, as an organization, you need to encourage that. Also as an organization, healthy AI means focus on the growth AI strategy. That word makes me nuts. AI is a tool. Your business strategy is your business strategy. How can you incorporate AI into your future state vision of what you want to become and how you're going to compete? AI is not a strategy, it's a tactic, it's a tool. So that's healthy organization as an individual. And the other thing as an organization, shrinking innovation cycles, that's actually a good thing. I've brought a lot of new products and services to market. Agile shrunk innovation cycles. Now an agile team enabled by AI can shrink that even more. That doesn't mean shirking doing the steps, that just means being more efficient. And that's where the balance between using AI for growth versus efficiency. If, if somebody thinks that AI is only for efficiency and cutting heads, they are so short sighted and shooting themselves in the foot. AI is a tremendous growth opportunity and you need to reimagine your skill set, your role and the organization needs to reconsider its competitive set and its, its sustainable competitive advantage or what everybody in Silicon Valley is now calling the moat. Which why we're going back to medieval [00:53:44] Speaker A: castles, I don't know Eileen, we're going to have to bring you back. I'm going to do an episode in June with Amy Swanson, our mutual friend. We're going to talk about growth hacking. And the fact is, most of AI being implemented today is not in the box of growth or even customer experience. It's in the box of let's take what we're doing and make it a little bit faster and easier and cheaper, in some cases better quality. But I could tell you I'm starting to see some examples of AI being used to deliver new capabilities. We will have another episode in either June or July about AI being used to improve safety. And I saw a great example of this at the University of Arizona this week with my son and his capstone project. It was just amazing to see some of the things AI being used today. Joanne, your thoughts on healthy AI adoption. [00:54:48] Speaker F: I would echo a lot of what Eileen just said. First of all, it is a not a double edged sword, but it is a, it is a capability more than it is a tool. It's not tactical. It is strategic because you can use AI to create the homogeneity or the connective fabric between disparate parts of your organization, just, you know, disconnected systems, all of those wonderful things with governance and, and security around them. And in doing that you are promoting top line value even more than you're actually creating bottom line value because there's only so much that you can remove in terms of operational efficiency, but there's a wealth and an infinite flywheel of value that can be created. So healthy adoption is aim at what you want to be in a year from now. Now aim at your out the outcomes you're really, really trying to achieve and go beyond that. That's healthy AI adoption. Wow. [00:55:59] Speaker A: In a year. So you think the time frame is a year. That's how far we should be looking at. On a personal level, on a personal [00:56:07] Speaker F: level, on a professional level, on a corporate level. A year from now, the the tooling will have changed three times over. The markets will have changed three times over. But your outcomes, those things that you as an organization or you as a human want to accomplish, will not have changed unless you've made radical changes during the course of that year. But basically it's a continuum like process and your outcome, the things that you want to have happen, are not as esoteric as a vision board maybe portray them to be, but rather can be very tangibly oriented as goals. I want to achieve this in this period of time using the tools as they are consistently changing. You can get there faster, but then you yourself are going to iterate around that as a human. Well, this was my outcome, this was my goal. Now I want to take it farther because I see the potential and you may not see all of the potential right off the bat. [00:57:15] Speaker A: Thank you, Joanne. Thank you, Eileen. Derek is raising his hands. Derek, you're going to get the last word today. [00:57:20] Speaker E: Yeah, I think when you look at also the AI adoption, it's not about how fast you deploy the AI, but how do you deploy responsibly, sustainably, resiliently and safely. Those things really come together based from a business strategy looking at the value and continuity that it's going to bring to the business. But it's also looking at the data aspect, the trust and control you're going to implement based on the AI standards, the guidelines you work with, such as the NIST AI Risk Manager Framework, the MITRE Atlas, and then also looking at the people dimension, the adoption and the confidence. Those all have to come across the board because you got to increase the confidence to increase the capabilities, increase the engagement so people aren't threatened by what they're actually getting into. And by doing that, I think we can have a higher, a better adoption rate as far as the future is concerned and people will get more into it. It's just going to take time though. [00:58:12] Speaker A: Thank you Derek, Eileen, thank you for being such a strong special guest today talking about mental health in the AI era, easing fears about the future of work. Thank you Eileen. Thank you Joe, Joanne, John, Derek and Liz for all your contributions today. Really great comment stream today. Thank you Jason and Mohammad, Jay, Jeanette for your question. Thank you to Sanji for being open about I've used AI. Thank you Amit. Thank you for everybody who said hello on the comment stream. Do visit us next week. We'll be talking about global teams and concentrating on culture diversity and building AI products for everyone. We'll be taking a week off our mental health break here at the Coffee with Digital trailblazers on the 22nd for the memorial Day weekend here in the United States. Then we'll be back on the 29th. From ideas to impact shrinking innovation cycles with AI. Really excited about that personal announcement, folks. I hit the 10,000 learner in my course digital transformation for leaders in the AI era and I announced that earlier this week. If you want to take that course, it's on LinkedIn learning, you can go to star cio.com AI transformation. It will redirect you there and it's gotten a ton of really good reviews. If you've taken it. Thank you for your support. I am working on a new project. I'm not ready to announce it yet. It is AI related. If you're interested, just reach out to me and I'll tell you about it privately. And thank you for being here. Very important week talking about mental health in the AI era. Thanks for all your contributions and for your listening today. If you are suffering from a mental health issue, please know the number 988 or if you know somebody else, please use the resources available to you to get help. Folks, enjoy your weekend. We'll be back here next week to talk about building AI products for everyone. Have a great weekend everybody.