5 Human Skills That Make You Irreplaceable in the AI Era

In this episode of Imperfect Marketing, I sit down with Stephanie Sylvestre, founder of Avatar Buddy, to explore how AI is reshaping the way businesses operate—and why human skills matter more than ever.

Stephanie shares her fascinating journey from corporate IT leadership to building an AI-powered company, along with the lessons she’s learned along the way (including a few hard-earned ones she hopes you won’t have to repeat).

We dive into how businesses can actually use AI effectively—without losing their values, their culture, or their competitive edge.

In this conversation, we discuss:

The Human Skills That Matter Most in an AI World

•  Why resilience is essential when working with AI (hint: your first output isn’t your best) 
•  How creativity and resourcefulness give you a competitive advantage—especially in fast-changing environments 
•  The critical role of problem-solving and critical thinking when AI sounds right… but isn’t 
•  Why these “human skills” are becoming the real differentiator in an AI-driven world 

Demystifying AI for Businesses

•  What AI agents actually are—and how they can streamline your workflows 
•  How AI can save massive amounts of time when used strategically 
•  Why understanding your data is just as important as understanding the technology 
•  The biggest mistake organizations make when adopting AI too quickly 

Responsible AI: Where Ethics Meet Execution

•  Why responsible AI starts with people—not the technology 
•  How your data directly shapes your AI outcomes (for better or worse) 
•  Practical ways to build ethical guardrails into your AI systems 
•  Why transparency, ownership, and respect for content matter more than ever 

AI, Leadership, and Company Culture

•  How AI can actually strengthen (not weaken) your company culture 
•  Why leaders need to treat AI like any other business initiative—with clear goals and strategy 
•  The importance of starting small, iterating, and evolving your AI implementation 
•  How AI can reduce internal friction and improve team dynamics 

Key Takeaways for Marketers and Leaders

•  You’re not selling AI—you’re selling trust 
•  AI won’t replace people, but people who use AI effectively will have a clear advantage 
•  Your values should guide how you implement and use AI 
•  Success with AI comes from clarity, strategy, and continuous iteration 

Whether you're just starting to explore AI or looking to refine how you’re using it in your business, this episode offers a grounded, practical perspective on what it really takes to succeed.

Are you ready to use AI in a way that actually supports your business—and your values? Tune in to learn how to make AI work with you, not instead of you.

Connect with Stephanie
Website: https://avatarbuddy.co/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/avatar_buddyai/
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@avatar_buddyai?lang=en

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Hi, I'm Kendra Corman. If you're a coach, consultant, or marketer, you know marketing is far from a perfect science. And that's why this show is called Imperfect Marketing. Join me and my guests as we explore how to grow your business with marketing tips and, of course, lessons learned along the way. Welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. I am super excited to be joined by Stephanie today. We're gonna be talking about one of my favorite topics, which of course is AI, um, and all of the things that you can do with it. Welcome. Thank you for coming on the show, Stephanie. I really appreciate your time today.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Thank you for having me on the show. I am super excited. This is a topic that I was like, oh my goodness. Like, I feel like I just want to share all of my wins so people don't have to go through what I went through. So thank you for the platform.

Stephanie’s Path Into AI

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Awesome. And I feel like we've like, we we all learned the hard way, right? So if we can simplify and take some roadblocks out, that's awesome. So um tell me, so how did you get into AI? Because you have like quite a journey, right? That you've been on.

What Avatar Buddy Actually Does

SPEAKER_00 1:43

I was teasing with my my teammates today. I said, I like to believe that I'm a Renaissance woman, and so I'm constantly trying to learn new things. And and so because I'm always opening to open to learning new things, I'm like, why not? Um, I have a master's in economic development and Latin American studies, and then I had an internship at Hewlett Packer because why not? And then I met one of the guys that was the original um code writer for Unix. And if you know anything about Unix, you know that it never breaks. So he's bored. I'm an intern. I don't really have a lot to do. Perfect, perfect, perfect environment for me to get a master class in AI. I'm sorry, in technology. And that just started my my technology career. I just moved up the ranks. I did boutique consulting. I worked at corporate IT. Um, before I started Avatar Buddy, I was chief informations officer and chief programs officer. Again, one of the few things that one of the few people that can do both business and tech at the same time. And and one of the things that um I was trying to do was to figure out how we could get more participation in the programs that we funded. And I was at dinner one night with a friend and my friends telling me about why not create a digital twin. And I was like, oh my God, that is it. That oh, thank you for that. And she's like, that's not what I said. I'm like, doesn't matter, but that's the that's the solution. And that was in 2016, and the rest was history. And from 2016 to 2019, people were like, No, Stephanie, it cannot be done. You're insane, doesn't work. COVID happens, the world shuts down. Even my developer is like, no, you can't do this. My developer says, Oh, I know what you're talking about now. So Martin Luther King Day 2021, he gives me a prototype. I was like, Okay, this is this is this is we're starting. And then in the fall, I heard about OpenAI. We signed, we back then you had to apply for to become a developer, and you had to explain why you wanted to do all of this stuff. So we got through the developer um program, and then I was like, double down. Like we did uh uh a test in 2022, we had 145 kids, and our researcher said, I've never seen an intervention that moved the self-esteem needle as quickly as this did. So we're like, oh, this is cool. Then 23, we went to market, and that's where the story that we really want to share today really gets the beat of it. 24, we did another research and it validated what we had found in 22, and so we spent 25 launching ourselves, and um July 1st we relaunched, and it's been seven months, and all of it's working in like small and big ways, it's just crazy how like and I was and most of those things I was like, this is really simple, this is really simple. Why did I think about this? That's so cool. So tell me about Avatar Buddy. So, what is it? So, Avatar Buddy is a managed AI as a service company. We build the AI agents for you so you don't have to worry about maintaining them and and building them, and then we provide um a data vault so that your information can be walled off from the rest of the world, and that ensures that the AI is um has um clean data and less likely to hallucinate. And then um we provide advisory services because there's no one company that no one need one company that can support all your AI needs. There's no one company that can support all your AI needs, and so we help you with that.

SPEAKER_01 6:03

For those listening that might not be as uh familiar with some of those terms, can you explain what you mean by AI agent?

SPEAKER_00 6:11

So we build out the system prompts for you so that the AI knows how to behave, and that way you don't have to repeat it. You just can give it like literally, you can give our AI phrases and it will produce masterpieces. I was like, whoa, this is pretty cool.

Five Human Skills That Matter

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Before we started recording, I was telling you that like back when ChatGPT came out a couple months afterwards, I was like, I'm saving 30 to 40 hours a week, and everyone was like, How is that possible? And it just, I mean, it is, and now they actually understand and are getting it, which is pretty cool. But one of the things that I was intrigued by is that you talk regularly, I think, about the top five human skills for success in the AI world. And I think human skills are one of those things that are really overlooked when it comes to AI. Everyone's like, let's use AI, let's get rid of people. Um, right. And that's not necessarily the case. And these skills are just so, so important. So, talk to me about what are those five skills, and then how can those listening and watching work on those skills today?

SPEAKER_00 7:23

So I'll start with resiliency, right? You're gonna need to be able to be resilient. You need to be okay with not the first thing that gets produced, you're gonna take. You're gonna no, no, no, do a little bit better. Is this the best you can do? Actually, you can ask the AI, is this the best? And just like how you ask a human, this is the best job you've done, you can do, AI will go back and redo the work. It's hilarious. I just I just think it's hilarious. Um, then resourcefulness and creativity. And I feel like the people from low resource communities have a have a leg up on resourcefulness and creativity because when you're from a low resource community, by default, you're having to be resourceful. Like, you know, jar of peanut butter that then gets converted into um a cup, and then you get some flowers, it gets inverted into a vase, and then it gets back converted into a cup, and then it might be a measuring cup at one point in time. I mean, there's just so many different uses. Do you have to do that? Because you can't afford to go buy a regular glass, uh, measuring cup, fancy vase, right? But you want to be able to have flowers in your house and you want to be able to drink stuff and so forth. So I think marginalized communities already have to be resilient, resourceful, and creative all day long. And I'm saying, look, these are skills that you have limitless, and you should now think about them and reapply them. And then if you're fortunate enough to not have grown up in a place where you don't need to be creative and resourceful with the things you have, and that you could like buy five peanut butter jars and you could go buy two dozen glasses and all that, then I say to people like that go spend a week or two in a low resource community and live like them, not come and want all of the comforts that you left at home. Live like them. Then critical thinking and problem solving. You have to have problem solving and critical thinking because the AI will write stuff that sounds beautifully and 100% wrong. And and so that fortunately can be taught in school, or get a wise mentor that's gonna tell you whatever it is that's undermined and they won't cheer-code stuff, and you're good to go.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

I think the critical thinking and problem solving is just something that we need to really work hard on, right? I think that, you know, you say that it's it's that you can learn it in school. I think to an extent, right? I think it's I think education is gonna be moving that way, but I don't think we've been there. And I think AI is gonna help us get there, which is going to be amazing, I think, for students and educators alike. And I think it's gonna make huge improvements in what we end up with um as a world, right?

SPEAKER_00 10:35

As output. Education's always been constrained by time and space. I can only interact at a quality level with so many people. I believe the the thing is 12 to 15 people, anything more than that, and you're really not having meaningful uh engagement with your entire class. It's a subset. Yeah, I can address that space, right? You might have like an absolutely incredible teacher in South Africa that like instills intellectual curiosity and a love of learning to anybody that is in his class. He's in South Africa, you're in Miami, you're in Wyoming. Now AI and other technology, it's like you're all in the same place. You create a digital twin of him, he's available 24-7 in whatever language that person speaks. You're not at the mercy of he, oh, I don't speak English, I don't speak Africana, so I don't understand what he says. Doesn't matter. I speak Spanish, it will translate it from Africa from um Africana to Spanish for me, is translate from English to Spanish. And so when you stop and think about that, like what will the world look like? How are we gonna re-imagine the world? And I like to tell people we're in Renaissance 2.0, but we don't have 500 years. Maybe we have 50 years.

Education And Digital Twins

Responsible AI And Clean Data

SPEAKER_01 12:03

That's very cool. I do, yeah, we are in a different kind of renaissance, right? Where we there's just so much opportunity. Okay. So one of the things that that you talk about that I that I love to talk about is responsible AI. Um, I just heard I was watching a clip on the news of someone talking about um how upset that they are that AI just launched and it had no, you know, guardrails or regulation. They're like, this is what happened with social media and why it's all so bad and um all those things. I gotta say, I'm not a huge fan of people that don't know what they're doing with the technology regulating my use of the technology, but that's separate. What are some of those practical things that organizations can do to ensure human oversight and ethical guardrails on their AI implementations? Because I think that that is just so important. That human oversight, again, is just it's just discounted in this world of AI, I think.

SPEAKER_00 13:07

Yeah. So, first of all, if you're gonna do responsible AI, you have to have a team of people that understand your organization and understand your data. So AI still needs input, even when people are like agentic AI can take over your desktop, it can do all this stuff. I was like, Yes, but you still need an input. It doesn't just get up, like how you and I can just get up and decide, like, today I'm gonna go learn how to mountain climb. Like it's it's not gonna do that. It's not gonna just and so you still need input. And I think that the way you implement responsible AI is focusing on data because what the AI does is it amplifies whatever you give it, and so if you give it clean, um respectful, unbiased data, that's what it's gonna reflect back out, and now it's a whole different conversation, it's a whole different way. If you say, you know what, it doesn't matter, whatever we'll just pull from the internet and the large language model, you're being irresponsible. Um also, what data you put in there, right? So it starts with the ethic, the ethics of the human being, the humility of the human being. Are you going to look at a piece of content and know that that is just not ethically and morally right and still put it into the AI? Because if you are, then you're not practicing responsible AI. If you say somebody says you need to put it in, then responsible AI is holding your ground and saying, no, I don't want to put this in. I think the other piece of responsible AI is making sure that you know where the source of the data is. Don't copyright, don't steal people's content, buy it from them. You'd be surprised how happy people would be to license their content because they're like, oh my God, that's so great that you want to learn what I'm doing and respect people and lean into it. And that's another way to do responsible AI. Um, and so if you were doing that approach, your AI solution will be responsible. And then when you configure the system, put guardrails in there. It's not hard to put guardrails in. You know, last April, last August, they came out with a study that said that um the way to lower a hallucination is to have the AI tell the AI it's okay to say it doesn't know. Think about that. They spent five million dollars to learn that if you're if you're humble, the AI will behave properly. By the way, like back in 23 when we went to market and we're like this hallucination thing is crazy. We just started telling AI every single AI we configure says, I don't know. For a while, I honestly thought, I was like, am I did I do something wrong? How come our AI is not hallucinated? Like, maybe maybe I'm not really using this correctly. And then that study comes out, and I was like, well, so responsible AI, ethical AI starts with the humans, not with the machine. Because if you have people that are not appropriate, I mean, we're not gonna get into the fact that some people thought it would be a good use of their time and energy to create an AI that can take off women's clothes. I was like, what? Well, that is not the this is not the story the the the podcast for that, but just an example of that's not being ecticol or responsible. Just because you can do something shouldn't mean you should do it. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

Right. 100%, 100%. And I like how you talked about standing your ground, right? If you know something is wrong, you need to push back. And that has been a theme forever, right? I feel like because anytime you don't stand that ground and you know it's wrong, it's just it's not the right thing to do. And being being guided by your own values and what's important to you. And I think honesty and trust are two of those two huge values that we should live by is very important. Um, I still remember I was I was scared. I was in I was in my um the CEO's office at one point, and he's like, um, he goes, Well, just this vendor um said that she'll just beat anybody's price by a penny. And I'm like, but the other vendors spend all the time coming up with the ideas. So no, I I can't, I can't do that. She's welcome to come up with her own ideas and we'll reward that when she does, but we're not gonna let everybody else come up with the ideas and then award it to her so she can beat it by a penny. It was just shady and not ethical. And I said that I wouldn't be part of it. And the response was, oh, okay. He didn't realize what was involved in the process. It wasn't that he was trying to be shady, right? He'd gotten a call from a friend of his and was like, Oh, well, this will save me money, right? And it's like, oh, no, that doesn't really matter, right? And once he realized that, you know, it wasn't ethical, he had no problem with it. So it's like, okay. And I think we build up a lot of fear around that. And it's just that people don't know, right? And I speak think with AI and holding your ground with that, I think there's a lot of people that there's just stuff that they don't realize and haven't thought through.

Culture, Jobs, And AI Adoption

SPEAKER_00 18:49

Just so much, so much, so much stuff you have to think about. And and you have to, your brain has to look at things differently. It's just, you know, I I just had a conversation with some artists, and they're like, should we say that the music got created by AI, right? Because it's coming from a I don't want anybody to know I use AI. And I said, when you put a song together, don't you list everybody that was in the song? So what would make using AI different? Like, just list that, right? The role that the AI played. And I think that when I said that back to them, they were just like, I never never thought about it this way. And then somebody else was saying, you know, I'm using Sona to create a song, and Sona is charging me to get my own music back. And I was like, when you create a song, don't you have to um, and and now I'm getting into areas that I don't know, I'm not very well versed. Um, don't you have to pay somebody to um help you this the song engineer? Well, pay paying sonos is like paying the song engineer.

SPEAKER_01 20:02

Well, and again, I think that that again goes back to you really do need to understand and you need to have a team or people that understand, you know, when you were going back to talking about the about responsible AI use, you have to understand AI, right? To some extent, but you also have to understand the business. And that, you know, when you were talking about understanding the data and what's in it and what there is, I think that that's really important. And I think people are glazing over that to an extent. Um, and that's why the people are so, so important right now. Speaking of the people, I heard this like way back at the beginning, and then I didn't hear it for a while. And then last year I did a presentation, like first half of the year, and it's they said, well, I was really worried that AI was gonna take my job, and so I didn't want to use it. And then she's like, now I realize no, someone that knows how to use AI is going to take my job because I can do so much more with AI. And she's like, I'm I'm done like sticking my head in the sand and I'm gonna start using it, which was just so exciting. Like, I loved that. When we're talking about AI replacing jobs, ruining company culture, things like that. How are you talking to leaders about this? What are you having them address?

Leadership Rollout And Iteration

SPEAKER_00 21:22

There's two questions in it. So let me unpack um the culture piece. Actually, AI makes it easier to maintain your culture. Case in point. So I have an intern that works with me. I meet with her like half an hour once a week. She's the reason I'm on this podcast because we gave her marketing buddy and we said apply for the podcast that matches, and I don't have to supervise her. She's maintaining, and almost every podcast that I'm on, there's a value alignment. So she's maintaining my culture, and I'm not having to spend a lot of time. Another example is I have a marketing company in South Africa. I keep saying this is how we want the terminology, and I got frustrated because I mean, it's it's they don't remember their South African English is different from an American English, and so I just coded all the terms into the AI. And I gave the AI a glossary. I said, use this glossary when you don't know. No more problems. So it does maintain it, it actually helps you maintain. I'm gonna leave one more thing and then I'll then I'll talk about how I prepare leaders. This one customer said, um, the AI is helping reduce inter-office conflicts because I'm not having you're not getting frustrated because you have to answer the question for the 79th time. I'm not getting frustrated because you got an attitude with me because I don't understand something. It's a whole different. I mean, all of those things are different. Um, how do I prepare leaders? I say to them, first of all, what is it that you're trying to solve with AI? What are the goals? What are the accomplishments? It's like in any project that you have, anything that you do, like, do you know what you're trying to accomplish? Do you know what your pain points are? That you're trying to remediate, what does success look like? I mean people are like that just sounds like regular projects. I was like, yeah, because it is regular project. And then I say your data quality. What does your data look like? What's the quality of your data? And from there, we then are able to have this conversation about evolving and what is going to be change, and then let's not change everything at once. Roll out a few AI agents, see what happens, tweak them, then roll out some more and iterate and iterate and iterate.

The Marketing Lesson: Selling Trust

SPEAKER_01 24:07

I love the iteration. That's just so, so good. Well, before I let you go, and before we wrap up, I do have to ask you the question that I ask all of my guests, and that is that this show is called Imperfect Marketing, because marketing is anything but a perfect science. What's been your biggest marketing lesson learned?

SPEAKER_00 24:25

Understanding the why behind what you're doing and understanding what you're really trusting, um, selling. So until I really understood that I'm selling trust, I'm not selling AI, I'm selling trust. I mean, once I got that, everything else just seemed like easy. It took two and a half years of torture of my marketing person to get to we sell trusts.

SPEAKER_01 24:51

It's true, right? Because they're working with you. And I think that's so important. And if you don't know what you're selling, then it just is not gonna work. So, so that's huge. First off, I love that that you're investing in an intern. So congratulations. I think working with interns is so important because it's really helping build the skills of the next generation as they enter the workforce in ways that that they can't get other places. And I think it's really important for all of us to to take that into consideration. And then um, I loved all the things that we talked about. So resiliency, creativity, these are the things, resourcefulness, these are the things that are really important. And then again, taking a values-based approach, right? You're selling trust. And then we talked about um about your values when dealing with responsible AI. And I think that that all just ties together so well. I usually talk a lot about little things that you can do all of the time so that there's that there's takeaways. And I think one of the biggest takeaways from this is that people are part of the process with AI, right? And that our our values need to guide the rollout and the implementation, and that we are going to be really impressed by what we can come up with and what we end up with from there.

SPEAKER_00 26:17

You're you're a hundred percent right. Um, so I appreciate you having me on the show today.

SPEAKER_01 26:23

Thank you so much, Stephanie, for being on the show. I appreciate your time. I um I thank you all for tuning in, wherever you're listening or watching. Until next time, have a great rest of your day.