How Curiosity, Identity, And Agentic AI Can Transform Your Career

Reinvention isn’t a single leap; it’s a habit you can practice. That’s the thread running through our conversation with Monica Marquez—military brat, first‑gen grad, Wall Street and Big Tech leader, and now cofounder of Flipwork—who lays out a playbook for turning AI from a threat into a force multiplier for your most human work. We dig into how curiosity fuels smart pivots, why acculturation beats assimilation, and how to keep your voice while navigating very different company cultures.

Monica breaks down the identity shift at the center of AI adoption: moving from effort equals success to impact equals success. Think of AI as an eager intern—fast, imperfect, and coachable. You don’t ship its first draft; you iterate, capture prompts that work, and build repeatable playbooks. We talk practical tactics for psychological safety, creating space to test and learn, and using critique prompts to expose blind spots without the sting. Monica shares why tool-first rollouts fail, how to teach AI thinking before tool clicking, and what “agentic human” actually looks like in practice.

We also zoom out to the workforce: right-sizing headlines, real upskilling examples like IKEA’s customer service-to-design pivot, and the quiet crisis of undocumented workflows. Monica explains Flipwork’s approach—90‑day sprints that start with people, move through process mapping with agentic AI, then build only the tools that matter. Along the way, we cover visibility for underrepresented leaders, transferable skills that defy rigid degree paths, and the brand advantage of turning artificial intelligence into authentic intelligence. If survival once favored the fittest, today it favors the fastest learners—the ones who ship, measure, and refine.

If this conversation sparked a new way to think about your work, tap follow, leave a quick review, and share it with a friend who’s ready to reinvent.

This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.

Transcript

Welcome And Monica’s Origin Story

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Media Escape, Insights from Digital Changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world.

SPEAKER_02 0:21

It is an absolute honor to have Monica Marquez on the show. Monica, you are so many things and you've done so much in your career with your schooling. You're a podcast host, but that's the least of it. You have an amazing newsletter, III AI. Love the name. And I think we all need those short bits of content that can really help us hone in on what do we need to know in AI and what can we use and how can we use it quickly. And you're doing a lot in this field. But before we get into that, love for you to talk a little bit about your backstory. Because going from a first generation college student in Texas, and I used to live in Houston for several years, and I grew up in Kansas, so have that whole, you know, Midwest to South connection. I was born in Wichita, Kansas, ironically. I didn't even know that. But I'm a Lawrence girl myself, you know, go Jayhawks. But yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit about your backstory and that journey because to see all of the different things you've accomplished and the fact that you went from there to here, I'm just blown away.

Curiosity, Reinvention, And Career Pivots

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Yeah, well, I thank you so much for having me on the show. It's an honor for you to be be kind of given your platform and kind of give me some time and space to share my story and really kind of really democratizing access to other people to hear about these types of stories and journeys and what we did and what we did wrong and what you should do to kind of maybe move further in your career and faster than than I was ever able to. But by way of introduction, I was a military brat. My father was in the Air Force, and my I was born in Wichita, Kansas, on an Air Force base there, as I mentioned. Honestly, I've never been back. It's always been one of those things of like I have to go back and just kind of experience, you know, where I was born. But I grew up on various different military bases. But the core of my childhood, I grew up in Texas. And so after my dad retired, I was just about to turn 14 and we moved back to his hometown in West Texas, which was Odessa, Texas, where I went to high school, which was the first public school I'd ever gone to. So it was, it's a it was a lot of firsts for me in getting getting kind of acclimated to non-military kind of education. And then, you know, I was the oldest and only daughter of a very traditional Mexican-American family, and was the first to go off to school, pursue a graduate degree, you know, go to graduate school. And I think all along the way, I think part of the exposure as a very young of being exposed to lots of different people and cultures on a military base kind of gave me this kind of yearning for there's a lot out there that I hadn't seen. And so when we did move to West Texas and I went to school, I really enjoyed what where I was, but I always knew that there was something out there that I, you know, wanted to pursue more of. And so I went off to school and went, didn't go too far. It was one of those things where I didn't know what I didn't know at the time. And being first generation, my parents didn't know either. They just pushed education as kind of this way that would kind of amplify and it kind of the way out. But I got accepted to all of the big kind of Ivy League schools. And I remember one of the schools I was seriously considered going to was Princeton University. But I remember looking at a map and seeing where Princeton, New Jersey was at and where Odessa, Texas was at. And I'd never flown before in my life. And I was thinking, how do I get back for like holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, because the flights were super expensive and you know, there's no way you could drive, and I didn't have a car. And so all of these things kind of played into it. And I ended up choosing Texas Tech University because it was two hours from home. And I literally could take a Greyhound bus or my parents could come and go in one day and pick me up. So I went to Texas Tech. And sometimes I think, would I change that? And I don't think so. I had an amazing experience at Texas Tech and I finished my master's. Once I got my master's, I packed up and then I moved to New York City and I figured if I can make it there, I could make it anywhere. But it was a little, there were journeys all the way through, and there were moments of these kind of like aha moments of there's so much out there, and realizing that I had a very limited frame of reference. And remembering that when I wanted to grow up, I was like, I'm gonna be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer because those were successful people in my circle in Odessa, Texas. And it wasn't until I got on college campus and I saw all of the amazing things you could do, and it was kind of this overwhelm of like, what can I or what do I do? So I kind of have always been open to like what's out there. And so I've always been curious, and I think that curiosity has always caused moments of reinvention for myself, of like going somewhere and realizing, is this a zone of genius for me or not? And if it's not, then it's like, okay, I need a pivot and do something else that where curiosity is like, can I do this? And I think really that has been at the premise of my success, of being curious and open to opportunities and shifting to see where's the world going and and how can I be on the forefront of that. And, you know, how can I leverage my zone of genius in all of these spaces and pivot and just be successful. And so that's kind of been the through life, the the through line of my life is reinvention, pivoting, and just following passion of like what excites me and how can I add value.

SPEAKER_02 6:00

You make a really important point here, and it's that we shouldn't be afraid of reinvention and those pivot points and inflection points and aha moments. So many times people are, and I'm similar to you, although I haven't had all of these titles that you've had in that same vein of okay, I'm doing this. Oh, but this is something that I really enjoy. Let me go explore that area and figuring out what equates to success and what that happy zone is, that ee-guy moment. And you've done everything from diversity leadership, senior VP of banks, right? Multiple things in community engagement, inclusivity, flexibility, diversity. So was that a purposeful decision, or was that somewhere that you were kind of guided to based on your education, but also being a woman of color?

SPEAKER_01 6:49

Yeah, so that's a really great question. There was intentionality in the sense of I knew that I wanted to have impact. And so when I really kind of go back and I look at all of the various roles that I had over the course of my career, the through line is always that I was always trying to MacGyver away or find a way to help the underdog navigate and kind of really capitalize on the most potential that they could have, right? And so whether it was doing diversity work and really trying to help women and minorities navigate the corporate culture, because we were definitely a huge minority in some of these spaces, to recruiting, where I was trying to recruit more people and kind of help them have that aha moment that I had when I didn't realize, like, oh, all I could do was become a doctor. And then telling people, look, I have a bachelor's in biology, minor in organic chemistry, and a master's in higher education administration, but I ended up on Wall Street, right? I ended up at Google, I ended up at Bank of America or Ernst and Young. And getting people to understand that like those titles or those kind of degrees don't necessarily like there aren't rigid. It's not set in stone. And there are so many transferable skills and things that you can tap into. And really at the end of the day, you can put your mind to something that you want to do and you can do it, right? So it's one of those things of really starting to understand that nothing is set in stone. And at the end of the day, proximity or finding ways to get proximity to the things that you want to do is really something that you have to be intentional and curious about. And so I think, like you said, it's something that was intentional and that I knew I wanted to have impact and I knew that I was wanting to do something in this, these faces. But I really couldn't say that when I set my target on, hey, I want to become chief diversity officer, or I want to become head of diversity recruiting, or I want to do X. Many of my titles were roles that didn't exist at that time. And if you think about now in my current venture of, you know, artificial intelligence launching my third company, which is Flipwork, all about AI, I'm now being sought out as an AI expert. And those roles don't exist. Like they just started coming to, like everybody's kind of like figuring it all out, but having that courage and that curiosity of saying, you know, hey, like let me, let's pave away, right? This pioneering kind of thing of like, well, if not me, then who? And not being afraid to kind of just move forward despite the uncertainty.

SPEAKER_02 9:29

And that does take us, you are the MacGyver for the AI age, which is an amazing title that and Moniker, talk to us a little bit about that transition into because you've always been at that forefront of how do we transform work, how do we make people feel included and feel like they have because I I think this is still an issue people struggle with is making sure we're offering the right mentorship, the right support systems so that minority communities and women feel like they can still achieve. Because if you look at even in the AI world, right, the number of women who are in forward-facing roles is few and far between. I recently met somebody who has a really big role at OpenAI because we're doing work together for the Webies on the AI side of things, but she doesn't, she's not very forward-facing. She doesn't want to be. She doesn't think she's a good speaker, even though from what I've seen, she is, but she just wants to stay behind. So I want to hear more about that aspect, how you realized, okay, this is the next transformation. We need to humanize this. I need to help lead this charge, and I'm going to be a face in the front of this.

Impact-Driven Diversity And Breaking Rigid Paths

SPEAKER_01 10:34

Yeah. And I think you touched on a piece of the idea of visibility. And so one of the things that I realized, you know, in many of these organizations I worked at, I was one of very few, or sometimes the only one in the room that like looked like me. And yes, at first it was one of those things where you try to you acclimate too much, right? There's a fine line where I tell people that yes, you want to acclimate to where you kind of understand what is the definition of success in this organization or this environment, or every company has its own culture. And so I learned later on is that when you try to basically acclimate too much, you start becoming something that you're not. And then that's when you start feeling like a foreigner in that space, right? But it did take me a few years to understand. And I think the best way I can describe it is I started thinking about it as culture instead, of like visiting a different country. Every company that you work at, I mean, Goldman Sachs was very, very different from Google. And the cultures were very different, similar in that they both want to make impact and they both are very inclusive environments. But the definition of success was very different, right? And so I started telling myself, listen, when in Rome, do as Romans do. You acculturate, right? But when you're in Rome, you still know that you're this Mexican-American woman from the US in Rome or in whatever country you're at. And so don't lose yourself. But yes, embrace the culture, embrace the traditions and all of these things. But don't, you know, the old saying, that old adage of like, don't forget your roots of like where you come from. And I think the same thing happens in organizations where you start to kind of drink the Kool-Aid or you start kind of acclimating it a little too much, and you cross that fine line where too much of a good thing becomes not so good, right? And so that's where I tell people you want to acculturate, not assimilate, because when we start to assimilate too much, then we don't recognize ourselves. And then that's when we start feeling burned out or like you don't belong because you're always covering or trying to be somebody that you're not. And so those are the things that I had to really start thinking about in all of these organizations and starting to really identify the acculturation. And when I started to acculturate, that is when I started to feel like not so much as like an imposter or any of those types of things, but I started to realize that others were noticing it, other Latinas or other women that look like me. And then I started to realize that I needed to kind of like lend my hand, like reach out and pull others up and really kind of help open doors and navigate as well. And I think that's, but it's hard, right? You've got to figure it out for yourself. And I would say maybe the first few years in your career, you're just trying to figure things out for yourself. And you do feel like until I can figure it out, I can't help anybody else. But I also had to realize that it doesn't matter where you are in your career. You are going to be a step ahead of somebody in your career. And so reach backwards and say, like, listen, I may not be that far ahead of you, but I have learned a few things or I've been around this corner and you haven't yet. Let me transfer knowledge to you so that you can avoid any of the pitfalls or speed bumps or obstacles that I ran into. And so we put this kind of crazy goal is it's like, until I reach this title or this point in my career, can I turn around and really help anybody else? And the the truth is, is that if you started two weeks before somebody else, you've been able to navigate or find some things out that you can share with an individual and still mentor or guide somebody. And so I had to get rid of that kind of limiting belief that I had is that I couldn't help anybody because I'm learning the way to. And that's the way I look at it with this whole kind of AI age as well of, you know what, like let me dig in there, let me kind of like, you know, kick the tires on things, play around with tools, do different things and learn. And then I can turn around and tell people, hey, I tried this out and I really liked it, and maybe you can use it too, kind of thing. And so that's kind of become my mantra of let's test and learn. And whatever I learn, let's also share that knowledge. And so those are kind of the things that you kind of learn along the way. But now sharing with everybody else, I would say to all of your listeners, it doesn't matter where you are in your career, you are a step ahead of somebody. Find that somebody and kind of be that kind of guiding light for them, or just say, hey, I'm gonna transfer this knowledge to you and it hopefully it'll benefit you in some way or another.

SPEAKER_02 15:19

Yeah. That's amazing advice at any level, 100%. And as somebody who's reinvented, I'm now into my fifth decade and I'm still reinventing, I feel like. So I love hearing your point of view and what you've learned along the way and what you've been able to really solidify and ground as your foundation and then help others to do the same. So let's talk about in your transition to AI, going from working for these large corporate organizations to becoming a multiple-time founder. What was that experience like and what led you to decide it's time for me to go out on my own? Yes.

Visibility, Acculturation, And Lifting Others

SPEAKER_01 15:55

So I loved my corporate career. I mean, I think it it kind of molded me into who I was. And I learned from some of the best minds at some of the organizations that I worked at. And I started to realize as kind of after the second, third company that I worked at, I started to realize that we're all dealing with the same struggles, the same systemic barriers, the same kind of, it was almost kind of like same song, different DJ, right? And so the more and more I started kind of thinking about how could I have more impact. And part of the reasons that I would, I know that I'm someone who has to be challenged and I'm always curious to like do new things and kind of like pioneer things. And so every time I went to different organizations, there was a new problem or a new challenge or a new culture or a new subset of people that I wanted to impact. And then as I started kind of getting further into my career, realizing that I was doing a lot of the same things over and over again, I started to realize that you could productize this. Or there were certain things that certain things that were holding us back because of certain systemic barriers or things within these organizations where I started thinking, how could I have more impact? And at that time, my wife, Nikki, who is a serial entrepreneur and an award-winning entrepreneur, she kept telling me that you're limiting yourself. You're limiting the impact you can have because you're restricted to the four walls of whatever organization you're at. And so she had always been buzzing around in my ear that like I should leave and start something on my own. And it wasn't until I would say probably towards the end of 2019 that it was one of those things that I can kind of always was thinking about. And she was at a point where she was about to exit her other company where she was going to have a successful exit. And I said, listen, I think this is the perfect kind of like point where if I leave, you and I can partner and build something together. And for me, I was fortunate that I was going to learn from someone who was already a seasoned entrepreneur. And so I took the plunge, but it didn't come without the challenges, right? It didn't come without the those moments of like, oh my God, what did I just do? Or like I gave up this secure, cushy job and paycheck and title. And then came the identity crisis of like, who am I without the big titles of like a Google or Bank of America or EY or Goldman Sachs behind my name? So there was a lot of soul searching and kind of reinvention in that regard of building my brand, right? And understanding that you could take the title of any company or take the company name away. But at the end of the day, there's my personal brand and who I am that I needed to double down on that no one could take away, right? And so that's when I started to realize that success really comes in that confidence of who you are and what it is that you do and really doing the self-reflection work of what is my zone of genius? And my zone of genius is reinvention, is pioneering, is always MacGyvering things, right? Like, and MacGyver came from a nickname that other people would call me because they were like, listen, you're like MacGyver. If there's no budget and a paper clip and duct tape, you're gonna figure out how to make something work, right? And so I started to embrace that of like, yeah, that is who I am. And because of that, it has given me that confidence to kind of say, I can do anything I put my mind to. I can become an expert in anything. And so two years ago, really three years ago, when I saw AI, kind of like what it was doing, and and I'm a big research nerd, I'm a big geek, I'm always reading, listening to podcasts, but I was hearing and seeing kind of the tea leaves of AI was going to change the workplace faster than people have ever experienced and faster than people can change. And so, how do we get on the forefront of that? Because I could already see the challenges that we were going to have with people and adoption, people and change, and even the compounding factors for women and minorities. And others, there was already a digital divide, and now that's going to become wider. So, how do we get in front of that? And that's really what caused me to really think about pivoting and doing those, you know, doing really focusing on building flip work and really starting to help people understand that you can throw all the AI tools you want to at people. Companies have spent billions of dollars on rolling out AI and they're scratching their heads now, wondering why less than 50% of their people are adopting the tools. And it's like, because you can't teach the tool, you can't teach AI tools. You have to teach AI. And so people were waiting around to say, hey, tell me how I'm supposed to use this. And the IT folks are like, no, you have to figure out how to use these. And so there was a little bit of a kind of like this confusion of like, hey, I'm just going to wait till somebody tells me what I'm supposed to do with this. And it doesn't work that way. And so we are really trying to help people understand how do you become an agentic human? How do you really start to amplify your zone of genius and the things that you do really, really well with AI so that you can focus more on the strategic kind of really high value work and let AI take care of the stuff that you can automate. So those are the things that we started seeing three years ago and started really thinking about how do we help people start to see that sooner.

SPEAKER_02 21:21

Yeah. So many things in what you just said. I have an MBA specializing in AIML, but it's all through trying out and testing and iterating myself. You can be given prompts to input all day long, but unless you really understand what you're inputting and you go, oh, this is completely wrong data. Here's how I refine it. You don't know what you're doing. You can play with agentic AI and build out tools again all day long, but you have to have the idea, the concept, and understand how you can have this conversation and get the tool, or now a lot of people are saying partner to do what you're asking. And we see, I mean we see in the news every day, oh, this company is now laying all these people off. This company, and is it AI? Is it partly AI, or is it also just they're using that as an excuse? No, exactly.

Leaving Corporate And Building A Personal Brand

SPEAKER_01 22:13

They're right sizing. And you nailed a point, right? Because a lot of people, you're seeing all the huge layoffs. You're seeing like Amazon laying off 10,000, 14,000, whatever the number was at the end. But the reality is that AI isn't replacing people. People who are leveraging AI are replacing people who don't. But the reality is, is that most of these companies are actually right sizing from the overhiring they did during COVID, right? And like you said, using AI as an excuse, or right now, this is an opportunity where people are starting to right size. Because yes, the truth is that there are jobs that are being replaced by automation and by AI. But there are some success stories. Like IKEA, for one, they basically automated their entire customer service kind of bench. And they had about 8,000 people that were going to get displaced. Instead of firing those people, IKEA decided to train those people to become like design consultants, right? Because of all of the IKEA furniture, designing spaces, and all this stuff. And so they basically repotted those people into these roles. And because IKEA did that, they ended up seeing something like$1.00 billion more in revenue because they took that talent and moved it somewhere else. And so companies that are being smart are realizing that you do have to kind of upskill your people. And like I tell people, you have to, for yourself, be kind of a little bit more of a self-starter. Kind of you have to be intentional of thinking, okay, where do I sit on the assembly line in my organization? And am I on this front part of the assembly line that can be automated? And if so, where do I kind of take myself and plug myself in in another area of the assembly line that requires more discernment, more judgment, or more hands-on things so that I can really start to amplify my success using AI. And so those are the things where we have to get past the fear of AI is going to replace me and start to, exactly like you said, kind of be in partnership with it. And what I like to say is like the new hybrid, like it's no longer work from home hybrid kind of thing. The new hybrid is human and machine. And so we like to say here at Flipwork that it's you have to become the kind of like this agentic human, right? It's so it's the you have to reinvent yourself as this agentic human, which is similar to like people squared. You have to become a people squared kind of person where you have your, for lack of a better term, almost kind of clone, right? Of like this AI artificial clone that is helping you do some of the work that takes up a lot of your time that doesn't allow you to really like apply your intelligence in the right way.

SPEAKER_02 25:02

Some of great examples I've seen of this. There's a company that I partner with that does near shoring. So they take employees, perhaps from Mexico, engineers who are maybe a little bit less expensive than the US, and put them in and they will help create systems and processes using AI. But their best use cases are showing okay, a maybe a dental office went from three locations to nine locations, hired 60 or 90 more people while still having AI, more profitable, and able to also hire these near shoring people separately from their other employees. Or I was just in Vietnam and there is a software company that did a lot of design and they spent two years upskilling all of their software engineers to get AI certifications from Google, from all of the major corporations, so they'd be prepared for what their clients need next. And those to me are really brilliant examples of how you can smartly implement and still have jobs for people, which we need, and also implement great benefit, right? Great strategies and tools that will help with all of our workflows and help us figure out where those pain points are that we need technology versus humans. And I'm also hearing a lot about collective intelligence. So the human mind with AI mind, and how do we make again using the best of both? So I'd love to hear a little bit about what Flipwork is going to be doing. Is it more for enterprise organizations? Is it scalable for smaller businesses, small to medium? And how do you see yourselves playing this role in helping define the future of the human AI workforce?

Why AI Adoption Fails And Agentic Humans

SPEAKER_01 26:45

Yeah, so thanks for that question. It's a really great question. I mean, any good business, as you realize, you have to kind of be intentional and really kind of finding out what is our niche going to be. A little bit like Amazon, right? Amazon first started selling books and then they kind of like, you know, opened up to anything under the planet now. And so we're starting off very intentional in the same way. But what Flipwork does is we're really kind of reinventing this idea of it's no longer transformation, it's reinvention. The old playbook of success for many companies is no longer a moat or no longer like the right way to do things. AI is really causing people to have to reinvent their workflows in a very different way. So if companies are coming in saying, hey, let's take our old playbook and just layer over AI, you're gonna basically amplify all of the inefficiencies in that workflow and really not see any of the return on investment on that. And so what we're doing is we're coming in and saying, like, this is workforce reinvention. You have to really reinvent the way that you've done work, but you can't do it from a top down, right? You know, many big companies and these big consulting firms who come in, they are like, if you really think about the whole change management process, the old school way, is too slow. I mean, this sometimes they come in, they bring thousands of consultants, and it takes them 18 to 24 months to kind of say, here's we're gonna help change your company. Well, I'm sorry, 24 months from now, like it's dated and things are gonna be done very, very differently. And so we're talking about needing to change kind of in quarterly kind of a quarterly cadence because the tools keep changing, the processes keep changing. So we come in and we work with companies mid-size right now, we're talking mid-sized companies. The irony is we've piloted it with a lot of kind of Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies, but we first really start focusing on the human. How do you help the human shift their identity to becoming this agentic human? Because there is a level of fear where someone is saying, Am I training this tool or training this bot or training this agent to replace me? And so there's a little bit of hesitancy there where people and there's not a lot of trust. And so we're trying to get people to rewire your brain because we're wired for certainty, right? Like our brains are wired for certainty, for safety to like protect us and things like that. So there's natural kind of subconscious things where we're already kind of like saying, maybe I don't want to do this AI thing, or the change is just too fast that I can't really kind of like, I'm overwhelmed by it. And so what we're coming in is really thinking about people, processes, and tools, but first focus on the person because many companies haven't done that. They've deployed all of these tools and they're wondering why their people aren't adopting them. But the truth of the matter is that we're starting to find lots of really interesting things that it's not that the people fear or just are refusing to change. It's just that they don't know where to start. They're overwhelmed with it. And the other thing is that we have these conditioned norms and these conditioned beliefs that we've been taught that effort equals success. You got to work hard to be successful. Well, if you start using a tool that makes it almost effortless, then you start to say, question, well, if I didn't apply any effort, am I going to be successful? And so we're having to rewire our brain that to say it's no longer about effort equaling success, it's about impact equaling success. How much more impactful can the work that you do or the output that you get from AI have so that you can be successful? And so, really rewriting that equation in our head as that impact equals success or quality equals success, that you can have better quality output or more work that you can do with the help of AI and kind of try to unlearn this idea that effort equals success, right? And so we've, but we've lived and breathed that, especially those of us who, like you said, are in our fifth decade where the last four decades we've been like burning the candle at both ends, sweat equity, like all of these things where we're working so hard, hard and it's kind of like a trophy that we wear that like, oh, we're such hard workers. But now AI is making it feel effortless. And so you start to question that identity of self-worth, like, is what I'm doing really worth it? And so this is where you really have to start working with people to say, well, let's help dig and find out where's your zone of genius and how do you amplify and amplify that with AI so that you can have more impact, where you're applying your strengths and the discernment and the judgment and the lived experience and all of these things that you bring, where you turn artificial intelligence into authentic intelligence and your own authentic intelligence so that you can differentiate yourself from the same AI output that everybody else is gonna get. And so that's the difference, and that's where brand comes in, right? It's just like, what is your brand? What is your authentic intelligence that you're gonna overlay on the ABC output that Chat GPT is gonna give everybody when they prompt it in the same way? But then how do you take your judgment, your expertise, you all of the things, the nuanced things that you bring, that taste that you bring, like you have a certain taste that you have that you add that makes it different and then makes you kind of the trusted source that people are gonna go to.

SPEAKER_02 32:25

Yeah. Amazing. And you are in stealth mode a little bit, right?

SPEAKER_01 32:30

Yes. In stealth mode, we've we piloted it with um some really great partners, my old colleagues and and peers who've worked with me for years and years, but we all knew that this was something new. And they were like, You're pioneering, you're you're a MacGyver. Can you help us MacGyver it? And let's pilot it and build it as we go. And so there are people who trusted us to do that. And so we're super excited. We come in and we do these 90-day sprints of where we first get your people ready. Once your people are ready and they realize, okay, I need to be an agentic human. The second piece that we do is we call it our flip labs, where we help people kind of flip work, really. That's why we're called flip work, but thinking about what are all your workflows? How do you have to reinvent your workflows? And we use agentic AI to help map out all of those workflows, present-day workflows, to say, here are areas that you might be able to really amplify or really kind of make it more efficient with AI. And this is where you can amplify your area of expertise by doing that. Once they start understanding the workflows and how they need to change, they might need to build agentic tools or apps or do those things. And this is where we have our flip factory, which is our team of 200 plus engineers that could build any kind of tool, proprietary tool that a company would need in order to do business. But first, you have to start from the inside out. You have to partner with your people because the reality is, which is really scary, most companies really have not documented their workflows. They just have all these people that have their area of expertise and they get their work done, but really kind of like documentation-wise, they don't have it down, soup to nuts. So they don't really know where to start to improve those processes with AI. So you kind of have to help pull it out of them and transfer that knowledge and document that knowledge to say, how do you get work done for us? And then how do we actually make it better, more efficient with AI? And then once we identify that, then let's build agents where it can kind of be automated and things like that. So we come in and really help individuals do that, but we leverage AI to do it much faster than your traditional change management consultants do.

SPEAKER_02 34:50

This is a really important point that Monica just shared because I know a ton of people who've have AI businesses. I work with many of them, I've tried out their tools, I've tested them, but again, they're not getting to that trucks where it's about getting people ready for change management and then implementing the tool tech stack. It's all about, oh, here is a platform I can create this agent, or here's a platform for lead flow for my small business or whatever the case may be. But it is tech first, people, second, third, fourth, last, right? In this situation. And we'll make people in the workforce feel a lot better if they know that they are still being taken care of, that they're still being considered in the process and that they're being given this, it's almost freedom, right? To really think about, like you said, what is their zone of genius? How can they best implement and then give them the confidence to say, oh, I can. I have friends who work for Salesforce and big agent companies who are have trying to kind of stay away from AI until they had to. And now one friend was like, I was just up at Salesforce in San Francisco, and I started using AI for all this stuff, and I feel so much more confident now. Yes. Like, yes, I keep telling people like just try one little thing at a time. And it's something I share with my students at USC, right? Yes, you want to be a digital marketer, but you need to know how to use this, this, and this, but only in the context of what you really want to do based on who you are and what you're the best at. But it oh gosh, I just could not put a bigger pin in the point you just made.

Jobs, Right-Sizing, And Upskilling Success Stories

SPEAKER_01 36:25

It's all of these things that people aren't realizing, it's behavioral change really that we've got to focus on first and really creating that psychological safety, like you said, to let people test and learn and try out the AI. Because if you don't, if you have a manager that is not creating a safe space for people to say, let's try to do the workflow differently, or let's try to do it differently. If you get it wrong, okay, we just learned a way that you're not supposed to do it or that you can't do it, right? Or we've learned where we need to put some boundaries or we or a human to quality check something before it goes out, right? And so that's what I tell people sometimes for some of these big organizations, like you said, your friend at Salesforce, where they were kind of like, I'm not quite sure. I don't like I'm not bought into it. I have friends who've said, I've tried it, but it just gave me a bunch of slop and it's not any good. And I said, listen, and I love a play of words, I'm a big nerd for this, but I was like, you have to think of AI, artificial intelligence, like an artificial intern, your AI intern, right? And just like an intern, they are green behind their ears. They don't know what they're doing. You could say, go do this project, and they could do it all wrong at first. You're not gonna take that work and turn it over to a client. What you're gonna do is you're gonna tell that intern, no, no, no, this is how we do it, this is how you should do it. These are the things that, like, here are the requirements that you have to do. Here's my preferred way of doing it. This is, you've got to learn. And so you get them to do it over and over and make edits and tweak it and all of these things. You have to do the same thing with AI. You have to train it in the same way, like it's just some intern that's never done it before and is going to give you this first output that they're eager to kind of say, Hey, here's here it is, and you're gonna say, not quite what I wanted. And then through prompts, through communicating with it, all of these things, being able to say, This is what I want, and then you get to that output. And then you have to go back and say, okay, what were all of the prompts and the things that I did so that I can repeat this process over and over and over again? So that's the important thing, like you said, of getting people to start just playing with it and not giving up just because it spits out what work slop or like spits out something that you're like, not it. So I'm not using it anymore. But this is the first technology that we are having to train the technology. It used to be like, here's a calculator or here's Excel, learn how to use Excel. And so you could take a couple of courses, but what people are realizing and the IT teams are trying to get other people to understand, is like, this isn't just like a calculator that we hand you that you can just start like, you actually have to train it in what it is that you want to do. And so that's where it means that it's human and machine. And so you're part of that equation. And if you really are just expecting it to give you the output, that's where you're going to end up getting left behind.

SPEAKER_02 39:18

Yeah. I'd love to hear about some of the transformations you've made with the companies that you've been testing on. Sure. Large, small, environmental.

SPEAKER_01 39:29

I mean, the biggest feedback, the irony is that even the behavioral or the people part, we're using a tool, like a we call it Flippy. Flippy, your AI change agent. And Flippy will actually help people do some of the deeper what is your zone of genius? Because if you know, sometimes you know how it is, Anika, someone says, Tell me who are you in 30 seconds, right? It's really hard to kind of tell someone your strengths or your zone of genius or what it is, unless you've done the work to really kind of be able to. Have that elevator pitch kind of thing. And so when we start telling people AI can help you, it can help amplify your strengths or amplify your zone of genius. They're like, well, I can't even describe my zone of genius. I don't know what that is. And so sometimes that's really embarrassing to admit to another human or to admit to your boss or to admit to your peers around you. So we've developed this tool. It's Flippy, the AI change agent, that will help you go through all of these kind of self-reflective course, this journey, which we call the reinvention engine of reinventing who you are so that you can amplify. And so what we're seeing is that people are having these aha moments and having these kind of private, intimate conversations of really kind of discovering who they are and how they can use AI. So we're seeing a lot of kind of confidence coming from that, of like now I'm able to articulate to my boss or to other people on how I want to use AI to do better. And like you said, your friend now who's using AI and feels much more confident because they have somebody they can spar with or kind of debate and even say, hey, here's what I'm thinking. Here are my outputs. Where are the blind spots? Right. Like learning how to prompt it in the right way to say, critique this for me. And it's a safe place because you're like, okay, well, this is just this is just a tool that's giving me critique. It doesn't sting like it does from some human that like I'm seeking validation from or something of the sort. So we're seeing a lot of growth really quickly, even in the in the kind of like identity space, like people reinventing themselves, working through identity, and then getting people to realize like reinventing their workflows and realizing how much how inefficient they had been in the past. And now, what are some of these things that they can kind of offload to AI? And then they're starting to do more work that they love, right? Like the strategic work. Like you hear people all the time, I love strategy, but I don't get to do it because I'm doing all the grunt work. Well, now AI can do all the grunt work and you can really spend time on the creative strategy, judgment, discernment things that you love to do because you've basically saved so much time of instead of three hours of pulling everything together and only having an hour to really kind of finesse things, you now have three hours to kind of put your spin on it or your own kind of like stamp on it. And so we're starting to see a lot more people being satisfied in the work that they're doing because they're not having to do the grunt work. So that's just been really amazing to see people's satisfaction rate kind of going up in the sense of like, I love what I'm doing now because I feel like I'm having more impact. And so now getting them to really put a really deep proove that impact equals success opposed to effort equals success. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_02 42:49

I could ask you questions all day because I'm just I'm so engaged by everything that you're sharing and having my own aha moments and ways of looking at things. So I really appreciate that. And I appreciate everything you're bringing to the work that you're doing and just to your life and all the things that you enjoy. And so I would like to ask you to come back on the show six months, eight months down the road, once you're fully open, right? And you have your new podcast started and all the other things that you're going to be doing to put brilliance into the world. So, Monica, I will have, of course, your personal website where people can sign up for your newsletter, as well as the Flipwork website in the show notes. So I just want to ask, do you have a favorite quote, mantra, family motto, verse, poem, just words that continue to inspire you?

What Flipwork Does And Who It Serves

SPEAKER_01 43:41

Yeah, you know, you know, I have a lot, right? I have some that are very inspirational, but one that my wife, Nikki, who's the CEO of our company, Flipwork, I mean, she said something that really resonated with me. And I think it's perfect for this day and age, is that it's no longer survival of the fittest, it's survival of the fastest. And so it used to be the other way around, but now it's one of these things where we have to embrace this idea of change or get comfortable with change and be excited about you may not do a project or a task in the same way two times in a row, you know, and it's okay. You'd still come out with the same output. And so for me, it's that it that really resonated with me of like learning to pivot and really kind of this idea of reinvention is gonna be kind of the new normal. And it's something that we all have to get used to because our brains aren't wired that way.

SPEAKER_02 44:37

Yeah, fantastic. Thank you so much for being on the show. Really appreciate your time and looking forward to having you back on in the future.

SPEAKER_01 44:46

Absolutely. Well, thanks again, Anika, for the platform for the work that you do. I truly believe in podcasts and the work you do because you're really democratizing access to the masses. Because not everybody will have proximity to people with knowledge, and you're creating that platform for people to kind of hear from different voices, different areas of expertise. And so kudos to you as well.

SPEAKER_02 45:09

Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And thank you to everybody who's joined us today. Be sure to give us a rating, review, follow, subscribe, share with a friend. Discoverability is huge for podcasters and it really helps us continue our platforms. With that, have a brilliant day. And I hope that this episode with Monica and Marquez really inspired you to think about your reinvention in this new era of AI.

SPEAKER_00 45:35

To learn more about the Master of Science and Digital Media Management program, visit us on the web at dmm.usc.edu.