AI Hype to Healthy Habits

AI is everywhere, but adoption isn't.

In this episode of The Metamorphosis Moment, Nancie McDonnell Dougherty explores how marketing leaders can move teams from uneven AI experimentation to healthy, sustainable habits. Samantha Martin, Executive Coach at Noetic Consultants, brings an on-the-ground perspective of why adoption stalls, where teams get stuck, and how to adopt AI without losing the humans in the process.

Listen for practical guidance on how to spot readiness gaps, create clearer workflows and guide teams through AI change without adding more chaos.

Curious how mission, strategy and proof align inside your organization?

At Noetic Consultants, we help leaders connect culture to credibility and brand to business impact.

Learn more at noeticconsultants.com.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Everyone thinks about the robots. Like AI is the robots.

SPEAKER_00 0:03

The robots are coming. They only work with humans. We have to make them human.

SPEAKER_02 0:15

This is the Metamorphosis Moment, a podcast from Noetic Consultants. We are researchers, strategists, trainers, and coaches obsessed with how change actually sticks. On our show, we have candid discussions with leaders who are embracing change, and we work to uncover what they're doing to help others achieve similar success. Just like with our clients, we bring our Noetic Secret Sauce to each conversation. We dig into the messy middle, finding human behavior and leadership factors that are making a difference, and sharing practical guidance that you can use in the moments that matter most. I'm your host, Nancy McDonald Doherty. Let's fly. If AI in your organization feels a little chaotic right now, you're not alone. There's a lot of emotion around AI, and even though it seems to be everywhere, adoption is wildly uneven. Senior marketers know AI is important, but most teams are stuck in that in-between zone where AI is being used, but it's happening individually and inconsistently. In the broader world, it's loud and full of hype, but inside organizations, it's chaotic and unclear. Which adds tension to the already emotionally charged conversation, governance concerns, privacy concerns, job security fears, and honestly confusion about what good even looks like. So today I'm sitting down with my noetic team member, Samantha Martin, to move this conversation out of hype and into productive AI habits. We'll be unpacking what's going on inside marketing teams right now and why leadership matters so much in this moment. Thanks for listening in. Today is a really special day because I have the wonderful Samantha Martin with me, who is on our team and just an amazing contributor, and I'm super, super excited to have her here. And we are going to be talking all about AI today. Big topic, obviously, for many, but in particular, we're going to talk about how senior marketers are navigating it right now or not navigating it as it goes. So welcome, Sam. So happy to have you here.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Thank you. I'm so excited to be here and to talk about AI. You know, like it's been a journey for me and you've been leading the charge. So I'm excited to talk about it.

SPEAKER_02 2:42

Yeah, we're all rolling on the journey. What we're gonna get at today is helping people who are listening understand like what's going on out there, you know, normalize it a bit and talk about like where are we right now and what can everybody do to try to advance themselves. It's a super hot topic. It's being talked about anywhere and everywhere. And what we're seeing right now is this unevenness, you know, I'll call it like lumpiness, where everybody knows AI is important. But what we're seeing in marketing functions at the senior marketer level, all the way through teams, is that people are working with AI to very, varying degrees. So we have people who are really into it, you know, using it every day. You have people who aren't using it at all, and then people in many different places in between. But in general, we are seeing that people are not using it as a team. So let's just start there. What are you seeing from marketing leaders when you talk to them about AI?

SPEAKER_01 3:43

Yeah, um, you said it beautifully. It's like the inconsistency. Every organization is approaching it differently, and I think it's because people don't know how to govern it yet. Um, we hear that um in some of the very larger organizations, they're creating their own AI, which then it puts some of their marketing leaders at a bit of a disadvantage because they're waiting to create that AI. And so then they're like secretly using Chat GPT on their phone because they don't want to miss out on what's happening. And then we see teams kind of hoarding that knowledge because um as like individuals. Yeah, because they don't want to lose their jobs and they're they're concerned. There really is just a lot of fear around it. We have a story where we heard this mid-sized agency shut down all of its AI with no explanation. Someone said something bad had happened, and so then people were like, Oh my gosh, what happened? You know, did someone put something in there? So it's like this real inconsistency and feeling rogue. And I mean, just like anything, you have to have a little consistency to be able to use it.

SPEAKER_02 4:43

Yeah, and and I'll add another story of a big company, Global Company, and they're building one and they've told everybody to wait and like don't use, you know, don't use any tools until you get, you know, the one that's going to be blessed to use. And I'm sitting there with a very senior person who I will not name who is telling me what she is using in her rogue. Yeah. Yeah. She's like, I I can't wait for this in in my role, and and knows like full on that she's not in compliance. So yes, there's a lot going on, and I I agree with you. Governance is is one of the really biggest issues. So when you think about the the hesitancy and the fear, like what in particular, just take that down a click. Like, you know, anytime we learn, we talk all the time about above the line and below the line thinking. Um, so for those of you listening who haven't sat in one of our trainings or our facilitations, it's not our model. But from um the 15 commitments of conscious leadership, they talk about this invisible line that we have around like curiosities above it and fears below it. And and our brains take us into the fear all the time. But like, put a sharper point on that. Like, specific to AI, what are those things that are making people hesitant to jump in?

SPEAKER_01 5:59

Oh my gosh, easy peasy lemon squeezy on that one. It is the data, privacy data. Everyone is so fearful for that. And by the way, we have been brought up over the last 10 years of digital is like, do not PII, do not put PII. You know, that's why we have cookies. And so people are really nervous about what I can put in, what can I put in, what can I ask, what can I ask, especially when we work with healthcare and financial services companies. The second is like, what if I learn to do something really well and it's gonna make me lose my job? Like it's it can replace me, you know, and I think that's a scary moment for people. And then this one, which makes me so sad, is like they think like creativity is gonna be lost. And I'm like a fairly recent adopter to AI, I'd say like the last 12 to 18 months, and I think it makes you more creative. And I call it like the like sourdough starter a moose bouche. Like you have to put the human element on top of it. And so it I have such empathy where they're saying that creativity is gonna be lost because we all see it on TikTok, you know, all those videos that are created and things like that. But like to really have it be impactful for a marketing team, you have to put the human layer on it.

SPEAKER_02 7:01

I agree with you. I think it actually enhances creativity. I don't think it, I don't think it squelches it. Although I do think that you you could get into like lazy thinking. So you could you could, you know, let the AI do it, right? And and then be less creative, but but it doesn't have to be that way. One of the things that I recently read about that creativity concern is the fact that like as as AI gets better and better, a person's creative vision can be brought to life easier and more specifically. So let's say I'm a I'm a sculptor and I have a vision in my mind of what this new statue is going to look like. I don't know, this is the best example, but I'm going with the statue.

SPEAKER_01 7:45

You make the statue, Nancy. Let's do it.

SPEAKER_02 7:47

We'll go with it. I can build that in AI to see what it looks like so that I know and can have with specificity, I can like work through the coding of what's in my brain to then bring it to life as a demo version to then be able to create it. So our ability to take something from our imagination to the page, our imagination to the 3D structure, our imagination to the full documentary, like whatever the thing is, that that that we can do that with more ease with AI. I mean, not AI doesn't have that capability perfected, but that was like just a really interesting angle that I hadn't heard before on the on like further creative juice.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Well, and then riff on that. Imagine if you could put a campaign in there. You know, I've been in marketing for years. Imagine if you put a campaign in there, ask them to build the 3D around it and poke holes at it. Like, what's wrong with this campaign? What like that's creativity and it's giving you that juice of AI to really poke the holes around it very quickly.

SPEAKER_02 8:46

Yeah, that I think the thing that you're also touching on there is the ability of AI to help make one's thinking clearer or better. And while I'm well aware that, you know, it can hallucinate and it's only pulling from what's out there. So you have you know you have to be very discerning. But one of the things I've really noticed, I would say, especially in the last like six months, where I've been really intensely using it for research to get myself smarter on topics that are relevant to noetic and our clients, is that it's making me smarter. It's teaching me things, you know, trust and verify, but it's teaching me things. That actually doesn't make me faster in any way. Like there's no, there's no like, you know, efficiency there. It's actually probably slowing me down in certain kinds of ways, but I feel like it's making my my outputs better. One of the things I know we've been talking about and seeing is that there's a difference in the adoption curve based upon size of company. Like the long story short of that is it's like the mid-sized, which obviously that's a really big range. But I want to talk a little bit about what we're seeing there and why it is like the mid-sized company that seems to be struggling the most with adoption.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

Well, and I think um, touching on it from before, is those enterprise organizations caught AI at the beginning and have built their own AI. So they have been strong. Whereas mid-sized organizations are in that messy middle, they're like, don't have enough money to build one. What should we buy? And then there's so many things to buy now, you know, like are you gonna use Chat GPT or you're gonna use Copilot because that's what's available in there? Are you gonna use Claude? Um, and just not understanding how it can be tailored to them. And then we sit in, you know, a time now where five generations are at work, you know, and so there are people that have been using AI, you know, for the last five years, you know, for so for their whole career, and then people that like me who are just new to it in the last 18 months. So there's this comfort divide of how people are using it.

SPEAKER_02 10:54

Um and a lot of feelings about that too. A lot of feelings about it too. I was talking to somebody yesterday who said with with great emotion, you know, I have been working with AI since 2022. Like it's so it's so tedious to him that people are like just getting on board.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

Well, and and that's an interesting point too, Nancy. Sometimes the more comfortable you get, the less guardrails you give on yourself. You're like, oh, I'm just gonna like start throwing things in there and doing it. And then that becomes a problem in a team, you know, of like somebody who has this expertise on it that feels more comfortable, but then it's not operationalized, like they're not using the right governance.

SPEAKER_02 11:33

Talk about the risk with the governance. Like obviously, if people are going rogue, like which they are, by the way, like especially I will say, like, if your organization doesn't have a governance policy, I and even if you do, if you're not enforcing it and you don't have transparency on it, people are going rogue. But but what about like beyond the governance, which is a huge issue and data privacy and all that, but what else is a company at risk for, you know, if if they're using it just in the individualized manner?

SPEAKER_01 12:07

I think the risk for them is that there isn't a consistent way that it's being used and people are using it without training. I kind of think about if you buy a gym membership and then you don't take advantage of like the tour and you don't understand the classes and you're not going on a consistent basis. That's how I feel organizations have approached. They've bought a big some sort of AI and then they haven't taught themselves how to do it. Um they really need that training for people to use it. Um, and just like a gym membership, some people will go every day, some people will never go, you know. So, how do you like not treat it like a gym membership, treat it like something that is like inherent and something that you have to use every single day?

SPEAKER_02 12:48

Yeah, you don't you don't want to buy the tool and and have it sit on the shelf, but there is the proper use thing, right? And then and then knowing that you have people in all different mindsets with it. So at Noetic, the first thing that we are doing with clients is the AI readiness survey. It's like 15 questions, but it really gets at people's mindsets and beliefs and and behaviors, all of that around what they're doing with AI right now with no judgment. And it's interesting because there may come a day where people wouldn't feel comfortable answer answering this honestly, but right now people are in a space where they are comfortable answering it because everybody knows they need this help. And so it enables us to have an individualized look at all the people in the team, where they are in their AI readiness, and it helps us roll it up and be able to look at the full team and what are those collective gaps and opportunities. And then from there, there's two branch outside. One has to do with okay, from a learning and development standpoint, what do your individuals and what does your team need? And we develop training curriculum around that to get people more AI equipped to where they need to be. And then the workflow side. The workflow side it's really addressing this thing where people are not operationaling, operationalizing AI across. They are working as individuals. So we've always done process work, right? But this is taking AI and infusing it into that workflow. So let's say you are building campaigns, looking at the step by step by step of what you're doing as a team to build out that campaign in partnership with external partners or not, and then where should AI infuse and making that a stood-up process that everyone can then follow? So we look for what we call the hotspots. So when people are telling us about the current state, like we do this and then we do this, and then we do this, oftentimes hot spots come up like where are you spending too much time? Where are things not being done with consistency? Where are the handoffs not really working? Where are people not involved as early on as they should be involved? Where is quality falling off, like whatever is making it difficult? And in some of those cases, not all, AI can help. And so then we figure out where are those places, and then very importantly, we then train it out because you know, just because you document the new process with AI and fuse, and you're like, there it is, really pretty. You know, people don't necessarily know how to use it, but that's really what it takes. And why we start with the AI readiness is that you're this is change management, you know, and you're not gonna get you're not gonna get to the change if you don't start with like where are your people right now? And honestly, like you don't want to skip that part because that's the part where we're finding people pull themselves into a new place of of learning because we really looked at them as an individual of where you are right now, we're gonna meet you where you are and help you get further.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

The key on that too is the consistently training across an entire team, you know, is getting those processes, but make sure we do that consistent training across the team.

SPEAKER_02 15:56

And we can identify champions too. If you have people within the organization who really get it and are passionate about it, there's a very constructive way, non-punitive way, of having those people become part of that effort. It's the same idea of having brand ambassadors within the company. It's AI ambassadors who help catalyze other people.

SPEAKER_01 16:16

Yeah, it's such a smart tool. And I think it's such a benefit for leaders to understand. And I think the tool then gives you the right entry points to have conversations. You know, where should you be using it? Where should you not be using it? Should we add governance? What are people confused about? Are people fearful about it? I think it's a really smart way to do it, especially, especially in those middle-sized organizations. Like I think the big enterprises are kind of figuring it out, but in those the messy middle, you know, where can we help people with that?

SPEAKER_02 16:48

Yeah, yeah, agreed. The other really important aspect that I want to make sure people are are thinking through is moving from this individual use, as uneven as that is, into uh what I'll call like workflow use, right? Infusion into your processes, infusion into your ways of working. And what you know, we've talked about is like this work is not really any different in its foundational nature from what process work has always been. And recently, a few months back, we um we did this for ourselves.

SPEAKER_01 17:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:28

And we love to go, shout out to Lands Down in Virginia because it's just beautiful there and they're so nice to us. They have lovely, lovely fireplaces that we sit by. But talk a little bit about like what what that was like, right? Going through that process.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

Yeah, it was a real aha moment because we think that we have good adoption, but to turn the lens on ourselves, drink our own Kool-Aid, drink our own champagne, and throw in a process and say, analyze this process. Um, tell us what we're missing, tell us what where where it can be refined was really amazing. And you said something so interesting. Why are we treating AI different than we've tried treated every process we've been doing in marketing for years? Like, how to do a creative brief, how to launch a campaign. And so that's where I think we could blow the fog off of AI scariness for organizations is like let's assess your AI readiness, but then let's deep dive into the process.

SPEAKER_02 18:24

It's like the bones of it. Yeah, the bones of it are the same. But I think too, I will say, like, uh just such a kudos to you and the team that you have a way of in in trainings, like so, you know, once once we know what those changes are, you know, that you want to infuse, getting people excited about it, getting people to put down their worries and just dig in and learn and feel safe to learn. And it's like the vibe you create, but it's also about getting people focused on the fact that, like, nobody in this room knows how to do this yet. We're creating it together. You know, we talk about that power of co-creating, and it's true. Like, and you get everybody rolling up their sleeves together. And in particular, when you're looking at like the current state, it's really helpful to identify the hot spots. So, where are we spending a lot of time? Where are we maybe not as high quality as we want to be in any way? But a lot of it is about where are the time savers? That's an easy one to think of with AI, but I think the less easy one is where do we need really good collaboration and really good handoffs?

SPEAKER_01 19:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:32

Because that stuff is not going to be solved by AI and should not be replaced by AI. And so you want to protect, right, the parts of the workflow that need to be protected.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

Everyone thinks about the robots, like AI is the robots and the robots.

SPEAKER_00 19:49

The robots are coming.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

They only they only work with humans. We have to make them human. You have a great podcast that you did not too long ago talking about like the eight things that are the soft skills. And I think for a while, soft skills kind of got a bad rap, you know?

SPEAKER_02 20:02

Yeah, soft, soft gets gets easily confused with easy.

SPEAKER_01 20:06

Yeah. And the soft skills um are the hard skills. They're the hard skills, they're the hard skills. And I feel I feel compelled to go through them because I am listed on a sticky note on my laptop. Communication, never easy. You need communication for AI. Collaboration, you have to work together. You need to have curiosity, you need to have creativity, you need to have critical thinking. People think that AI gets rid of critical thinking. It's not, it makes your brain get bigger. I love that when I put something into AI and I'm like, hey, you know what? That's a that's a good thing. That's interesting. I hadn't thought of that. Um, you have to be adaptable. AI is not really adaptable. We have to be adaptable as humans. We have to be emotionally intelligent. We still have to deal with each other. And then we got to project manage the whole thing to the end. AI is not doing any of that. So when people get fearful about losing their jobs, I'm like, lean into those soft skills. Like, have those soft skills, like they're so important. And then the other thing that you said was back on training is there is this like little weird thing about AI that people think it just solves it right away. It's not, it's a journey. Like, I think about how much I had to train my AI to like understand like what I'm looking for. Like, try it again, make it more hardworking, think about it. And so when we talk about equipping people, we are equipping people with the right toolbox to use AI. AI is not the toolbox. We have to give you a toolbox to use AI. Like, we want to make it hardworking for you.

SPEAKER_02 21:34

On the skills, I love that you had those on a sticky and wanted to go through all of them. I love that. I want to put a slightly finer point on two of those. One is project management, because I think it just feels like one of these is not like the others. Like we're talking about like, you know, communication, emotional intelligence, whatever. But in a world where we're working alongside the bots and the people, and we're managing, frankly, more complex. Work because we have more capabilities because AI is the engine for that. You have to be more organized. Even in one's own AI ecosystem, you can quickly get lost once you do enough searches. So you have to know when is it time to build, you know, a bot, what chat would call a GPT, when is it time to just do you know a regular old prompt? So it's managing across the projects that you have, but it's also more specifically project managing your own AI work, if that if that makes sense. And then the other one is emotional intelligence. Increasingly, as we are with the tech all the time, we have to remember how to be human with the humans. I I think of back, it probably was like 2006 or something when like blackberries got big. And I was with a client and we were in person and we were walking to lunch, and blackberries had just gotten distributed at the company. And so everybody had one. And we were walking to lunch, and everybody was on their phone, and nobody was talking to each other, and nobody was looking where they were walking. And I'd never seen it before. I'd never seen it before. And I was like, that is rude, it's a little dangerous because people were not looking where they were going, crossing the streets, the sidewalk, whatever. But you think nothing of that now. If you think about this world where we will have robots walking down the street, right? We will have machines. It's gonna be machines and people. We have to bring our humanness all the more. And in bringing our humanness, thinking about how other people will receive your messaging, how other people are feeling about an initiative, that stuff is gonna matter all the more because we'll have less attention naturally paid to it. So I'm not trying to get super existential here, but I just pull those up because I think from from the soft skills that are quite hard, those are those are biggies.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

I do think an interesting um the emotional intelligence one too is that I don't think as good as you can get AI, it's never a copy and paste. And that's something that like organizations need to understand as well, is that it all needs to have an emotional component to it. It and like if you copy and paste, it's kind of like you're plagiarizing AI and you need to put your human element to it to make sure that you've overlaid your curiosity, you've overlaid um the emotional part of it, and just making sure that that is translatable or else it's just robots talking.

SPEAKER_02 24:33

I think I think plagiarism is exactly right. Also, if you don't take the time to rewrite, I I rewrite everything that I get from AI. I rewrite it. I I'll I might paste it as my reference, but I rewrite it. If you don't do that, you don't hold it in your brain.

SPEAKER_01 24:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:54

I I have a friend, you're not present to it, to the content that you have now put out there. I have a friend who did, I forget exactly what it was, and he made this post in social about it that he had done something, I don't know if it was a performance review or it was something like significant for his team. And he had AI do it. And he did copy paste. Like he he said, I did, I copy pasted. And he had somebody come back and ask him a question about it later, and he didn't, he he couldn't pull the file from his brain. And he was like, I'm never gonna do that again. So you know, it it is, it's like problematic. And the if that's not enough reasons, I was reading just this week how hard it is to get AI to write like you, like you, Sam Martin. There's many, many steps that go into it, and even with all those those steps, sometimes the AI devolves back to its own, its own AI-ness and it's and its own voice. So there too. Like, do you want people reading communication from you that sounds like you didn't write it, no? And you can tell. You can tell. It it uses some weird words, and of course the M-dashes. Um, I want to ask you about leadership. You know, leadership when it comes to AI. We are in immense change, so there is an inherent lack of stability when technology is moving so quickly, but it's not like the leaders are sitting there with all the answers. What are you seeing again in the in the glass half bowl? What are you seeing that leaders are doing to create that stability in what is a rather unstable time?

SPEAKER_01 26:31

Yeah. Um, I mean, there's a really simple answer to this is leaders continue to be stable. We've seen the really beautiful leaders are the ones that are steady through the course, you know, like they they're they're navigating the waters, they're figuring it out, they're admitting when it's hard. You know, I'm thinking about the global organization we're working with right now who has like an amazing CMO who's steady through it all. Like so many things are happening, and she's steady and she's trying out AI and she's trying out all sorts of things and is being very honest with her team. But I also think she's equipping her team. You know, that's why, of course, I'm gonna talk about our AI readiness again. She wants to know where her team is, you know, and like using an AI readiness is to say, wow, these are my gaps. This is what I'm looking at six months, 12 months, 18 months from now, that I can fill in those gaps. It would be hard to be a CMO right now. Um you know, they have so many reasons for many reasons, but AI is like that additional one, and just to be steady through the storm and to make sure that your team feels adapted and they're using their gym membership.

SPEAKER_02 27:34

I literally am just off a coaching call with a senior leader. And what you're saying right now around that stability, it was a big part of our conversation. And I just want to give like a plug for having a coach if you're a senior leader. Now, you know, I of course think you should do that with us, but but but honestly, just the idea of having a coach if you are in a leadership position, because and and what I was just discussing in this session is you really need to be that stability. And when you are that stability, your people get so much from that. It's like when a toddler falls down and skins their knee, the first thing they do is they look at their parent to see whether or not they should be upset.

SPEAKER_01 28:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:21

And when the parent is not upset, they don't they don't cry. They get up and you know, they they move on. However, there's a there's a wear and tear on that too, because the leader is being that absorber, right? They're they're absorbing all of that. That is part of where coaching can be so helpful because it gives you this like safe container confidential space to work through your management of yourself. And I really think that any great leader has a coach for performance, but I also think for one's emotional management of oneself is an amazing tool. Let's let's talk a little bit about like on the bright side. What do you see happens when leaders are setting those clear guardrails, when they're helping people, like leaving room for the fears, but pushing them to the curiosity? Like, what kinds of things do you observe in in that space where people are doing it well?

SPEAKER_01 29:17

One thing that I would say is leaders that acknowledge AI is here to stay is such a mind-opening moment for a team. Um, because I think there's a lot of like hesitancy about using it and guardrails, and we can talk about all these things, but like just having that acceptance that AI is around and we're gonna have to figure out how to navigate it. And for leaders to be very specific about how to use it. Um, we were actually in a meeting and um something came up and the leader looked it up and said, Oh, yeah, I just put it in Chat GPT, and this is what they said. There's a good idea. And like the team was like, Wait, you're using Chat GPT? And she's like, No, we should all be using Chat GPT. And so it's like demo do, you know, as a leader, show how to use it, show that it's um an opportunity to be collaborative and not to be um just kind of using it on your own and not sharing. Um, that's where I'm seeing the the best, also finding really specific moments to use it. So I'll use an example for an organization that really researched what their competitors were doing in campaigns, adding that overlay of looking at it on AI. It was different than you know, they could go out there and Google and see what they were doing. But then adding that, um, like look at these three competitors, what are they doing for you know their camp their digital campaigns? Tell us like where there's gaps, where there's strengths. And I thought that was a really interesting way to approach it because in some cases you're gonna have the subjectivity of just looking at it. If you're a creative, if you're a production person, you're looking at it. But then like, let's put it into like the AI expert and to say what they see, what what's the benefit, what's a strength. So those are just two like examples that are off the top of my head.

SPEAKER_02 31:04

I love that. I think what you're saying in the in the demo, do like leaders need to lead from the front on this. You know, there there are various things have that have come up over the years that are, you know, technological advances that I think if you're a very senior leader, you appropriately delegate. You know, you might even stand up a function around it, but but you might delegate to someone to become that expert. And for so many reasons, it's not a good idea with AI because if you don't, it it's it's such a big change. I'm not gonna go to the hype. It's it's huge. It's huge. But it's such a big change that if you as a leader aren't leading from the front, then you you will not have people really respect and understand, no, I really do need to get my mind around this. Again, there's gonna be some people are gonna do it naturally anyway, but you're not gonna get all the people to buy in. It's gonna be hard enough to get all the people to buy in. So we are we are close to the end, Sam. This is not so fast. And I know, I know. I could I could just talk to you all day. Sometimes I do talk to you all day. Um, so typically at the end of a session, we ask our like classic metamorphosis moment question. I'm gonna switch it up a little bit because this is an AI-driven episode. So my question for you is we always talk about like pivotal moments coming out of your chrysalis, right? Is there a moment for you that got you thinking about AI differently? What was your metamorphosis moment when it comes to your AI journey?

SPEAKER_01 32:44

I was really kind of slow to the AI because I was like, the robots, the robots. And then I had one day I saw my husband sent an email, a family, a female email to everyone in the family, and it was so beautifully written. And I was like, I do not know who I'm married to right now. I'm like, what is this? And I go, did you write that? And he said, Oh no, I put it in AI and um it helped me write it. And then I made it sound like me. And I just had this moment of like, it is for everybody. AI is for everybody. It's gonna be out there, and it kind of blew the fog off of my nervousness about getting in it because I didn't want AI to think I was dumb. I know that sounds terrible, but like I didn't want to be like asking the wrong questions and they're like, no. And so it was like AI is everywhere, it's omnipresent. I had to just get in there and do it. And the first, I think the first question I asked AI is what I should be, what should I be asking you AI? Like I wanted it to tell me what to do. Um and that was just my big moment, you know, everyone's gonna use it. Um I have such empathy for leaders because it's hard and you have to figure out how to bring AI into it. Come find us. We're doing the AI readiness. I think even with coaching, um ironically, I just came off a coaching call as well, and she's really stressed about AI, and we talked about it. That's really interesting with our coaching practices is we coach marketing leaders, so coach you through advancing your professional career. But also we are in marketing, we do marketing every day. So, like, what are you finding? How do you make that connection?

SPEAKER_02 34:09

That cross-section, yeah. Yeah. So whether it's, you know, the readiness survey to get a beat on it, whether it's working it into workflows, whether it's working it into coaching, it it's malleable in terms of how we can help, but but we can help. Just adding to your point of like where you didn't want AI to like think that you were dumb. This may sound a little weird. I think one of the things that's made me much better with AI is that I have now made friends with it. It's become a bit of a coworker for me. I don't take everything it says at face value and I don't cut and paste from it, but I try to really tell it what I really think and what I really am trying to do and see what it tells me. And so it's kind of like a an informed and sometimes uninformed advisor of sorts that I have to stay, you know, skeptical and discerning with, but but is inherently trying to be helpful to me. But I don't like it when it blows smoke at me. If you don't tell it to be objective, it's always complimenting you. I don't like so I'm always saying to it, be objective. And and oftentimes I'll say be a tough critic because I wanted to give it to you.

SPEAKER_01 35:23

I think of it like back when I was a kid, we had a full set of encyclopedias. As I became an adult, I had the internet, and now I have AI. You know, it's um we live in amazing times. And I never thought I could just go in and ask for give me a 10-day trip to, you know, Italy. There you go, it gives you a 10-day trip. And then it also can help me with work. I mean, it's just an amazing piece, but it's a tool in your toolbox. Like you still need to be a human, you still need to talk to people, you still need to communicate, but figuring that out and finding those efficiencies and finding those ways to get smarter through AI help is amazing.

SPEAKER_02 35:58

Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time.

unknown 36:02

Of course.

SPEAKER_02 36:02

So much of our getting to a good place with AI is going to be the human leadership. Agreed. Um, so for people who are listening, if there is anything in this conversation that hopefully it sparked some ideas for you, if it sparked questions for you, we'd we'd love to hear from you, or if you have any feedback at all. You can always find us on our website, noaticconsultants.com. I love it when people connect with me on LinkedIn, um, particularly, you know, if it's related to an episode and you know, you have specific thoughts. We are here to help strengthen brands, we're here to help strengthen teams, we're here to help strengthen leaders. AI is a tool in that toolbox. So thank you for listening. Sam, thank you for being with me. And until next time, keep strengthening those brands and the leaders who bring them to life, especially the leader in you. See you next time. Thanks for listening to the Metamorphosis Moment, a podcast from Noetic Consultants. If this episode made you think about what's next for your team or about a challenge you're currently facing, we'd love to hear from you. We often help leaders think through complex issues to realize the change they seek. Until next time, trust the transformation and make it stick.