How AI Is Reshaping Education Beyond the Classroom in 2026 with Christophe Zoghbi

Michael interviews Christophe “Chris” Zoghbi, founder and CEO of Zaka, about how AI is reshaping education and workplace learning, with a focus on the Middle East. Zoghbi shares his path from software engineering and early machine-learning work in 2014 to building Beirut AI and then Zaka to make AI accessible through training, consulting, development, hiring, and governance. He explains how AI is shifting education away from memorization toward practical, personalized, project-based learning, including Zaka’s Seeds K–12 program for students and educators. They discuss corporate AI adoption challenges, the need for contextual hands-on training, and Zoghbi’s mission to build local talent to solve local problems.

Timestamps:
00:24  Welcome and Setup
01:28  Christophe Origin Story
05:28  AI Then vs Now
07:09  Rethinking Curriculum
09:29  K12 AI Learning Path
13:23  Corporate AI Transformation
16:34  Training for Real ROI
21:50  Global Adoption Patterns
24:23  Democratizing AI Access
27:18  Why Focus on MENA
29:09  Key Takeaways

Connect with Chris:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophezoghbi/
https://zaka.ai

Michael's National Workforce Study on Change Management:
https://www.michaeljlopez.coach/research

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Top Voice Podcast, where each week I sit down with leading voices in business leadership and transformation to unpack the issues that matter most. Together, we explore fresh insights, bold ideas, and real-world stories from people shaping how we think about change, culture, and what's possible.

SPEAKER_02 0:22

Hello and welcome to the Top Voice podcast. It is May 19th. Hard to believe we're almost halfway through the year, but here we are, and I'm excited to have Christoph Zogby with us to talk about a subject that we haven't talked about in some time, which is how AI is reshaping education in the classroom. Your focus is in the Middle East, and we'll talk about that. But the implications of this conversation go well beyond any one region. Christoph, before I give you a chance to introduce yourself, uh quick reminder to those of you who are tuning in live, please do let us know where you're tuning in from. This is a global conversation. So we like to get people from around the world, leave us a comment or a question. We'd love to be able to get to those. And for those of you who are listening on your favorite podcast platform, please do be sure to hit the subscribe button. It's the best way to support the show. Uh, Christoph, I'm excited to get into this. Uh, you're there in Canada, but working in the Middle East, as we always start, tell us who you are, tell us what you do about your companies and why you're focused in this AI education space.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Thank you so much, Michael, for having me on the podcast. So um I'm I'm Christoph Zohbi, or Chris for short. Uh I'm the founder and CEO of Zaka, and I've been working in the tech field for the last 15 years. Uh, I got into artificial intelligence back in 2014. Uh, I was working on a startup. I had a product I was building as a software engineer. So, my background is in software engineering. I'm a very technical person by nature, and I was building that product, and it required what we know as machine learning. So, building some models to collect data and stuff like that. So, I had to jump on the opportunity to learn. I had no idea what that required. I didn't know what machine learning was, what are the models, all of these things. So I did what any engineer would do. I went on Google and I started searching and reading and diving into topics. But back then there wasn't enough information as easily accessible as today, right? We didn't have these online courses, and AI wasn't as trendy as it is today. So it wasn't very simple for me to kind of learn all of that. It took me time, but I at the end of it, I came out with a big passion for AI. So, long story short, um I I went on on building this product, but also the startup obviously uh failed. But what remained was my passion for AI and uh what I learned. And uh I wanted to spread that you know, that initiative that I had, like the passion uh on AI and the power that I noticed that AI can have. So back then I was still based in Lebanon. Uh so I founded a community called Beirut AI, and the goal of that community was to promote artificial intelligence, practical AI in Lebanon. And we organized a lot of events and meetups, and we brought speakers who share their experiences. And I noticed that there's a big hype around AI, but when it came to implementation, people were still lacking the proper understanding of how to do that. And this is where I noticed that I can do this as my full-time job because I love sharing knowledge and you know, creating content and doing these workshops. So the educational piece, which I'm not an educator, but I kind of figured that I had to make this transition. And there's a big need uh back in Lebanon and the region at the time. AI was very new as a topic. So this is when I decided to build Zaka. And uh basically over the last several years, we've been focused on mainly one mission at Zaka, which is making AI accessible to everyone across the region. So that means a lot of trainings, capacity building, also consultancy, and now we offer you know a bunch of uh services. So, in a nutshell, we've trained you know professionals, educators, students, executives, um, startups, like different target audiences around uh AI, you know, what it means for them, practical AI. We've done the technical part of AI where you know you're building code and writing Python stuff to train models, and we've done the Gen AI, AI tools part where anyone can now leverage an AI to help them do their job. So we've kind of done the whole thing, and now we're considered one of the leaders in AI training and education in the region. And we've started also expanding uh our offerings uh where we now have a product and a subunit called um seeds, and seeds is our K-12 AI for schools uh program. So in a nutshell, SEEDS covers a curriculum that that trains students on AI. Also, it's a training for educators, and there's also like a platform. So it combines multiple elements to really provide the full AI transformation that a school would require uh nowadays. And we can dive into that. I know we have some some topics to discuss, but in a nutshell, that's what we we've been doing.

SPEAKER_02 5:10

Yeah, what a what a great story and what a great reminder to follow your passion and follow your purpose and turn that into education. You you may not be an educator by training, but when you build that much educational material, I think you become one. Um, I I before we dive into this, I'm just curious for someone who's worked in AI for a decade and plus, clearly we're at a different in a different world right now. How would you describe the maybe the difference in the tools? Clearly, the difference is about scale and accessibility and capacity, but what what is really different now about what's happened with AI than maybe this small community of people that were starting a decade ago before anyone really knew what what the term AI was?

SPEAKER_00 5:56

I mean, I can tell you directly from my experience at Zaka. Uh in 2019, 2020, we were knocking on doors to kind of get people to let's develop something, let's train, like do something with AI. And most people did not really care about that. They they saw AI as either too futuristic or too technical, they didn't really care. Uh, whereas now it's the opposite. People now see the value, it's much more like mainstream, if you want to say, it's much more accessible for them, and they can see the tangible results. Like, even if we did a training back in 2020, for example, AI was something where it's more of a concept. Unless you're a technical person who wants to build solutions, you can do much with it, right? But now we do trainings, let's say, for marketing people, for finance, for HR. Any person can leverage a bunch of tools and they can see the effect in their jobs, right? Because we're teaching them how to build automations, how to build agents for their day-to-day tasks. So they can see the results immediately. And this is amazing because the idea of AI is now much more useful and practical for them.

SPEAKER_02 7:03

Yeah, yeah. Well, let's dive into that because I think the you know, the biggest thing when it comes to education, and maybe just say the quiet part out loud, is at least here in the US, but I think it's probably a Western orientation mostly, education has been built around memorization. What can I remember? I I study some material, I commit that material to memory, I take a test, I demonstrate that I remembered those things. I'm obviously generalizing here a bit, and and then I get a grade. And clearly AI represents a pretty big shift where I don't have to remember everything. So when it comes to the curriculum, and maybe this is just in your in in the MENA region, but but what is it changing about the curriculum and and how we actually educate young people?

SPEAKER_00 7:52

So I believe in general, education is kind of shifting from the static theory uh memorization, as you mentioned, one size fits all, into more of a dynamic uh approach that is more uh application-based, practical, personalized, right? So um, and this is what AI is helping with. So uh in general, as I said, uh education is changing. What do I need to memorize if if if any information is like two seconds away? I can just open up my phone and click a couple of buttons and I have that info. So why do I need to memorize? Um, same thing with the the the way we approach learning, right? Um, this why do I have to like say learn the first 10-15 years of my life and then learning stops there? It's actually changing more into like life learning, lifelong learning. So, my point is that education in general is changing because the our lives are changing by technology, and the biggest part of technology is AI. That's the most acceleration that's happening. Um, and that's where you know AI is also helping um change this to become more personalized, right? That's the biggest uh takeaway from AI in education, is it's helping teachers kind of uh focus on changing the content, adapting their uh teaching styles, their content, their information to each student's uh pace of learning and style of learning and all of these things. Um so that that's that's the biggest shift that that I see in the education uh field nowadays.

SPEAKER_02 9:24

Yeah. So if if I'm a you mentioned the work you do in K through 12. So if I'm a walk us through that, what does that journey look like? I mean, I can again I can equate it to I've got a two-year-old and I've got an 18-year-old, and I I know and I got a middle schooler, so I know the journey of what they work on. When it comes to AI, what what is my journey as a as a as a preschooler, as a first grader, and moving on, how does that change the expectations of what I'm doing along that that journey?

SPEAKER_00 9:57

Um, so okay, so the idea here becomes some schools, uh actually most schools don't really know how to adapt to this technology, right? Do we ban it, do we uh uh approve it? And if we approve it, how do we actually use it, right? There are different tools that a student can use in their journey to learn and to, or maybe a teacher can also use, but no one's actually focusing on how do we teach them on AI. Like, what is AI? Like, how do I deal with that technology, right? We're using ChatGPT and Claude and these tools, but not only how do I prompt it, but how does it work? Like what's the magic behind it? So we we set out to initially build this curriculum that teaches both students and educators on AI as a technology because that's what we do. We we are initially educators uh of AI. So we set out to do this curriculum, and then along the way, we noticed that we actually did the curriculum four times. We had to repeat it because each time we did the version, it was like, okay, that works, but is this what they care about? So at the end, we ended up with a project-based, very practical uh program for the students where they're not learning about AI and learning technical terms. Who cares about you know what we call this or that? They're learning to do day-to-day tasks that they usually do using some AI tools. Like, for example, the grades four, five, six, we teach them storytelling, right? How do I create a story? I create my characters, uh, I create a visual for that character, I place that character in a story. Maybe I animate, I create some visuals. So there are different things that we can add in terms of storytelling where I'm leveraging generative AI tools to create that, to make that happen, for example. Um when you're a bit older, you care about games or you care about something maybe more. So, how do I create games with AI? How do I create maybe uh a study helper, someone who can help me study or understand the concept? And for the high school level, we focus more on the career side. So, how do I maybe prepare for a better career? What do I need to specialize in? Uh, build my personal profile or websites or maybe LinkedIn profiles. So we have tools and we have AI prompts and we have curriculum based built around these topics. And the whole point is for them, they're doing something they already need to do, uh, something they care about, and they're learning how to best deal with AI, how to best you know, prompt it and all of these technical things, they're learning them indirectly by applying on these projects.

SPEAKER_02 12:25

Yeah. One of the things I hear is a big shift is this shift from education is about finding the answers that somebody's already identified to solving novel problems that I experience in my life with creativity and exploration and experimentation and you know, failure starting over, all of those things, which is a really interesting way to think about it because I think so much of again, my my my high schoolers here, they some of their teachers are like use it, some of them are like don't. And it's very confusing for them to understand because it's all about just finding the answer that somebody's already come up with. I mean, my my two-year-old daughter knows how to talk to my Apple Watch, and she loves to come up with timers and all sorts of different stuff. So there's a real natural faculty with the tools, even if they don't understand what they're there for. So uh so that's interesting. Let let's let's come back to this in the corporate world later because I want to talk about your other big mission, which is democratizing AI access. And and I I I liken this to when the internet became a thing and it was all about democratizing access to the internet, making sure people had Wi-Fi access or terminals. What are you all doing there? How do you do that? How is that mission going? Because this feels like an important moment.

SPEAKER_00 13:45

Absolutely. And this is a moment that kind of really started happening after the ChatGPT release, right? Because as I said, prior to that, maybe most corporates didn't really see any value in AI or didn't see the transformation effect. But now we're getting a lot of requests on a day-to-day basis from companies who want to adopt AI and help us figure out what do we do with AI. And for all of them, AI is still this big uh unknown black box. They just call it AI. But if you break it down, AI can mean a million different things to a million different persons. So our job is really to help guide them through this uh world of AI and to kind of summarize things. We we have five main pillars that we support companies with. We call them our transformation operating system. The first one is training and capacity building, where we kind of run workshops, trainings, help them understand uh you know what AI is and what does it look like for them. The second pillar is the consulting pillar where we guide them into understanding where AI fits into their company and what does it look like for them to have that AI. The third pillar is our development uh branch, where we have them build automations, build agents, or any custom AI solutions for their company. Um, the fourth one is hiring, because talent is very important for any company, and that's what we want to do. Part of our community is training and building this talent uh pool to be able to support companies in the talent that they're looking for. So that's a big effort for us. And then the last pillar is mainly governance, uh, policies, frameworks. So, how do I run AI at scale? And so, across those five pillars, we support companies at different sizes to help them um uh like transition to become an AI-enabled uh organizations or or entity. And lots of interesting examples there, lots of you know, people who are really eager to start pushing and implementing AI.

SPEAKER_02 15:41

One of the things I I did a post the other day because I last Friday my computer stopped sending email to anyone with a gmail.com address. And I had no idea why. I called a buddy of mine who knows a lot about computers, and we dropped the error I was getting into Gemini. It took me a couple hours, but I solved the problem. And it it reminded me of a lot of the AI pilots that we're seeing, at least here, maybe in America, but we've seen them in other global companies. A lot of the data suggesting that they're not being effective, they're not getting the returns, employees are being asked to log in, play around, figure it out, solve a problem, but not a lot of structure around what they're doing, or maybe a North Star or, you know, other sort of clear objectives. Since we were talking about education, what what's the biggest difference of educating an adult in a corporate setting when it comes to AI than maybe thinking about the younger generation? Because that's a that's obviously a big opportunity, but adults are very different than young people who are open to experimentation and learning in different ways.

SPEAKER_00 16:50

You know, if you think about it honestly, there's not much difference between both, and I'll tell you why. Um we thought there was a difference, but based on my experience with different things we're running, it's actually pretty similar in a way where I think effective education needs to be practical, needs to be contextual in the context that like you care about, needs to be role-based, needs to be uh um hands-on, right? And whether you do that for a five-year-old student or for a 50-year-old employee at the company, it's literally the same thing. Once you go to a company, for example, if if you care, if you work in finance and I'm giving you prompts for how to create a marketing campaign with ChatGPT, you will not care, right? Like it's not gonna trigger you. It has to be, even if it's a practical, it's not contextual, it's not role-based, it's not something you can relate to. Or if I talk about the history of AI and what AI has been doing for the last five years, you don't care if it's not something you can benefit with. Like the number one demand we see in all people or professionals is that yeah, AI is amazing. Tell me how I can benefit from it. Tell me what's the low-hanging fruit, what's the prompt I can use, or the tool I can app I can install, and tomorrow I have some productivity gains. They want to see how they can benefit directly. And the good thing is that they can do that, but sometimes it's also not directly jumping into the prompt. You have to take a moment and understand the technology, right? That's something we always do. Even though you don't really like to listen to it, we give you a bit of the history, not the history, but like the magic behind the scenes. How does an LLM work, a large language model? How does it work? Because if you know how it works, you know why sometimes it hallucinates or it gives you, you know, like wrong information. So I can just give you a prompt and say, okay, run this prompt and you'll get an amazing results. But did I teach you how to fish or did I give you give you a fish? Right? So we want to teach people how it works so that eventually tools come and go, but fundamental understanding remains, right? So if tomorrow a new LLM pops up or a new tool is there, if you understand the basics, you can learn how to use a tool. But we teach you the framework, the structured thinking. And same thing to go back to the students and the younger age students as well. As long as it's something they are interested in, right? Uh something they're doing that it's fun for them, they can see, oh yeah, I would care about this, then they would be doing it and learning from it. So that's what I think is the same.

SPEAKER_02 19:16

Yeah. I I appreciate that distinction. I guess maybe let me pick on that a little bit because not the on the distinction between learning, but there's a different set of incentives, perhaps, with companies who are trying to get a certain set of returns out of those pilots. There's there's either one of two expectations: either you're gonna do more, which is gonna earn me more, or you're gonna do faster, which is gonna save me more, which is ultimately gonna improve profit. How do those incentives influence the experience of learning in the corporate setting? Does it put pressure on it? Is it not material? Does it depend?

SPEAKER_00 19:53

Uh, I mean, you're absolutely right. And usually companies who are paying for the training, they care about, as you said, an ROI. Like I need to see that return. And we, our job is to balance basically the ROI for the company versus the ROI for the for the individual as well. Um, like a lot of companies just they just reach out and say, okay, we have this co-pilot license. I want to maximize. I'm paying for the license. I don't see anyone like using it. I need more people to be using that license. So come in, deliver a training, help them understand that. I mean, like, yeah, sure, I would love to do that. But also sometimes our job is to push back on a little bit on that and say, like, we're not just delivering training for the sake of training, we want to see real uh impact or real adoption. So we usually couple the training with some uh like a challenge where okay, now that you've learned these things, apply them on this specific challenge for your department, right? And then we provide the mentorship, we provide the guidance after the training to make sure that there is this proper adoption, change management piece of of the training as well.

SPEAKER_02 20:58

So so yeah, I think that that's what the I I spend a lot of time, obviously, I spend a lot of time in the world of change. That's kind of what I do. And one of the things I do note, and I said this in my post, was that it's change for change sake is not is not really helpful. It you've got to have a purpose behind it that has two things, and I think you've hit that really well. One is a broader context of why you're doing it, but then is some kind of personal attachment to the goal itself. And I always I say this to my clients all the time we own what we create. So if I have a vested interest in something being helpful, beneficial, positive, I'm gonna be more motivated with that. So so what do we run into then? And maybe I I know you're focused in the re in in the in the MENA region, but do you have some perspective on variation across the globe and other regions, Asia, Europe, the US, that is there any difference of what's happening across corporate cultures or cultures itself as it comes to AI adoption?

SPEAKER_00 21:58

Uh I think. More or less they're similar, and that's what I'm discovering uh with time. Um, maybe it changes from the size of the company and maybe the industry. But overall, I feel people are saving the same the same issues. Uh, everyone is uh interested and eager to to kind of benefit from AI, but at the same time doesn't understand exactly how to get there. You always have people within any company that are early adopters, champions, jumping on already, like using these tools on a day-to-day basis. But this is 10% of the most of the employees. The remainders are either dinosaurs, we call them, where they don't care about you know, jumping in, or they they don't know, or they have fears about AI being replacing them, or oh, it's too late for me to learn, I'm too old for this, or AI is only technical, so it's not for me. So there's like a a bunch of majority for that falls under that category. But I believe overall it's literally the same. Like in the Middle region or in the US or in Canada, uh, same things are happening because we're seeing this um in a way, uh, equalization. Like um, technology is once you deploy a feature here, it gets used everywhere, right? So um I don't see that big of a difference. The difference comes maybe more into the um different company uh countries maybe investing more in specific areas, supporting maybe the ecosystem for startups or things like that. But within the corporate world, it's the same. Companies are getting their you know, ChatGPT or copilot licenses for their employees, whether it's in the US or in the MINA region. They are getting investing and training and upskilling them. So you don't see a lot of difference there.

SPEAKER_02 23:37

Yeah. I I think this this concept of experimentation and being hands-on, creating, trying, and and understanding is a really important point. I I always liken it to when I was in geometry class. I remember when I was a sophomore in high school, I used to get very frustrated by proofs when we'd have to do word problems. And I remember my teacher at the time, and I I remember this to this day, so good on him, said it's one thing to know the answer. It's it's another to understand why it's the answer. And I think that's what you're you're getting at here in terms of a fundamental understanding of what these two tools do and what they're capable of and and and why and how you can use them in really additive ways. Uh we're getting close to time, Kristen. I want to come back to the to the democratization of access peace a little bit because I think you have not just a corporate mission to train people, but it sounds like a much more purpose-driven mission to make sure that everyone has access to these tools. They are fundamentally changing the world. Tell us more about what that looks like. Is it uh a nonprofit sector of your business? Is it uh a side project? Is it something that you're doing in addition to? We'd love to hear more about that.

SPEAKER_00 24:50

I think um I always say that community is like at the heart of Zaka, even though we're a for-profit company. Zaka grew out of a community. I remember I founded Beirut AI as a just a community to promote AI. We did a lot of workshops and a lot of uh knowledge spreading, and the whole mission was to you know democratize access to knowledge. But then I figured out maybe the best and fastest way to grow it is to make it a company, put in all my effort and investment and then scale that while keeping the community at the center and keeping this mission. So I do believe you can merge both. It's not always easy, but it's doable. And the goal for me is to uh like build local talent pools to be able to really, especially in the region, make us not only uh users of technology but creators of technology. So I I've been working in the field for a long time and I saw that you can be based out of a small country like Lebanon, who at the time no one was doing AI, but still work with companies in the US and in Europe who are developing cutting-edge AI solutions. You know, you can get access to the same opportunities. What you're looking for is maybe just knowledge, know-how, right? Anyone is based anywhere in the world, can now access everything online, and you are kind of equalizing or uh democratizing that access. So, same thing, that that's the that's the core mission of Zaka is how do we make sure everyone understands and has access to the same tools and knowledge to build, right? And because at the end of the day, you need local people to build solutions for local problems. You cannot expect someone sitting in a different country to solve your problems, they don't see that problem, it's a different problem. So, local people solving local problems, that's the best usage of AI. And AI can do that, right? It can be that leverage.

SPEAKER_02 26:36

I I love that. I I'd never heard it said that way. And I think if you look at the big tech companies that obviously dominate our life and meta and Google and and X, you know, and now OpenAI and Claude, and those companies now I think have given us tools that allow us to solve things locally. I mean, I I I have a I built a CRM system on my computer using Claude that runs my podcast, and I have all my guests in a pipeline and I know who's coming when and all that other stuff. I didn't have to go buy a commercial product to do that. I could figure that out. It's not perfect, but I'm learning just like the people that you teach. So let's talk about the region real quick because I think clearly, you know, obviously you've you've got a background there, you came from there. Um, do you work in other parts? Why just the MENA region? Yeah, I know you're in Canada. How does that work in terms of your passion and commitment to the region, which is undergoing a it seems like we say this all the time, but there's some turbulence there. You know, what what is it about your mission just in that region? And and do you work in other parts of the globe or are you really exclusively focused there?

SPEAKER_00 27:43

Uh there's always something happening in the region. It's never a like a calming period. But yeah, nowadays it's a bit more than than usual. Um, so yeah, as I said, like I'm a Lebanese person. I was born and raised in Lebanon, and when I grew up, uh I wanted to focus on that region because I feel like there's a lot, a lot of uh untapped potential, to be honest. Um, and it's growing a lot. Like when I came to Canada, I actually noticed that it's growing bigger and faster than things are growing here. There are more opportunities in the region, in Dubai, in Saudi Arabia, in Abu Dhabi, in Qatar, than than there are here. Because companies over there and the government as well, that they are very serious about you know adopting and implementing practical AI solutions. So we see more of uh like money flowing investments, companies actually interested instead of just you know um high-level things. So there's a very big market that is growing. Uh, I don't mind working outside. It's not like I exclusively focus on the region, but there's a lot there that I can't even have the time and effort to put it anywhere else. Uh so that's the reason why I'm focusing there.

SPEAKER_02 28:52

Yeah, I just think it's great that you're committed to planting seeds where you where you grow, and and when you combine it with this local tools for local pro local problems, I can see and understand how you're making an impact. Uh, Christoph, we've we've talked about a lot here on the show as we normally do. It's kind of time to start thinking about wrapping up. Uh what are the two to three things you want the listener to take away or the viewer to take away from this conversation about the future of learning, uh, democratizing access, the transformation of the education system as it relates to AI and the moment that we're in?

SPEAKER_00 29:28

Um, I think everyone should know that AI is becoming this new form of literacy. It's not enough for you to just know how to use the internet or like digital literacy. You need to know how to use AI because it's becoming like part of the everyday job, your career, your everyday life. I think the future belongs to fast learners, not just experts, but people who can adapt because learning is not just in the classroom. You're always on the go, things are always moving. So your ability to adapt quickly and to keep on learning is something essential. Um, and kind of to focus back on the education sector specifically as well. I believe also the role of educators is also evolving and not disappearing, but it's changing with AI. So I really encourage all educators to adapt to that because education is building the future, right? The shaping the minds of the kids for the future. So if you play it right, I believe you know we have a prosperous future and we can uh, you know, rest assured that the future is in safe hands.

SPEAKER_02 30:28

I love that. I love that. And I think it's I'm taking away adaptation, experimentation, and adaptation. Those are two words that I talk a talk a lot about. And I think it is truly we are seeing not just the introduction of a new technology, but the way in which that technology is starting to shape human behavior. And we're not done, we've got a long way to go. And and we're lucky that we have people like you and your company that are helping the young minds of the world start to start to move in the right direction. Um, Christoph, also, as you know, we have a closing tradition on this podcast that I shamelessly stole from somewhere else, but I love it because it's a great way to have continuity. Where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest. Uh, so the question that's been left for you, as you look back, is there anything that you would do differently in your career or business?

SPEAKER_00 31:14

Um not maybe differently, but I would start what I what I did a bit earlier, and I would have more confidence and in what I did because I I like as I said, I'm a technical person, I'm an engineer, I'm not a business person. For me to have the confidence to actually build a business and put myself out there, even AI, I had to learn it on my own. No one taught me AI. So to have this confidence to actually stand on stage or in front of people and say, hey, I know about AI, let me teach you, let alone charge you money, let me just tell you about AI. This took a long time, much more than it needed to, to be honest. So if I would redo something, I would just put more confidence in myself and jump into this a bit uh earlier, sooner.

SPEAKER_02 32:00

I can relate to that. One of the things I hear a lot from people that have made big decisions in their life is the one of the first things they say is, I wish I had done it sooner. And I know for me, going on my own and starting my own company, I wish I had done it 10 years before. But I think that's the benefit of looking back, is you don't always get to know and you appreciate the moments. And as it becomes an educator, you've you can tell that story to other people. Don't don't wait to chase your dreams. And I think that's wonderful. Absolutely. Uh, Chris, this has been a great conversation. Where can we follow you, learn more about your company? For those who are listening and want to learn more, uh, where can we find you?

SPEAKER_00 32:34

Um, I mean, we're very active on social media. You can, or just go to our website, uh, Zaka.ai, Z-A-K-A.ai. You can find our social media handles, our newsletter, and also seeds and other other other projects that we have. So follow us there and uh we hope to see you soon.

SPEAKER_02 32:52

Yeah, well, and we'll include all that in the show notes. Uh, thank you for this. I think it's just been such a great deep dive into the importance of the topic in education. We haven't talked about it, as I mentioned, for a long time. So thank you for sharing all that with you. Thank you for coming on. Uh, for those of you that tuned in today, uh, please do make sure you hit subscribe and follow us and subscribe to the podcast. And as you see behind me, uh, I wanted to reiterate again, we just released a new national study called Rethinking Change Management, uh, voices from a thousand workers across America about what's really needed in the world of organizational change. And we hit on some of that today. And you so beautifully articulated being hands-on, experimentation, adaptation, support, understanding that it takes time, the creativity, you know, these are the things that have been hallmarks of human learning for a long time. And the world of organizational change seems to have forgotten some of that. So if you're interested in that study, go to michaeljlopez.coach slash research, and you can download the study for free. Thank you again, Chris. Thank you all for tuning in today. And we'll see you next week on the Top Voice podcast. Thank you. Thank you, Mike.