Aram DiGennaro: AI & The Human Story; AI Workshop @ VACEOs

In this episode of the Coherent Business Podcast, host Aram DiGennaro delivers a keynote-style talk for a room of CEOs and senior leaders navigating the accelerating disruption of artificial intelligence. Drawing on his work as a consultant, strategist, and student of human evolution, Aram cuts through the hype to offer a grounded, whole-brain framework for integrating AI without losing what makes your company — and your people — distinctly human.

Aram opens with a deceptively simple diagnostic: how do you feel about new technology right now? Whether the answer is panic, fear, or greed, he argues that emotional self-awareness is the starting point for strategic clarity. From there, he maps three escalating levels of AI leverage — doing things faster, redesigning the organization, and reimagining what's possible — and challenges leaders to move through all three without letting the technology become the story.

The conversation bridges neuroscience and business strategy, exploring how centuries of industrial reward for left-brain thinking have undervalued the relational, intuitive, and visionary capacities that AI cannot replace. Aram makes the provocative case that AI's rise could actually reverse this imbalance — if leaders are willing to invest in the human side with the same urgency they bring to the technological one. From appointing innovation champions to sitting down with direct reports about their careers, he offers five concrete moves leaders can make now.

Resources: Coherent Business Project Website: https://coherentbusinessproject.com/ — For leaders, thinkers, and builders who believe business can be more than just efficient — it can be whole, human, and meaningful. Aram's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aram-digennaro/

Key Topics: AI adoption and the hype cycle, left brain vs. right brain leadership, three levels of AI leverage, organizational redesign, human skills worth protecting, accountability and AI decision-making, professional development in the age of AI, and injecting humanity as technology scales.

Key Takeaways:

• Master Your Lizard Brain Before You Master AI: Panic, fear, and greed are reactions to hype — not signals for strategy. The two-second test: notice what you feel, then wait for a wiser emotion before you act.
• Three Levels of Leverage — Don't Stop at Level One: Most leaders are using AI to go faster. The real opportunity is in redesigning your organization around new capabilities, then rethinking what your company can produce entirely.
• The Machine Can Now Talk to the Machine: AI doesn't just automate tasks — it frees your best people to do the distinctly human work they were hired to do. That's a shift worth designing for.
• Protect the Skills That Make You Human: If a skill involves dealing with machines, let AI have it. If it involves reading a room, building trust, or carrying responsibility — guard it fiercely.
• You Are Responsible for What AI Decides: The more you outsource deep sense-making, values, and vision to AI, the more you expose yourself — and your company — to accountability without understanding.
• Make It Your Story, Not AI's: The leaders and companies that win the next three years will be the ones who keep their people at the center of the narrative — and invest in human connection as aggressively as they invest in technology.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I really hope that we don't think of the 2020s as the story of artificial intelligence. It needs to become our story. Our story needs to remain the through line. Otherwise, then the doomers are right, right? When they say AI will destroy humanity. If you want to know how to act through what's coming next, you need to learn to pay attention to how you are reacting to what's around you. I'm going to give you a two-second test that will help you determine how to respond to new technology. And that is this. Ask yourself how you feel. And if that emotion is panic, fear, or greed, then take a beat because two things are happening. One, that's not a very smart part of your brain. And you need to master your lizard brain when you're in chaos or when you're in a rapid change or where the stakes are high. The other is that almost by definition, those reactions come from something early in the hype cycle. Panic, fear, and greed are the proper response to hype. So you hear these breathless YouTube videos of I'm replacing 20% of my company processes every week on a compounding basis with open claw. And you're like, oh shit, like my company's going to fall apart. Good. Notice that. Don't fight it. Don't try to repress the lizard brain, but wait for a second and see if you get a wiser emotion. So y'all have seen the Gartner hype cycle. The innovation. And there's a peak of inflated expectations and the troth of delusion. And then the long, slow work of making this actually do something useful in the world. And the problem that we're dealing with is the innovations are coming so quickly that there's just a massive confusion in this first wave. And it's even harder to sort through. So that's why the two-second test is going to be critical. What do you feel? And then can I wait for a wiser emotion? Can I wait to react to something that's here instead of back here? So it's not that you don't have emotions about things. New technology is awesome. It's really cool. And you can do stuff with it. But we want to wait until instead of panic, we get some sort of curiosity, like, I want to understand this better. Maybe we start to feel like a weight of responsibility, opportunity settling on our shoulders that this is something I'm going to have to work hard to integrate with my story, with my company's story. So wait for a wiser emotion, master your lizard brain. And that's how you move beyond getting pushed around in this hype cycle. While we're on the topic of brains, you've all heard of the left brain and the right brain. The left is analytical, sequential, efficiency, language, verbal language. And the right is intuitive, relational, connected. It looks at the big picture instead of zooming in on the part. Short version is over the last several hundred years, through the first, second, and third industrial revolutions, we've rewarded the people who are good at left brain stuff. If you want to get people to read your article or listen to TikToks, how does it start? Here's one thing that's going to change your life. Here's the thing you're doing wrong. If you listen to the next 30 seconds, then you're going to have something that's actionable. Very left brain. We're bombarded with left brain. Industry is built on left brain. And the right brain is there, but it tends to get shunted over into its own set of careers. There's some people in my company somewhere, there's some people in my town somewhere who can help us deal with big questions of where our town is headed, but the money is not going to them. The power is not going to them. The power is going to people with the left brain. So for hundreds of years, the world has rewarded the disciples of Prometheus, those who can master the machine. And here's the ironic part is there's a potential now for AI to put that into reverse. Because now the machine can talk to the machine. And this is some of the some of the things that I heard out here as you were discussing the possibilities. Is you know, we've spent decades sending our brightest and best people to study and to give their lives to talking to the machine, to writing computer codes, to making more efficient assembly lines, to mastering process efficiency through the organization. And we need all that stuff. It's done amazing things for us. But what if instead there was a machine that could deal with a lot of that layer of interfacing and we spend less of our time moving lines, a pixel or two on a CAD drawing, and more of our time doing the thing that an architect or a civil engineer actually has to do. So before we move to go into the practical stuff, I want to kind of ground us in this picture of the left brain and the right brain. And as the people in this room, you're the CEO. So you've already learned to move these things together. And that connector in the middle will be king. So get used to that. Get used to a world that cannot just be run from your left brain, but it has to be run from the whole brain. So let's take a minute, although these minutes tend to stretch pretty long, but try to keep it brief. And let's spend it on the other side at looking at the big picture. Let's populate the context window, if you will, with the whole picture that needs to stay connected in order for us to move forward. So, what do you want your company to look like when you retire? What do you want it to feel like? What do you want it to be doing for your customers, for your employees, for you, for your family? Before you start talking, take a minute and jot something down or let it run through your mind. At least one thing. We're trying to create this bigger picture of who we are. All right, so what's new? Let's look at it. We have new leverage, we have new dangers, and we have new tools. Our leverage scales according to how complexly we are able to think. Level one is probably what you're already doing. This is taking things that you already do and doing it faster. Somebody's talking about, I want to write an email and then like, just say this. Or like, I made a website for the CEO trips that Brian and I are going to lead. And so I literally took the meeting transcript, put it into Claude, and asked Claude to make a website. And it took some time, like it took, it took work to direct Claude what to do, but it was something that I might have spent a month on before. Had to find a contractor of how to find a designer and figure out where to put it and all that speeds up what you already do. The second, and this is what you really should be focusing on this year, that is redesigning your organization, your organizational process and your org chart based on the new capabilities that are available. So right now, your company looks like this. All of your employees are humans, unless you're really ahead of the career. In three years, when we're back here, that is not how your company will look. Your company will look and feel like there's a bunch of software agents working with a bunch of humans. That's a big change and it unlocks a lot more learning. Because once you start to construct your company that way, then you can build the company and what you do around what's now possible and what's infinitely scalable. The third is that you change your strategy and outputs based on what's possible. So instead of just redesigning the organization itself, you're changing where the organization is pointed at. So there are things that are possible today, and certainly things will be possible a year from now that you can do quickly and at scale that weren't possible before. So if you can tap into that, if you can understand it, then you can start to produce things that you wouldn't have been able to before. Now, at each level here, you have like another dimension. There's like a geometrical amount of leverage. And what I would like to see unfolding over the next three years, that's not very long, guys. That's not very long. But what I like to see unfolding is that we can move through these and we can learn to think deeply enough about what the organization is and what it's delivering that we are able to marry the technological and our life as usual. And that that is key, right? Because if you just embrace the technology without understanding what it's for, like I said at the beginning, then you lose your way. The technology doesn't serve you, it doesn't become part of your story. You become a part of its story. It distracts you, it corrupts you and redirects you, it confuses you. So what are the dangers that are coming up? And I know some of these are on your mind already. What happens if you have a skill and you don't use it regularly? It goes away. And it goes away pretty dang fast. So here's my rule of thumb: if artificial intelligence can take over my skills of dealing with the machine, whether that's a software program, a bureaucracy, a tax code, the way PDFs are organized. I know my I'm not attached to those sets of skills. I'm happy for a machine to take over my dealings with the machines. But the things that have to do with me being a human, being able to carry out a conversation, being able to look people in the eye, being able to diffuse conflict in a room by the way that I am aware of my body and the way I position myself, those are things that I don't want to lose. Think carefully about that. Then there's the guardrails. The question that I tell young students is how would you know if it's wrong? If you can't answer that, you're in a danger zone. Unless the stakes are very low, right? There are some things where the stakes are low enough, it doesn't matter. But when you do something, it begins with your thinking and it ends with your thinking. And your thinking goes all the way around the task. And then you're fine. Then the artificial intelligence can advance your thinking, speed it up, do things that you wouldn't be able to do in the middle. Number three is flattening. The way LLMs work is that they try to predict what is most likely to be helpful. But what is most likely is also kind of generic sometimes. And there's ways you can play with it to sharpen it a bit, or to, you know, you can tell it to be surprising or weird. But you also need to keep in mind that there are things at your company that don't need to be most likely. What are those things? Your remote, it better not be the most likely moat. Your competitive advantage, the way you treat your people, your voice as you talk to the company about what its future is. Those are things you might not want to flatten. And number four is maybe the squish it's the most abstract, but it's also at the heart of what we're dealing with. AI is like a pattern of patterns, it functions on patterns, it recognizes them, it predicts them, it generates its own. And thus it comes to resemble a will because that's what an intelligent will does, is it links a pattern with a body, or it takes something that exists only in an invisible world and it gives it something of substance. That's what wills do. So it's not that the AI is thinking or that someone designed it to screw doigt, but it was designed by a large corporation, by engineers, by forces that we partially understand. And all of those forces in the aggregate comprise a will that may or may not align with your deepest interests. So keep these four dangers in mind as you're moving forward. For decades, we've talked about data hygiene, right? Protecting the flow of information that comes into and moves through your organization. We need to start talking about decision hygiene. How do decisions get made? What information and reasoning and processing goes into making a decision? Every time you're puzzled by something, you ask AI or one of your direct reports gets busy. And so they basically just come to the meeting with the proposal that came off of Claude. Then you multiply that hour by hour, day by day, across weeks, across your whole organization. You really need to start asking who's making my decisions? This is going to be a huge, huge question for the coming years. And I think you're probably already starting to think about it. So here's a practical way to think about what we're dealing with about the new tools. Sort them into three buckets. What can you use now with very little caution or modification? What do you want to have your eyes wide open for? And where should you use caution even when they become mature? So what are we using it for now? We're using it for graphic design, generate assets. We're definitely using it for copying for manipulating words. It does brain in that. And I don't mind, I don't miss that job. Creating websites. Very recently, spreadsheet modeling. This is just in the last several months, but a CFO, I love them being able to tell it to create a financial model or take uh take three years of financials and do projections and then explain its assumptions. So, what is coming online so the various aspects of writing code are certainly in tier one. Can you code a full production app with a non-technical background? Some people say yes, some people say no. You should definitely try it. Because what used to be the first hundred or two hundred thousand dollars of figuring out albums to make an app, you can do it in an afternoon with a hundred dollars worth of tokens or less without knowing anything about premiering. So if you have a business problem or process problem or life problem that you think you're gonna be solved by software, try to make some competitive research and research in general. This is something I want you to do, but I want you to do it with a bit of caution. For interfacing with the machine, with the world wide web and bringing back what you want, great. But what you can do with that still has to be your decision. So it can tell you what's out there, but it can't tell you what's important to you. The off-the-shelf tends to be it's a bit restricted on what it can search. So again, fine for gathering stuff, but be cautious about replacing your judgment about where things are going. Contact and document review and decision support. And I think almost everyone who's at this conference is already using AI as a thinking partner, and we're using it to augment or replace coaches, consultants, and colleagues and mentors. And therapists. And therapists. Don't get me started. So this can be useful, but what I need you to focus on is your own understanding. So remember, Steve Jobs, he used to, people would come with a PowerPoint and he'd tell him, scrap it. Tell me what do you think we should do and why. And I do have people who come to me in a with big desert decision and say, here's 20 pages of output. What do you think? And I say, What do you think? Because in the end, you need to know that in order to proceed. And I think when we get it over into the realm of therapy, you start to understand why this is the case. Because the things that are most human about us are the most dangerous to turn over to a machine. I mean, again, expensive neural machinery. And it's not just our neurons, it's our entire bodies have been built over millions of years to make extremely sophisticated judgments about who we can trust and when. When someone's certainty is overblown and when they really know what they're talking about. And we tell that with our bodies. And when you're talking to a machine, you do not have that. Again, if your thinking is not all the way around it and you're leaning into something where it really needs to be your understanding, then you're in danger of turning it over to a will that is not yours and one that you don't fully understand. I'm a consultant, right? So I can't just stand here and tell you you should use consultants instead of AI. Like I think you should use it, but you need to understand how this works. That's kind of the third category of things that I think you should have caution. When a self-driving car runs over someone, who is responsible? If there's someone in the driver's seat, we can put that person in jail. If there's no one in the driver's seat, then we have an institutional problem because we don't know who's responsible. And if we don't know who's responsible, guess what? You're a CEO. You're responsible. So AI can walk you through decisions, it cannot give you wisdom. And the more you lean on it for deep sense making, values, vision, identity, the more you run into all of the dangers that we were talking about. So let's talk about this. What are we gonna turn over to AI? There's huge potential to create crap. Technology is getting easier and easier, and the understanding part is getting harder and harder. So I want you to leave with at least one or two things that you're gonna do differently. Something actionable. We can get back to the left brain here. Five things I have to suggest. One is appoint a champion. There's already somebody in your company, it might be you, but hopefully it's somebody else who can support you on this. They're curious, they're forward-thinking, they're innovative, they're problem solver. People go to look to them when you need something to start moving. Give them a bit more surface error, give them some time to present, give them some time in their schedule to experiment, and try to give them a bit more of a voice. Number two, try something. This is probably the most important. You know, pull a group of people or tell your leadership team to take an hour, give them paid cloud subscriptions and tell them to try to solve some problem. Really, just getting hands-on and experimenting with what is possible and knowing that is going to change, starting to experiment is critical. Number three is get dramatically faster at software decisions. This is an organizational capability that gets not just a technological question. It's a question of marrying the technology with the direction and purpose and constitution of your company. Things that used to take quarters to identify vendors and call the references and assess the capabilities and map across processes. We're gonna have to start doing all of that a lot faster. Software is going to become cheaper, there's gonna be more crap, and the cost of development will go down. The cost of doing it in-house is gonna go down. So it changes the five reclusive build calculus. Develop this organizational capability. Number four, protect the stories of your people. So the story of Prometheus, remember, we don't think of it as the story of fire. And I really hope that we don't think of the 2020s as the story of artificial intelligence. It needs to become our story. Our story needs to remain the through line. Otherwise, then the doomers are right, right? When they say AI will destroy humanity. Maybe AI is already destroying humanity if you let it, right? If it becomes the story of AI, then we lost. We need to make sure we don't lose. And we need to make sure that every person in your company doesn't lose. So spend more time talking to people about their careers. Sit down with your direct reports, and if you can, the people one layer below that, and understand where they're trying to go, how technology is going to impact them, how they can upskill, how they can change their perspective from fear to excitement. You all know this. If you can get people to be on their own hero's journey and see themselves as the hero in their career, and this is happening inside your company, then that's how you unlock super performance. So have those meetings, invest more in professional development, and make sure that for you, for your company, and for your employees, it is your story that gets to be told. Similarly, inject more humanity, not less, as you rely more in technology. These things kind of have to stay in a kind of dynamic balance. And so if technology has a lot more decibels, like when you're running sound, right? If one thing has a lot more decibels, you've either got to turn that down or you have to turn the other thing up, or it sounds off balance. And if you do not protect, if you do not inject enough humanity into your company, then you'll get resistance. Adoption will stall. People will start to disengage or even to sabotage what's going on. And then you've lost your luggage, right? You're losing out on what the technology can give you. I don't think that the solution is trying to slow down technology. It's kind of an interesting thought experiment, but you just quickly realize that that's not how this works. What you have to do is get better at having meals together and telling stories and communicating repeatedly about the narrative of your company and elevating the stories of your people. Figure out what you're gonna do differently next week. It can be a project or it can just be a curiosity, a conclusion, but I want you to go away with something that this workshop can help you. If we want to get through the next three years and if you want to be prepared for the world that I described at the beginning of this talk, we're gonna have to do some deep, serious work. And it's gonna have to be work that involves the whole brain and maybe challenges us as leaders in ways that we haven't been challenged before.