AI Speeds Up Everything And Forces Hard Decisions

Welcome to Coaching Conversations

We have created a NEW and Innovative line of books called Workplace Coaching Books. These books use QR codes with embedded audio and video lessons speaking directly to the reader. Each book comes with assessments and journal based coaching pages where they document what they've learned and what they've applied. In addition each book comes with the self analysis link that prompts them to share what they've learned and what they've put into action leading to greater learner application a

Coaching Talks is a dynamic leadership development speaking series customized to your needs. Need help spreading the value and application of workplace coaching? Let us help:

We provide many styles of speaking services:

• We provide virtual keynotes
• We specialize in 4 part virtual series (we always customize)
• We have a unique feature called "Speaker Tracks" where we send to all audience members reinforcement lessons after the talk (to the pc or cell phone), thus keeping people on track after the talk

Get More Info Here: https://form.jotform.com/241193119118149

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing AI’s Promise And Peril
• 1:36 Rapid Automation In Everyday Roles
• 3:00 Building Courses In Under An Hour
• 3:50 Small Teams With AI Partners
• 4:38 Three Lenses: Employee, Leader, Organization
• 5:38 The Fork In The Road For Workers
• 6:58 Leaders Caught By Sudden Change
• 7:46 Rebuilding Trust And Clarity
• 8:26 Connection, Engagement, And AI Productivity
• 9:14 Banking, Branches, And Human Habit
• 10:08 Remote, Hybrid, And Return To Office

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:37

The logistical nightmare of artificial intelligence. AI is going to provide incredible productivity opportunities for people and for companies. Let me just start out by sharing a very unique perspective. I am not cautious about AI. I have great admiration for AI. AI has helped our company tremendously. But at the same time, I've also seen, I'm going to use a really rough term, the carnage. When I look at learning and development teams, typically I report through LD or training or human resource teams, and I'm watching some of the carnage. I'm starting to see more and more layoffs in learning and development. Let me give you an example. When I think about the opportunity of what AI presents from a productivity standpoint, let's just take a simple job, and I'm not trivializing this job, but somebody who answers the phones and somebody who uh schedules for doctors or schedules meetings if it's a business that has, you know, appointments as the mainstay of the revenue source. Today a bot can handle that. I can tell you I haven't had a phone system in probably eight, nine years. I use my cell phone. I typically email clients. I can automate the delivery of my emails. As simple as that technology perspective comes off, it really teaches us that what AI is going to do is be unbelievably disruptive and has been disruptive. Let me give you another example. You know, when I would build a course and people who I know inside my client sites who are in instructional design, when they build courses to assemble, to design, to lay out the curriculum, that's still there. But the tools to build it become faster and faster to complete the task. Let me give you another example. You know, I just built a course and I went to ChatGPT. I said, please outline this course, build me a slide deck, took the slide deck, put it over into one of my slide decks, put it up into a site called beautiful.ai, and it retrofitted it to a brand image that I wanted. Pretty contemporary looking slide deck. I recorded over it. All of it took me less than 50 minutes to do. I had built a course. Now, that blows me away. I used to have a person almost full-time who built slide decks and would set these courses up for me to record. And I thought to myself, wow, this is going so fast. And even Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT, recently came out of October 2025 and said, we need to slow things down because it's going so fast. You now have companies like Moderna just announced they're going to non-individual contributor teams. They're going to have an AI assistant, they're going to have an AI coach, they're going to have a human being on these very small teams. Think about that. Now, do I think that's going to eradicate our need for leadership? Of course not. But at the same time, think about the impact. It is great for the bottom line for a company. So it's going to present cost savings, productivity gains for corporations. Now it's going to have an impact on people. So let's look at that from three different perspectives. Number one, the employee. I just had this conversation with a friend of 27, 28 years, works at one of her client sites, just wants to retire. We've got about six years left before retirement. She cannot retire before that. And she said to me straight out, I don't want to get involved in the AI. I go, I'm going to leave you with a thought. You do not have a choice. No sooner than 30 days later, they asked her, What else would you like to do with the company? We're going to be automating the receptionist position. And she was dismayed. And I said, You have a choice. You're at the fork in the road. You have no time to ponder. You have to choose the AI road. I'm not saying you should love it. I'm not saying you should agree with it. What I'm saying is you do not have time to fight. And that's a hard transition for somebody in their late 50s. Now, I hate the stigma of old people, they can't learn technology, they can't learn new things. That's just not true. But that has an impact in that person. Now, where does that impact go? That impact can also be transitioned to friends of hers because they might see what happens to her and her reaction and certainly take the decision out of context. And then the story starts to unfold inside the corporate walls. Number two, that puts the leader in a really tough position. You know, when I think about artificial intelligence and an employee simply going up to a boss, and I had this two years ago at a newspaper that we were working with. And with ChatGPT and editing, you know, editors today. I'm not saying they've gotten commoditized. What I'm saying is some of the punctuation, the grammar, all of that stuff can be done in a matter of seconds now. Take tools like Grammarly, that is now has an AI component. Look what happens. When that was going on, one of my friends who was an editor at this paper went to the head publisher and said, Are we okay? And the guy goes, Yeah. And at that time, he did not know of any layoffs. Two weeks later, he had to lay off two editors. They were furious. So what happens? What happens? People lose sight. They lose sight of how fast this is going. So then the leader was coined as not telling the truth. In the moment he was telling the truth. He didn't know. That has had a dramatic impact in that workplace. Now, number three, it's the organization. I think what you're going to see, and this is a prediction of AI in the workplace, I think you're going to have people, literally, much like the pandemic, crave human connection. I mean, I don't think we can argue about engagement. That I think AI is not going to facilitate more engagement, but I do think AI is going to provide productivity. But how do we get people staying connected to the mission of their work, the mission of the organization, the mission of the team that they represent, when it's going to be fractured at some point with AI? Jobs are going to change. Jobs are changing. Now, when I think about back office, I think about my credit union clients. You know, one of the things that happened is when you think about what happened years ago. And you think about online banking. What did everybody say? Oh my gosh, why did we build all these branches? I talked to my credit union clients. They all say, people are coming into the branch now more than ever. I can deposit my check online. Do you know? I still go into my local credit union, summit credit union in Wisconsin. I still go in there because I know John, the president, the local president. I know some of the people that work in those uh organizations that I'd like to go see. I'm like, but I could be so much more efficient. What it teaches us is people want to be around humans. The pandemic proved that. We found out we could be really, really productive working at home. Very few people thought that was even a viable thing. And now all of a sudden, people are working at home. So what happens? We work at home, and all of a sudden people are like, this is great. I'm not spending money on gas. I'm not, you know, I'm not in traffic, I'm saving time. The water cooler talk subsided, obviously. So people were working five and a half to six hours, having more time for their family. But guess what happened two years later when the pandemic, or three years later, when the pandemic started to subside? People wanted to come back to the office. Oh, they wanted to come back with conditions. And those conditions are what? I don't want to be in the office full time. I don't want to be at the home full time. I want this hybrid model. That has forced leaders and organizations into some very tough conversations. AI is going to have that same type of impact. The conversations are going to become more and more important. What are your thoughts?