No Playbook for the AI Era

Speaker A: I'd be daring enough to say, I think the definition of leadership is love in action. And I know that's not a word that a lot of organizations want to get around, but when you're a leader, you're in the business of caretaking for people. You're in the business of caretaking for livelihoods, for their interests, their passions, their progression. And whether you like it or not, they're families. Like we learn this in the military. You know, you're never just one soldier, one airman, one sailor, one Marine. Behind all of them is a family. And you have to think about them as well. And so that's where I think leaders have a wonderful opportunity to use all of the change that's happening right now to also change it up for themselves. And if you don't do that, my. My worry is, and I write about this in the book, that we're going to get through all this tumult, all of this epic level change, and we're not going to remember who we are, we're not going to remember how we got here, and we're not going to remember what made us tick and what made us unique and distinct and divine. And that's what I fear.

Speaker B: Artificial intelligence is changing how decisions are made. Wisdom determines whether those decisions serve what matters, protect what is human, and shape a future worthy of us. That is where our conversations begin. Welcome to Beyond AI Wisdom at Work. Welcome to the inaugural episode of, uh, Beyond AI Wisdom at Work, the podcast formerly known as Conversations. I'm Brian Gorman, your host, the founder of Transforming Lives, that coach and I work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human wisdom. Our guest today is Bill Kirst. Bill is a change architect, an author of two books, a poet, a keynote speaker, a developmental editor, and host of the Coffee and Change podcast. He works at the intersection of artificial intelligence, organizational transformation, and human potential, helping leaders and organizations navigate change with greater clarity, curiosity, confidence, and empathy. Bill's book, Leading Change in the Era of AI explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping leadership work and the human experience. Drawing on more than two decades of leading enterprise transformation, Bill offers a practical and deeply human perspective on helping people adapt, thrive, and lead with purpose in an age of accelerating technological change. I could go on and on, Bill, but welcome.

Speaker A: Thank you. I appreciate it. Uh, so funny when you get those bios read back to you, you're like, who's he talking about? You're like, oh, yeah, I guess that's me. Because when you stack it, you're just like, have I done all that Stuff. And you're like, yes, the wrinkles and the gray hairs that are now coming in are proof that I've done that. Yes. So thanks for having me. Uh, and congratulations on the rebirth of this beautiful body of work. I believe you're in the 170something episodes. And what's interesting is I'm in the 180something episodes. So whether we knew it or not, Brian, we're kind of like neck and neck, so. Bravo.

Speaker B: Well, there. There are so many parallels. We are both military vets. We are both, uh, edge walkers, uh, trained and certified Edge Walker, uh, facilitators. We both are change practitioners. We are both authors, we're both podcasters, and we're both here now.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So let's start off with leading change in the era of AI. What brought you to write that book?

Speaker A: Yeah, you know, um, the book emerged as kind of a cry for help, a bit of a manifesto. Um, it began as a collection of questions that spurred from me seeing the first demonstration of AI at scale, and at the time when Microsoft released or told the world it was going to release Copilot, um, obviously built on top of what we'd seen in the months prior with ChatGPT. I watched the demonstrations and I watched, um, the people on stage, but more importantly, I watched the people in the audience, and I watched their body language shift as they realized what a seismic change this was going to be in the way that they work. And I just started writing down questions, Brian, like, well, if it does all this, what do we do? And if it does all this better without error, what do we do? And what's left to, uh, us? And I just started kind of collecting them on, like, a scratch pad. And then I started asking my peers these questions, and their response at the time was, why would you think of that? Like, where did that question come from? What do you mean? Why are you asking about livelihood? Like, what are you talking about? And for a brief moment, I felt like I was on an island. And then I realized, well, if I'm on an island, then I guess my job is to find a way to write SOS in the sand so when somebody flies over, they can. They can at least catch that. And that's how it began. And I started writing articles on LinkedIn that were anchored on these questions, these big, unanswerable questions. And I started having people reach out and say, thank you for asking this. I've never said those words aloud, or I thought the same thing, but nobody wanted me to say it. Um, and as I Got more and more people reaching out. I realized I had something, but I thought it was just a newsletter. And then, um, about two years later, after writing two years worth of articles that had about 6,000 subscribers, like followers to the newsletter, a dear friend of mine came over and he had printed out every article that I had written around this topic. And he dropped the contents of those articles on my kitchen table. And I asked him, what is that? He said, this is every article you've written about leading change in the era of AI. And I said, there's no way, because it was thick. I was like, wait. And he looked at me and he said, you have a book. And I said, no, there's no possible way. He said, it's sitting right here in front of you and it's really important you put it out in the world. Because I've taken copious notes while reading these articles and I could see it, they were in the margins, they were highlighted. He said, these articles in collection stir something up in the reader. And so this needs to be out in the world. And then I began the journey of trying to figure out how to self publish. So that's how the book came about. It was published, uh, August 8, 2025.

Speaker B: So your book came out about three months, I guess, ahead of my book. Mhm. Which also started with me on an island. I didn't realize that you were just over the horizon, Bill. Um, my island came out of listening over and over again to the technocrats, uh, if you will, um, describing this dystopian future in which we are increasingly replacing workers with technology professions, entire professions will go away the way of AI, um, and then a, uh, a or AI CEO saying this technology can even replace me.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And that was like a whack on the side of my head because there was something that just said no way, no way. And, and the, the. What I was writing in the sand in my case was intelligence and wisdom are not the same.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker B: The technology can bring the intelligence, but it is unique. There is this unique thing, thing about us humans that the technology is not prepared to replace. One of the things I'm really curious about in, in terms of what you are ready, um, to share with our listeners. And I actually spend two chapters on this in my book. We both grew up, um, probably with different models of organizational change management, probably practicing in a hybrid that grew out of those models in their own experience. And one of the things that, that I learned as I practiced organizational change management for longer and longer is that there were Some big holes in those models even then. And as the workforce has evolved, all of those models were driven out of a command, uh, and control, top down, uh, hierarchical, uh, organizational framework that was becoming less and less viable. And all of those models are based on the premise that we start a change, we execute a change and we complete a change. Yeah, and that, yeah, that, that does still happen, but that ain't the world we're living in.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: What?

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Whatever. You, wherever you want to go with this. Bill, what do you see as the role of change, the future of change? Uh, who gets to play in change? However you want to take this, as we move into this AI environment more and more.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think I'll start with what you, what you named so precisely, which is, um, we no longer operate in a deterministic world, especially with technology. And so the era of you and I growing up and leading teams through change and guiding people through technology change, it looked different, it felt different, it sounded different, and it sort of rhymed with something like this. You click this button, this thing happens. You click this button, this thing happens. You click this button, this thing happens. Bravo, you're done. Process change, technology change, whatever, policy change. There was a beginning, a middle and an end. Some of the middle was messy, yes, but you at least kind of knew when you were done, or at least what done looked like. Now the most consequential technology and culture change I think we're facing is non deterministic. Which means we cannot use the same models, we cannot use the same playbooks or the same frameworks to guide people through. Because it is as much a tesseract cube as it is a choose your own adventure. Um, when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace and in your personal life, um, many people know this by now. But if you and I type in the same exact prompt into the same tool that is an AI tool, you and I will likely get varied answers, highly variable, completely variant. Um, and there's a couple reasons why. One is a lot of these tools have been now built to include, um, memory storage, to mimic and to sort of take us down a path that uh, it believes or the patterns believe we want to go to. And two, um, it does still hallucinate, right? It's a pattern seeking device. But more than a pattern seeking device, it's a pattern, um, completing tool. And so I remember somebody telling me, um, this concept of what they said was the seventh word. I'm sure you've come across this as well, which is um, basically These machines are trying to just guess the seventh word. So no matter what six words you put in, it's going to try and guess the seventh word. And the work it's doing is essentially just every other seventh word. The analogy I would give for those of us that occasionally are out in the ocean body surfing or surfing, um, it's like trying to guess the ninth wave. If you've ever been out there and you're wading in the waters, either on a boogie board or surfboard or your body body surfing, you're like looking at the waves and you're like, okay, is this the one? No, that's not the one. So this thought, no, that's not the one. And, and it's an intuition, right? It becomes an intuition. And eventually you have this wisdom, like you said, Brian, this sort of felt, observed, witnessed wisdom of like, I could see the arc of the wave. I can see where I'm at. I can see it cresting, I can see the distance to the shore. And I know that if I take this wave, then I'm going to write it, as opposed to get completely slammed down, right? Or tossed, like you're in the, the tumble cycle of the washing machine. But the only way that you can know that is by intuition and feeling and wisdom and witnessing. And the part that scares me is that a lot of people are confusing these tools as if they're doing all of those things, when in fact what they're doing is you're just counting the seventh word, um, pattern seeking, and then taking you to another place. Um, last thing I'll say here, which is kind of fascinating, is think about how when we use these tools and you could swap the tool. ChatGPT Claude Copilot Whatever you notice at the end of every interaction we have with now does one of two things. It will either affirm you, compliment you in that, in that vein, or it will sort of challenge you in a suggestion. It will say, you might want to, or perhaps, or what if? Um, and that's nice the first couple times. But when you keep going and you realize that everything you put in there, it's going to come back with another suggestion, you then are left to wonder, has it been like, does. Is it even listening to me anymore? Are we in a circuitous loop? Is it just telling me this because it wants to feign listening? Right? And many of us know this if we've ever been with a friend or in a meeting, you know, when someone's not really listening to you, um, and they tell you what you Want to hear, to sort of just keep the motion going. I think that's where we're at right now. So. A long way to say it's completely undeterministic and it excites me. It terrifies others that every playbook you learned. I learned every methodology, like pick it up and literally drop it out the window because that's where we are right now.

Speaker B: I, I was laughing when you were describing that ending of, of the response. Because I have gotten to say to the point where when I put in my prompt, I say, and I only want to go through this once.

Speaker A: It's like talking to your dentist. Right. I only want to go through this once.

Speaker B: Bad example, Bill. Because this winter my dentist dropped a dental file down my throat and I was in.

Speaker A: No.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And you're right.

Speaker B: I only want to go through that once.

Speaker A: What happens in that instance?

Speaker B: Um, we'll, we'll pick that up offline. That's not, not a topic for this conversation.

Speaker A: Okay. Wow.

Speaker B: But, um, one of the things that, that I write about and you alluded to in what you were just saying is the playbooks don't work anymore. And the language that, that I used, and I'm, I'm guessing you and your colleagues used for many years was navigating change.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: The language I'm now using is wayfinding. It's great because there is no map, there are no playbooks. The, the rules are gone. The underpinnings, the neuroscience, the psychology, uh, some of which was in those, those change management methodologies. Much of it was missing. Yeah, those things still apply. We are still human.

Speaker A: Last I checked.

Speaker B: I have a good friend, um, out of the UK who, um, is in the business of irrational change.

Speaker A: Oh, I love that.

Speaker B: Based on the understanding that at the end of the day, change, our response to change is emotional. It, it is not necessarily rational. Mhm. I want to come back to the surfing for a moment.

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker B: Because if you and I went out together looking for those waves, I'll, uh, guarantee you would do a much better job than me because I have never done that before.

Speaker A: Oh, wow. Okay.

Speaker B: And, and you know, what you said is intuition, which again is, is a uniquely human characteristic. And it comes from lived experience solely. And, and so one of the things that I'm, I'm now beginning. This was one of the questions I asked, and it sounds like one of the questions you were asking early on. I'm now beginning to hear this question more and more. If, for example, we now replace all of our entry level coders with technology, how does anyone develop the ability to oversee mhm that team of chatbots or whatever the heck they are.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Um, how does one develop the intuition to say there's something not right here? And I would say that historically I, I know as a coach and, and even as a, during my consulting days, uh, leaders didn't like to rely on intuition. They didn't like to rely on emotion. They wanted one of the data, the data, the data. And, and so AI is giving the data might not be the legitimate data. Yeah, um, and yet most of what we know is in our unconscious comes to us through intuit intuition. Change is no longer an event or a project that has a beginning and an end. Change is now the environment. I work with CEOs, founders, senior executives and boards who are leading through uncertainty, uh, transformation, culture, strain and rapid technological change. I help them move beyond reaction, create sharper alignment and lead from purpose rather than pressure. The outcome um, is wiser leadership. When easy answers are not enough. Start with a no pitch 30 minute conversation. Call country code 1 917-653-5198 or email Brian B R I A N uh, transforminglives coach. Where are some of the holes that you see in traditional approaches to change management today beyond the fact that you might as well drop the, the books out the window?

Speaker A: You know it's a very timely question because um, I'm probably in some sort of debate around this topic at least two times a day in my world presently. And I'll tell you where um, it's kind of coming to roost a little bit. The holes in the ways in which we work. You mentioned agentic or agents. Um, I recently wrote an article on LinkedIn. Um, I think it was titled where are we going or where are we headed or something. And the premise of this article was all around this future where we actually have agents on an org chart. So let's say you're a manager and you've got maybe one full time equivalent fte, but you've also got seven agents that you're managing.

Speaker B: Um,

Speaker A: the way in which you manage is not going to be the same and the way in which those agents and those humans interact is not going to be the same. Because let's say for example that you, Brian, say, you know what, we need to have a meeting with the chief Digital Officer of this organization and we need to um, understand what his needs are. Typically what would happen is the FTE would set up a meeting, find out, you know, whether to meet the Chief of Staff or Go find out or go read some information. Basically work the political game. What we would do to sort of lay the foundation to go have a meeting, a positive meeting with this chief, uh, digital Officer. Um, and they'd come back to you and say, here's what I did, here's what I found out. Here's the meeting I had before the meeting so that you can have a meeting. And we all know these motions. Well, in the future, when you have these agents, basically, the agents don't experience org charts, they don't experience hierarchy, they don't experience politics, they certainly don't experience emotions. Um, and they don't experience ego. So you might basically have those agents say, oh, okay, I'll just go to the Chief Digital Officer's inbox or database or whatever, mine, everything I possibly can, get all the information I need. And then they might come back and say, you don't need the meeting, Brian. Here's your answer. And, uh, in one world, that's probably great. But in another world, we've crossed thresholds and barriers and privacy and, and politics and expectation and social building and relationship building. And now you as a manager have the information you need to get what you need done, but you've actually not interacted with that Chief Digital Officer. Um, we don't know what would happen in that situation. Like, they could be like, great, you saved me a lot of time. You saved a lot of time. Proceed. It could go the other way, however, and that was one example that I wrote about. Another one I have kind of going on right now that I'm thinking about writing is this concept of mcp. As if we don't have enough letters in the world, we have to do more acronyms. MCP is what's called Model Context Protocol. For those that are kind of used to using claude. When you build out a skill in CLAUDE and it performs actions for you, for example, you can connect it to your Gmail, or you can connect it to Microsoft 365, to your Slack, whatever it is, and you can have it take action for you. The way that happens, the way it can take action for you is, is through an MCP model Context protocol. Now, let's break those words out a little bit. The model is what you would think of as like the OpenAI models or the cloud models. That's basically the large language model. The context is basically the ability for it to look at all of these sources of information and understand quickly what reality is in context. And the protocol part is the instructions. It's allowed to take on your behalf. It's not a human, but it's going to perform otherwise human actions with your permission. It gets really complex because I'll give you a very specific change management example. If we're training people on a new tool, a new system or a new policy, what do we typically do? We find out who the stakeholders are, we understand the change impacts, we build out training and enablement material to minimize the resistance. We hold office hours. We do all these things, sometimes white glove service, so that they can use the new tool effectively. Well, if you put an MCP or an agent in and you make it conversational, where the user can basically type in, I'd like to create a marketing brief for a, an energy company that is based in New Jersey. And you hit enter the AI tool, the agent basically goes and does steps 2 through 16 for you. What emerges on the other side is step 17 and 18. You look at the final product, you say it looks good and you send it off. Now, that could be great, that could be wonderful. But the part that concerns me is we now have a user that is driving a car and doesn't understand what happened between step two and 17. So what happens if things go awry? What happens if that final product goes out to the client or customer and they say this is actually incorrect? Can you tell me where you got this final analysis or answer from? I now have someone that doesn't know what happened in the middle. I'm not saying I have to belabor them and take them through it. I am saying in order for the model context protocol to work well and cleanly and efficiently, what's kind of ironic is what it needs to consume are all those things that we used to make. Brian. It needs the user guides, it needs the enablement, it needs the scripts, it needs the transcripts from the office hours. It needs the context and the nuance. And so our worlds change drastically because we're not training people because they're just having conversations. But what makes the conversations work well, what makes the output better, are the things we made with a, uh, fine tooth comb before. And I can speak about this specifically because I've built chatbots and they've been very successful. The only reason they're successful is because I eyeballed every piece of data that went into that chatbot. So I can say with certainty and with confidence that it's holding a 93% resolution rate because I know what it's looking at. I worry at the pace that we're going and the amount of stuff that people are putting in these tools. If you don't have that intuitive, lived wisdom, those eyeballs. They call me Hawkeye for a reason, because I catch things that other people don't. I attribute that to my military training. Um, that's a great combination to have in this agent stick world. Not everybody has it. That's what I worry about. So that's where I think our roles change. The ingredients are kind of the same, but we have to take a different approach. And in many ways, what we used to make becomes invaluable and what we used to make becomes invisible at the same time.

Speaker B: Another piece of this bill that. That I write and talk about a whole lot is that as we use the technology of artificial intelligence to speed things up and, and you alluded to this or mentioned this as well. We are taking out the conversations. M. We are taking out the. The friction. And some friction does need to come out. Some friction can easily come out in ways that benefit the organization. And there is value in friction.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: There is value in not optimizing everything. And the. The example that we have all lived with is optimized supply chains.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, when I was recording a podcast with Jeffrey, uh, Beeson, who wrote Network Leadership, he said, we have two arteries feeding the brain.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: You know, optimization would say we only need one. Yeah. Um, so I think that there are a lot of things that we need to be careful of. And, and again, I, um, write and speak about this a lot. What we're doing now is quickly becoming the norm. And as it becomes the norm, we both know from our change management days, it becomes more and more difficult to change.

Speaker A: Yes. Unlearning in a way, is by far the most valuable investment that some can do. I mean, I talk about this a few. A few portions in the book, but one of the greatest things about the work that I've had the honor to do, that you've had the honor to do is I think every day we kind of show up like a pupil and we say to ourselves, I'm entering a laboratory, and I'm going to learn a lot of things during the day in that laboratory. Um, and then I'm going to go home, and I'm probably going to reflect on it, and then I'm going to have a redo the next day. My nephew used to say this. He was. He was so. He was such a wise philosopher when he was young. And he's. I can't wait for him to, you know, continue in the world. But I remember at one point he said to me, Tether his mom or me. It's okay, Uncle Bill. You always get a redo tomorrow. And I thought it was so healthy to remind, to have a child remind me that there is another tomorrow. And we do have the opportunity to sort of go home at night and almost do a cleansing. Right? That's why sleep is so important. I talk about that a lot as well, is you're kind of, um, you're kind of doing like a sea salt body scrub of your brain when you go and you have that deep sleep, um, you emerge the next day and the problems that you're going to solve the next day are going to be different. So you almost want to have a slightly different brain or a slightly different polish on the brain. Um, and I think that unlearning is so important, and that's one of the fascinating things about all this technology now, is if we're not careful, we will atrophy. And I think atrophy and unlearning are completely different things. Right. It doesn't mean we stop learning, doesn't mean we stop inquiring, but it does mean the things that we have, uh, learned in the manner in which we've learned them, we might need to say, that just doesn't hold right now, or it doesn't take. So I've got to try something different, right? I've got to try vibe coding. I've got to try building an agent and seeing what happens. In order for me to have a conversation with an, uh, executive to say, I don't think this is the right path for these reasons, I have to understand why. And I'm an insatiably curious person. To your point, the only way to be able to recommend something is to have tried and failed and learned and embodied it. Um, and that's the path I take. And so at this stage in my life, I imagine there will be much more unlearning in my second chapter of life than there has been in my first chapter. And I'm excited about that.

Speaker B: When I turned 65, I committed to do everything I can to pay it forward with whatever wisdom I've garnered. M And as we mentioned, this is, I think, going to be episode 174 of this podcast series. It's over 300 podcasts, but staying with this series. Of those 174 episodes, I haven't counted, but I would estimate that somewhere between 125 and 130, 140, um, were with book authors. Yes. And there was a selfishness about that because. Or there is because I. I read the book.

Speaker A: Yeah, me too.

Speaker B: I read the book because it's a way of unlearning and relearning. Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh,

Speaker B: uh, leadership today is not what leadership was when I was a young pup in corporate life. What are the key unlearning learnings that you think leaders need to make in this AI, uh, driven environment?

Speaker A: Well, start with where you. You left off. I think they should read more books. Uh, hands down, I think they should read more books, but not the books that people would expect me to recommend they read. I do not think leaders need to read business books. I had a wonderful teacher years ago who said to me, bill, you never need to buy another business book again. In fact, I please ask you, don't buy any more business books. Now, I'm not. This is no shot at the people writing wonderful leadership books and business books. But her point was, everything you need to know already exists within you. At some point. You're just reaching for affirmation. And I think that pretty much every business wisdom lesson that could be written about has been written about. We're basically just getting people's variations on it, and that's fine. But what I would encourage leaders to read is science fiction, is deep fiction, is speculative fiction, biography, autobiography. I would encourage them to read about things that, as you're talking about, Brian, bring the essence of our humanity, of our dignity, of our decency, of our agency, like, bring that to life, whether it's in a character or in sort of a reflection. I often times find that we can find ourselves on a page of a book more than we can on these screens or in a mirror. So I would encourage them to do that. Um, the other thing I would say is there's a. There's such a need for creativity. I think that the more you move up the ladder, um, the less we're given permission to just play. And I know you and I have talked about the importance of playfulness, right? And the edgewalker work that we've done, that's one of the. The sort of entities that always called to me, and I'm working on that. But isn't it sad that, like, as I approach my fifth decade, I'm starting to say, hey, you know what? I think you've earned the right to play. Um, and what does that look like? I don't know. But I do know on the other side of that playfulness will be some amazing ideas. Innovation, creativity, curiosity. Um, I think when people show up to teams and face really big, thorny problems, if you can show up with curiosity and playfulness and sort of that, uh, ability to innovate. You do everyone a service, including yourself. And that's where I feel like leaders, they have to stop asking permission to do those things. They just need to take the time to do it. Like clear your calendar, go for a walk, sign up for a painting course, take a novel writing course, do what, do whatever it is that calls you. And initially, the tension will be there. You'll say to yourself, oh, but, um, I've got this to do and I'm not following my obligations. But just like anything, over time that will wane and you'll start to see the value of what you're doing, bringing back to an organization. You know, I'd be, I'd be daring enough to say, I think the definition of leadership is love in action. And I know that's not a word that a lot of organizations want to get around, but when you're a leader, you're in the business of caretaking for people. You're in the business of caretaking for livelihoods, for their interests, their passions, their progression. And whether you like it or not, they're families. Like we learn this in the military. You know, you're never just one soldier, one airman, one sailor, one marine. Behind all of them is a family. And you have to think about them as well. And so that's where I think leaders have a wonderful opportunity to use all of the change that's happening right now to also change it up for themselves. And if you don't do that, my worry is, and I write about this in the book, that we're going to get through all this tumult, all of this epic level change, and we're not going to remember who we are, we're not going to remember how we got here, and we're not going to remember what made us tick and what made us unique and distinct and divine. And that's what I fear. And so as long as I can, as long as people will listen, um, I will sort of suggest that to them. And when they're ready to try new things, I'll extend them a hand or say, do you want to try it together?

Speaker B: Thank you for that. I. It took me a long time to find my playground.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And I found. I found it, actually. I was fortunate, bill, in my 30s, because my first partner was an artist who made a living working in the photo lab. And after trying for five years, unsuccessfully, to teach me how to draw, he said, you should go buy a camera, but get a good One.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And when I pick up that camera, I'm in the zone.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: The world disappears. And, and what I have discovered through that is the many venues through which creativity now shows up in my life. Um, in my leadership, in my writing, in, in my, um, willingness to engage others and, and their wisdom, not just my own. Because my photography subject is people. And, and I can't do that without other people. And we can't leave without other people. When I was writing my book, I asked several, uh, C suite type leaders. How would you define leadership in a world of AI? And three words came through. Over and over, more than anything else. Spirit, soul and love. Wow.

Speaker A: Uh, I have chills.

Speaker B: Wow. Bill, we are going to have to wrap this up. I hate to do it. Hey, and last, last thoughts for our listeners to Beyond AI Wisdom at work.

Speaker A: Yeah, so I'll, I'll pick up on something you talked about. When you described being with that camera, when you described that sensation of losing a sense of time and space, what I heard was it, it coursed through me, right. This creativity and this playfulness, it was coursing through me. And what I would encourage people to do is think about the things that when you are doing them or thinking about them, something courses through you.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Uh, you can feel it running through your veins and your spirit comes alive. Go there. And if you find yourself getting lost along the way, reach out. Reach out to Brian, reach out to me, reach out to the people we know. Um, there's a lot of bright lights out there that want to make sure that we don't lose the spirit, don't lose the love, and don't lose the humanity. Um, so I'm glad we're here to be able to echo that. Thank you, Brian, for the opportunity to be part of the inaugural of this beautiful body of work. Um, I'm excited to see where it goes.

Speaker B: Thank you, Bill. Bill Kirst, change architect, author, poet, keynote speaker, development editor, and host of the Coffee and Change podcast. And I highly recommend you listen to that podcast as well. Thank you, Bill.

Speaker A: Thanks, Brian. Appreciate it. Have a good one.

Speaker B: AI may give us faster answers, but the deeper work is, is still ours. Choosing wisely, leading humanely and shaping workplaces worth belonging to. If anything in this episode connects to what you or your organization is facing, reach out. I'd welcome the conversation. I'm Brian Gorman and this is Beyond AI Wisdom at Work.

Speaker A: Sam.