The AI-Powered Coach: Driving Performance at Scale

Speaker A: Bring out the talent. Bring out the talent.

Speaker B: Bring out the talent.

Speaker C: Welcome to Bring out the Talent, a podcast featuring learning and development experts discussing innovative approaches and industry insights. Tune in to hear our talent help develop yours. Now here are your hosts, TTA CEO and President Maria Melfa and talent manager Jocelyn Allen.

Speaker A: Jocelyn, Maria, uh, I miss you. I know. Same here.

Speaker D: It seems like we haven't done years

Speaker A: since our last episode. We're very, very rusty. So thank God we have a good topic to talk about today.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker D: And a guest who's well prepared. Make us look really, really?

Speaker A: Absolutely. We need that. Yes. Well, David, our podcast producer just said let's get, let's take the show on the road. And I know we've talked about that, that we want to get a TTA van and just drive around the country and actually just like randomly pick people because so many people have very interesting backgrounds and stories and just start like bringing them on our podcast. So David, that's a very good idea. I'll be looking for the van this weekend, so I love it. Okay.

Speaker D: Tta.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker A: We'll go visit Tim and Houston and Yep. We'll first stop all over the place.

Speaker D: Mhm.

Speaker A: Okay, excellent. So let's get started. So Tim helps organizations integrate AI into coaching strategies in ways that are grounded in real business outcomes. He also served as one of eight experts on the International Coaching Federation's global task force on AI. It's amazing. Helping shape how the coaching industry is approaching this transformation. In this episode of uh, Bring out the Talent, we explore how AI powered coaching is being used to extend coaching beyond a small group of leaders where it's creating real value and where organizations often get it wrong. This conversation will stay focused on practical applications, what is working today, and how to think about AI as a complement to human coaching rather than a replacement. So welcome Tim.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Speaker A: Great to have you.

Speaker D: Have you, Tim? I mean we talk about AI every single day here at tta. We talk about it with our clients. I mean this, this aspect of AI and what you are leaning into is a huge area that we also discuss what else could it be doing for us? And this coaching idea is coming through full force and so we're thrilled to be able to talk to you about it and learn more of what the work that you're to make this a, uh, reality of our kind of professional lives. So let's go back to the really, I mean, multiple really cool things in your bio, but you were part of the ICF Global task force shaping how the coaching industry is approaching AI. One of eight people, it said, uh, uh, incredible accomplishment. So tell us about those conversations. What stood out to you about where AI can genuinely support coaching versus where it's falling short?

Speaker B: Yeah, awesome. Um, I think at its core, coaching is about unlocking potential in people. And when people hear the word coaching, they think a lot of different things. Sometimes they think advice, sometimes they think telling what you did, telling you what to do, or sports coach. With this, we mean like non directive coaching, executive coaching. Right. To be clear. And there's so many different ways that AI can be used, whether it's AI as the actual coach or AI as a tool that helps unlock potential in a variety of different ways. So on that task force, we got to talk, I got to talk to colleagues all around the world about how, how it's being implemented. But there's also the need to keep the human at the center.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: There's a lot of ethical concerns too, with data privacy. So it's, it's span the gamut.

Speaker A: You've spoken about AI as a way to extend human capability, and we certainly know that it can do that. Every department in our organization is using it and various ways. Within the context of coaching, what does that actually look like in practice?

Speaker B: Yeah. When I started my career, I launched a nonprofit that would bring executive coaching to high school students. Right. It was graduated after the, uh, pandemic and I had a job lined up in strategy consulting, but I was like, okay, I want to do this. And at first we would pair coaches, like human coaches, of course. And it's funny you have to say that these days, but with students, and it was impactful, right. They got to think about their future, they got to get access to support that. Just otherwise they just wouldn't have.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: But then it came to a point where we were capped at how many students we could reach maybe like 40, 50 students in the school before you start running out of private spaces. And then our biggest partner got their funding cut, so they discontinued our program. And then we were just figuring out how are we going to move things forward. And that's around that time, late 2022, that's when AI started taking off. ChatGPT came out in November of 2022, and I found out about it, ah, Christmas Eve, about a month later. And I was using it a ton and I saw just how capable that made me in terms of doing things much quicker. It would take 15 hours to write a grant. I did it in three hours. And we got $50,000 for the nonprofit or in, uh, my consulting work with organizations. I had a project that was three months, finished it in one month, got paid the same, which means I tripled what I earned per hour. So I was using these tools. And then I thought about, well, what about the challenges with the nonprofit? We have this coaching model that we know works, but it doesn't scale. And Currently in the US there is a 400 to 1 student to guidance counselor gap. And it's like, man, if AI could coach, then we could put a coach in a pocket.

Speaker E: Right?

Speaker B: And so that was the core idea. The challenge was, how do we build this? I had never written a line of code. It wasn't like we had this huge budget to then hire a whole bunch of software developers. And the semester was coming to an end and at that point I was using AI, uh, enough. And I told it my situation. I said, hey, I want to build something like this. How can I do it? And it gave me an answer. And I read that answer and I asked a follow up and a follow up and a follow up until 5am the next morning. I had a working app that would take someone through a skilled coaching conversation. And so what that does is it allows you to have this additional support. I, uh, remember going, we, we partnered with different schools and students could interact with this system and it would ask them questions, it would try to understand their situation, it would help them take new action. And as a result we were able to provide this new kind of support layer that dramatically changed what we were able to do as a, as a small nonprofit at the time.

Speaker A: That's fantastic. Was there any particular school schools that you targeted, like secondary or.

Speaker B: Yeah, we worked with high school students at the time when I was running the nonprofit, we partnered with a school district and we ran some pilots and even did some studies on it and.

Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, how did the students like it?

Speaker B: They liked it. They enjoyed it. You know, one of the things that was interesting at that time is they said that they would rather talk to the AI coach than their counselor in the classroom. Because it won't judge them.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: It won't judge them.

Speaker B: They could talk to it at 9:00pm yes. When it's inappropriate to talk to an adult from school right now. That's.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's when I like to talk to mine. Right. Always available. So that's a really interesting pilot, especially doing this several years ago and a lot of people don't even know about it, let alone these schools. So that must have had like a major impact. Was there an Assessment at the end to see how it was doing or how did that work?

Speaker B: Yeah, we did a variety of different studies. We had a research team, so we looked at things like how long are they spinning it, how long are they using it? But we also looked at what are they using it for. And what we found is that, uh, they're using it for all different types of things, whether it's school, whether it's time management. A lot of it is struggling with procrastination and things of that nature. And then of course, you talk to the students and they tell you, hey, this is what I'm now doing. Or this is how this intervene and help me, help me think through this problem or this challenge.

Speaker D: Those are some great points. And I love, I love that they're getting comfortable with it in that way because it is it part of, of the development of the AI is kind of feeding it that information so that it has that adaptability to you. So I much, uh, like Maria, I understand that kind of like safe feeling. Right. Of sharing things and asking for advice in areas where they wouldn't normally with like their guidance counselor or what have you. So those are some great areas of where it's like working really well. What about areas where you think that it's as from the coaching piece, where is it being underutilized and how is AI going to help that? Like, let's talk about your clients and this, the districts that you're working with. Where. What's a key area where this. Okay, this needs coaching.

Speaker E: Right.

Speaker D: And you're not doing that or we're not doing it sufficiently. So let's bring in the AI tool to assist. Like what. What's an example of where that may be happening?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, totally. I do want to be clear. The. I'm no longer with the nonprofit. I'm now running the Coaching Innovation Lab. And I work with organizations. But that's where I started and that was the first time I did the AI with the coaching piece. I think a lot of times it's not that there is something wrong with the human coach, that the AI coach is going to do something unique. A lot of times it's just access. Right. Executive coaching, we know is proven to boost performance, but traditionally that's been reserved for the corporate elite. In recent years, you have big companies, digital coaching platforms that make it a lot more accessible, but then you end up squeezing the coach. They end up getting paid very little, and they have to take more and more and more clients just to make a living. And so they stop like coaching is only now maybe to middle managers to type of thing, but there's so many more people who need that support. It's a big gap. Right. Everybody can use an additional resource or that space to be able to make sense of things, to develop their leadership and whatnot. So what AI can do is fill the space, not just replace.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker B: And there's even research out there. A, uh, guy, Nikki Ter Blanche out of South Africa, he does a lot of research on AI and coaching and the impacts. And a few years ago he put out a study that showed that AI coaching and human coaching had equal impact on goal attainment over a 10 month period. But what they found is they worked for different reasons. Human coaching actually worked earlier, but over the 10 month mark, AI coaching caught up. And the reason why it was useful is because it was way more frequent. They can have three or four or five sessions a week with the AI coach that they, it was this tech space coach at the time versus a human coach you're going to meet maybe once or twice a month. So what this is, it's like a lower potency, higher frequency form of coaching, a form of support. So I think it can complement, but in many cases it might be a standalone because most people in the world just never going to work with an executive coach or a leadership coach. This is never going to work out. That doesn't mean they can't benefit from it. And so what this allows is for more people to get baseline access. And if you're working with a coach, you might have things that you can do in on top of working with, working with a person.

Speaker A: You're using the existing programs out there, the ChatGpts and the Gemini. So you're helping them implement this like on a medium to like larger scale.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, that's fantastic. Because I know as Jocelyn said, every day we're talking about this. Being in the learning and development world, we have a lot of clients that have no idea where to begin. They come to us and they might want to get a bunch of people trained, they might want to get a bunch of people coached, they might want to get a bunch of people assessed. And a lot of people are just still kind of stalled out. We do have like a lot of different like programs but as everything is moving very quickly. So how do you go about assessing the client that comes to you and says like, we need to like incorporate AI? We know it can help us tremendously, but where do we start?

Speaker B: Yeah, so many people come in saying I want to use AI, I need to be using AI, but that's like the tail wagging the dog.

Speaker C: Why?

Speaker B: What does your business actually do? So the first thing I do is I ask them, uh, what does your business do? What are you trying to accomplish? And then you work backwards and then you think about, well, hey, how can AI help us do this better, faster, cheaper, or in a way that was previously not possible? So a lot of it also is. People treat learning AI often like learning a new subject or studying a new field. It's more like reaching for a new tool to do things that you are already doing. So if you have an expertise at something, you often have an advantage of using AI in that domain because you know what prompt to put in there, right? You have an understanding, you know how to frame it, what you're looking for.

Speaker A: Very good point. Sorry. But very, very good point. Yeah, okay, sorry. Okay.

Speaker B: You also can evaluate the response so you know when it's wrong. If it's something that you don't know about, the AI is probably smarter than you. It's probably above your threshold, so you'll take that. But if you are an expert in that domain, you have more nuance and more ability to judge what comes back to you.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker B: There was this research around AI and how it impacts human performance. There's something called the compression effect where it raises the floor, but the ceiling is still up to you. So they did a study where they had groups of people, a dyad, two person teams, and they had one person teams, except the one person team was using AI. So let's say you had a marketer and a finance person and they had a task to do together. But then you would just have a marketing person with AI for finance or a finance person with AI for marketing. They found that the individuals who were using AI outperformed the teams who didn't. So AI has this ability to raise the floor on the areas that you're not skilled at. But when they looked at, well, how did it impact their existing expertise? It didn't really change it. It didn't change it much. So it's this unique new capability where individuals can now borrow expertise, leverage expertise that they themselves don't have. But there's still a need to develop your own expertise in whatever domain it is, and that becomes your new ceiling.

Speaker D: So, Tim, I'm, um, very intrigued by this compression effect. And as you could see from Maria, being like, great point, great point. That she's also very in tune to this idea. Right. Of understanding and what you feed it and like how, how These partnerships can exist. So can you dive more into that? I mean, you've been teasing before we started this about a couple frameworks that you have and things that you can kind of go over as far as implementing this and the training that is provided. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about this compression effect and the capability that it has at the core of it.

Speaker B: It's that, uh, it raises the floor on the things that you're not great at. Uh, but the ceiling is still up to you. When they looked at their expertise, it had little to no effect. And in some cases, it actually hurt their performance because after they stopped using AI, they had atrophied, they had regressed in that area. And so whenever I'm training people on how they can build this skill set of getting results with AI, I think about the zones of ability. Everybody has four different zones of ability. You have your zone of incompetence, your zone of competence, your zone of excellence, and your zone of genius. Your zone of incompetence are the things that you don't necessarily do well. You're not good at it, or other people do it better than you. Let's say it might be scheduling meetings or just something that's routine, just outside of your realm. That's where you get the biggest impact from AI. Then you have your zone of competence. Hey, you're decent at it, but you're about average. Most people are similar. Your zone of excellence. These are things that, uh, you're exceptional at, you're above average, you're really good at, but they're still not zone of genius. Zone of genius are the things that are your unique ability. It's kind of like your, your niche, the thing that you're wired for, you're good at, you tend to enjoy it, you get immersed in it, and it has the biggest impact on, on your bottom line. And so when you think about that, AI is an opportunity to actually live out of the things that make you most human, which is very contrary to how a lot of people think about it. You have your zone of genius. And so I like to say, do what you do best. Let AI do the rest. And there's four different ways that you can use AI, right? It's such a broad thing. You have four different A's of innovation. You have automation, augmentation, amplification, and adaptation. Automation is where AI does everything 100%. So let's say meeting scheduling. That's in my zone of incompetence. I'm not the world's best meeting scheduler. Okay? I use a tool like Calendly, right? I send a link it, they click it, they find a time shows up on my calendar. My zoom creates a zoom link. My AI notetaker hops on the call, right? So it's just boom there. And that's saving 10 hours a week or something like that. Then you have augmentation. Augmentation is you do as little as possible. So the AI is doing most of the work. You still need a human in the loop to approve or to review or to revise. Think about a AI note taker. It hops on the call, but it can still make some mistakes. And since you're on the meeting and you kind of have a bit of judgment, you can read through it, approve it, and then it sends out the notes to everybody, right? So that's an augmentation. Amplification is when you leverage the strengths of the AI and your own strengths. So let's say you are presenting or you're building a training program, and you need to make a presentation. Your zone of excellence is the actual facilitation, the actual content, being able to read the room. But maybe building the slide deck isn't your zone of excellence. So AIs can build the slide deck. So you create your content, throw that into an AI, and AI actually makes the slides, the designs, adds the color, and all that. Right now you could be a designer, and maybe that is your zone of excellence. So maybe you don't want to delegate that and you use the AI for the other part. So it's very unique to how you're wired. You get to augment yourself based on your strengths and gaps. And then the last one is adaptation. Adaptation is where you reinvent everything around this core capability, and that's what you want to use your zone of genius for. So you want to automate your zone of incompetence, augment your zone of competence, amplify your zone of excellence, and want to adapt everything else around your zone of, uh, genius. Let's say you're an effective communicator, and that's your zone of genius. When you speak, you're compelling. That drives the most for your business. You come alive. What you can do is you can restructure everything you're doing around that using AI. Let's say it comes to content creation. What I might do is I might just record a video. I'll ask myself some very powerful prompts, things that get me excited that I can just go off and get enthusiastic about. I'll just record it. Then I'll have an hour clip. I throw it into an AI tool called Vizard. Vizard will read the transcript, figure out what are the clippable moments. It'll clip them up, it'll add the captions, and then it can schedule posts on my social media accounts out for the rest of the month. So then now I'm spending all my time in that zone of genius. But then the AI is, I've adapted everything else around that so that it has the highest leverage. And so do what you do best. Let AI do the rest.

Speaker A: Very cool. So can you give us an example? So say it's a, uh, mid level manager and they're coming to you and saying, tim, how can I use AI to help me grow? Yeah, how do, like where do you, where do you start?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I start off with asking questions to really understand it. Because when it comes to AI, there's no one size fits, uh, all. There's definitely categories of things. But the thing that's unique about this is you are the expert of AI in your domain. You just don't know it yet because you know intimately your workflows, you know your customer who you're engaging with. And so the you could produce Maria for something that you're interested in is going to exceed my ability to do that. Now I can show you how to wire the tools together. I can let you know what capabilities there are, I can create a path for you to build your confidence and your competence in that. But actually you're in the best position to figure out what automation looks like in yours because there's so many degrees of freedom. One in every seven Google searches has never been searched before today. Um, still think about how many trillions of different searches there have been, how much more an AI prompt where it's literally free range and they can be pages and pages long. Pretty much every single prompt is unique, but it's just like casting a spell in Harry Potter. You just change one word, you get a very different output, right? If I say, hey, create an article versus create a program versus create a image that's just one letter, like one word difference, but it's a dramatically different output. So what you really want to do is you want to empower the people who are in the best position to have proximity to the problem. You want to empower them to be able to use the AI, not be so prescriptive. But then they also need to be taught how, what, what's possible and principles. And so when I teach, I don't teach certain tools or certain prompt templates. I don't believe in that. I believe in teaching them to fish. So that way I can. I can. Whether they're in finance, whether they're in marketing, whether they're in operations, there's still a lot of value to be conveyed. And it also makes them feel encouraged, because so many people feel intimidated by this stuff. Like, man, I spent so long doing things this way. I don't want to learn anything new. By the way, this might take my job. Uh, and we're killing the planet with this. There's so much around this. I understand why some people might feel hesitant, but when you tell them, hey, no, you're actually the expert. You just need to reach for a new tool, and this tool can actually amplify you and allow you to spend more time in your zone of genius so that you can do better business and in service of the people that you interact with. Right. And I think that's the paradigm shift that I often experience when companies bring me in to do training or to do advising is they feel like, oh, wow, I was intimidated. I felt left behind. I felt like this wave was gonna crash over me. And now I'm on my surfboard and I'm riding this wave, and I see how it's propelling me forward and it. And it can be a good thing.

Speaker A: Such a different approach. I love it. We haven't seen that at all. That somebody goes in from this direction because it's like you're. It's building confidence. Right. And how to use it. And it is funny because the power users just keep on getting better and better. Right? Because they do feel comfortable. And then you still have these people that are extremely hesitant, um, in our organization, I know there's a handful of people that have yet to dabble in it, but. But some of the things that we're using and building on right now. So one of the things is the notes that our sales notes, we went. We had Otter. Now we're using Fathom Fathom. And our sales managers just built out a bunch of templates, and it will put all the templates in. And I mean, put all the notes in from the templates, and we'll coach. You did a great job on this step. You could do better on this step, and you could have asked this, but it's absolutely amazing when you use it. And that's something that we're rolling out now to all the different teams here. And I know, again, like, some people are very comfortable with that, some aren't but it's really incredible. So I really like what you're saying because again, even though it's everywhere and everybody's talking about it, there's so many people that don't have the confidence. Like, what about from a perspective? And I don't know if you get into this at all, but there are still many people that like, I can't use this because how do I know that this information is confidential or like, from a like it tech perspective, effective. Do you get involved in that at all?

Speaker B: Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's one of the most common people.

Speaker E: Right.

Speaker B: So look at the, look at the policy. A lot of these tools, uh, have protocols where you can go in and you can turn off training data. That's the first thing I do whenever I grab a new AI tool is actually look at the security. So I log in and then I'll actually see you, uh, go into settings. And sometimes these companies are a little tricky and what they'll do is they'll say, would you like to make our tool better for everyone else? Are you a good person? And what they really mean is, we want to train on all of your information, everything you put in here. And very often you could opt out. That's the first thing I do is opting out. Even then, there are sometimes cases where you might be working with a client, you might be doing something else where you don't want to store that data or they have something there. Now that's a case by case basis. Many companies have their own bespoke tools for that exact reason. And so it is on a case by case. What is, what is the policy here and what's appropriate here? I've done work with organizations where I have my AI notetaker in the room if I'm doing team coaching. I, uh, worked with this publicly traded company that does leadership development and digital services. And I was there during an off site, right, but. And I'd use my note taker because it actually made me better in the room. I could prompt it and say, oh, hey, what was said? What were some of the themes? Send a recap. I would take part of that transcript, generate an infographic based on the discussion we just had, and send that to everybody. So it allowed me to be very valuable in the room. But then afterwards I just deleted the data and we had an agreement up front, so, okay, cool, it'll last as long, delete it and then send it off. But during that moment, it was an advantage. It gave me an edge and I was able to produce More value. So if you're also able to have that conversation of, uh, why is AI needed to need to be used? You can also create the opportunities that you want. Now, one of the other common things that I hear is people are they just don't trust it. They're just like, hm, I somehow feel like I'm being exploited. If I put my information in here, is someone able to just take all my ideas and run away with it? And I think sometimes it comes from a lack of under. I mean, there is a. There's some validity to it, but sometimes it comes from a lack of understanding where they treat it like, if I put something into the AI, someone else can like, say, hey, what did Tim say? What was Tim's framework?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: But it's like a drop of rain in the ocean. It's like, can I retrieve that exact drop back? Not necessarily. So that may be less of a concern. And the other thing I hear is, around the policy, after you do turn off training data, they're like, I don't know. But the reality is your data is sitting somewhere on somebody's platform. If you use Evernote, if you use Notion, if you use Apple Notes, if you use Gmail, all of your important data is already on somebody's software. That's not an AI question, that's a company policy question. People tend to treat AI different because it's new, because it's changing, because it's unfamiliar, it's strange in nature. But it comes down, do you trust OpenAI, anthropic Google that they're following through on their policy, but you're already trusting these other companies, Zoom, Otter, et cetera. Right. And you may not have thought critically about where else is your data. So I also challenge people to think, this is an invitation to think about how do you feel about your data being stored? But don't just single that out to AI, because your data is already being trained on by Google if you use Gmail.

Speaker E: Right.

Speaker B: And so people don't bat an eye at that necessarily.

Speaker D: Well, these are all very good points because you're right, it's exactly what everybody is dealing with, whether it's the organization themselves or somebody sitting in the room of the training that you're doing for the organization. It comes up all of the time. And even that's where some people start, right? We're like, it's. We don't even want to talk about AI yet. We just want to make sure people, like, really understand it before we start embedding it into their everyday lives. I so what, what do you think is the most common mission step when you see organizations trying to introduce AI without, um, I guess maybe without having a clear definition of success, or maybe some of the other key areas that you were talking about, like understanding what your goals are and maybe how you want this to help. What's. What are people doing that you're like, oh, well, maybe you want to go back and start over, you know?

Speaker B: Yeah, totally. One is not using it themselves. If the leader is like, everybody needs to use AI. It's the future, and they don't use it. It shows because there's an intuition that you gain from spending 10 to 20 hours on it. There's just, you get it, you get, okay, this is what it is. This is how it might respond. Yeah, it hallucinates, but this is where hallucination. This is the shape of a hallucination. And, uh, you can just tell when people just talk about it versus people who are actually using it. So that's the first thing. Use it yourself before you say everybody else needs to use it. Right. The second thing I would say is it's too top down. It's too top down. You need leadership buy in. You need the leaders to say, okay, uh, if this is the direction we're going, here's why. Here's the value we think it's going to produce, and here's why that's important. Leaders can also do a good job of saying what that means for them. Because if you're an employee and your leadership is saying, we're going AI first, and your first thought is, holy crap, do I have financial security? Right? Am I going to lose my job? That's going to create friction in the adoption and in the rollout. And I've also seen other leaders who are like, hey, this is going to be a tool that you're going to be able to become way more capable. The parts of your job that you hate, we're going to be able to augment that. And some things are going to change, but your skills are going to be used here now. So that's one thing. But there's also something bringing back what we said before, where it's the expert, the one who has proximity to the work being done, actually has the best insight into how AI can often be used. They know what prompts to put. They know how to evaluate the output. So there has to be a culture where people can do ongoing experimentation, where they can go off and find those things. Because you're a leader, you don't know you haven't done tactical execution probably in a long time. By the time you get to that position, the ones making those decisions are usually the ones furthest from the actual execution. And so you need to invite that their voices need to be there and they also need to feel empowered that they can go out and try stuff. AI is weird. It's good at some stuff, it's not good at other things that no human, a human who can perfectly quote Shakespeare can tell you how many Rs are in the word strawberry. But sometimes AIs will struggle with something like that. So it's weird where it's like, okay, it's really great at these. It's not that there's going to be some mistakes, there's going to be some things that don't work out. There has to be a culture where you can actually experiment and put it in place. And one of the things that I've done is I've developed a framework for how organizations can think about how they create this kind of bottom up culture where people are actually testing it out. And I call it do good deeds. Deeds. That's D E E D S. Discover, experiment, evaluate, decide and scale. And it's a simple process. What a catchy name. So that everyone in the company can say hey, we're going to do a deed or hey, we're doing good deeds. It also makes it something positive that we can share and it creates a very systematic way of going through the process. Discover why should we do this in the first place? So many people are just like, oh, the tool is shiny object, let's go do it. Otherwise my shareholders think we're falling behind. But like what value is this producing? Because in a business you really have two top line metrics. You have profits and you have impact, right? Hopefully both. And hopefully you're also thinking about the impact of the things that you, you're doing. But there's only two ways to increase profits. Earn more, spend less. There's only two finite amount of ways to earn more. You can charge more, you can offer more, you can do it more frequently, more doses, et cetera. It's a finite amount of things. So once you just think strategically what actually produces value in my business, then discover, well, what aspect of what we're doing now can AI support to that aim? Now it's grounded. Now you're not just out here chasing these unfamiliar things. You're very grounded in what you already are doing. You're already grounded in what matters already has been established. Experiment. It's about actually Running an experiment, actually doing it. Right. So in discovery, you also define, okay, here's what we want to do. We think that implementing an AI notetaker on the calls is going to increase our close rate or whatever it looks like in your context. You define what that is and then you also define a bit of, okay, what tools can we use that are actually going to be safe in our environment? How complex can this be? Right? If this tool has a really steep learning curve, maybe that's not something we can do. And you figure out what that is in your business. And that's a lot of what we help companies understand. Experiment is actually doing it. Test it out. So what is the smallest possible version of this? You don't have to change your company overnight, but hey, can you run a one week trial on this? Can you just try? If you're a smaller business, can you try using this AI tool for your next presentation? A, uh, DEED can be as big as organization, wide change or just making a small adaptation to a workflow. And that's why it also sticks in the culture. It's a culture of experimentation, trying new things, but then also evaluating. So experiment, evaluate deeds. Discover, Experiment, evaluate, evaluate. Did it work? What happened? What are you learning? How easy? What was unexpected? Did you get the results that you were hoping to see? And then you move to the second D, which is decide. And there's only four decisions that you can make. Adopt, adapt, delay, decline. That's it. Adopt. Yes, we're going to use it. We saw the results that we saw and we want to move forward with this in this direction. Adapt. Hmm, it kind of worked, but I think maybe if we tweak it, uh, let's try a different AI model, let's try better context, or let's prompt it in a different way, that's an adaptation. And run it again. Then you have delay. Now, delay is an unusual decision, but in the age of AI, where things are moving so quickly, the version of AI that you're using today might not be able to handle it, but the next version or the one after that might. And, uh, you'd be surprised how often the delay actually works. So you'll say, hey, let's put this in the freezer. Let's wait for the world to evolve and let's pull it back out when that is actually necessary. And then the last one is decline. It didn't work. It did not work. Uh, for whatever reason, this you can move forward with. And then the final letter of deeds is S. So discover, experiment, evaluate, decide, and Last is scale. And you only scale things that you choose to adopt. So once you adopt, scale means how do we spread the results of this across the organization or across the appropriate context? Whether that's horizontally. Okay, we're going to use this for all tasks like this, or vertically, we're going to start, we're going to do it more in this context. So if you. Yeah, yeah. So scaling, how do you spread the results? And then there's. Sometimes there's a big rollout, sometimes it's as simple of just keep the subscription going.

Speaker D: Unbelievable overview, Tim. So thank you so much for sharing that because it makes so much sense in a quick wrap up, because we've discussed so much between frameworks and coaching and training and preparing and implementing. What is the one practical way that you can, uh, introduce AI that delivers value quickly without over complicating the process for the organization or the leader?

Speaker B: It's a good question. I'll say do a deed.

Speaker A: I was gonna say that and I didn't even know. That's so funny. Yeah, just use a deed.

Speaker B: Do a deed. Right.

Speaker A: But no, no, because it really is cool. Uh, I mean, no, I know you invented this, but it's excellent.

Speaker B: Yeah. It can be as small as you want, or it could be as big as you want. A giant deed was me running this, like coaching based nonprofit. And we decide we're going to try an AI coach. And we changed the whole trajectory of the company. But we started small. I built the AI coach, then we built the next version. We got feedback from students, et cetera. But that's a big initiative that took over 18 months. There's a deed you can run that takes 10 minutes. There's an AI tool called Whisper. It's a voice dictation app. It is better than a professional human. If they were writing down everything you said. And it takes over one key on your keyboard. And the average person speaks four times as fast as they can type. And if you're me, it's like eight times as fast. So what you can do is you find out a tool like this, discover, oh, hey, people speak four times as fast as they can type. So if I can just type, if I can just speak, I'd be way more efficient. If I spend over two hours typing a day, that's over a work week, over a year that you save just off of pushing this button. I hardly use my keyboard anymore. I like this tool. I'm not sponsored by them, but this is something that I use. It's helpful. So experiment, download it Right. Go straight into Settings, turn off training data so they're not trading on your stuff. Right. But then use it. Okay, I have. I'm behind on emails. I have 15 emails that I have to get to anyways. Let me just reach for a new tool and something I already have to do. Don't make it overcomplicated. Don't, like, try to go off. What are you already going to do? You have plenty of work. Just use that. That's your playground for AI. Right, Evaluate. Okay, I used it. You know what? It was good, but it did some weird punctuation here and there, but it wasn't too annoying. That was okay. It's easy to use. I just pressed the FN key. It took me a little time to figure out how to set it up in Settings, but I can see myself using this. Okay, evaluate. That's the. That's the evaluation. It worked. Decide. I'm gonna adopt it or I'm gonna adapt. Uh, hey, I saw some settings where my name is not traditionally spelled, so when I say it, it misspells my name. But you can teach it, you can train it. Okay, I'll adapt that a little bit. Let me. What are the things that I might say commonly? What are some shortcuts? How can I tweak the settings? Okay, I'm gonna adopt it. So that's my decision. And then scale. What does scale look like? I'm gonna use it. I'm gonna use it now for most of my writing tasks. So that's what a deed looks like. And that can take 15 minutes. Right now, I break it up, and it seems like a lot of thinking for something simple, but once you do that, you find that you're probably already making decisions in this process. But when you clearly define it, you know what you're doing, you know what stage you're at, you know how to tweak it, you know what decisions you're making. So off run a deed, run a small deed, and. And then go from there. Go from there.

Speaker D: Love it. TIM M. That's such a great way to wrap it up and bring it back to the. The framework and the foundation of what you're looking to do and how you teach others how to incorporate AI appropriately into their organization. We love this stuff. I mean, we have been taking notes the entire time, so we can't wait to digest some of this ourselves and appreciate you sharing all of your knowledge with us. Us. We have a couple of more questions to get a little bit more knowledge out of you, so to speak. It's our TTA 10. So David, when you're ready, come back on in here.

Speaker C: It's the TTA 1010 final questions for our guest.

Speaker D: All right, Tim, so I may or may not have used AI to get these questions. I'm not going to take tell you, but I am going to ask you 10 more playful questions that have to do a little bit more with your personality and your style to get to know you a little bit better. Answer them as quickly as you can. There's no right or wrong answers, but there's definitely good and bad ones. And we will celebrate you at the end if you achieve such an accomplishment of answering them in under 60 seconds.

Speaker E: Wow.

Speaker D: Okay. Yeah, right. And get that, get that framework out. Okay.

Speaker A: 127 questions.

Speaker D: 34. No, 10. TTA 10. We're keeping it to 10 with 60 seconds. We'll be on the clock, Tim. So are you ready?

Speaker B: I'm, um, ready.

Speaker D: All right, David, Countdown please.

Speaker C: TTA 10 starts now.

Speaker D: All right, Tim, so your phone dies at 10 or your laptop dies mid presentation. Pick your nightmare laptop.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker D: Silent disco or a karaoke bar?

Speaker B: Karaoke.

Speaker D: What to hell that you will absolutely die on?

Speaker B: Pineapple on pizza.

Speaker E: Okay.

Speaker D: What's the useless talent that you secretly have?

Speaker A: I don't know.

Speaker B: I can freestyle.

Speaker D: Okay, what's the most unthink, unhinged thing that you believe as a kid that you realize was unhinged now?

Speaker B: So many things.

Speaker A: Good answer. Yeah.

Speaker D: A documentary is made about your life. What's the title?

Speaker B: The enjoyable pain of Growth.

Speaker D: You can talk to one animal. What's the animal you talk?

Speaker B: Dog.

Speaker D: What's your first purchase if you win the lottery tomorrow?

Speaker A: House.

Speaker D: Okay, you're in the zombie apocalypse. What's your weapon?

Speaker B: Gun.

Speaker D: Okay, what's a song you know every word to but you won't admit until now?

Speaker B: There's no song I wouldn't admit.

Speaker A: Better not be a swifty song, huh?

Speaker D: What's a totally normal thing you do that might that other people might find weird?

Speaker B: I touch things. I'm six foot eight. And so I touch things that are really high up that are strange to people, but they're like normal for me, I don't think about it.

Speaker D: I'm going to say if I was 6 8, I'd be trying to touch

Speaker B: everything in the ceiling at all times.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker D: All right, well, with all the extra commentary we have gotten through 10 questions. So David, could you please give us some whatever as an official of a timing as you can

Speaker E: with a time of

Speaker C: 87 seconds. Tim is a winner GTA 10. Congratulations.

Speaker B: Nice.

Speaker A: Nice. Yes.

Speaker C: And we do have a, uh, salute for Tim. Now you can be the judge as to whether this is a salute created by AI for an AI expert. Who knows? Maybe it was involved. I mean, we're talking about how the great tools. But stand by with me for a moment. This is a musical salute to Tim and everything that revolves around him in his world. And let's give it a go.

Speaker E: Yeah. Yeah. From the court to the cold. Tim Harrison in the house. Let's go. Started with a vision not a whole game change Coaching with the future why the rest stay strange? AI in the toolkit Wisdom in the brain showing folks the shortcut without cutting the game. CEO Founder, Innovation Lab trying to scare coaches in the. Look what I have. Everybody wanna know what the future gonna make ICF task force. Only eight got picked.

Speaker A: We need to use this as the teaser for the podcast

Speaker E: Human heart AI driven vision from the classroom all the way to the boardroom he bring the light when the future feeling more doomed Tim Harrison yeah, he changing the pace keep the people first why innovate in the space? If you want to level up, better get information. Welcome to the coaching Innovation Lab station project beacon yet a mission state deep helping future PhDs chase dreams they can keep not study with a 3 million plan building bridge just for the people overlooked by the man in E Park academy started making noise power pass system giving guidance to the boys and the girls too Everybody gets a lane Tim trying to live life not just chase fame you still hoop bad rights with the owls in flight now we slam

Speaker B: dunk strategy every single. This is crazy. This is incredible.

Speaker E: Oh, my gosh.

Speaker B: Uh,

Speaker A: Uh, your new theme song. When you walk into company like, wait a minute here. I gotta play this.

Speaker B: I'm drinking and driving.

Speaker A: David, we're not sure if we like that. It was sparkling cider.

Speaker D: Incredible.

Speaker B: That is awesome. That is awesome. I didn't know you could rap like that, man.

Speaker D: You said freestyle, he said bet.

Speaker A: Okay. Thank you so much.

Speaker D: We had a blast.

Speaker A: Excellent. Thank you you so much. Pleasure to meet.

Speaker D: For more information on how to enable your organization with AI uh, for efficiency, visit us@thetrainingassociates.com we'll see you later.