Why AI Adoption Is a Leadership Challenge, Not a Technology Challenge with Paul Gibbons

Speaker A: Hey Foresight listeners. Thanks for tuning into our show. If you like what you hear and want a monthly roundup, a sneak peek into the insights from our Foresight plus members only events and more, sign up for our monthly newsletter. It's free and subscribing also gets you access to our quarterly Foresight whitepaper. This quarter's white paper is about rethinking entry level work in The Age of AI. Produced in collaboration with Dr. Miranda M. Rodak from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, an important topic for HR leadership and parents, students and society as a whole. Link to subscribe in our show Notes now on to today's episode.

Speaker B: You're listening to Foresight, the weekly podcast about HR M leadership and the future of work. We explore the ideas, trends and the real stories reshaping how work gets done. I'm your co host, Mark Edgar, a former consultant and coach turned chief people officer on a mission to make work more human.

Speaker A: And I'm Naomi Teitelman, former big firm consultant and HR executive, now striving to make work better, one leader and one organization at a time. Every week we chat with top experts and dive deep into the issues facing HR and business leaders today, from retention and engagement to AI, flexible work culture and leadership effectiveness, with ideas you can use right now to lead with confidence into the future of work. Welcome to Foresight, a podcast about HR leadership and the future of work. I'm one of your co hosts, Naomi Teitelman, and I'm joined today by our next special guest, Paul Gibbons. Paul is the creator of the Adaptive Adoption Framework and the author of eight books on change, culture and AI, including Adopting AI, written for leaders who need a practical strategy. For three decades, Paul has worked at the intersection of human capital and technology, helping leaders at Shell, Microsoft, Barclays, HSBC and hundreds of other organizations navigate the hardest part of transformation as we know the people. Welcome to Foresight, Paul, it's great to have you here. How are you today and where are you joining us from?

Speaker C: I am, um, in Las Vegas, where it's about to be in centigrade, 35 degrees or something like that. So there you are.

Speaker A: Oh boy. Well, in Toronto it's about that too, actually. But we've been waiting a long time for that. So we are happy about the sun shining and the heat. Vegas heat is a whole other heat, especially as you go in and out of freezing cold buildings.

Speaker C: Yeah, freezing cold buildings. I always tell everybody when you come to Vegas for the summer, you have to bring. You have to bring long trousers and a Hoodie. Otherwise you'll be very miserable in most of these places anyhow.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker C: Lovely to see you.

Speaker A: Lovely to see you. And before we get started, we'd like to check in. So today's check in question for you today, Paul, is what is the biggest personal change you've experienced and how did you get through it?

Speaker C: Oh God, I saw that and I thought, oh, am I really going to do this? So in 1993, I stopped drinking. And so that's like what, 35, 30, 33 years ago. Congratulations. Pretty big change. But it's kind of funny for moms will understand this. Giving birth feels like if you're a dude, that's like the end of the process. Was it actually the beginning of the process? Because if you've been soaking your prefrontal cortex and alcohol for 20 years, it doesn't work so good, as they say it in America. So there's a kind of whole personal growth journey that. Not just cutting out the substances, but you know, like getting, getting it together. Which is why I got into organizational change. Because I saw one of your questions and you're like, why did you get interested in organizational change? And that was partly it. It's partly like, how do human beings change? You know, whether that quit smoking or lose weight or spend more time with your children or meditate more or less, you know, think more, you know, whatever. These changes that we manifest in our lives that we wish to correct, in my case, one of them was rather acute.

Speaker A: So let's go there and, uh, let's start with you. If you could tell us a bit about your career journey. Thank you for sharing that personal information with us. And congratulations again on being sober. Let's go to your career journey. What inspired you to focus on change in culture other than what you've just shared? And now you're focusing on the largest transformation hitting our generation, which is AI. So, so tell me about your journey.

Speaker C: Maybe any generation certainly consider that electrification was a really big deal, but took 100 years. Right. This is the sort of thing we're expecting to make that sort of change in a couple of years. But anyway, I was a science and math guy. Ah. And then, uh, I became a consultant. And then what do you do when you're a science and math guy? As a consultant. You're a strategy consultant. So I know you worked in risk, right? So I was a risk management consultant. So I was the equation guy. And just what I found over and over again is like we would make these recommendations, sometimes get paid millions of dollars for Them and clients couldn't implement them. They couldn't execute.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And this is the early 90s. And there was this thing that I was reading about, and I was doing my own personal change journey. Like, you know, how do humans change? But also like, well, how do organization change? Because it seems to be more than just like, let me read the report and do that, like, that's not enough. Or, you know, people get inspired at workshops, but do they change their behavior on Monday morning? So that whole idea about behavioral change. And so I became a change management nerd. You know, I went back to college. I did a master's degree. I did a million different workshops and facilitation and certifications and all this kind of stuff. So that was my thing. I trained as a counselor and a coach. Like, I went, I went, I went super deep. And then I started my own firm and blah, blah, blah, blah. So, uh, I won't go to, I'm 66. So when someone says, like, tell me, talk me through your journey, I'm like, well, we only have, like, you know,

Speaker A: yeah, no, that's, that's great. And similarly, you know, I started, as you said, in risk management, and then there was a point in my career very early on where I said, I'm really much more interested in the people side of things than the risk side of things, which was, you know, in support of audit. So it was a great way to learn the business. But then I was realizing that my larger clients were, you know, acquiring my smaller clients and not doing anything from a change perspective. And I didn't even know the change management existed as a discipline, but it was something that I was really interested in. So you've developed, actually a new modern framework for this time. I've also, I always think to myself, this change management thing has got to change. So you offer the concept of adaptive adoption as an alternative to the change change frameworks that were built for slower, more, you know, more methodical times. Can you talk about the framework and its three interlocking systems?

Speaker C: My mission has been to unlock the secret sauce for individuals and organizations. I, I, I often think, like, individual change is a really interesting thing, because if human beings were always as good as their intentions and their noblest values. We live in a different world. But what makes a difference is behaviors. And when I did my master's in the 1990s. But there's a piece of research on training transfer which just scared the bananas out of me. Only 10% of training transfers to the job.

Speaker A: That does not surprise me.

Speaker C: Uh, And I thought, what? Because sort of what I was doing for a living at the time was leadership development. You think of only 10%. And then you think about it like these guys in my leadership development course, like a year from now, will they be doing the stuff that they say? They love it. A good trainer is good at giving people those ahas, uh, and all that kind of stuff. Will they be doing anything different in years? So I began to become really interested in behavioral science and a lot of the change management frameworks. I'm going to name one called Adkar, which is about, um, an old model of change, which is if you change what's between the ears, that behaviors will follow. But we know that's not true in society. We know that it takes much more than just influencing someone and persuading them that something's a good idea for them to affect change to their behavior. So what's the X? What changes behaviors if it's not just good ideas? And so I wanted a change framework that was grounded in behavioral science, which precisely none of them are. They're grounded in workshops and training and educations and communication planning and stakeholder engagement and all those kind of things that work here, but not, you know, head, hard hands. Like, they don't necessarily inevitably change behaviors. So that's what's interesting about it. And then also, I think these ideas that change, important change happens in a nice orderly sequence, doesn't happen like that for human beings. There's no abcde. We're, guess what, you know, individuals. And Darwin says something like a, uh, requisite and beautiful variety, an endless and beautiful variety. I can't remember poetic language to describe the fact that we are multivariate. And so a lot of orthodox change management has been trying to universalize. All organizations change according to this recipe. All human beings change according to this recipe. And so part of my journey has been trying to unbundle that. The first change framework I learned was denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Everybody knows it. It's on the news. It's not a Seinfeld whatever, but it's not meant for change. But it was meant to apply to the dying. She studied the dying, not the guys on the third floor IT department. Uh, what kind of logical leap are you trying to make? And then if you ask a grief specialist today, they say there's no scripted way that people grieve. There's like, no, it's infinitely variable. So even for the dying people, it really isn't applicable. And then how do you take something that was research on the dying and apply it to organizational change. This idea to put humans in boxes and to script their journeys is understandable. Question is, does it work? This question. So what do you think of that? I know that you're.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I think that makes a ton of sense. I think it's the struggle between I want something that I can do step by step and scale as a leader, as an organization. Right. I want to hand this methodology to my leaders, tell them, you do these steps in this order and you will have magical change. And as someone who, you know, was a change management professional early in my career, I never said it out loud, but I was like, I'm not really sure that we're getting it. And also a lot of change projects just became about communications and training, you know, a little bit of stakeholder mapping, but then communications and training because that's all we really had access to. So it's interesting, as we go into this next era with AI enablement, how that can help us change at, uh, scale, but at an individual level as well. So I'd love to hear about your framework and the interlocking systems and how that's different from some of the methodologies that we've all used as gospel for the past 50 years.

Speaker C: There are three bits. One bit is kind of an agile design thinking framework. I'll say more about that in a second. One is a leadership framework, one is a governance framework. So those are the three bits that have to fit together. If you want to think about it metaphorically, like the agile design thinking, workflow, redesign, AI adoption bit is a wheel. Mhm. Not a series of steps. In order to make that spin, you need adequate leadership. In order to keep it safe, you need governance. Hm, Whatever. Okay, makes sense. The reason leadership is in there, I was hired by IBM Consulting to change their change practice. I joined IBM in like 2020 and they bought PwC Consulting, uh, in the late 1990s. And so I was expecting 20 years later to what are you doing? And change. And it was more or less what they bought from PwC in the 1990s. So they brought me in and gave me a big title and big salary and said, how can we improve what we do and change? One of the things I said, we need to do leadership development. Because people inevitably say if change is going to fail, it's going to be something to do with ineffective leadership. It's hard to paint a broad brush, but let's say that it's always in the mix. Right. But none of these canonical change frameworks, um, they Name sponsors and they name change champions. But giving someone a role or a title or a description does not make them competent to do it. And so part of adaptive adoption is leadership development. And part of it is ask the very serious question, is anything really different for AI? Because like, everybody wants. Oh, it's just so different. And this changes everything. And all the kind of nonsense that you hear around, does it change anything? Does it change anything? Is leadership always leadership? That's the question, right? Is leadership always leadership? It doesn't matter whether it's AI or it's Salesforce or it's culture change or it's leading a country. Is leadership always leadership?

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: And I think AI is different. Different enough so you can say, you know, why don't we just use authentic leadership or servant leadership or empathic leadership or transformation leadership? There are, I counted them for a book I was writing, like something like 98 different X leaderships. Because everybody who's a leadership consultant wants to have their own X, Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And, uh, some of those are very old, like Transformational Leadership, 1978, Servant Leaderships, 1971. You know, they've been around for a long time. So what's different about AI? What's different about AI leadership? Is there anything different? And so that's the question I've tried to answer is yes. I mean, yes, leadership is still leadership. It's still about connecting with people. There's still a sort of relational aspect of leadership. Trust, empathy, connection, influence, support. So I don't want to take anything away from that. But what's different about this technological beast that requires leaders to make some different moves? And then there's governance. Like, you got to have good brakes and good gas pedals. This thing has an ethical footprint unlike, um, anything I've ever seen in my whole life. Like the AI ethical footprint is like there's like a hundred items on it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: So can you really do organizational change? If I'm at change consultant going to help.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: American Express. Can you really support these teams in AI deployment and leave ethics completely out? Leave it like, hope that the compliance department does it, deals with it. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: Somebody else's job. No, it's not.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: No, it's not. These people are working with customer data, they're working with patient data. If they're in healthcare, they're working with customer data. If they're in financial services, they're working with supplier data. There's all kinds of ethical dimensions to AI adoption. And so having a Change framework that doesn't mention ethics. Kind of stupid in my view. Like hoping that compliance catches the bad boys. Yeah, that's just like an old model. What do you think about that? I don't want to go into it too much because like, it's like. So I've been working on it for six months. There's so much I could say, but I hope that's enough to tease people

Speaker A: like, oh yeah, no, I think it makes a ton of sense. And your point about leadership? I'd love to double click on that one because I do agree that leadership says some of the elements are the same, but some need to be better honed, better scaled, better relied on in this given moment. So I think what's different is that change is happening so quickly that we can't rely on like an eight step framework in order to get through. Change is, I mean it's, it's become cliche. But change is the constant. So when you're in an environment where volatility and change is a constant, how do you build those leadership skills that enable that? There's also this tension or kind of this, this dual problem we're solving, which is let's do change management for AI, right? Like adoption of AI and let's do change management as a whole, right? Like let's. Everything we go through every day is a change. So I think, you know, zooming out a little bit and figuring out what are those key development areas that we need for leadership in order to rely on them to be the front lines for governance, to be the front lines for, you know, unlocking new problems that we can solve with AI and when we should choose not to use AI, I think it's a really interesting topic to dive into. So I'm curious to hear from you, what is different about leadership in this world of AI?

Speaker C: Well, one of the things I think I discovered kind of experientially, like viscerally, like we've always talked about leaderships need to model the change. Right. And they often don't. And one of, by the way, I got to say one thing which is a sort of a brag and then one said I was ranked like number five in the world in culture change and some stupid website, global gurus, website, whatever. Right.

Speaker A: Congratulations.

Speaker C: Yeah, whatever. It's definitely like whatever. Like I had somebody called me. I don't want to Hilter. Uh, anyway, but I'm the guy who says a lot of what people say about culture change is not really very solid. Like of the 20 of the 30 people on the top list, two or three, I think, know what they're doing. And the thing is that we're trying to change values. This goes back to the behavioral change thing as well. And we've always wanted leaders to model the values, model the behaviors, model the way, everything, like. And, um, when leaders talk about culture change, you're a bunch of old guys sitting around the boardroom, oh, we need to change the culture. They're not talking about us, they're talking about them. And that's one of the things I find kind of like, if I may use strong language, kind of disgusting. Like, you talk about changing the culture of the organization and as if somehow it was something over there that you weren't the steward of and that people weren't looking, taking their cues from you, from what behaviors are legit and which aren't. So I'm the kind of guy that says culture change is all screwed up and it's frequency, an excuse, because leaders kind of know they're not going to change it, right? They go, oh, we need to change the culture. The culture wasn't right. What are you doing about that? Like, it's not like a trivial thing that you wake up one morning and say, we're going to have a different culture. Right? I've. I've seen.

Speaker A: Let's outsource that.

Speaker C: As you have in your career. You've seen hundreds and hundreds of people. It's like the weather, right? Everybody talks about it all the time and never changes. So it's kind of like that with organizational culture. So that's the, uh, that's the bit that distresses me the most. So back to leadership is like, I think they have to really live it, and I think they need to get. Dive in and become AI power users. Like, I just don't think you can do it because they need to feel that when you start to use AI in a kind of deep way, and Claude code and permissions and using the terminal and command line interfaces and using it to do real work and building agents. When you do that, you discover a whole level of pain. Like sometimes a pain in the butt. Like, sometimes it's like, oh, you know, I'm trying to do something, and there's a screen of red error messages on the terminal. I don't know. I don't know if you've ever used quad code, right?

Speaker A: I haven't, but it broke. Brings me back to my days coding Pascal in undergrad, right?

Speaker C: Oh, you're a Pascal? No,

Speaker A: that's another topic.

Speaker C: Well, that's another podcast. So you have this stream of red and you're like, okay, but I want leaders to feel that. I want them to feel like I'm trying to do this kind of thing. That should be easy. But I don't know where the source of truth is my hard drive, or is it in the Slack channel, or is it in my emails, or is it in spreadsheets, or is it in PowerPoint? Unless you've kind of grappled with the mess that is organizational data and the mess that is organizational workflows yourself, you don't have a visceral sense of what are you asking people to do. You know what you're asking people to do. There's something very difficult. And then I also want them to experience the joy. Because 100% of the people that I've said, okay, let me show you how to stand up a second brain, they go, I don't want a second brain. I got enough trouble with the one I have.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: I said, you want a second brain. Sort of grounded in neuroscience, but also just in practical utility is like. And 15 minutes in they go, as the children say, today I won't curse on your show. HFS like, oh, did you. I mean, 100% of the time I show people how Quad code works with Obsidian, works with a knowledge management system, and people go, like, I couldn't. So I want leaders to feel the joy. Mhm. Because they know, understand something of the potential of AI in a visceral way. Not like I read it on some stupid MIT or McKinsey paper, but I actually have a felt sense of what. Wow, this is pretty incredible. I also want to have a felt sense of the perspective because they're asking people to go through this and also they send a message. Right. So there's the communicative nature of it. So it's like it's not one of these inauthenticities or disconnects between what a leader says and what a leader does. Like, if I'm following this guy, I want to see like, is that guy using it himself or is this just some way that he's flogging the workforce with this new technology? Like, work faster, harder, longer, smarter, integrate it with all alike. I want to see senior leaders actually get in the mix too. So that's part of. That's just one dimension of the seven leadership Deltas, by the way, is modeling the way. But I just don't think you can fake it anymore. And also, this thing is incredibly complex. Like, once you get to the Top of an organization, you can speak very confidently for three to five minutes about almost any topic. M Training your. You've been training your whole life for it, Right. And a lot of it, especially when it comes to AI, can be bullshit, right? Mhm. You're making stuff up as you go along. I worked in consulting. Like partners used to wing it all the time. Yeah, the guys, the subject matter experts are like, oh, I can't believe he said that. But, but that's right. We'll train to be confident and fluent and extremely. Like we're not trained in doubt. We're not trained in, uh. That's a very complicated issue. I'm going to need a few days to think about that or I'm going to have to do some research or homework or I'm of two minds about this. It could go one way or could. We're not trained to think that. This is the annual. Especially like this is archetypally mail. Right. This is the answer. This is the way to go. And we're 100% certain it's going to be done by Friday. Like that kind of really, you know, like I just don't know if that works so well. So.

Speaker A: Yeah. So what is the answer to develop? Like we throw around the word leadership development all the time, Right. Like what does that look like in this day and age? It's not just going to a training session and you're trained, right?

Speaker C: Oh good God, those don't work at all. I had a leadership development firm and Our programs were one year, 14 months long and they had very small doses of learning and then very small doses of learning, very small doses of sort of the classroom type stuff, but very small doses on that. Um, very skills focused. And then six weeks of application, working in teams, trying to apply knowledge and then another short session, that sort of thing. So like the idea was because I just didn't want to fill people's heads full of ideas, that leadership is more like golf, or as I say today, more like carpentry than calculus. It's more like being able to do stuff and not, uh, talk about stuff. Obviously talking is part of it because it's one of the ways we communicate. But it's also being able to do things, give feedback, negotiate, you know, handle dissent, inspire people. All of those kind of leadership things. Those are behaviors. And so I can explain how to give a performance, uh, management review in approximately six or seven minutes. That does not mean that someone's going to be able to do it.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: They need to practice it they need to practice giving difficult message. Like it feels, it feels shitty, like to have to say someone like this is unsatisfactory performance. And you know, I'm afraid if it continues, we're going to have to, you know, find a way to address this together. Like that's hard to do for human beings.

Speaker A: Mhm. And are you pro or against using AI to help you coach you through that moment? Like preparation?

Speaker C: Super pro.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Yeah. First of all, it's a very good foil. It's a very. If you say, like, I want you to push back on what I'm about to do here.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Mm.

Speaker C: I mean, I don't know. Did you use it to prepare for talking to me?

Speaker A: In certain ways. Yeah, certain ways. Not in a coach relationship, more in a, you know, what are some interesting, you know, topic areas that we could explore. But I think it's super useful, especially since people don't like to practice things in front of other humans. But practicing in front of an AI feels less, you know, oh, I don't

Speaker C: do the rehearsal bit with it. I haven't, you know, I would, but if I've got a meeting with someone like you about 90 minutes ago, I threw your website and a bunch of your LinkedIn posts said it. And I said, I'm talking to interesting person here. You know, first of all, give me a briefing. What are some questions I could ask, what are some things she might ask and all of that kind of stuff. Yeah, so I go into meetings really well prepared these days.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's very helpful that way.

Speaker C: Very, very, very helpful. Yeah, very helpful. Your daughter's called Jerry. Like, I mean, I shouldn't know that, but you know.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: A bit creepy.

Speaker C: Oh, sorry, I didn't mean that.

Speaker A: No, I'll go like, like, I.

Speaker C: It's a level of preparation I can have and I think for performance management meetings, preparations, everything.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense. You could go into someone's social media profile and see like, what have they been posting about these days? Like, how are they feeling, you know, in life? Not just, you know, at work, but, uh, in life.

Speaker C: So yeah, now we're getting, now we're getting creepy.

Speaker A: Yeah, now we're getting creepy. I'm giving, I'm giving our listeners some creepy ideas. Oh, uh, anyway, let's talk role of hr because a lot of our listeners are HR leaders and HR professionals. So HR is being asked to lead the people side of AI adoption while simultaneously figuring out how AI is going to, you know, help or, or change HR Itself, which you've called the double bind. So where are you seeing that tension surface and who's navigating it? Well, do you have any examples of companies navigating that?

Speaker C: Well, I don't know if I can use the name, but some of these accelerated pedagogies are really interesting. Like we're being told to learn more quickly, but we can't just wait for the webinar. I think that most books. So people say I wrote a book on AI. Like what book should I read in AI? I say I actually don't read any of them. Completely useless for you trying to m. You're not a theoretician, you're a business person. And the books are. By the time it finishes with the publisher, it's nine months. And by the time I'd written a chapter and moved on to the next chapter, two weeks later, I wanted to rewrite the chapters. Right, yeah, don't read them. I mean, you know, the entertainment or the ones that are more deep, um, you know, on alignment and ethics and all that kind of stuff. That stuff's not quite so fluid. And then the other thing is like, are the universities keeping up? No, they are. So the fastest luck kind of pedagogies can be designed inside organizations which can have people learning and doing. And these will be familiar with hackathons and datathons and peer to peer learnings and community of practice. So how does HR really support that? What's our role?

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Do we know how to support people in, for example, developing community practice? You could just throw some people in a room together for a hackathon. But there are better and worse ways to do that. How do you deal with the rift? Like intelligent people can be not fond of AI. Uh, now you have really solid ethical reasons for thinking this whole thing's a bad idea.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: I don't happen to agree, but that doesn't mean that they're smoking funny stuff. As I come from Colorado. So anyway, people do a lot. So how do you deal with skeptics? Because nobody ever said back 30 years ago, it's like, oh, this new Excel patch, man, I don't trust that at all. It's coming from my job. One minute it's going to be Excel, the next minute I'm going to be out of it. Like no, but that's a real risk with things. So the job of HR is to kind of help to lubricate some of this transformational project. I don't think it's just hr, by the way, like I really do think the learning HR always gets beat with a stick. Like it's always on the front line of the uh, sort of people side of change. And while it's being asked to change itself.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: And I've never envied. Because when something goes wrong it tends to be HR's fault. Like people don't have the capability or not hiring our people, retention's not right. Engagement, stuff like that. There's always like something I feel that HR is always kind of getting beat with one of those sticks, which is not something I've been in favor of. One of the other things for HR people is a lot of my. Like I have like 12,000 LinkedIn followers. I'm not saying that as a Brag, but like 10,000 more coaches. I used to run a coaching business. Right. Most people in the people, Most of the people I know on the people side of organizations and enterprises aren't super tech friendly. They're not ex PAC programmers. They don't go into HR to become coders.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: They're going just because they care about people and there's some nobility and wanting to make people's working lives better and helping organizations to administer the people side of things in a compassionate and human centered way. People go into HR for not always, but mostly noble reasons. Not because they want to write tons of code, but we're increasingly being forced into that. That kind of opposite. What I said about the chief executive, like it gets. I think HR leaders too need to actually dig in. And I think a lot of, you know, there's this television show, the Bear. Have you ever seen that?

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Like why does the guy become a chef? Right. Because he's the greatest chef in the world. This is passion. Is cooking his food like that. What does he end up doing? 80% of his days dealing with bullshit. Right. I think that that's a sentence that happens a lot in HR too is we kind of have a strong commitment to humanistic commitment to people and we end up having to do too much drudgery and busy work. So I, my great hope is that AI will become power users.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Honestly, I can save you 10 hours a week. How would that be? Can we take through some of the BS that's making your life miserable?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: You know, yeah.

Speaker A: So let's stick with that thread and propose some solutions. So what can an HR listener start doing right now to change either their mindset, their habits, their behaviors, their ways of thinking? What would you propose?

Speaker C: Uh, I think if you're still talking to uh, AI and asking it for advice in 2026, you're not using it right. That's kind of very 2024. Start asking you to do stuff. And there's three basic things. There's plug, cowork.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Which came out in February. So if you haven't used it yet, you're not that far behind. Right where I don't chat to it anymore. I say okay, what are my meetings for today? Can you draft replies to all of the emails that don't require my attention and three or four that do require my attention? Then I'll draft them. Can you prepare me for all my meetings today? Can you send me a one page morning briefing? Begin to use cowork in a way to take to help you do your job better and to help you do your job faster. Cowork will I have this thing I do in one of my talks. I upload one of my books to Cloud Cowork and I say make that into a uh, landing page.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: And in six minutes, out pops the most gorgeous landing page I've ever seen.

Speaker A: Amazing.

Speaker C: Like it's six minutes. And they say how much that cost you in tokens, buddy? Haha. Two dollars and two cents. Like you know, I've had web pages built before and I've spent $5,000 on them.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.

Speaker C: $2, $2, 10 minutes of my time. So I want HR people to have that kind of visceral experience of having IT do valuable work for them and I want them to have that sort of personal transformation because I think they'll be better able to carry it to the organization if they're deep inside the thing. And I want their lives to be better. Like honestly, my impulses are humanistic. I don't care if Sam Altman makes more money. My impulses with HR are humanistic. I want human lives to be better. Like my mechanic. Like my mechanic who built a website for the first time. Like this guy is kind of like a door to door mechanic guy. He's like, oh, is that AI over there? I'm like, yeah. So I love it when it transforms people at the bottom of the pyramid and not just people at the top of the pyramid. Now HR people are squarely in the middle of the pyramid, but all over the pyramid. All over the pyramid. But that business about uplifting humanity.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: I have a friend who wanted to has been whining to me like a victim for 10 years. Oh, I hate my job. I hate my job. I have listened to it. It's Just, Just awful.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: I really should start a business. I really feel like I'm an entrepreneur. I really want to get, start my own business. Okay, but do it then. For 10 years. And then finally, like a week ago, he said, holy shit, Paul, this AI stuff's amazing. Why don't you tell me about it? I've been telling you every day for four years. But anyway, yeah, and he built up a business and he stood up a business and he built a website and he built the flyers and he did that. He's like, I've got a business now.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing what the tools can do. But and also to your point before, he's not that far behind because the tools have really, really, really changed over the past and accessibility to them have changed significantly over the past year.

Speaker C: So people think it was 2023, it was really 2026 when this thing started. Because 2023 was kind of a toy. Like, oh, you know, where can I find Wagyu on a Friday night? Like, whatever. Okay, whose life is better now?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that makes a ton of sense. All right, well, we are nearing the end of our time together, Paul. So before we go, how can our listeners find out more about the great work you're doing?

Speaker C: Paul Gibbons Advisory is my website. And um, that is all things Paul Gibbons. I've just written my ninth book, by the way. My ninth book is up on. Yeah, I write tons. I, I actually like writing like, uh, like I play these poker tournaments and sometimes there's millions of dollars for first places. So what are you going to do if you win? So I'm gonna do exactly the same thing on Tuesday morning. Like I'm gonna write books and um, that's great. I'm gonna talk to business leaders and I'm gonna think about important problems for the world to solve and do stuff like that. So that's Paul Gibbs Advisory. And then Slack is called Think Bigger, Think Better. That's my sort of other brand if you want.

Speaker A: Great. So we will put both of those in the show notes. And before we say goodbye, we like to end on a feel good. So what are you feeling good about today?

Speaker C: Oh, good golly Miss Molly. Well, the ninth book came out like yesterday, so huge congrats. I have a lot to be grateful for. But also I'm going to be grateful for small things. I've been kind of off base with my morning routine lately. I've been kind of like getting up and staggering to coffee and sitting down on the computer. And I got up, I did yoga, I meditated, I did the supplements, I had my 15 minutes of sunlight. Like, you know, like, I'm. I feel I'm set up for the day, which is. Doesn't happen every day, but I don't want to pretend that it does. But, yeah, that's a symptom of me feeling pretty good about myself.

Speaker A: That's great.

Speaker C: Setting up for the day.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. It's the small gratitudes that are really important.

Speaker C: Um, you're a yoga. You're a yoga person too, right?

Speaker A: I am. And I did my peloton and my weights today, because Wednesdays are for weights.

Speaker C: Wednesdays are for weights. Now that I ww.

Speaker A: Yes, ww.

Speaker C: I do something called F45, which no person my age should be doing, too. It's something I have a lot of fun at as well. So, yeah, part of my new book is on human performance and executive performance and how the body isn't like an optional add on, um, that drags around your brain and your mouth. It's actually something you need to look after for executive effectiveness. But anyway, I'm preaching to the choir.

Speaker A: Yes, I know. You know.

Speaker C: All right. Yes. Good to meet you.

Speaker A: Great to meet you. It was a delight to chat with you. And until next time, everyone take care. Thanks for listening to Foresight. If you enjoyed the episode, we would love to hear from you. Leave us a review wherever you listen to your podcast.

Speaker B: Your ratings and reviews also help more people like you find our show so that we can reach more Future Forward leaders and achieve our mission of making work better.

Speaker A: Uh, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram @FutureForward and sign up for our monthly newsletter, Foresight on our website, futureforward.com that's

Speaker B: F U T U R E F O H R W A r dash dot com where we share even more about the new world of work.

Speaker A: Talk to you next week.