Turning AI Anxiety Into AI Agency at Exclaimer with Antonia Bowler

In this episode, Sue Bethanis shares what nearly three decades of executive coaching have taught her about leading people through disruption, and why AI adoption is as much a human challenge as a technical one. Sue is CEO and founder of Mariposa Leadership, author of Leadership Chronicles of a Corporate Sage, and host of Wise Talk and Wise Space. She has coached more than 400 executives at companies including Amazon, Apple, Cisco, LinkedIn, and PayPal, and co-teaches a course on moving from director and VP roles into the C-suite. She and Andy discuss what she calls the uncollar economy, why knowledge workers feel more exposed by this wave of change than any before it, and how fear and overwhelm are showing up in her coaching conversations at every level, including among leaders themselves.Sue walks through the three pillars of her framework, role, mindset, and practices, and makes the case that leaders need to consciously take on the role of change agent rather than letting change happen to them. She shares her sandpile metaphor for expecting disruption, the shift from blame to aim when teams push back, and why executives modeling their own learning, including the mistakes, matters more than any mandate. The conversation then turns to executive presence and influence, where Sue offers a practical framework for being heard in meetings, advice on interrupting gracefully, and her view on what actually separates leaders who get promoted from those who stall.I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website (andystorch.com) or LinkedIn. And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon.Connect with Sue Bethanis: LinkedIn | mariposaleadership.com

In this episode, Katie Tonda shares how she is leading a company-wide AI transformation and rebuilding leadership development from the ground up at ECI Software Solutions. Katie is Global Senior Director of Learning and Development at ECI, a private equity backed software company supporting around 2,400 employees globally, and she came there deliberately after building her career at two of the largest employers in the world, Verizon and Walmart. She and Andy talk about why she made that move, what best practices transfer from massive organizations to a lean team of three operating as a center of excellence, and her philosophy of being brief, being brilliant, and being gone.Katie walks through ECI's three-phase AI enablement strategy in detail, from a required baseline covering terminology, prompting, and hallucinations, through software-specific hands-on integration, to department-level work led by internal champions. She explains why her team builds custom AI apps in-house rather than buying off the shelf, including a career development tool that maps an employee's skills, values, and interests against future roles and generates a development plan. The conversation also covers how AI competency is now built into job descriptions and interviews, why L&D has to treat measurement like any other business decision, and her belief that the window to build a future-ready workforce has shrunk from five years to about eighteen months.I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website (andystorch.com) or LinkedIn. And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon.Connect with Katie Tonda: LinkedIn

In this episode, Njabulo Mashigo shares how deliberate culture work has helped make Vodacom South Africa the number one top employer in the country three years running, a first in that market. Njabulo is HR Executive Director at Vodacom South Africa, the largest market in the Vodafone Group, and describes herself as a people strategist and culture evangelist. Across 24 years and three industries, from Unilever to South Africa's National Treasury and the JSE to Heineken, she has developed a clear view that culture is not something that simply happens to an organization. It can be orchestrated, measured, and treated as a strategic asset. She and Andy open on the tension facing large companies right now, the pressure to keep growing while cutting costs, and why HR has a role on both sides of that without becoming the hangman.Njabulo explains how her team documents the lived experiences of specific groups inside the business and turns that into an action plan, how they expanded their listening beyond the annual engagement survey, and how data on attrition revealed a leaking bucket problem with retaining women that attraction numbers had masked. She also shares Vodacom's approach to AI, from early instincts to block the tools to running AI immersions in HR, why leader resistance is usually about confidence rather than unwillingness, and how their firelighters hold leadership accountable from the grassroots. Throughout, she makes a practical case for connecting people patterns directly to business results.I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website (andystorch.com) or LinkedIn. And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon.Connect with Njabulo Mashigo: LinkedIn

In this solo episode, Andy Storch shares the top 10 lessons he has gathered on AI transformation over the last several months, drawing from podcast interviews, private one-on-one conversations, industry conferences, and the virtual roundtables he has been hosting with L&D leaders. The picture that emerges is consistent: the technology is rarely the hard part. What determines whether an AI rollout succeeds is training, time, psychological safety, and whether anyone bothered to address the very human fears sitting underneath the initiative.Andy walks through why employees are simultaneously hungry for AI content and lost about how to apply it, why the tools budget and the training budget are so wildly out of balance, and how one company took adoption from 45 percent to 97 percent by naming the fear out loud. He covers the two distinct fears holding people back, why the traditional instinct to teach fundamentals first may be backwards, the growing risk of outsourcing critical thinking, and a cautionary pilot story where five weeks of rollout produced ten minutes of total usage.In This Episode, You'll Hear:Why employees can be in a feeding frenzy for AI content and still be completely lostWhy people need a Sherpa, not just a mountain to climbThe three Ts of adoption: training, time, and tools, and why most companies deliver only oneHow the tools budget and training budget got so out of balance, and the 70/30 split that explains itWhy psychological safety is the real adoption lever, not a nice to haveThe second fear nobody names: that using AI feels like cheatingWhy we might be teaching AI backwards, and the case for building before learning fundamentalsThe death of critical thinking, and one leader's refreshingly low tech fixWhy the technology curve is outpacing the people curve, and what that means for L&DHow to meet resistance where it actually lives, sometimes outside of work entirelyThe AI pilot that got 10 minutes of total usage in five weeks, and the three mistakes behind itWhy employees are three times more ready than leaders believe, and why only 21 percent of CHROs are in the room earlyEpisodes Mentioned:Christa Hill on AI adoption and the messy middleAlex Zubko on the three Ts and why availability isn't adoptionAntonia Bowler on AI adoption at ExclaimerJulie Stone on AI enabled learning at TTECJoshua Remerowski on measuring impact and the death of critical thinkingWork With Andy:Andy runs hands-on AI Kickstarter workshops for teams who need to move past fear and into real usage, getting people actually using the tools during the session so they experience the aha moment for themselves. He also delivers a keynote on career ownership in the AI world for audiences who need to understand what all of this means for their own careers.Reach out at [email protected] or connect on LinkedInAbout The Talent Development Hot Seat:Hosted by Andy Storch, this podcast connects talent development professionals with insights, ideas, and inspiration to grow their careers and their organizations. With over 600 episodes published since 2018, the Hot Seat is your resource for what's next in L&D.

In this episode, Alex Zubko shares what she is seeing inside organizations trying to make AI transformation actually work. Alex has been in the AI trenches since 2022, when she pivoted a company into AI right as ChatGPT launched, and she now works with private equity firms, fintech companies, and beyond, doing everything from education to hands-on consulting to executive coaching. She and Andy dig into the gap between the headline statistics on AI usage and what is really happening, and why making a tool available is not the same as people using it. Alex lays out her three Ts, training, time, and tools, and explains why organizations that skip any one of them will not see the adoption or the returns they expect.Alex and Andy also explore the pressure CEOs feel from their boards, and the irony that the leaders asking the biggest strategic questions about AI are often the ones using it least. She unpacks the J curve of productivity, why treating AI like a new intern is a more useful mental model than treating it like software, and why so many teams struggle to hand work to AI when their own processes were never written down. The conversation covers what the best companies are doing, from ambassadors and centers of excellence to hackathons and channels where people share AI fails, and closes with practical guidance for L&D professionals on leading by example, anchoring AI change in the organization's mission and values, and remembering that the human judgment is the whole point.I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website (andystorch.com) or LinkedIn. And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon.Connect with Alex Zubko: LinkedIn | alextalksai.com

In this episode, Antonia Bowler shares how her organization approached AI adoption by putting people first. Antonia is a people leader at Exclaimer, a private equity backed software company, where she has led an AI enablement effort grounded in psychological safety and the human side of the technology. She and Andy explore why trust has to come before adoption, how the company countered the common fear that employees are training their own replacements, and why being vocal about issues like the environmental impact of AI matters to the people you are asking to experiment. Antonia is refreshingly transparent about where they are on the journey, from a low pressure first sprint that took adoption from forty-five percent to ninety-seven percent, to the champions, e-learning, and showcasing that made it happen.Antonia and Andy also dig into the widening productivity divide between heavy AI users and those hanging back, the leadership layer that is easy to skip and expensive to miss, and the risk of quietly outsourcing your own critical thinking to the tools. She unpacks the idea of the human in the loop, the thinking behind their AI Careers Month, and why framing AI fluency as a portable, career building skill answers the question every employee is really asking: what's in it for me. It is an honest, practical conversation for anyone leading AI enablement inside a real organization.I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website (andystorch.com) or LinkedIn. And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon.Connect with Antonia Bowler: LinkedIn

In this episode, Shawn Vanderhoven shares what he learned researching how the best leaders help their teams focus in a relentlessly distracting world. Shawn is a longtime partner at the Wiseman Group, where he leads the executive development practice, a collaborator on the New York Times bestseller Multipliers, and the author of the new book Pause: How to Lead Brilliant Work in a Busy World. After hundreds of interviews, the finding surprised him: the leaders who create the most space for deep work are the ones who tap the brakes, treating pauses like a performance pit stop that makes sustained speed possible. He and Andy unpack the Red Queen effect, why so many teams end the day full of activity and short on impact, and why productivity turns out to be a social issue rather than a personal one.Shawn walks through the practical behaviors behind the research, including how leaders help teams choose among too many competing priorities, why growth conversations belong on the monthly agenda, and how to surface the hidden workload that never makes the board. He explains the difference between giving permission to focus and sponsoring it, why inviting dissent leads to more confident trade-offs, and shares the one habit any leader can start this week: tune in before you jump in. It is a conversation about slowing down just enough to do work that actually matters.I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website (andystorch.com) or LinkedIn. And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon.Connect with Shawn Vanderhoven: LinkedIn and visit his website: www.pausebook.co

In this episode, Heather Burright shares what she has learned building learning and development programs for the nonprofit sector. Heather is the founder of Skill Masters Market and host of the Learning for Good podcast, with more than 15 years in L&D and a niche helping nonprofits and associations build the training their missions deserve. She combines instructional design expertise with change management principles to create real behavior change rather than course completions. Heather and Andy explore what makes L&D in the nonprofit world genuinely different, from training volunteers and community members to navigating federated structures where the national office supports local organizations it does not actually manage, and why influence and buy-in matter more there than authority ever could.The heart of the conversation is Heather's argument that training is too often treated as the goal when the real goal is change. She explains why L&D professionals should see themselves as change agents rather than training factories, walks through a seven month learning experience she designed that finally made a struggling team feel heard, and shares how she approaches skills analysis, competency models, and AI readiness. She also offers practical advice on building trusting stakeholder relationships, asking better questions instead of absorbing other people's stress, and the identity shift that helps talent development professionals earn genuine credibility.I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website (andystorch.com) or LinkedIn. And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon.Connect with Heather Burright: LinkedIn

In this episode, Christa Hill shares what she has learned moving teams from AI resistance to real capability. Christa is the founder of Tacit Edge and creator of an AI readiness framework used by organizations across Canada and beyond. A product leader turned educator, she works at the intersection of AI literacy, leadership development, and workforce transformation. She and Andy dig into what she calls the messy middle of AI adoption, the place organizations land after the licenses are handed out and there is no plan for what comes next. Christa makes the case that there are no product problems, only people problems, and that adoption moves at the speed of trust, not the speed of technology.Christa walks through her mindset first framework and the sequence she takes teams through: mindset, then skill set, then tool set, and why buying tools before doing the other two is a costly mistake. She unpacks the most common sources of resistance she hears, the trap of judging AI by free tools, why leaders cannot delegate their own literacy, and how weak AI policies are usually a symptom of leadership that has not built any. The conversation also covers what companies getting this right actually do differently, the shift toward flatter organizations, and a round of Smash or Pass on the AI tools everyone is using right now.I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website (andystorch.com) or LinkedIn. And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon.Connect with Christa Hill: LinkedIn | tacit-edge.com

In this episode, Julie Stone shares how she is reinventing learning and development for a 50,000 person workforce as Group Vice President and Chief Learning Officer at TTEC, a global customer experience company operating in 22 countries. With a background in linguistics that shapes how she thinks about the way humans learn, Julie explains why practice, spaced repetition, and real feedback are the elements most training programs have been missing for decades, and how AI simulated practice finally solves for them. She walks through how letting frontline agents rehearse live customer conversations with AI builds confidence, shortens training duration by around 20 percent, and speeds up time to proficiency, all without the awkwardness of traditional role plays.Julie and Andy also dig into the bigger picture of AI in the enterprise: the proprietary wizard suite her team built to redesign the entire curriculum discovery, design, and development process, the redesign of jobs and workflows that comes with it, and why she believes L&D is now mission critical rather than optional. She makes the case for L&D professionals becoming work design architects, explains why skills are the new currency inside organizations, and offers practical advice for anyone trying to build a skills-based approach or drive real AI adoption on their team.I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website (andystorch.com) or LinkedIn. And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon.Connect with Julie Stone: LinkedIn