← At Work with The Ready
At Work with The Ready
AUA: What Should L&D Do About AI Right Now?
00:07:29
Rodney and Sam unpack how L&D can build capabilities—not just content—in the age of AI.
Loading summary
Transcript9 lines
- [00:01]
A
Hey, y'. All. Welcome back to Outwork with the Ready. I'm Rodney Evans and that guy is Sam Sperlin.
- [00:06]
B
Hello, everybody.
- [00:08]
A
Every other week we are tackling one tough, thought provoking listener question sent to us by you and sharing a few ideas that might help. Let's get right to it. Sam, what have you got for us this week?
- [00:19]
B
All right, this week's question is I lead L and D at a big company. And your recent episode about change skills really hit home. We are facing even more pressure from, from our exec team this year to figure out future skills in the age of AI. And we are getting pulled into strategy conversations we've never really owned before. If you were leading L and D right now, what are the first moves you'd make to start showing up to this conversation differently so we can shift from churning out more courses to strategically building capabilities? What do you think?
- [00:57]
A
If I were you, I would first get my own hands real dirty with AI. So I've really been on one about this recently, but, like, there are now so many really easy to use tools like relay and N8N for doing workflow automation. I think if you haven't tried to build something, then it's very difficult to speak credibly about what skills are needed. Because inherent in building something is the skill to know. Know what kind of thing to build and how the technology works. And it's not just about fidelity with the tooling. It's understanding the inputs and the outputs and the ways of working and the architecture and the use cases and a bunch of other stuff. And so I think that, like, actually learning how to do something beyond chat is something that, if I'm at the table talking about AI is table stakes.
- [01:54]
B
Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. I think to take it a step further, if you're doing what Rodney just said, the other thing that you are probably inherently doing is already trying to see what's coming around the corner. And I think a lot of folks in your position, we all have this kind of pervasive sense of like, oh, I'm behind. Everybody feels behind. Everybody feels behind in AI stuff. And I think trying to feel no longer behind is different from trying to get proactive about where things are heading. And what I think about is all of those folks who maybe made really intricate, prompt engineering courses and trainings, you know, in the last year that are more or less like, that's not where the juice is anymore. Like, these tools are, have moved beyond needing this kind of like, esoteric, like, sorcery language to make them do things. And that's not where we should be. So if you're focused on like how do I not get behind or how do I feel no longer behind, I think you actually miss where you're trying to go. And that means creating a point of view for yourself about where all this is headed and trying to disprove it and check in with other experts and really kind of put on your, your knowledge knowledge. Why am I saying knowledge leader, Your knowledge hat. Thought leader, your thought leader hat, which is gross maybe. And, and, but I think it puts you in a position to be prepared to have these kind of more strategy or strategic conversations.
- [03:25]
A
Yeah, these more strategy conversations we shouldn't be doing Friday afternoon. Yeah, yeah. Very related. But a piece of advice I've been giving a lot of people lately is like, find a couple of sources that really resonate for you around AI expertise and consume a lot from them. Rather than sort of like, I've kind of stopped even like looking at LinkedIn because everybody's just like, here's my hot take on AI. And I'm like, shut up, this is boring. Like, I follow like a very small handful of people and I'm going to tell you guys who so that if it's useful to you, you can just start with this group. So I follow Ethan Malik, I follow friend of the Show/section AI CEO Greg Shove and also Scott Galloway's AI takes. I read everything that Chase Adams, who is Aaron's Murmur co founder, puts out about AI. I follow the Instagram account Evolving AI and I read the morning Brew AI daily newsletter and that's about it. And I feel like between those sources, which is not in aggregate, that many words in a week. I know enough, I know enough to like experiment and know what's coming tooling wise and what's happened in the last seven days. That's interesting. So like, I think as you try to shape a point of view, which is the job, if you're being asked to show up to the table and be part of the strategy conversation, your job is to, is to have a point of view, go deeper with a few sources that are really good rather than sort of skimming headlines from 30 things that are not that good. And you'll probably find yourself more able to have provocations, clarity, discernment around the domain that's going to give you a different level of authority in the room.
- [05:13]
B
Yeah, my last thought is to get as tool agnostic as possible in how you're thinking about this. So what are the capabilities that are going to be truly needed regardless of any specific manifestation of AI. And I would start there that's going to be valuable no matter how this all ends up shaking out in the end. And I'm thinking about things like how do we see our organization in ways where we can find places is to intervene with AI so that systems thinking around the organization itself I think is actually a bit of a prerequisite for being able to use AI really well. The idea of being able to design and run an experiment both very small but also kind of more at the team level self efficacy just in general around new tools and things of that nature those are all relevant beyond just any specific AI thing. All right, that's it for this mini. If you've got a question of your own hit us up at podcast at the ready Com.
- [06:17]
A
We will see you back here next week for a full episode of At Work with the Ready. Thank you so much for listening.