“In this next era, the key to leadership will be blending systems thinking and AI automation—at least being aware of what you can do with it—with empathy, discernment, connection, and clarity.”

– Lavinia Iosub

About Lavinia Iosub

Lavinia Iosub is the Founder of Livit Hub Bali, which has been named as one of Asia’s Best Workplaces, and Remote Skills Academy, which has enabled 40,000+ youths globally to develop digital and remote work skills. She has been named a Top 50 Remote Innovator, a Top Voice in Asia Pacific on the future of work, with her work featured in the Washington Post, CNET, and other major media.

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What you will learn

How AI can augment leadership decision-making by enhancing cognitive processes rather than replacing human judgment
Strategies for integrating AI into teams, focusing on volunteer-driven adoption and fostering AI fluency without forcing uptake
The importance of continuous experimentation and knowledge sharing with AI tools for organizational growth and team building
Why successful leadership in the AI era requires blending systems thinking, empathy, and a focus on human-AI collaboration
How organizational value is shifting from knowledge accumulation toward skills like curiosity, adaptability, and discernment
The concept of “people and AI resources” (PAIR), emphasizing the quality of partnership between humans and AI for organizational effectiveness
Critical skills for future workers in an AI-driven world, such as AI orchestration, emotional clarity, and the ability to direct AI outputs with taste and judgment
Practical lessons from the Remote Skills Academy in democratizing access to digital and AI skills for a diverse range of job seekers and business owners

Episode Resources

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Lavinia, it is awesome to have you on the show.

Lavinia Iosub: Thank you so much for having me, Ross.

Ross Dawson: Well, we’ve been planning it for a long time. We’ve had lots of conversations about interesting stuff. So let’s do something to share with the world.

Lavinia Iosub: Let’s do it.

Ross Dawson: So you run a very interesting organization, and you are a leader who is bringing AI into your work and that of your team, and more generally, providing AI skills to many people. I just want to start from that point—your role as a leader of a diverse, interesting organization or set of organizations. What do you see as the role of AI for you to assist you in being an effective leader?

Lavinia Iosub: Great question. I think that the two of us initially met through the AI in Strategic Decision Making course, right? So I would say that’s actually probably one of the top uses for me, or one of the areas where I found it very useful. The most important thing here is to not start with the mindset that AI will make any worthy decisions for you, but that it will augment your cognition and your decision making when you are feeding it the right context, the right master prompts, the right information about your business, your values, what you’re trying to achieve, how you normally make decisions, and so on.

Then you work with it, have a conversation with it, and even build an advisory board of different kinds of AI personas that may disagree or have slightly different views. So it enhances your thinking, rather than serving you decisions on a plate that you don’t know where they come from or what they’re based on. That’s one of the things that’s been really interesting for me to explore.

If we zoom out a little bit, I think a lot of people think of AI as a way of doing the things they don’t want to do. I think of AI as a way to do more of the things I’ve always wanted to do—delegate some menial, drudgery work that no human should be doing in the year of our Lord 2025 anymore, and do more of the creative, strategic projects or activities that many of us who have been in what we call knowledge work—which, to me, is not a good term for 2025 anym...