What am I role modeling today? Most of us think that question belongs to the most senior people in the building. This episode is here to convince you otherwise.

In this episode of AI-isms I sit down with Eli Potter, one of the most respected CIOs in Silicon Valley and an advisor to 125+ organizations. Eli was born in Cold War Bulgaria, arrived in the US with two suitcases, and learned English from the Beatles. Out of a lifelong love of words she coined one the moment needed, role modelship, and wrote the book by the same name.

The idea that stayed with me: AI can't be what it can't see. AI isn't just code and models, it's a mirror of our habits, our relationships, and our values, and it learns and unlearns the way we do. Which makes role modeling everyone's job, not just the CEO's. Every prompt is training the thing someone you love will one day ask for advice.

What we get into:
• Why the gap beyond leaders and managers is the who, and how role models "engineer identity"
• AI as a mirror, and why it's dangerous to treat it as an independent thing
• The five disciplines of role modelship, through real cases you're probably living right now
• Creator vs. consumer: why opting out of AI is a destiny choice, not a tech choice
• Mentorship vs. sponsorship, and the reputational chip nobody talks about
• What happens when a young employee asks the CEO, "what are you doing to learn AI?"

Chapters
00:00 What am I role modeling today?
01:34 Meet Eli Potter
02:13 The origin of role modelship
03:39 Managers, leaders, and the missing "who"
06:27 Role modelship in the age of AI
08:02 Why AI is a mirror
09:43 The five disciplines
10:24 Stewardship: the biased hiring AI
13:52 Fellowship: creator vs. consumer
17:25 Mentorship vs. sponsorship
22:25 Leadership: the town-hall question
27:12 The AI-isms Eli lives by
30:20 The five-year-old who got it
32:05 Finding your voice in a second language

This is AI-isms, human rhythms in a synthetic world. Next time you open a chat window, ask yourself: what am I role modeling today? Tell me what you see.

Topics: role modelship, AI and leadership, AI as a mirror, stewardship, fellowship, mentorship, sponsorship, creator vs consumer, AI-first vs human-first, future of work, CIO leadership, Eli Potter

At the heart of anxiety is uncertainty. There's research that when your brain has full certainty about what's coming, even if what's coming is an electric shock, you feel calmer than when you don't know. Now look at where we are. AI everywhere, no real playbook, a dozen versions of the future arriving at once. Of course we feel uncertain and anxious.

In this episode of AI-isms, I sit down with Liz Fosslien to talk about what AI is doing to how we feel at work. Liz studies human emotions at work. She's the author and illustrator of the bestsellers Big Feelings and No Hard Feelings, her work has run on NPR, TED, and Good Morning America. She and her co-author Molly Duffy recently concluded a study on how AI is making us feel at work.

The idea that stayed with me is ambivalent anxiety, two opposite emotions in the same body at the same time. I'm scared this ends my job. I'm relieved I might not have to do the part of it I hate. Both, at once. And most of us are performing 'calm' over the top of it.

What we get into:
• Why "uncertainty" has outgrown the word, and the research on why we'd rather know a bad thing is coming than sit with a fifty-fifty chance
• Ambivalent anxiety: holding fear and relief at once, and the quiet tax of performing calm at work
• The early-career squeeze, when the first rung is the first to get automated, and the human skills that travel across any industry
• Chasing curiosity instead of fear: peer learning, skills swaps, and how to move when nobody hands you a playbook
• Why pretending to have it figured out is the biggest mistake leaders make right now, and why the honest questions create more clarity than fake answers

Chapters
00:00 The uncertainty under the anxiety
01:36 Meet Liz Fosslien
02:36 We need a new word for uncertainty
03:26 Why humans hate uncertainty
07:25 Enter AI: ambivalent anxiety and performing calm
12:57 Case 1: early career and the "AI slop" moment
17:37 AI-isms for early career, and the mid-career squeeze
20:38 Chasing curiosity: peer learning and skills swaps
23:11 Not everything catastrophic will happen
26:35 Leading a transformation with no playbook
30:31 The illustration: ambivalent anxiety on a swing
34:04 How Liz processes her own emotions
35:54 The AI-isms I took from this one

This is AI-isms, human rhythms in a synthetic world. If you're leading people through this shift, what are you feeling underneath the calm? Tell me what you see.

Topics: AI and emotions at work, uncertainty and anxiety, ambivalent anxiety, the future of work, early career and automation, reskilling and peer learning, leadership in uncertainty, performing calm, Liz Fosslien, Big Feelings, No Hard Feelings

We spend our careers drawing lines. My team, my P&L, my data, my customers. Then agentic AI starts working across all of them, and the old question comes back sharper than ever: what happens to power?

In this first episode of AI-isms, I sit down with organization designer Amy Kates to unpack how AI is redrawing the lines of power inside organizations. Amy is the author of six books on org design and operating models and the founder of Kates Kessler.

Her core idea stayed with me - real power lives horizontally. That is where value gets created, and it is exactly where AI is now blurring the boundaries.

What we get into:
• Why organizational power is horizontal, not just vertical, and why the seams matter more as AI dissolves silos
• Designing for outcomes instead of headcount when agents do the work
• A real finance-versus-HR standoff over workforce planning, and how to redeploy capacity instead of just cutting it
• Why AI is often a red herring for collaboration problems, and how Jay Galbraith's STAR model diagnoses the real issue: trust and metrics
• Learning is greater than lurching: the honest answer to how long an org design should last

Chapters
00:00 Power in the age of agents
01:33 Meet Amy Kates
02:26 Why power lives in the horizontal seams
10:35 Enter AI: the end of people equals power
16:50 Case 1: Finance vs. HR and who owns workforce planning
24:43 Case 2: Two leaders who won't share the data
27:55 Why AI is a red herring for trust (the STAR model)
34:10 The shelf life of an org design: learning over lurching
37:25 How Amy actually uses AI in her life
40:26 The AIisms I took from this one

This is AI-isms, human rhythms in a synthetic world.

Intelligence now surrounds us in every dimension of our lives. It is rapidly evolving not just how we work, but our social norms and core behaviors. We are learning to think, team, lead, play, learn, and even sleep differently. 

Welcome to AI-isms. My name is Shulagna Dasgupta.

For over two decades, I’ve partnered with CXOs through their most audacious transformations. And this is what I can tell you: no matter how sophisticated the technology, at the end of the day, change is almost always human. AI is altering our behaviors and our state of being in the most profound ways - but are we being intentional about what we allow it to do to us? Are we using it in a way that unlocks our greatest potential or are we letting it into our subconscious in ways we didn’t intend to?

Join me and a guest as we bring some intentionality to AI-driven behavior change. In each episode we will talk through lived experiences of people who have used AI to better their lives and behaviors. Maybe, you could borrow an idea or two?

This is AI-isms. Let’s talk human rhythms in a synthetic world.