King Dems Podcast

By 2036, there is a 50 per cent chance AGI has already arrived, says futurist Calum Chace. Almost nobody is planning for it.Cop a copy of my books NOW: https://ademolaodewade.comGet paid to help train the AI models reshaping work: Ethos (paid link): https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw

Put your expertise to work on frontier AI projects: Mercor (paid link): https://t.mercor.com/neABb

Turn your AI strategy into a board-ready deck in minutes: Gamma (paid link): https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h

Build and test your first AI agent workflows without code: Make (paid link): https://www.make.com/en/register?pc=kingdemspodcastThis is Episode 1 of Voices From The Future (2036), a new series on The King Dems Podcast and Diary of a CFO. Each episode asks one of the world's leading futurists, founders or finance leaders what the decade to 2036 will demand of leaders, and what they should do now so it does not catch them by surprise.The biggest risk from superintelligence is not the machines. It is that almost nobody is planning for it.Calum Chace, known to many as "the AI guy", is a futurist, keynote speaker and bestselling author of Surviving AI and The Economic Singularity. He is one of five co-founders of Conscium and its Chief Marketing Officer. Conscium explores whether machines can become conscious and runs an agent verification platform. Before writing about AI, Calum spent 30 years in journalism and business, including at KPMG.Calum grew up on Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick, but assumed human-level AI was centuries away. Then in 1999 he read Ray Kurzweil and realised superintelligence could arrive in his lifetime. Colleagues tired of hearing about it and called him "the AI guy" sarcastically. He kept the name. After retiring in 2011 he fell into writing and speaking about AI, and found the books became marketing for the talks rather than the other way round.In this episode:

• Why Calum estimates 99.9999 per cent of humanity is "sleepwalking into the future"
• The five human revolutions (fire, cognition, agriculture, industry, information) and why AI is not the fourth industrial revolution
• Why AGI is a fleeting moment and superintelligence is the issue that matters
• The "jagged edge": judgement, volition, common sense and a world model that AI still lacks
• Calum's timeline: possibly 10 to 20 years, and a 50 per cent chance of AGI by 2035
• The economic singularity, a term Calum coined in 2016, and why economists must design the post-automation economy now
• Shadow AI and the "phony war": why most large companies have not deployed AI at scale yet
• Conscium's five levels of AI agents and why agents need verifying before and during deployment
• Ademola's offload, extend and elevate model for AI agents
• Host and guest disagree: Ademola argues AI will remain a tool given uneven adoption across Africa and the developing world. Calum counters that this argues for slow dispersal, not against arrival, pointing to how fast smartphones and large language models spread

Calum Chace, futurist and co-founder of Conscium, on superintelligence, AGI, the economic singularity, AI agents and the future of work, on The King Dems Podcast with Ademola Odewade.

More from Calum Chace:

Website: https://calumchace.com

Conscium: https://conscium.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/calum-chace-bb68168/

Hosted by Ademola Odewade: chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich) and Founder of K-DEMS Consulting.The King Dems Podcast: Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Global top 2% on Listen Notes

Diary of a CFO: Financial Strategies for Smart Business Growth. Global top 2.5% on Listen Notes.Conceive, believe, strive to thrive and achieve.Disclosure: links marked (paid link) are affiliate links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.#KingDemsPodcast #DiaryOfACFO #Superintelligence #FutureOfWork #VoicesFromTheFuture

Your customers are not lying in your surveys. They simply do not know why they do what they do.

Cop a copy of my books NOW:

⁠https://mybook.to/TheAI-PoweredFuture⁠

⁠https://mybook.to/HumanLedFinance⁠

Host live webinars and restream them to LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook: WebinarGeek (paid link): ⁠https://webinargeek.com/product?red=kdemsc⁠

Get paid to put your expert judgement to work training AI: Ethos (paid link): ⁠https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw⁠

Earn from your professional expertise on frontier AI projects: Mercor (paid link): ⁠https://t.mercor.com/neABb⁠

Turn customer insight into a boardroom-ready deck in minutes: Gamma (paid link): ⁠https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h⁠

Automate the analytic grunt work so your team can focus on the human questions: Make (paid link): ⁠https://www.make.com/en/register?pc=kingdemspodcast⁠

Johanna Faigelman is a cultural anthropologist, speaker and the founder and CEO of Human Branding, the Toronto consultancy she launched in 2006 to apply anthropology to business strategy. She is the pioneer of Applied Anthropology Thinking (AAT)™, studied at York University and ran planning at a large advertising agency before going out on her own. Human Branding now has more than 40 people working across North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America, with clients including 11 of the world's top 20 pharmaceutical companies and brands such as Nestlé, Visa and Logitech.

She is an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2026 Ontario finalist, an EY Winning Women 2025 honoree and a 100 Women to Know Winner 2026.

In this episode:

• Why Johanna works on the principle that roughly 80 per cent of decision making sits at the unconscious and subconscious level (her working rule, not a cited study)
• Why she places almost zero value on the answer to a direct question
• Every business problem is a human problem: why doctors who say in surveys they will prescribe a drug still do not
• Applied Anthropology Thinking (AAT)™, the approach she created when she founded Human Branding
• The Who Say Do principle: who people are, how they say things and what they actually do
• Ten years with no holidays: the unglamorous reality of building a bootstrapped consultancy
• Why saying no protects a company's vision more than saying yes
• How Human Branding uses AI: a closed model built about five years ago, with Johanna reporting 30 per cent efficiency gains overall and 80 per cent on analytic grunt work
• Where they differ: Ademola asks what AI will do better than humans in anthropology, and Johanna is not convinced it will do anything better, only that it frees people for the human work
• Her one piece of advice to women founders: your difference is your advantage

Johanna Faigelman, cultural anthropologist and founder and CEO of Human Branding, on consumer behaviour, decision making, Applied Anthropology Thinking, bootstrapping and human-led AI, on The King Dems Podcast and Diary of a CFO with Ademola Odewade.

What is Applied Anthropology Thinking?

It is Johanna Faigelman's approach to using anthropology's methods, especially ethnography, to uncover the hidden drivers of customer behaviour and turn them into marketing and strategy. She built Human Branding around it in 2006.

Can AI replace market research?

Johanna's view is no. AI speeds up the analysis of transcripts and data, but the insight that changes behaviour depends on human wisdom that is often not captured in language at all.

More from Johanna Faigelman: ⁠https://humanbranding.com⁠ · ⁠linkedin.com/in/johannafaigelman⁠

Hosted by Ademola Odewade: chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich) and Founder of K-DEMS Consulting.

The King Dems Podcast. Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts.

This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

#BusinessAnthropology #HumanLedAI #DiaryOfACFO #KingDemsPodcast

The voice you hear when you speak is not the one your team hears.

Cop a copy of my new book NOW: https://ademolaodewade.com

Turn communication expertise into paid advisory work: Ethos (paid link): https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw

AI labs pay highly skilled experts: Mercor (paid link): https://t.mercor.com/neABb

Build your next keynote deck in minutes: Gamma (paid link): https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h

Automate the admin and spend the time rehearsing: Make (paid link): https://www.make.com/en/register?pc=kingdemspodcast

David Pope is an executive voice coach who has been based in Hong Kong for 32 years. He began in 1980s London at a Soho production company making music videos for Wham!, Dire Straits and A-ha, then joined the BBC as an assistant film editor. In 2010 he founded All Voice Talent, where he is Managing Director. He has spent more than 30,000 hours in recording studios as a producer and director, produced the English-language teen radio drama Songbirds for RTHK and now coaches leaders from law firms, financial institutions, hotels and fashion brands in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Australia, the Middle East and London.

About 20 years ago he was told that growing his business meant leaving the quiet of the studio for stages, workshops and online video. He faced that fear, made mistakes in public and built the self-belief he now teaches.

In this episode:

- The three communication mistakes that weaken executive presence: speaking too fast, a monotone delivery and filler words

- A slightly slower pace reads as authority; rapid delivery reads as nerves

- The emphasis pause before a key figure and the rhetorical question pause before the answer

- Chunking: mark a script with slash marks and stress one word per chunk, what Pope calls "audio punctuation"

- Speakers who think they paused for five seconds usually paused for half a second

- Gravitas is a balance of authority, energy and warmth, not a booming voice

- In 2012 Center for Talent Innovation research, 5 per cent of senior executives named appearance and 28 per cent communication as core to executive presence; 67 per cent named gravitas

- Pope's Voice Influence Framework: voice, presence and messaging

- Why communication becomes more valuable as AI spreads: voiceover artists are already losing work to AI, but live, bespoke human feedback cannot be replaced

- Pope says charisma can be developed; Ademola argues it is largely natural

David Pope, founder of All Voice Talent, on executive presence, gravitas, communication in the AI era and his Voice Influence Framework, on The King Dems Podcast with Ademola Odewade.

How can I sound more confident in meetings?

Slow down slightly, vary your intonation and drop filler words. Record yourself first to find out which one you need to fix.

What is gravitas in executive presence?

A voice that balances authority with energy and warmth. It is not a low, booming voice.

More from David Pope:

https://www.allvoicetalent.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/popedavid

Hosted by Ademola Odewade: chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich) and Founder of K-DEMS Consulting.

The King Dems Podcast. Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts.

Diary of a CFO. Finance leadership, unfiltered. Ranked in the global top 2.5% of podcasts.

This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

#ExecutivePresence #PublicSpeaking #DiaryOfACFO #KingDemsPodcast

Most finance teams start closing the month before the month has even finished.

Cop a copy of my new book NOW: ⁠https://ademolaodewade.com⁠

Turn audit and finance expertise into paid advisory work — Ethos (paid link): ⁠https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw⁠

AI labs pay highly-skilled experts — Mercor (paid link): ⁠https://t.mercor.com/neABb⁠

Build the design partner deck in minutes — Gamma (paid link): ⁠https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h⁠

Esther Adeogun spent over a decade in audit and assurance across KPMG Nigeria, WYZE, Sapro, PKF Littlejohn and RSM UK, working between Lagos and London. She audited multinationals with US, Canadian and Australian parent structures. She then left professional services to found Valdore Systems and Intelligence Limited (VSIL), a pre-product platform building what she calls an intelligent operating layer: financial intelligence, controls and real-time visibility embedded directly into business workflows rather than applied after the fact.

The pattern that convinced her was not jurisdictional. Across Lagos, London and multinational engagements she kept meeting the same problem. Organisations had invested heavily in software, yet finance teams still ran on spreadsheets, manual reconciliations and judgement applied outside the system. Some of her design partners begin their July month-end work in the second or third week of July in order to report to management by 4 August. That is time taken away from professional judgement and scepticism, and Esther argues the gap between activity and visibility is the thing worth closing, not the accounting concepts underneath it.

In this episode:

• The one sentence she would give a Fortune 500 CEO: an intelligent operating layer embedding financial intelligence, controls and real-time visibility into business workflows
• The exact shift from auditor to founder, moving from "what went wrong" to "why did the system allow this to happen in the first place"
• Why real-time reporting does not overturn the historical cost concept, and what she actually means by real-time
• What SAP, Oracle and Microsoft would say in response, and where the design philosophies genuinely diverge
• Where AI earns its place, and the deterministic, rules-based work that should stay conventional software
• "Consulting is largely constrained by people and time" and why that pushed her to SaaS instead of another consulting firm
• The four eras of accounting: paper, spreadsheets, ERP, and AI-assisted decision-making
• Whether the Big Four look the same in 2035, and why she thinks firms evolve rather than disappear
• Nigeria rewards technical skill, the UK rewards relationships, and what that cost her to learn
• Why she no longer believes progress is linear, and what experimentation replaced it with
• Rapid fire: the biggest misconception about AI, the biggest misconception about accounting, and the technology she is watching
• Her legacy test: not to be remembered for building software but for helping build better businesses

More from Esther:

LinkedIn (personal): ⁠linkedin.com/in/esther-adeogun-0b9118125⁠

LinkedIn (company): ⁠linkedin.com/company/valdore-systems-intelligence-ltd⁠

Hosted by Ademola Odewade — chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich), and Founder of K-Dems Consulting.

The King Dems Podcast. Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts.

Diary of a CFO. Finance leadership, unfiltered. Ranked in the global top 2.5% of podcasts.

This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

#AIinAccounting #ContinuousAssurance #DiaryOfACFO #KingDemsPodcast

Why Transformation Programmes Fail — The Inner Game of Organisations

Most transformation programmes fail because the organisation is quietly protecting the very thing you are trying to change.

Cop a copy of my new book NOW: ⁠https://ademolaodewade.com⁠

Turn transformation experience into paid advisory work — Ethos (paid link): ⁠https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw⁠

AI labs pay highly-skilled experts — Mercor (paid link): ⁠https://t.mercor.com/neABb⁠

Build the culture diagnostic deck in minutes — Gamma (paid link): ⁠https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h⁠

Zhanna Zhuravleva grew up in Georgia and lived through war as a child, then built her career across Russia, Israel and the UK. She completed two master's degrees — finance and human resources — followed by postgraduate study, and taught finance, management and philosophy at a university in St. Petersburg.

She started in industry as a Kaizen team leader and went on to lead HR and cultural transformation across organisations of more than 1,000 people in 40 countries. She is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD, has run over 3,000 sessions with leaders, and founded Awake Conscious Play, a school of conscious leadership and leadership transformation.

Early in her career she ran a textbook transformation — designed framework, defined KPIs, strong governance. Six months later almost nothing had changed. The organisation was not governed by its processes; it was governed by informal power. Everything since has been built on that finding.

The 30% improvement in employee satisfaction and 10% reduction in turnover she reports came from no single initiative — a culture hub that put interns and juniors into the improvement process, people partners trained in coaching, and one-to-ones where the feedback actually changed the next decision.

In this episode:

Change fluency — why transformation is not a project with a start date and an end dateThe "inner game": why a fintech's people-first programme stalls because the tension is giving leaders their identity

Three signals that tell you inside a week whether a culture is healthy — quality of disagreement, speed of bad news, and the gap between the official story and the underground story

Diagnosis before prescription: the first 30 days run across Ken Wilber's four quadrants, not a rush to launch programmes

Three types of values — declarative, conscious, unconscious — and which layer actually decides

Why Meta making AI token consumption a performance metric produced engineers burning tokens instead of better decisions

WEF Future of Jobs: 170 million roles created against 92 million displaced — recalibration, not replacement"AI is electricity with intelligence" — why this is an electricity moment rather than an internet one

The 4D Compass for building trust: self, soul, soft, spiritWhy engagement surveys measure compliance — a purple, tribal culture scores high on engagement and low on trust

What she protects if the HR budget is halved: leader development, and a culture diagnosis every year

The mistake founders make at 100 employees — still leading as though there are 20Zhanna's recommendation for every CEO is Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan.

Her conscious leadership programmes — including Lila, the transformational game she has adapted for leaders and runs offline and online — are at: ⁠https://awake-play.co.uk/⁠

Upcoming cohorts: ⁠https://awake-play.co.uk/upcoming⁠

Connect with Zhanna on LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhanna-zhuravleva-chartered-fcipd-03a0a622a/⁠

Hosted by Ademola Odewade — chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich), and Founder of K-Dems Consulting.

The King Dems Podcast. Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts.

Diary of a CFO. Finance leadership, unfiltered. Ranked in the global top 2.5% of podcasts.

This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Why Transformation Programmes Fail — The Inner Game of Organisations

Most transformation programmes fail because the organisation is quietly protecting the very thing you are trying to change.

Cop a copy of my new book NOW: https://ademolaodewade.com

Turn transformation experience into paid advisory work — Ethos (paid link): https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw

AI labs pay highly-skilled experts — Mercor (paid link): https://t.mercor.com/neABb

Build the culture diagnostic deck in minutes — Gamma (paid link): https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h

Zhanna Zhuravleva grew up in Georgia and lived through war as a child, then built her career across Russia, Israel and the UK. She completed two master's degrees — finance and human resources — followed by postgraduate study, and taught finance, management and philosophy at a university in St. Petersburg.

She started in industry as a Kaizen team leader and went on to lead HR and cultural transformation across organisations of more than 1,000 people in 40 countries. She is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD, has run over 3,000 sessions with leaders, and founded Awake Conscious Play, a school of conscious leadership and leadership transformation.

Early in her career she ran a textbook transformation — designed framework, defined KPIs, strong governance. Six months later almost nothing had changed. The organisation was not governed by its processes; it was governed by informal power. Everything since has been built on that finding.

The 30% improvement in employee satisfaction and 10% reduction in turnover she reports came from no single initiative — a culture hub that put interns and juniors into the improvement process, people partners trained in coaching, and one-to-ones where the feedback actually changed the next decision.

In this episode:

Change fluency — why transformation is not a project with a start date and an end dateThe "inner game": why a fintech's people-first programme stalls because the tension is giving leaders their identity

Three signals that tell you inside a week whether a culture is healthy — quality of disagreement, speed of bad news, and the gap between the official story and the underground story

Diagnosis before prescription: the first 30 days run across Ken Wilber's four quadrants, not a rush to launch programmes

Three types of values — declarative, conscious, unconscious — and which layer actually decides

Why Meta making AI token consumption a performance metric produced engineers burning tokens instead of better decisions

WEF Future of Jobs: 170 million roles created against 92 million displaced — recalibration, not replacement"AI is electricity with intelligence" — why this is an electricity moment rather than an internet one

The 4D Compass for building trust: self, soul, soft, spiritWhy engagement surveys measure compliance — a purple, tribal culture scores high on engagement and low on trust

What she protects if the HR budget is halved: leader development, and a culture diagnosis every year

The mistake founders make at 100 employees — still leading as though there are 20Zhanna's recommendation for every CEO is Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan.

Her conscious leadership programmes — including Lila, the transformational game she has adapted for leaders and runs offline and online — are at: https://awake-play.co.uk/

Upcoming cohorts: https://awake-play.co.uk/upcoming

Connect with Zhanna on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhanna-zhuravleva-chartered-fcipd-03a0a622a/

Hosted by Ademola Odewade — chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich), and Founder of K-Dems Consulting.

The King Dems Podcast. Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts.

Diary of a CFO. Finance leadership, unfiltered. Ranked in the global top 2.5% of podcasts.

This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Business valuation isn't a multiple of EBITDA. Cop a copy of my new book NOW: https://ademolaodewade.com

Turn expertise into paid advisory work — Ethos (paid link): https://agent.askethos.com/refer/nd01w7e2eelw

AI labs pay highly-skilled experts — Mercor (paid link): https://t.mercor.com/neABb

Build the buyer deck in minutes — Gamma (paid link): https://try.gamma.app/f2d4kygskm1h

Mark Mills OBE started Cardpoint plc from scratch in 2000. Two years later it floated on AIM at a £7 million valuation. By 2006 it was turning over £100 million a year on £19.8 million of EBITDA, and he exited in 2007 at £175 million.

He now sells other people's businesses. One owner was told his company was worth £3 million. Mark sold it for just over £10 million. Nothing changed in the accounts — what changed was who the business was presented to, and why they needed it.

In this episode:

- Why bids from strategic buyers don't resemble a multiple of EBITDA

- The £3m-to-£10m sale, and the buyer maths that produced it

- Rule one of any business model: recurring income — learned from a payphone business that died in the 1991 recession

- How Mark and his CFO reverse-engineered £100m of revenue onto a sheet of paper, then landed within 2%

- Why "in three years" is a useless target and "by 31 August 2029" is not

- Solving a working capital problem by finding a bank with too much physical cash

- The one metric he never ignores when assessing a company for sale

- FARM — why people work for Fun, Achievement, Recognition, then Money, in that order

- Selling to strangers, and why referrals cannot scale a business

- What AI actually changes about client acquisition and KPI monitoring

- Realistic exit timelines: 12 to 30 months, not six

Mark's book is Making Your Mark: How I Built a Fortune From £1.50 — and You Can Too.

He offered listeners a free signed copy — email him at [email protected] with your address and he'll send one out.

More from Mark: www.mark.co.uk · linkedin.com/in/markrichardmills

Hosted by Ademola Odewade — chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich), and Founder of K-Dems Consulting.

The King Dems Podcast. Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights. Ranked in the global top 2% of podcasts.

Diary of a CFO. Finance leadership, unfiltered. Ranked in the global top 2.5% of podcasts.

This description contains paid links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

#BusinessValuation #ExitStrategy #DiaryOfACFO #KingDemsPodcast

How can leaders use AI without weakening the judgement, creativity and critical thinking that leadership requires? Dr David Rock explains what neuroscience reveals about decision-making, cognitive bias, uncertainty and human performance.

This conversation is for leaders navigating a world of rising information overload, faster technology and increasing pressure. Dr Rock, Co-Founder and CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute, coined the term neuroleadership and has spent decades translating cognitive science into practical tools for organisations and executives.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why leadership creates three recurring cognitive challenges: capacity, self-regulation and social cognitionWhy intelligent leaders can still make poor decisions under pressure
• How uncertainty affects the way people think, regulate emotion and understand others
• Why David argues that AI should keep the human in the lead, rather than outsourcing critical judgement
• Why recognising your own cognitive bias is harder than most leaders assume
• How the SEEDS framework helps teams identify recurring categories of bias
• How the SCARF model explains Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness
• Why useful leadership frameworks require both scientific credibility and practical simplicity

About Dr David Rock

Dr David Rock is Co-Founder and CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute and the originator of the term neuroleadership. His work applies cognitive science to leadership, organisational change and human performance. He is the author of Your Brain at Work and the forthcoming Good with Humans, which explores the SCARF model and the neuroscience of social motivation.

Connect with Dr David Rock

NeuroLeadership Institute: https://www.neuroleadership.com

NILES: https://www.askniles.ai/

Book: Good with Humans by David Rock

Explore The King Dems Podcast

Website: https://kingdemspodcast.com

Explore the tools behind our podcast network: https://kingdemspodcast.com/tools

The King Dems Podcast ranks in the Global Top 2% on Listen Notes and reaches audiences in 130+ countries.

Our mission is simple: Educate. Inspire. Empower.

Sponsored by BetterHelp. Start your growth journey with a credentialed therapist and get 10% off at ⁠⁠https://betterhelp.com/kingdems

What if the career you worked hardest to build is actually keeping you from the work you were meant to do?

In this episode of The King Dems Podcast, Ademola Odewade sits down with Ashley Stahl, bestselling author, TEDx speaker, career expert and Founder of Wise Whisper Agency, for a powerful conversation about career reinvention, artificial intelligence, personal branding, leadership, intuition and the future of work.

Ashley’s own journey took her from national security into career coaching, entrepreneurship, authorship and public speaking. But this conversation goes far beyond the polished career-pivot story.

Ashley explains why careers are not supposed to be linear, why the skills you developed in one chapter of your life can become your competitive advantage in the next and why sometimes “backing up” in your career is not the same as backing down.

We explore:

• How to recognise when your career is genuinely misaligned
• Why your values and your skill set serve different purposes
• Why clarity comes from exploration, not endless thinking
• How to experiment with a new career without immediately quitting your job
• The transferable skills Ashley carried from national security into entrepreneurship
• How intuition can improve leadership and business decisions
• The difference between intuition and impulsiveness
• Why busy calendars can destroy creativity
• How storytelling and a signature talk can transform a personal brand
• Why follower count may be one of the most overrated measures of influence
• How AI is changing careers and the future of work
• Why professionals who know how to leverage AI may have an advantage over those who resist it
• What every executive should ask before stepping onto a stage

Ashley also shares how a TEDx talk became a turning point in her career and revealed the extraordinary power of combining your story, expertise and message to create meaningful impact.

One of the biggest ideas from the conversation?

You cannot think your way into clarity. You have to explore your way into it.

And when it comes to AI, Ashley offers an equally important challenge: the greatest risk may not simply be AI replacing people. It may be people who understand how to use AI replacing those who refuse to adapt.

If you are navigating a career transition, building your personal brand, leading through disruption or wondering how to remain relevant in the AI era, this conversation is for you.

🎙️ The King Dems Podcast explores growth mindset, leadership, AI, business, entrepreneurship and the ideas shaping the future of work.

🔗 Connect with Ashley Stahl:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleystahl/

🛠️ Explore the tools we use to create, grow and scale our podcasts and digital ecosystem:
https://kingdemspodcast.com/tools

Subscribe, follow and share this episode with someone navigating their next chapter.

Mindset > Skillset > Toolset.

#AshleyStahl #CareerReinvention #ArtificialIntelligence #FutureOfWork #Leadership #PersonalBranding #CareerGrowth #Entrepreneurship #AI #KingDemsPodcast

Sponsored by BetterHelp. Start your growth journey with a credentialed therapist and get 10% off at ⁠https://betterhelp.com/kingdems

What human skills will leaders need to remain valuable in the age of artificial intelligence?

Oluchi Ikechi-D’Amico, Founder and CEO of Fully Bossed, joins Ademola Odewade on The King Dems Podcast to explore AI leadership, organisational transformation, executive presence and the human capabilities technology cannot replace.

Oluchi spent nearly two decades advising CEOs, boards and financial institutions on major transformation programmes. Her career includes senior leadership roles at Accenture and EY-Parthenon, more than 30 transformation and M&A programmes and transactions with a combined value exceeding $15 billion.

In this episode, Oluchi explains why effective AI adoption is not simply about purchasing new tools. Organisations must change behaviours, strengthen leadership capabilities and connect technology investments to measurable business value.

You will learn:

• Why human skills become more valuable as AI capabilities expand
  • How leaders can move from AI adoption to genuine AI enablement
• Why many organisations invest billions in AI without achieving the expected ROI
• How to measure transformation through revenue growth, cost reduction and operational efficiency
• Why mindset, storytelling, personal branding and orchestration matter in modern leadership
• How resilience and self-belief helped Oluchi succeed as a Black female executive
• What it takes to lead major mergers, acquisitions and organisational transformation programmes
• How executives can communicate, influence decisions and hold the boardroom in the AI era
• Why leadership is defined by impact and followership rather than job title
• How Oluchi evaluated the risk of leaving an EY partner role to build Fully Bossed

Oluchi’s central message is clear: AI can generate the report, but it cannot replace your ability to defend the analysis, influence the boardroom and lead people through change.

This conversation is essential listening for CEOs, CFOs, founders, consultants, transformation leaders and executives developing an AI strategy for their organisations.

Connect with Oluchi Ikechi-D’Amico:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/oli-ikechi/

Discover Fully Bossed:
https://fullybossed.com/

Explore the tools and resources I use to power my podcasts, business and content at:

https://kingdemspodcast.com/tools

Subscribe, follow and share this episode with a leader navigating AI adoption or organisational transformation.

What is the most important human skill leaders must develop to remain valuable in an AI-powered workplace?