The Talent Development Hot Seat - The #1 podcast for L&D Professionals

What happens to the HR role when AI takes over the data crunching? In this episode, Andy Storch talks with Violetta Drobot, a Boston-based consultant who leads organizational transformation and systems projects at the intersection of HR, project management, and AI. Violetta explains how AI flips the traditional HR workload so that the strategic part of the job grows from 10% to 60%. She shares a simple rule for deciding where AI should stop and human judgment has to take over, and she explains why project management skills are becoming essential for HR. She also walks through how any HR professional can build a first AI agent this week, with no technical background required.

In This Episode, You’ll Hear:

• Why Violetta added a PMP to her SHRM-SCP, and why she believes project management is the future of HR
• The 60/30/10 flip: how AI moves HR from spreadsheets and data handling to strategy, governance, and trust-building
• The courtroom rule: why any decision that could end up in front of a judge needs a human decision, not “AI told me to”
• Why the first answer from any AI tool is never the final answer, and how to push back to get better results
• Three ways Violetta sees AI changing HR: flatter organizations, faster performance feedback, and diversity of thought as a competitive advantage
• How to pressure-test your ideas by asking AI to play your CFO, your CEO, or your legal team before you present
• Why HR leaders will soon be leading people and leading agents
• How to build your first HR agent in Copilot, including an onboarding agent that answers new hires’ questions from your own documents
• RAG explained with a living-room rug analogy, and why it keeps answers specific to your company’s policies

Resources Mentioned:

• Wispr Flow (voice dictation)
• PMP certification (Project Management Institute)
• SHRM-SCP certification

Connect with Violetta on LinkedIn

Connect with Andy on LinkedIn

Work With Andy:

If your team has AI licenses but isn’t really using them yet, Andy’s AI Kickstarter Workshop is a hands-on session that gets teams past the fear and actually building with AI. Andy also delivers a Career Ownership and AI Keynote for audiences working out what AI means for their own careers. Reach out at [email protected] or visit andystorch.com.

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Connect with Andy:

• Website: andystorch.com
• Email: [email protected]

Christa Hill is back on the Hot Seat, four months (a lifetime in AI years) after her first appearance. Christa is Chief AI Learning Officer at LearnIt and co-founder of Tacit Edge. She tells Andy what she's seeing inside companies now. Organizations are tired of rebuilding workflows every time a new model drops. Boards are in the "show me the money" phase. And the definition of AI adoption is changing, from a few power users to whole teams getting better together.

Christa explains why logins and token spend tell you you're getting bills, not results. She shares how she measures real adoption by baselining the actual work first, and why she now only trains teams, not individuals. She also covers why the prompt-engineering era is over, and why anyone leading AI implementation needs strong coaching skills. She offers a simple way to take the fear out of data. And she shares how she's raising a 14-year-old who built her own business with AI. If you've been worried your organization is behind, Christa's message is clear: you're not too late. You're right on time.

Resources Mentioned:

• Christa Hill on LinkedIn
• LearnIit: https://www.learnit.com/andy
• Christa's first Hot Seat episode (Episode 623)
• Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick
• Holy Moly Goalie, built by Christa's daughter: holymolygoalie.com

Work With Andy:

Did your team get the AI tools but still isn't seeing the value? Andy's AI Kickstarter Workshop is a hands-on session that helps teams move past fear and into practical, everyday use of AI on their real work. He also delivers a Career Ownership and AI Keynote for audiences navigating what AI means for their own careers. Reach out at [email protected] or visit andystorch.com.

Enjoying the show? Take thirty seconds to leave a rating and review. It helps more talent development professionals find the podcast.

Connect with Andy:

• LinkedIn
• Email: [email protected]

This week I'm speaking with Giovanni Giamminola about using AI to strengthen (not surrende) human judgment.

Giovanni explains the difference between cognitive offloading and cognitive surrender, why AI fluency can create false confidence, and how cognitive governance helps organizations decide when people should lead the reasoning and when AI can productively support it.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• The distinction between delegating a task to AI and delegating your thinking.

• Why fluent, confident AI output still requires human evaluation.

• The four AI work postures: exploratory, generative, critical, and operating.

• How “System Zero” creates a deliberate pause before a decision is made.

• Why job redesign should focus on decision ownership, not just automation.

• How L&D teams can move beyond tool training and build real cognitive capability.

• The difference between model risk and cognitive risk.

• Why leaders need participation—not merely sponsorship—to lead AI adoption.

• How AI can give people more room for relationships, trust, values, and judgment.

Giovanni Giamminola is an AI transformation strategist focused on the human and organizational side of AI adoption. His work explores cognitive governance, decision-making, and how leaders and learning teams can build the capabilities needed to work thoughtfully with AI. Giovanni is also the author of The Augmented Manager - get here on Amazon.

Enjoy the episode? Follow Talent Development Hot Seat and share it with a leader or learning professional navigating AI transformation. You can also follow Andy on LinkedIn for more insights.

Looking for a dynamic speaker for your next event or someone to inspire your people to own their careers in the age of AI? Check out my website or reach out to me today: [email protected]

Don Taylor chairs the Learning Technologies Conference in London and has run the L&D Global Sentiment Survey for more than a decade. In this conversation, Andy and Don dig into the 2026 survey findings and Don's latest research with co-researcher Egle Vinauskaite, The Transformation Triangle, the fifth report in their AI in L&D series.

Don explains why AI hype has peaked and become part of the L&D toolkit, and why L&D professionals are more anxious than ever to prove their value now that content production is no longer a safe differentiator. He then walks through the three directions L&D teams are moving in, the three "drags" that hold them back, and what it takes to build a function that keeps working after its leader leaves. The conversation ends with Don's advice for setting yourself up for the future.

Resources:

• Get Don's free reports >>> here
• Learning Technologies Conference, London
• Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick (mentioned by Andy)

Take the Next Step:

• Listeners: Download Don's reports and share this episode with an L&D colleague who's worried about their team's future.
• L&D and HR leaders: Ask yourself Don's three questions: What's the most important problem you could own? What will the business support? What do you bring?
• Ready for real AI adoption? Andy's 90-minute AI Kickstarter Workshop gets your team hands-on with AI right away, in the same "go and try it" spirit Don describes. Reach out at [email protected].

In this solo episode, Andy Storch shares ten lessons pulled from The Artificial Intelligence Show's new AI Transformations series, which interviews leaders at companies that have gone through real AI transformations — Good Karma Brands, Zapier, HubSpot, and Peapack Private Bank. Andy connects each lesson back to what it means for talent development and L&D professionals specifically, and shares where his own AI Kickstarter and AI leadership work fits into addressing the people side of transformation.

In This Episode, You'll Hear:

• Why AI adoption is an organizational and behavioral challenge, not just a technology one (Dan Slagen, Zapier)
• Why leadership — not the CIO — has to be the engine of transformation, and how Good Karma Brands' founder and HubSpot's CEO modeled that (Ty Boczek, Good Karma Brands; John Dick, HubSpot)
• Why individual speed gained from AI doesn't move the business unless the work itself gets redesigned — and how HubSpot's agents now book 10,000 meetings a quarter
• Why structure beats enthusiasm: Good Karma's 50-person pilot and seven straight Tuesdays of onboarding, with each cohort teaching the next
• Why AI champion networks matter, including Peapack Bank's 29 embedded champions and Good Karma's full-time innovation specialist role
• Why the "curious generalist" may out-adapt the 20-year workflow veteran
• How the bar is moving from using AI to building with it (Zapier's shift to apps, dashboards, and digital twins)
• Why re-engineering the workflow beats laying AI on top of a broken one — "don't pave the cow path" (Peapack Bank)
• Why every company in the series measures and publicizes adoption, not just tracks it
• Why guardrails are the unlock, not the brake, in a regulated industry (Peapack Bank)

Work With Andy:

Andy is running AI Kickstarter programs to help organizations address the people side of AI adoption, plus a new AI leadership offering to help leaders build cultures of psychological safety around AI. He's also launching an AI for Career Acceleration program in October — join the waitlist at andystorch.com/ai-for-career-ownership. For corporate AI transformation or adoption workshops, reach out directly.

Connect with Andy:

• Website: andystorch.com
• Email: [email protected]

Referenced in this episode:

• The Artificial Intelligence Show with Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput (Marketing AI Institute / SmarterX) — specifically their new AI Transformations series, featuring Ty Boczek (Good Karma Brands), Dan Slagen (Zapier), John Dick (HubSpot), and John Kowal (Peapack Private Bank)

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 lost
• Why people need a Sherpa, not just a mountain to climb
• The three Ts of adoption: training, time, and tools, and why most companies deliver only one
• How the tools budget and training budget got so out of balance, and the 70/30 split that explains it
• Why psychological safety is the real adoption lever, not a nice to have
• The second fear nobody names: that using AI feels like cheating
• Why we might be teaching AI backwards, and the case for building before learning fundamentals
• The death of critical thinking, and one leader's refreshingly low tech fix
• Why the technology curve is outpacing the people curve, and what that means for L&D
• How to meet resistance where it actually lives, sometimes outside of work entirely
• The AI pilot that got 10 minutes of total usage in five weeks, and the three mistakes behind it
• Why employees are three times more ready than leaders believe, and why only 21 percent of CHROs are in the room early

Episodes Mentioned:

• Christa Hill on AI adoption and the messy middle
• Alex Zubko on the three Ts and why availability isn't adoption
• Antonia Bowler on AI adoption at Exclaimer
• Julie Stone on AI enabled learning at TTEC
• Joshua Remerowski on measuring impact and the death of critical thinking

Work 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 LinkedIn

About 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