Transcript
Aidan McCullen: today’s guest is the award-winning author of three comic books for executives on AI and human working life, and her new book is AI-Powered Leader. It is a pleasure to welcome to Inside Learning, Fiona Pasantino.
You’re very welcome to the show
Fiona Passantino.: Thank you, Aidan. Thank you. It’s a great pleasure to be here
Aidan McCullen: great to have you on the show, and I highly recommend, and we’re gonna link to your website, the brilliant cartoons that you have, the brilliant comics that you have and you create yourself. But the book, oh my, you pack in so much in here, AI literacy, leadership lag, data governance, responsible AI, compliance, training, workflows, RAGs, small language models, AI at scale, and so, so much more, including the future of human leadership.
But I thought for this show, for the Inside Learning Podcast, maybe we’ll start with HR, because HR [00:01:00] is an afterthought when it comes to AI integration. It’s thought a lot as owned by IT in some organizations. Sometimes it’s marketing, sometimes it’s the digital side of the building. But it really is, as you say in the book, has to be a human-led experience
Fiona Passantino.: Yes. I make the case in the book that the owner of the AI employee experience, so y- we talk about employee experience, I spent many, many years in HR, and my job was always helping and supporting training the working community. HR is in charge of managing people’s joy, happiness, inspiration, whether they have the tools that they need to manage the job. And if people are stressed out or overworked or they don’t have the tools that they need, then HR feels it, and they are the ones that have to, you know, meet the needs of the working community. [00:02:00] And there is no other place for an AI integration than within HR. Because what I see a lot of times that, does not work is that leaders will look at something like AI and they’ll say, “Oh, it’s tech.
It’s a tool. Well, IT guys, do AI. Go and do AI, integrate stuff, get some tools, , and call us when you’re done.” Because leaders don’t actually do the work. They delegate, which is their job. They should do that. because they don’t do the work, they’re not the ones experimenting and using the tools, because everybody who experiments and uses the tools understands that it’s not a tool in the classic sense.
It’s more resembles a new kind of employee. So therefore, that is why it falls more heavily under HR than under IT and tech. So what, what happens generally is leadership will say, “Okay. guys, check out the tools, do [00:03:00] AI,” and then the IT guys will try to teach people how to use these tools. They don’t really have a lot of governance support.
They don’t have rules of the road. Leaders don’t give them enough instruction as to what’s okay and what’s not, ’cause they don’t understand them. They don’t know what it is. then they’ll put on maybe a couple of workshops of an hour, not understanding how to give a training, right, which HR does. And then people look at them and they’re like, “, I don’t understand.” And of course they don’t, because being trained by people who are not trainers, expected to use a tool that, that they don’t understand what’s in it for me. There are no rules of the road, and it doesn’t get adopted. then leaders will say, “Oh, resistance.” Well, actually not. HR knows how to deal with this.
HR knows how to deal with change management and transformation and understands that people need training, they need governance, they need rules, and they need kind of like a change strategy [00:04:00] to meet the needs of this massive transformation
Aidan McCullen: I love that you said that, because most transformation efforts fail, as we know, and th- they don’t fail because it’s the wrong strategy or the wrong tool. It’s usually the human resistance, and as you say, it often comes from a lack of education or fear, and that manifests as resistance. And you talk a lot about leadership in the book, and, I do wanna come to something you touched on there, which is , the five-step AI integration roadmap that you talk about in the book, which is absolutely fantastic.
But first, maybe we’ll double-click on the leadership element, because they really have to have HR’s back, because oftentimes it’s delegated, but it’s delegated without real empowerment and air cover
Fiona Passantino.: Yeah. I’m gonna go back to one thing that you said where you said that resistance is, it’s not a matter d- of strategy. And, and I think what I’m trying to say in the book is that AI transformation is all about having a strategy and having a plan and [00:05:00] understanding what is the natural steps of the transformation, and that yes, most of the time it will manifest, the failure does manifest in resistance because that’s how we see things not working is when people aren’t doing what they’re expected to do, that’s resistance.
It, and doesn’t matter we’re asking them to do, whether it’s the new Microsoft tool or it’s the new, CRM, or it’s the new cloud, whatever. Any time that things aren’t working, it’ll manifest as resistance, right? And that is a leadership issue, right? So, I think the strategy is a function of understanding what AI is and how it affects people as well, and the strategy is very much about guiding your community through this process in a way that makes them feel like they’re in control.
Aidan McCullen: What it r- really means is that HR needs a seat at the boardroom table. I’ve been saying this for a very long time in times [00:06:00] of transformation, but you really emphasize this important link between leadership and HR
Fiona Passantino.: Absolutely. Because HR follows what leaders do. I mean, leaders are in charge of all the departments, and HR is one of them. HR is not the CEO. HR is one, you know, level down generally. But I also, I’ve been working in HR for many, many years, and I’ve always found that HR are the kidneys of the organization.
So if something’s not working somewhere or something’s going wrong, then HR has to clean that up, right? So if you have high t- toxicity or, , low level of employee empowerment or, support, then you’ll have very high turnover, which means that HR is constantly needing to fill seats. So that’s what I mean by the kidneys of the organization.
So people start leaving the organization, HR has to come in and fix that. I think it’s more than a seat at the table. It’s that HR has to be the one to understand the community and say, “Here is our adoption [00:07:00] curve of our community. This is how many people are early adopters. This is how many people are sort of the mid-range, the late adopters, and these are the resistors.
These are the analog people that say, ‘Hell no, I’m not doing AI ever.’” And, um, you know, those are the people that we might have to have a difficult conversation with the road if they’re still not, you know… So HR understands the community. HR would take stock of they’re dealing with, and then they would train everyone, right?
So everybody gets baseline training, so AI literacy. And by the way, in Europe, it’s law. It’s not optional. So I think it’s Article 2 or 4 of the AI, EU AI Act, is that organizations are responsible for the literacy of their employees, and organizations are responsible for governance, which means rules. So people need both of those things in order to thrive. They need training, and they need rules. HR is perfectly set up to [00:08:00] do both of those things because they know the rules, the kind of the sandbox that people feel comfortable in. They know their community better than any other department because they’re intricately involved with them. They can measure their community in a way that other people can’t because they have the demographics and they have the tools to measure who they are, what their skills are, how long they’ve been in the organization, what their levels of literacy are. They’re the ones who can set up these, pulse surveys very easily, very quickly. They’re also the one who deals with onboarding and getting the new people on board and making AI a non-negotiable part of that process. So A- able to say, “Okay, this is our community. We know more or less the people who are the early adopters. We know more or less the analog people. Everybody gets baseline AI literacy training, and then we’re gonna double down on training in two very important [00:09:00] populations.” So the first population where you give a little extra training is The early, early adopters, the enthusiasts, it’s usually a small group, maybe like 1% of the population, that loves AI.
They’re really enthusiastic. They see potential. They’re from everywhere. They’re from… They could be from data, but they could also be from sales, marketing, supply chain. They could be from leaders themselves. They could be, on the ground in retail, you know, truck drivers, whatever, people who are really into it, who understand it, and do it in their free time. These guys get extra training. This is your center of excellence, and they will then turn around with that training and then operate as coaches to that analog group, you know? The second group that needs extra training is that analog group, the “hell no” guys, uh, and girls. And they need a little bit of extra training.
They need some, some more nudging that, like, safe space kind of nudging, smaller class sizes, so a little bit of extra space is needed for them, perhaps even some one-on-one, and those coaches are gonna [00:10:00] be very, very instrumental to getting those people on board. What’s very important, and HR knows this very well, they have an instinctive feeling for their community. What’s very important is you don’t create a split in the organization, which is the AI everyone and the analog people who say, “Hell no.” Because then once you s- have that split that the analog people say, “I’m not doing this,” the rest of the organization pulls away, and these guys are left kind of high and dry, and then you create two organizations. So, to make the analog guys happy, we’re s- we’re sort of keeping up with the old processes just to make them happy, but that’s actually a disservice to everybody, and it’s very dissatisfying for the front runners who say, “You know what? I don’t wanna be part of an organization that is creating two organizations just to keep s- a couple of people happy that are…
They have to start learning this stuff. I can go down to the fintech people down the street. They’re, they’re AI first. I don’t need to be [00:11:00] here.” S- and we definitely don’t want those guys to leave. So, that’s why it’s really important to make sure that everybody gets just on the other side of that break, and so that there’s no such thing as an analog-only employee. if they still are after some months of intensive training, then you have that difficult conversation. And again, who does that? HR, the kidneys of the organization.
Aidan McCullen: I love that. I was thinking if HR are the kidneys, that makes L&D the nervous system,
Fiona Passantino.: Ooh
Aidan McCullen: they have to regulate and bring people on the journey and regenerate. And like you said, those two different, organizations, they need to keep each successful in their context as they move to the new context, which is the strategy.
But in that, perhaps we’ll say a word on L&D, because L&D and HR are two, two sides of the same coin in many senses in an organization. They work hand-in-hand
Fiona Passantino.: Yeah. Well, many times learning is part of [00:12:00] HR. , It, it differs by organization. The ones where I have been involved in very, very large multinationals, , learning and development is part of HR, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. It can, it can be anywhere. But yes, of course, the training plan is something that is gonna take a lot of time and consideration. Usually, you need e- outside experts. I mean, that’s what I do now. So I go into organizations, I help them integrate AI in a way that’s human first, and the way that leaders are supported in a way that also people who are not necessarily on, in, behind desks are supported. So generally, what learning and development Could be benefited to know about is that the first phase of the training plan is all hands literacy, general literacy.
You’re complying with the EU AI Act, you’re covering your bases in that way. You’re providing everybody that general baseline literacy. I usually kick this off with a kickoff day, which is fun, and [00:13:00] we do crazy stuff like we fold balloons, and we have, you know, beer and wine at the end of the day, and we make it a party.
We kick it off with a great fun keynote. We learn what we need to learn. We develop some human skills as well. I run what’s called the School for AI Human Skills. , My partner is a human trainer, like, she does really intensive, human development, confidence, and, , mindset, this change, , training. And then I kind of couple with the hard skills. And then we start things off with a fun, festive environment. Everybody then at the same time gets these elevated skills. the next phase for this group of people would be, department. So HR gets a different training from IT. It– They get a different training from sales and marketing. have to learn and use AI in a totally different way. The tools are generally the same. It’s not so much about the tools. We usually deal with, we s- we’re seeing Copilot, which is a lot more [00:14:00] powerful than people realize because they don’t really… They use 10% of it. And, then of course, marketing, AI training will be heavy multimodal, which means video, music, images, voice, so that you create an in-house agency.
You don’t have to hire a marketing agency ever, right? Or you create c- in-house company podcasts. Marketing can do all of that now by themselves. You’ll– leaders will need their own leadership training, which is specifically about integration and community support. HR gets their own training. So every single dep- finance, risk, they all have their supply chain, huge potential there.
And they would essentially get machine learning, skills, not just AI generative, but how do I use machine learning to develop better, routes? , That’s a different animal altogether. My favorite training for this m- moment in time would be the desk-less training. So this is a new thing I’ve developed [00:15:00] where 80% of the population that is not- sitting at a desk, people in retail, people on the move, people who are embedded with customers, people who are driving trucks, people at the factories, people who don’t log into a desktop, but we use it on the phone. But it’s the same intelligence. It’s just a different way of getting to it. But they need training too, right? So that’s the next phase is, is that kind of training. And then the final phase would be the second tier, the advanced, where you’re actually building your own small language models in-house, and you’re training yourselves how to train your own models right next to your data centers.
That’s the safest place to run AI
Aidan McCullen: , a couple of things you said just sparked to mind. One, this is show you how weird my mind is. One was you said about, say, an organization uses a tool like Copilot, and they’re only using 10% of it.
And then the other thing you said, you’ll celebrate maybe at the end of the [00:16:00] night with wine and beer. And it reminded me of a joke that was told to me by the author of Getting Things Done, David Allen. I interviewed him a few years ago, and he told me a joke, me being Irish, and as I’m a bit of a weirdo Irish person, I don’t drink much, but most jokes about Irish people involve alcohol.
And he said an Irish man meets a genie, and the genie gives him a wish. He wishes for a never-ending pint of Guinness. So he drinks it, and it refills, and he’s staring at it mesmerized and astonished. He thanks the genie, and the genie is impressed by his manners and grants him a second wish. So the Irish man looks at the bottomless po- pint, bottomless pint in his hand and says, “I’ll have another one of these, please.”
And the reason I mention it is, it, the reason I mention it is, it’s a little bit of how we’re using AI, and we’re, we’re, we have this, like, huge [00:17:00] opportunity, and I’m sure it’s very frustrating for you when you go into an organization and you see how immature, and I don’t mean that in a disparaging way, but how immature organizations are, not in their use, but in their imagination about how they could use this because how far they could go is just incredible.
And it, it links very much to your metaphor in the book about the ostrich and the eagle.
Fiona Passantino.: Well, gosh, there’s so many ways to answer this question actually, because what I see a lot is that people are very focused on the tools, and they say, “Well, what tools should I use? What tools? What tools?” I say, “Well, forget the tools for a moment.
What do you have?” people have Copilot. Most people have, .. that some people have, , OpenAI, ChatGPT, or some people have, , Claude. Claude is actually for me, , the probably the best overall model, I think, just general model. But it’s just h- how they go about their work. They s- they use AI kind of like, “Oh, let’s use it [00:18:00] like a browser,” you know?
“Let’s use it like a spellcheck. Let’s use it to generate text.” But one of the exercises I do with, with groups is think of everything you do in your day. What do you do every day? Like, what the hell do you do? You sit down, what do you do? And I have them break down, like literally in five-minute increments, okay, this is a task that you have to do.
You have to organize a stockholder meeting. Great. What does that mean? Let’s look at it. Break it out. So what, what does it mean to organize a shareholder meeting? Right? You have to get your invitations. You have to have a good concept. You have to have the… You know, it’s like can be used for every single phase of that journey, even in the ideation brainstorming.
Should I even have a stockholders meeting in the first place? Is there a better and more efficient way to do this? Let’s find out. It can totally transform your business. You could be building the wrong things. The, one of the in- the kind of c- case studies, it’s a fictitious case study, but it’s based loosely on a real study, was a marketing team [00:19:00] that used AI to create a whole new market and create a whole new product that they were not able to meet until AI was there to support. So it’s using AI to create new products and create new markets and find new markets and reposition yourself. And so we’re using it at the end, the tail end of the creative process, but not at the zero phase. So the earlier we can use AI at the very front of the process, the, it, it can just be an explosive way of working And then as we get later in our evolution, so the five steps, the integration roadmap takes you from ostrich through to, you know, sandpiper to through pelican where you’re scooping, you know, going out in with intention to bring AI back into your organization to the sparrow hawk phase, which is where you’re a tandem team, you know, AI human working together. And then the eagle phase where you’re actually scanning for new opportunities, [00:20:00] creating them, seeing the bigger picture is the end of the horizon is basically when you are using AI within your organization. You’re using frontier models commercially, but you’re also building them internally. And you’re also using open claw systems to have certain automated programs running independently and coming up with ideas independently to feed these other automations and to feed the humans that are working and the humans feeding that right back into these systems. It’s a totally different way of working that takes about a year to work up to.
You cannot skip a step. , It’s like, you know, going scuba diving. You don’t go to 60 meters like right away. You have to slowly, you know, descend, otherwise you’re gonna explode. so , when you’re looking down the road a little bit, and little by little these new ways of using it are gonna unlock [00:21:00] for you. So y- you’re not gonna be able to do all of those things at the very beginning
Aidan McCullen: fiona, there’s so much in the book, and we cannot do it justice. I don’t think we’ve even covered my notes from the introduction, by the way.
Fiona Passantino.: Sorry
Aidan McCullen: I was thinking about how we could give our audience as much value in the time that we have, because you’ve kindly joined us from Bali, from your holidays with your family.
But I would love you to share just, you touched on it, the AI integration roadmap. There’s loads in there, and just an overview of what people can expect from the book if they were to follow this roadmap all the way from start to finish
Fiona Passantino.: Okay. Well, one thing that I think is very important, and this sounds very frivolous and silly, but the comics are, what makes the book quite unique. , The comics are hand done, just like the book is handwritten with a lot of AI support, and the comics are the same way. The comics make us laugh, and they’re fun. I hope they make you laugh, right? [00:22:00] And is a very strategic, intentional part of the book. We need to be laughing and seeing how silly and funny all this is. It’s a weird time to be alive. Like, this stuff is science fiction. It shouldn’t be happening, right? It’s bonkers. And then you look at the robots.
The robots are coming. So it doesn’t take a great imagination to see that the brain of AI into one of these robots, and we’re in C-3PO land. Like, we’re there. We’re in Star Wars. It’s bonkers. So if we’re not laughing, ’cause it’s funny, and our reactions, our human reactions are very funny. The comics are a really very important part, ’cause if you’re laughing at the comics, it means you understand the material. You will not find the comics funny unless you understand , the written part. So the book has two parts. It’s the dr- the kind of dry learning stuff. That’s the text that with the diagrams and the text and the, you know… That can be very dense. It’s very technical stuff. every single page has a [00:23:00] full-page comic, and they should relate to one another, like, hopefully. And if you’re able to laugh at the comics, it means you’ve understood and digested the material to the extent that you get the joke. that is kind of like a carrot chocolate cake stick. Like, I was gonna say carrot and stick, but it’s like carrot and chocolate cake, ’cause, you know, you, you eat the choc- chocolate cake, you eat the carrot, and it gets you through.
You eat your vegetables with the chocolate, right? So it’s… that is important for all of everyone who’s listening to understand is that AI should be joyful. It should be fun. It should be inspiring, and it should make us laugh. And I find that a lot of people take integration very, very seriously, and that’s a big problem with resistance. And any resistance, right, is fear and anxiety. If you’re laughing, you can’t be afraid. if you’re laughing, you can’t resist. You know? It’s irresistible if you’re laughing at it. So I d- I’d say that’s the final point to make about it
Aidan McCullen: [00:24:00] Fantastic, and I’ll link to where people can find those comics as well, ’cause, and also your podcast as well. Where’s the best place for people to find you for keynotes, for workshops, and for training?
Fiona Passantino.: Sure. Well, my website is working-humans.com, everything is there. It’s kind of like a big dumping ground for bo- the blog. If you go to the blog, then you can see the articles. The articles make up the baseline of the book. The books are there too. They’re on Amazon. They’re everywhere books are sold. , And the keynotes are there. You can see, you know, the TED Talk is there, and i-it’s all basically, for you to see. Fionapasontino.com also has, , a f- that’s mostly the speaking, the keynote speaking side of the business. Yeah, I, I would say you could also go to the School for AI Human Skills, right?
So that is aihumanschool.com. That’s the s- specifically the school that I run together with my partner, with the human and [00:25:00] the AI hard skills, soft skills kind of one-two punch that we, provide for organizations
Aidan McCullen: Author of AI-Powered Leader, Fiona Passantino, thank you for joining us on Inside Learning
Fiona Passantino.: you, Aidan. It’s been a real pleasure
Please note that this transcript is auto-generated – please refer to the audio or video for exact wording.
AI isn't a tool. It's a new kind of employee. And that's exactly why it belongs to HR, not IT. Fiona Passantino is a TEDx speaker, trainer and coach who helps non-technical leaders integrate AI without the fear and the failed roll-outs. She's the award-winning author of the Comic Books for Executives series, creator of the AI Integration Roadmap, and founder of the School for AI-Human Skills.