00:01

Welcome to this week’s episode of the HRDQ-U In Review podcast, where we bring you the latest insights and practical tools for enhancing soft skills training within your organization. This podcast is brought to you by HRDQU.com, and I’m your host, Sarah, Learning Events Manager at HRDQ-U. And today I have Dr. Judith Cardenas with me to discuss the webinar, Empower Your Employees, Harness AI for Progressive Tomorrow.

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Welcome back, Judith. You’ve been here with me on the podcast a few times before, so I’m excited to chat a little bit more today about all things AI. Thank you, Sarah. I’m excited to be here. So Judith, I know you’ve been on the podcast before, but for those that have not had the chance to meet you yet, can you share a little bit about what you do, how you got to where you’re at today, a little bit about yourself? Great.

00:56

I’m the CEO of company called Strategies By Design. We are a consulting firm and we like to define ourselves as a human centered design consulting firm. Basically, we believe that we’re designing solutions for the people who are going to utilize them. So we have been in existence about 10, 12 years now. We start off as an executive leadership company and now we have delved in full head, speed ahead on.

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AI and AI strategy. And I would say we were in AI when AI was not cool, when people did not know what it was. But we saw it coming very quickly. And so we have been in the space for about four to five years now. And with AI, you know, that changes, I feel like by the day, there’s something new that’s changing in the AI in this space here. What changes do you see happening now in the current state?

01:52

So you’re right. Every day there’s something new. Every day there’s a new announcement being made. Somebody added some kind of AI element, you know, somewhere in your life. uh What I would say is that we’re seeing a couple of things that are happening that are interesting to the practitioners of the world. We’re seeing a lot of people calling this the AI hype. Is this hype? Is this just like something new and shiny that’s coming out every day? And what we like to say is, yeah, there’s a little bit of hype.

02:20

because there’s a lot of new shininess to the new AI apps or the new large language models that are coming out. But what we’re also seeing is we’re also seeing organizations and leaders trying to figure out, hmm, okay, this is hype, but it’s not going anywhere. So that’s something that’s gonna disappear. And so how do I best embrace it? How do I best utilize it? And how do I best really implement it?

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are integrated into my work so that my teams are working more efficiently. We are really delighting our customers as well as delighting our employees. So we are seeing some shifts there. The biggest shift, I will say, Sarah, that we’re seeing is something we call multimodality. So that you can use some of these large language models to understand text, create a visual, a piece of art, create a piece of music.

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for you. ah We can have a large language model that will analyze an Excel spreadsheet. And now we have ChatGPT 4.0 that actually will have a conversation with you. You don’t even need to type anything in. You just have a conversation like your best AI buddy that you would have right next to you. So the world’s changing. It’s changing very fast. ah But we find it pretty exciting. It’s pretty exciting right now.

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And the webinar that you presented with us recently was all about AI. was, empower your employees, harness AI for a progressive tomorrow. Can you share what the key takeaways were for the registrants at this event? Sure. I think the very first key takeaway, and it had to do even with one of our polls that we administered during the webinar, is that we have different levels of adoption of AI occurring within our own workforce.

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We’ve got some people who are definitely afraid of it still, and we have others who are using it every day, and they’re using it in many different ways. But there’s no cohesive approach to how organizations are saying, this is how we believe that we’re going to adopt AI. Even though we know it’s going to change, we’d like to have a strategy around how that adoption is going to occur. And so one of the highlights that we take away all the time from our webinars is that we don’t have a hundred percent buy-in.

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And yet at the same time, it’s not going anywhere. So we’d like to say this is an opportunity for us to really think, take a step back and think strategically to figure out how can we be the leaders where we are actually telling AI how we want it to help us and not have the technology influence how we do our work. I think that’s really the second takeaway is that for a long time we’ve had

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new technologies come in. I mean, I remember in the late 1990s where we had PowerPoint and Word and all these uh software packages, and we had to learn how to adapt to them. We had to figure out how to utilize them in our day-to-day work. With AI, it’s a little bit different. AI meets you where you’re at. So for some people, they just like to use a chat bot or uh some type of large language model to just ask simple questions.

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For others, they’re actually asking it to code an entire website. So it meets you where you’re at, which I think that personalization is something we’ve never really seen. And I think the third takeaway is that there’s a lot of myths that are still out there. Will AI take my job? Will my job disappear? We know AI is going to disrupt the world of work. We also know that AI is going to create a number of new jobs and job opportunities.

06:10

And so we’d rather have the people that we work with to be ahead of the curve instead of behind the curve. So I think those are the takeaways that I would really highlight today. And during the webinar, we talked about something exciting that we have going on, which is the AI master class workshop that you will be facilitating. Can you share a little bit about what the AI master class workshop is and what folks can expect? Yes. So we’re very excited about this.

06:39

The AI masterclass workshop really is about giving leaders practical tools, practical how-tos of how to create approaches and how to create strategies around utilizing AI. The biggest pain point that we’ve seen with leaders and teams is that they adopt AI without understanding where in their business process should it really

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impact or influence? How should we really utilize AI? ah How do I upscale my employees and my own team so that we’re all utilizing it in a way that we become a learning uh organization? So this masterclass is really about delving into those understandings. You we’re going to have a practical workbook and we’re going to have some AI cards to share with people and we’ll have some canvases so that you can actually pick those elements up.

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and utilize them in your job. So we are very focused on giving people takeaways, uh helping people co-create in their journey of AI and not necessarily need to react to AI. So we’ll delve in enough of understanding AI, because you just need some basic understanding. None of us want to be data scientists, I don’t believe. uh But we do want to have an understanding of how do you analyze that AI tool? How do you know if it’s the right one, if it’s safe?

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Is it protecting your data? What are the ethical and legal implications? We want to create a safe space for us to start having those how-to conversations. And can you share, know, what are the top, you know, key, the key benefits, the top three benefits that participants can expect if they, you know, when they attend this, this workshop? First key benefit is they’re going to have a solid basic understanding of what AI really is and isn’t.

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I would tell you one of the pain points that we have is when chat GPT came out It was the most exciting time and yet everyone I would not everyone a large majority of the people that we work with still think chat GPT is the only AI and that’s not true There’s so much more out there. I think the second Takeaway is the legal and ethical implications really understanding what those are Understand how to analyze those in your work and how to really understand how to

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uh look at an AI app or an AI large language model and said like, oh, there may be some risks to my team or to my organization. So we’re going to open up our screens and show you really how you analyze those large language model tools. I think the third takeaway is, what are the first five or six steps I need to take to strategically implement AI? Do I need some guardrails? Is there a policy that’s missing in my organization that I could

09:33

quickly design and share with the team. How do I upskill? And what is it going to do to the jobs of the future? We’re going to have those templates and those checklists for everyone to have so that they can actually use those to guide their decisions. There’s so much happening in AI, but we believe that those three elements are the first most critical steps that every leader needs to have. And can you share some of the practical strategies that, you

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that you’ll be covering during our workshop? Sure. So one of the very first practical strategies is we will be spending some time within the workshop doing what we call opportunity mapping, where we will take an organizational chart and we will look at how can a leader look at an entire organization, whether you have a small business, a medium-sized business, or working in large corporation.

10:32

How do you identify where AI is going to have the best impact and where it won’t? And maybe you do need to automate, but maybe you don’t need AI automation. And so how do you make those decisions? So one of the strategies we’re going to be working on is how do you strategically identify AI opportunities within your organization? The second strategy that we’ll be focusing on is what are the top three to five AI ethical considerations that you have to

11:01

to think about. Now, people talk about data privacy, they talk about bias, those are all important. But we have 17 other AI ethical dilemmas that we need to talk about, whether it’s bias or whether it’s displacement of a job or, you know, some of our AI elements are not carbon friendly, you know, so if you work for an organization that’s environmentally sound, you might want to ask different questions.

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So one of the strategies we’re going to be working with the team with would be looking at these 17 different types of AI ethical elements that you may want to consider and then identify the top five that make the best sense for your organization. And I think the last strategy that I think is going to be very, very critical is we’ll be working with a group to identify if I had to pick two or three things I needed to focus on this next two quarters of the year.

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or before the end of the year, or there’s something I need to fund. ah What would that look like, especially as it relates to upskilling your employees? People use terms like AI literacy, but nobody has the same definition of what that is. So we want to delve into really helping people define what AI literacy is for their team and for their organization. So they have those, you know, the next five, seven steps that they know that they can confidently go out.

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and leave and take action at the end of the workshop. Great. I’m really excited for this event. I can’t wait to attend myself. Thank you. We’re very excited to you. mean, it’s just the world is changing so fast. ah And so we can upscale our own community to be the progressive leaders. I’d love to say I want to train AI. I don’t want AI to train me.

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And so the only way I can train AI to actually help me work collaboratively with it is for me to be very clear of what I need strategically, ethically, legally, and how do need to move my business forward. So if you can walk away with those questions answered, you are way ahead of the game. So it’s very exciting. Great. And Judith, before we sign off today, where can listeners go to connect with you and learn more about your work?

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You can find me on LinkedIn at Judith Cardenas uh or you can check out our website at www.stratusbydesingroup.com

13:36

Great, and with that Judith, that will wrap up today. I won’t keep you too much longer on this Friday. So thank you so much for your time today. Thank you, Sarah. We’re looking forward. I’m looking forward to seeing everybody jump in and sign up for our workshop. Yes, make sure that you click the information. It’ll all be linked below so that you can register for the workshop. Don’t miss out. Also, the webinar will be linked below too, so you can check that out if you didn’t have the opportunity to join us there.

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