Keep Calm and Carry On with Artificial Intelligence

[00:01] Tom Moriarty: Welcome back to the Secret Society of Success. In this not-so-secret podcast, we explore the changing landscape of corporate learning and development so that you can bring successful L&D to your organizations. Here in season three, we're taking on a very hot and controversial topic generative artificial Intelligence. In each episode, we'll be talking to different L&D experts about what generative AI is, how it is already being deployed for learning, design, and administration today, and frankly, whether or not you should be scared. Oh, by the way, we used Chat GPT to write this intro. Hey, Erin, thanks for joining us today.

[00:41] Erin Peterschick: Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here, Tom. Thanks for having absolutely.

[00:45] Tom Moriarty: Before we jump into our discussion on the scary thing that is AI, why don't you give the audience a little bit more about your background in L&D?

[00:53] Erin Peterschick: Sure. Well, like many L&D Professionals, I have a meandering and diverse path and found myself needing to do things differently throughout various spots in my career. I actually started out training citizens in, like, grassroots lobbying and then did things like teaching English over in China. So that led to adult education and getting to work internally at companies like Boeing and Microsoft and Bridging Technology and working on leadership development and power skills. I do some coaching and I actually hung out my own shingle as Aballant Learning Innovation. I have spent about ten years really focusing on innovation, fostering cultures of innovation, teaching others how to innovate, leaning hard on my background, and certifications in things like Design Sprints and Design thinking. So it's kind of L&D adjacent, but also a natural extension of some of those skills that we foster as L& D pros.

[01:50] Tom Moriarty: Awesome. So where we want to dive in the conversation today is really all about artificial intelligence, I think. As we were preparing, you shared a bunch of examples from your experience recently, like Learnapalooza. This has become a buzzword in the word of L&D. Right. And I think where we'd like to explore today is not just the viewpoints and impact, but also the emotions for a lot of our target audience. Right. And our target audience in this podcast are an L&D department of one right, or an underresourced group where they're a mid level L&D professional trying to grow their career. And now there's this really scary thing out there called artificial intelligence that's coming to take your job or whatever you might believe. So I'd love to start there. What are you hearing in the world? Is AI scary?

[02:40] Erin Peterschick: 100%. No. I love the question, and I think “it depends” is the complex, nuanced answer. And as a glass half full optimist, I would say in a word, no. But let's hold some space for people to experience those emotions that you were just talking about. So I started kind of having conversations with various people in my network and not just learning and development professionals, but people like, I have a dear friend who runs the hackathon at Microsoft and works in innovation. And we were just, like, looking at all of those headlines that were coming out, like Chat GPT or AI is more Creative than Humans and Better at Solving Creative problems. And it's just like, oh my gosh, that's kind of inherently one of our human domains. What do you mean? And then you dig into a headline like that, and it's like, okay, it's maybe not so serious because headlines by nature are incendiary and supposed to grab your attention. But then there's real headlines, like some of the need for upskilling and reskilling. Like from LinkedIn, they're doing their reports pretty regularly, talking to managers about like, hey, what are the skills you're looking for? We're seeing more jobs requiring some sort of familiarity with generative AI, more job descriptions. And that's the real landscape. And I think it's a corollary to history, right? Where we've seen things like manufacturing change or we've seen the introduction of technology even in learning and development, like AR VR, or even a learning management system. And it creates some very reasonable emotions. As a human centered designer, as somebody who deeply tries to understand, where are the pain points, where are the frictions? Where are some of those emotions that lead to the behaviors that we're either seeking to change or harness the best of, then I think it's really important to go ahead and slow down and ask this question and hold some space for Is it scary? So, a Learnapalooza, I did a session on “how do we harness humans as analog?” You know, the analog you know, we're really more augmented than analog. And I see AI as a tool. I'm an optimist. I think it's a real ally for those learning and development professionals that you were describing. And I'm really hopeful. And that's the message that I've been trying to put out and cultivate while honoring some of the scariness.

[05:12] Tom Moriarty: I really appreciate that perspective. I think it's an emotional reaction of fear is just that right? You have to acknowledge its existence before you can even take a step to maybe help someone have a different perception that it doesn't need to be scary. In fact, it can be a tool. What were you hearing from the audience in your experience at Learnapalooza? Right. What was that reaction? Was it fear?

[05:36] Erin Peterschick: Yeah. I really liked that I got some great feedback, even in the moment saying, I really appreciated your perspective. It was a little less chicken little. The sky is there's a there's a spectrum of voices. And, like, our keynote speaker, Brandon Carson from Starbucks was just, you know, wake up call people. And his points were super legit and on. You know, it might have been again, kind of like those incendiary headlines, just a little like deer in headlights. What does that mean for me? L&D Department of one or company that is not letting me even play with these tools. So where do I even start? I asked my participants, even just let's start with, how familiar are you? And I got stats. Like 69% said that they've experimented a bit, and I think that maps pretty well to the bell curve of our industry. But then I also asked what concerned you about AI after those? Like, I shared some of those headlines and again, thoughtful nuanced responses like, we're taking the power out of the human touch, so exactly what we're talking about. Or replace the components of my job that I enjoy the most or make me the most valuable. Like, totally understandable. And then other people were citing things like ethics and sort of the transparency and the bias issues that we're seeing with generative AI. So thoughtful responses definitely, again, kind of ran the gamut of, Yeah, I'm concerned.

[07:09] Tom Moriarty: Yeah, I think about this change in the context of other changes. Right. I think that in the L&D space specifically, there are some seminal technology moments, right. I guess technically, probably date all the way back to the Internet as a big starting seminal one…

[07:29] Erin Peterschick: Or even remember how much we were scared of cell phones and how integral those are to our lives now.

[07:34] Tom Moriarty: Right. Both on a personal and professional level. Right. And then also the idea of LMS technology and AR and VR, like you said recently. Right. These are big technological advances that ultimately have occurred already and had some impact, probably some outlast than was believed at the beginning on all L& D professionals. Is this AI change significantly different than those?

[07:59] Erin Peterschick: Yeah, I think that's a good question. And I don't know if I have all the answers. Well, I would never claim to have all the answers, but I was thinking about this a little bit the other day where what we saw was maybe less of the speed and the pace concerns with some of those implementations. So something like an LMS that's also going to hang with your content management strategy. And so I think, again, we're looking at what is the AI strategy that then will fold into your overarching learning strategy and change management and upskilling and reskilling and workforce development concerns? Because it's moving so quickly right now that I think people are really feeling like they need to get out ahead of it. Whereas those other technologies you mentioned, some of our colleagues really struggled to ever see any application for XR. It just wasn't relevant in their particular L&D department or company or industry. So I think this is applicable. AI, unlike those, is going to touch everybody one way or another. And there's so much power. The ramp up and the ability to access what we have at our fingertips now is also, I think, a lot more accessible than some of those earlier technologies. So, again, I'm feeling pretty optimistic. But then we, as learning and development professionals, I think are uniquely poised to shepherd in some of that change, be at the tip of the spear for some of those strategy conversations, hopefully, which I know we struggle in L&D sometimes we struggle to get a seat at that strategy table, but instead of order taking, maybe we can inform it. We can convene an internal AI group or start doing AI user groups for L&D pros and see, let's see what the collective body is doing and what are the use cases, and then we can implement them quickly in our own environments.

[09:57] Tom Moriarty: Yeah, being the thought leader as it relates to AI is an interesting one, right? At the end of the day, as a learning and development professional, what our audience has learned or evolved to do for a living is actually help other people help and understand other people's subject matter, become subject matter experts, but really where they add value is getting others up to speed on that, right? So you don't need to be the person building a generative AI tool or building the next GPT to teach someone about Chat GPT. And I think that call to the audience is a takeaway of saying, hey, maybe instead of keeping this potentially powerful resource at arm's length, jump in and make it accessible to the organization and be a change agent for the organization and help it be a tool and harness it as a tool. What does it actually do as a tool for an L& D professional? Where do you see that and where have you started to see that fit in as a specific resource that someone can use to make their L& D department of one that much more impactful or efficient?

[11:08] Erin Peterschick: Yeah, absolutely. And I love this question and I think your other guests have also done some great answers. So apologies if I end up repeating because there is some real low hanging fruit. And again, I would see AI as a copilot or a trusted colleague. And there's a lot of isolation when you are a learning development professional of one or even just there's isolation because so many people are just doing so much right? Like, how many people, you know, feel like they're doing like 1.5 FTEs worth of a job? And sometimes it's hard to even grab that colleague or ping him on IM or Slack or whatever and just be like, hey, I need you for a thought partner. This is partially solved. That lack of a thought partner because everybody's so busy is absolutely partially solved by Chat GPT and other AI tools. I feel like it's always there. It's 24 hours, so when you get that shower thought or early morning brainstorm, you're noodling on like, okay, what do I want to do for this learning project that I'm working on? You can turn to Cloud or Bard or Chat GPT and start brainstorming. And so again, as an innovation person, I love anything that helps us brainstorm because that divergence and convergence is how we get to the good stuff. So that's a super easy one. It's just like just experiment with using generative AI tools like Chat GPT to brainstorm. Like, give me some of your best examples of how I might be able to do scenarios for call center folks and help generate some scripts or something like that. Or like, give me 100 bad ideas so that I can walk in with some levity, talk about all the things we won't be doing. Because that's also kind of a fun way to back into change management or get stakeholder buy in. One of the first uses we did in a company that I work for about six months ago, or I left about six months ago, is we just started using it for what Brene Brown calls the crappy first draft. And we would use it for things like first pass on updated Bloom's Taxonomy Learning Objectives, and we would just give it a little bit of context. Again, working with Chat GPT, the first versions, and it was a pretty powerful tool for developing learning objectives. I've always struggled with things like scenario based learning. Like, it's pretty complex. And how do you think through all of that, the time to development on things like that? Totally accelerated, totally truncated. Remember how you couldn't get a hold of SMEs all the time to really check knowledge check questions with them? I think this is a good distractor question, but I'm not sure. Again, Chat GPT great copilot for doing things like knowledge check questions that are pretty good and then you just quickly verify them with your SME.

[14:06] Tom Moriarty: Yeah, I think those are some really good examples. As you perfectly outlined, there's a number of opportunities where you can make yourself more efficient. Right. I particularly appreciate the call out of using a tool like a Chat GPT to do things that you don't enjoy as much, to help you generate specific outlines for a very detailed scenario based learning environment that frankly is not your favorite. It's part of your responsibility. Doesn't mean the job is going away. There's plenty of parts of all of our jobs I think that, you know, have to get done. Maybe that's a great place to look and say, how can I help? Let AI help me do this faster so that I could spend more time on the parts of my job that I personally enjoy and I probably can use to add more value to the business. Where is it probably not the right tool? Where is it not actually going?

[15:06] Erin Peterschick: Yeah, I love that and I think that the “not” field is shrinking fast every day. Like, again, just some of the stuff I'm tracking in the discourse. But no, you absolutely articulated it well, like AI as an enabler, not a replacer. Right. And I think that, like I've said, we should see it as a collaborator, as a trusted colleague and copilot, as they say. And then to your point, take over the repetitive and time-consuming tasks, the stuff that's boring or the stuff that just gives you, like I think again, because we're so busy, sometimes the cognitive load on us means that staring at a blank page is like deer in headlights. And so just that get that, start that creative. Let me get something on the canvas so that I can get to the strategy, the content development, the coaching, the creative collaboration with humans in real time. That more evolved stuff. And we've certainly seen that chat bots have been around for several years. And that was the point, is that that first point of contact is supposed to reduce the lower cognitive tasks that a skilled professional needs to address so that they can focus on the escalated issues that require more critical thinking, that require that nuanced, human touch, that empathy. And that's what we talked a lot about in my session at Learnapalooza is like, these are the stakes in the ground I'm going to put people, let's get your reactions. We as humans have in spades something that currently generative AI does not doesn't mean it's not going to catch up. But that is creativity. I do think we're inherently more creative. We are the spark, the pattern seeker and viewer in a human context is different than pattern seeking and viewing in generative AI's context. So that pattern seeking together can be like an amplifying force. I think we are inherently high empathy, right? Again, AI is catching up. It's actually using high empathy language and getting good human responses. So I'm tracking that. I'm very curious to see where that goes. But I would still say humans are better at empathy. And you might even be able to use something like generative AI to coach you on how to be more empathetic. If that's not something that you really lean into, maybe you're a more process-oriented person. And then finally, I just think we are practicing discernment, right? So whatever generative AI puts out, it tends to be sort of lowest common denominator or the middle of the bell curve, like the middle of the cloud of information that it's pulling from. And so we can push it and nudge it and get those nuances. You know, let's, let's grab something over here a little more esoteric. I really do need you to do this in the vein of Shakespeare or I need you to do it in the vein of Snoop Dogg for whatever reason, and not just like this know, kind of lowest common denominator, basic average response. And that discernment is where, again, we're kind of leaning on creativity and going somewhere maybe unexpected.

[18:18] Tom Moriarty: Right? Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. The word you keep going back to through the conversation is empathy and where that line is drawn. And that empathy gap is very compelling. Right. Because even in the ability to use something like chat GPT to generate a more empathetic or focused bit of content, if you will, for lack of a better term, the actual prompter needs to, as you just suggested, give the right guidance. Right? Like the tone I want is Snoop Dogg. It's not a professor.

[18:54] Erin Peterschick: Maybe your research and you've developed a persona where that's exactly what's going to speak to the head and heart of your learner. Maybe that is your nuanced understanding of that learner. There may be a universe in which that exists. So to your point about using data and our pre work to understand our learners deeply, then we can harness the power of the generative AI to speak to what we understand those needs might be. And again, nuance it, finesse it.

[19:22] Tom Moriarty: Yeah. And I think it's interesting too, in that it's a tool. What I've been hearing a lot from our other speakers and guests on the topic is that this is a tool that will help you complete tasks. Right. There are tasks that are part of your role, whether that's creating lists, organizing information, even generating content, which is a huge part of what this audience does, it will help you do that and help you do that more efficiently. Right. But if you're the L& D department of one, as an example, there's going to be delivery of content in some way, shape or form, and there's going to be some amount of empathy. That is going to be required to deliver that most effectively and resonate with not just the head, but also the heart of the audience where you really get to unlock the most meaningful learning experiences. Right? And I think that, to me, at least, what I've taken away from most of the conversations, I think what I'm hearing you say and what you've taken away from many conversations as well, is that that's the uniquely human part of this whole thing. Right? And it's really hard to see how that goes away because you're not communicating on the other side to a bot, to artificial intelligence. You're communicating to a human being.

[20:39] Erin Peterschick: Right.

[20:41] Tom Moriarty: One thing I've experienced through or I've always said and taught in my day to day profession is managing and leading salespeople. Empathy is very lost in email. Right. I have always told anybody who's worked for me in any organization that when in doubt, you need to get on the phone, pick up the phone or get on a zoom. Because the empathy that exists and the tone that exists in an email is actually driven by the reader, not really the writer. Now, when you get to do this and have a human interaction that can be different, you can clearly communicate things in a way that you use your voice, use inflection eye contact, other things like that. And that is a uniquely human part of this. At some point, maybe. But today I think is a gap for us to hopefully feel a little bit more comfortable with the tool and keeping and understanding that the tool is an additive supplement to make ourselves more effective.

[21:42] Erin Peterschick: Well, I think you're even kind of dovetailing back into discernment because the gifted salesperson kind of has the agility to move up and down on the spectrum of understanding the needs of that. The person on the other side of that call for something like using generative AI tools, the human being is going to have to help nudge the tool up and down that same spectrum or across the spectrum. So that's where, again, we're leaning on that discernment part as much as the empathy. And I think there was just one thing that you said that I wanted to double click on or underscore, which is I think we as learning and development professionals, this is not going away. It's going to get more prevalent. We understand that the workforce needs to be upskilled and reskilled. So what an opportunity for us to understand AI's capabilities and limitations to your point and then how to interact with those systems effectively and then again, make recommendations our our employers and our bosses and our leaders as they're developing their strategies. So know, again, maybe we get even more of a seat at the table.

[22:52] Tom Moriarty: Yeah, Erin, I think it's a great takeaway. As an L&D department of one, you get to make the choice. Generative AI thing is scary and I won't be able to use it because I don't want to because it's going to replace me. If I let it come anywhere near me, it's going to come get me. Or you can get really curious and you can start to integrate it into your day to day. And then once you've done that, your ability, because you're uniquely creative as an L&D professional and most likely extremely empathetic and have an audience that you serve that you understand quite well, you start to apply it to your day to day, and then you'll start to draw correlations and see ways, oh, I did this here. This would be a perfect way for my sales leader to generate training for their sales team or email scripts or whatever it is. Right. And then empower your ability to make recommendations, as you suggested, to the organization to say, here's how I did this well here. Which is great because then that's going to build more trust and credibility as you provide best practices to everybody else in the organization on how this is a valuable tool and how it'll make them better at their jobs.

[24:04] Erin Peterschick: I love that you said that, because that's actually a recommendation from a lot of people who are much smarter than I. Whether it's the Ethan Mollick or the other folks in the space where they're like, hey, if you're not using it at know, there's policies or whatever, then absolutely just start with your own know, have it help you and we see these examples. Have it help you plan a vacation, make recommendations for the perfect off the beaten path, three day itinerary in Venice, Italy, or something like that. And I've heard people have had great results. One of my earliest use cases, because I wasn't quite sure how to use it at work yet, was I have a friend who's a writer and I wanted to do sort of a thoughtful gift for her. And I worked with early Chat GPT to be like, my friend is a writer. Help me come up with some ideas. And it recommended like, ten creative things and I could double click on a couple. Some of them are kind of generic, maybe something I could have come up with on my own. But there were a couple that I was like, OOH, let's pull on that thread. And so several more prompts later, I ended up with just a list of creative writing prompts that I could print out and put on little slips of paper that I put in a jar for her and then gave her as like, hey, when you need creative prompts for your writing and creativity, I made this for you. Based on what I know about you and sort of taking the best of the best and not your generic creative writing prompts that you could just find on a website or whatever, like, I kind of collated all of them. So, yeah, I just wanted to emphasize if you're not using it even in your own day to day life, I think parents are using it with their kids for creative storytelling and writing and things like that. And then with new GPT with the conversation mode if you're on the paid version, yeah, there's great potential there for even just like a more interactive conversational use of the technology.

[25:52] Tom Moriarty: That's cool. I love that example. The story of the gift is a good one. You shared a story, a handful of stories or specific examples of people in the space using it, using AI as a tool to make an impact in their organization in very specific ways. One of those that I wrote down and I'd love to double click on and drill into is using it to actually develop a learning persona that should hopefully resonate with the audience. We actually did an entire season on learning personas themselves. Could you walk us through that story and kind of share the who's, the hows, the whats the whys, and kind of some of the results?

[26:30] Erin Peterschick: Yeah, sure. And to be fair, there are people who are doing an even better job of this than I am. But sort of like the zoomed out version is if you are an L&D professional department of one or a small team, we often have to be sort of full stack developers, and not everybody's really great at data visualization and data analytics. So again, use generative AI to kind of harness the power of data analytics. And personas are always based on data. So what data have you collected? Qualitative, qualitatively, quantitatively? Can you feed something like Chat GPT and ask it to help you sense the patterns in terms of discernment? I would say again, we have an opportunity to make sure that we're picking the right personas. Right. I think we've heard this from some of your other guests, but I'm a big fan of organizational network analysis. Who are the nodes in an organization? What are the roles that might not even be the highest roles, but maybe more senior or mid that have the most influence? Where can they actually make the biggest impact? And let's make sure we understand those personas or learn more about them to build the appropriate persona so that we are having the most like we're intervening at the most powerful point of impact. So that's just kind of a general philosophy. But yeah, I think a lot of people I know are using multiple tools. So it might be they take some of that research, they ask Chat GPT to generate personas and that means the thoughts and feelings, some of the reactions that they might have to the intervention that you're proposing, what might be the barriers, what might be the resistance that that persona experiences and make recommendations for how you can overcome those barriers? And then that might lead to some of your strategy and your content development. And then you can leverage even things like Mid Journey to make images for these people, to give them real faces and what we've heard all these years for product development and marketing that we really need to deeply understand. The thoughts, feelings, reactions, fear, risk, risk aversion and try and move them along the adoption curve of whatever skill, behavior, mindset we're trying to change as learning and development pro. So I have a friend that's actually doing a great job with this. He's actually using it in his YouTube channel and was able know, just very quickly download a template on persona creation specifically for getting the most out of your YouTube channel in terms of visits, clicks, likes, subscribers, et cetera, and just dumped that template into, I think Chat GPT, the paid version. And yeah, just helped him generate the people that he knows. He wants to hit it as audience. So he's always creating content for the right people versus just throwing spaghetti at the wall. So I think that's a great example too.

[29:28] Tom Moriarty: Yeah, that's awesome. I love that. And I think that there's so many even in that little string, there's so many takeaways. Right? So first, okay, let's go back to a previous season and say you want to focus on persona development, right? A couple of our takeaways from that first were that that's intensive. That's a lot of work. Right? It's like the work before the work even starts almost, right? And that can be. Daunting, especially for our L&D departments of one. So first the fact that to think to let AI help you with this hopefully should drop the barrier to entry to actually create a meaningful persona significantly, which would be a great win, right? I think. And then a couple very specific takeaways that I heard that you shared was one let a tool like a Chat GPT ingest all your inputs, right? Don't be the person that spends hours analyzing the inputs and trying to figure it out. Like, you have resources like this that you could just push all these inputs in and then prompt out the outputs that you want, right? The outputs being, okay, describe this persona or whatever. Tell me the common denominators that I'm seeing across this audience, right? Where are the barriers? Where are the risks? Where are they going to be averse? And use that to kind of pull out from the inputs that you shared with Chat GPT as an example. And then the output that you'll get ultimately, at the end of the day can be a really detailed persona, right? And then if you wanted, frankly, go back to the conversation later and use it to gut check. Totally.

[31:06] Erin Peterschick: Totally. Or even as a consultant, what is the change management you're trying to help affect with your clients? And so you might have enough of a sense of what the clients like from a biz dev perspective, what their pain points are, what their needs are. You don't have all that data yet because you haven't gotten in to do all that collection, but you're in earlier stages of the consultancy engagement. And so, yeah, I might actually just dump it. Like, again, there's this cool new feature, newer feature on Chat GPT where you can have it kind of have a conversation with you. And in real language you might say something like, okay, you're Tom, you're the Senior VP. What is your title again?

[31:49] Tom Moriarty: SVP of strategic accounts.

[31:50] Erin Peterschick: SVP of Strategic and you are interested in my project, implementing a project on leveraging Chat GPT for Learning and Development pros. You're not really sure where to start and you manage such and such number of people are driving such and such number of sales. Have a conversation with me about how I can help you want to green light this project and then give me feedback on my answers to the questions and things like that.

[32:19] Tom Moriarty: Oh, wow, that's really interesting.

[32:22] Erin Peterschick: For even things like the layoffs we've been experiencing in our industry. If people are out there job seeking, how might you leverage generative AI tools like the Chat GPT? Four? So it is the paid version for that conversational feature that I was just talking about to coach you on interviewing interview. Yeah, exactly. Ask me questions, let me answer one at a time because you don't want to get overwhelmed. You have to kind of coach the AI tools that you're working with to not give you a wall of text or not inundate you at first. Use the Socratic method or use a typical star story behavioral interview approach to ask me about my resume. Here's my resume and you upload the resume. Things like that.

[33:07] Tom Moriarty: That's great. I love that. Erin, this has been a really good conversation. I think some of the things that I heard, hopefully, that the audience can take away. First, it's okay to acknowledge that this is a potentially scary time, especially with a technology that, as you put look, on the one hand, it's a new technology. And as an L&D professional, adopting new technologies that are specific to us are things that we've done before. Helping organizations change and adopt new technologies and implement new technologies organization wide is something we do for a living. Right. But at the same time, this is scary and it's unique in the fact that the pace of change and innovation in this space is probably unlike anything we've ever seen, right. At least to date. Sure. That'll change in the future. It's the beauty of the future. Look, I think, as you've put well, I think there's a moment to just acknowledge that that's the reality that we're in. But I think hopefully, as it seems like you and I are both fellow optimists, there's no reason not to adopt this and be a change agent alongside AI as a tool. And I think you've done an amazing job of giving us countless examples that you could take away tomorrow and use and implement in your life, both personally or professionally. Whether it's using a conversational tool to come up with an incredibly creative gift for your friend, or using it to help you prep for a job interview or build a learning and development persona right to allow you to do your job more effectively. There are really endless amounts of opportunities and frankly, the outputs are probably limited to the prompts and the inputs and the creativity of you as an individual. Right. Which, at least from my experience in working with the L&D professionals I've worked at my tenure at Mimeo is really where L&D professionals are at their best, you know? So if know, hopefully, our audience, from this conversation and from some of the learnings that you have that you've shared, feels more empowered than anything. Right. Because this is an opportunity in an environment where they tend to thrive. So that should hopefully be a little bit of inspiration for them at the end of the day. Erin, any closing thoughts that I think you feel are important for the audience as we wrap up our conversation here today?

[35:44] Erin Peterschick: Yeah. No, I appreciate that. I think it's an interesting tension we're navigating because as you heard me say, don't wait right. Don't get left behind. But also, everything's changing so quickly. I think there's a little bit wait for the dust to settle dimension here as well. For example, if you can do some experimentation and pick one or two tools and just experiment in your own life, in your own work as it's allowed, just even for one month or six weeks and collect some data on yourself and your experience with it. Take notes, share with friends, whatever, just take one or two tools and run with it for a couple of months. Don't spend a bunch of money, don't do what I've done where I have spent a bunch of money and I have bought a bunch of tools. But I'm an L&D department of one who's my own consultancy. So these are great deductible business expenses for many of the tools that we're using. The AI is going to be incorporated. The integrations are happening faster than I can even keep up with. So don't spend a bunch of money. Kind of wait and see what shakes out. Even tools that we've used in the past are bringing forward AI integrations that you're like, oh, wow. Like loom videos are even cooler to make now and easier to make now. Or canva and their AI assistant or Drawify has like this great Maya. I haven't paid for her, but just really fun opportunities to very quickly develop content very quickly. Storyboard be more inclusive in your images and things like that. But a lot of them you got to pay for it. So let's just wait and see what the integrations look the for the macro suite of tools, whether it's Adobe or PowerPoint or whatever, especially with what Microsoft is doing with their stuff, just kind of see what you can play with that's maybe low cost, low barrier to access before you jump into other stuff. I want to give a plug for several resources and I'm going to share them with you. But recently the TLDC Training, Learning and Development community did a great series on AI labs where several speakers came and talked over three days. If you have a chance as an L and D professional, go ahead and pony up the membership fee for that organization and go back and watch those videos because that alone was gold and I just want to give them a huge shout out for very quickly curating content because that is, I think what we do well. And then follow some me, follow some thought leaders I mentioned Ethan Mollick, there's a couple of others that I'll link. But just get the newsletters dumped into your email, whether it's Ben's Bytes or following some of my L&D pros who's I'll just give you their names and their links, just see what they're doing on LinkedIn. And again, don't necessarily pay for the courses and all the things that people in our field are kind of pushing because nobody is an expert yet and what they pushed out even six months ago on prompt engineering is already stale. So just work with the tools that we have to sort of learn as you go and then find other people who are in the space, whether it's on LinkedIn or these user groups. I'm going to try and probably start an AI for L&D community even just some free kind of coffee chat, drop in user group type experiences in January of next year and run that for a couple of months and see if that has some traction. So I know that was a lot, but I'll give you a bunch of links and hopefully the main takeaway is calm down, but also don't wait.

[39:23] Tom Moriarty: Yeah, I love that. Keep calm and carry on with AI. That'll be the tagline for our discussion here today. No, I think that's great though. I really appreciate it, Erin. We'll grab all of that link information if the audience wants to find you and like you said, eventually your community, what's the best place to find you and engage with you either socially or what have you?

[39:47] Erin Peterschick: Yeah, I appreciate that. You can always find me on LinkedIn. Aaron Peterschick. Spelled like Peter’s chick. I haven't been as active on there as I could be, so I'm going to be leveraging some of these tools to up my content and Aballant Learning Innovation aballant.com. You can always jump on a 20 minutes free call with me. Happy to talk through anything, provide some thought, partnership or look for ways that we can creatively work together.

[40:12] Tom Moriarty: Awesome. Well, Erin, thanks so much for your time today. I know I learned a ton. Hopefully the audience left feeling empowered to keep calm and carry on with AI wherever you can actually apply it in your life, personally, professionally, wherever. Get yourself comfortable with the tool and hopefully use it to make an impact at your organization.

[40:30] Erin Peterschick: Amen.

[40:31] Tom Moriarty: Thanks for listening to The Secret Society of Success, a podcast by Mimeo. To find out more about how corporate L&D teams use Mimeo for smarter content distribution, visit www.mimeo.com. Also, don't forget to subscribe to get our episodes as soon as they launch. Enjoy your day.