Only 10% of Leaders Use AI—So Who’s Teaching Everyone Else?
Only 10% of senior leaders admit to using AI. Which raises an awkward question: if leadership isn’t really using the tools, who exactly is teaching everyone else how to work with them? Increasingly, the answer is peers. In this conversation from Transform, David Rice sits down with returning guest Kamaria Scott to unpack why AI adoption is becoming less of a top-down transformation initiative and more of a global peer-learning experiment happening in real time.
They explore the growing tension between organizational pressure to adopt AI and the complete lack of capacity many employees have to actually experiment with it. Along the way, they dig into manager enablement, skill atrophy, learning agility, performance management, and the uncomfortable possibility that companies are automating away the very expertise employees need to judge whether AI output is any good in the first place. The result is a candid discussion about why managers may become the bottleneck in AI adoption—and why organizations that failed to build real learning cultures before this moment are now paying for it.
What You’ll Learn
- Why AI adoption is failing when organizations don’t create space for experimentation
- How peer-led learning is quietly becoming the real AI enablement strategy
- Why managers—not HR—ultimately determine whether AI adoption succeeds
- The risks of skill atrophy and losing the ability to evaluate quality work
- How AI can strengthen human expertise instead of replacing it
- Why “learning agility” has become a critical organizational capability
- What performance management might look like when AI agents do part of the work
- How organizations can create healthier AI cultures instead of reactive AI policies
Key Takeaways
- AI adoption fails without slack time.
You can fund AI initiatives all day long, but if employees are expected to maintain full workloads while “experimenting” on the side, adoption stalls immediately. Managers control capacity far more than strategy decks do. - Peer learning is becoming the dominant learning model.
The people discovering the most useful AI workflows are learning from coworkers doing the same job—not from executives giving keynote speeches about transformation. - Managers are becoming the AI bottleneck.
Every organizational strategy eventually flows through frontline people leaders. If managers aren’t enabled, coached, and given room to experiment themselves, the strategy dies there. - AI should amplify expertise—not replace it.
Kamaria frames the danger perfectly: people risk becoming “human interfaces” for AI output instead of experts applying judgment and experience to improve it. - Skill erosion is already happening.
Employees may produce technically correct outputs while losing the ability to evaluate whether the work is actually good. That’s a much bigger problem than whether someone used AI to draft an email. - Passion projects create safer experimentation environments.
Giving employees protected time to explore AI around work they already care about creates far more engagement than forcing blanket adoption mandates. - Organizations never really built learning cultures.
Many companies spent years deprioritizing learning time in favor of billable utilization. Now they’re entering a massive technological transition without employees who have strong learning agility. - Performance management is entering strange territory.
If AI agents complete half the work, what exactly are organizations evaluating? Output? Judgment? Prompting skill? Collaboration? Companies are still figuring this out in real time.
Chapters
- 00:00 — AI adoption bottlenecks
- 02:31 — Managers and AI rollout
- 04:15 — Peer learning at work
- 05:05 — AI passion projects
- 07:51 — Experimentation fatigue
- 09:01 — Automating admin work
- 10:34 — AI as a strength multiplier
- 11:42 — The return of human writing
- 13:54 — AI-written communication
- 15:27 — Skill atrophy risks
- 18:09 — Human judgment vs AI output
- 20:58 — Why expertise still matters
- 23:06 — Learning agility failures
- 25:42 — AI and hiring backlash
- 26:24 — Performance reviews in the AI era
- 27:52 — AI as a conversation starter
- 29:35 — Final reflections
Meet Our Guest
Kamaria Scott is the Founder and CEO of Enetic, a technology and innovation company focused on helping organizations leverage AI, automation, and emerging technologies to drive smarter business outcomes. With a background spanning digital transformation, strategy, and operational leadership, she works with leaders and teams to bridge the gap between innovation and practical execution. Kamaria is recognized for her forward-thinking approach to AI adoption, organizational growth, and future-ready leadership, helping businesses navigate change while building more agile, people-centered systems.
Related Links:
- Join the People Managing People Community
- Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts
- Connect with Kamaria on LinkedIn
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David Rice: Only 10% of senior leaders admit to using AI, so who exactly is teaching everyone else? Nobody. Increasingly, we are seeing that we are in a global peer learning moment. But at the org-wide level, we're still figuring out what that means for how we develop roles and responsibilities.
On today's show, you're gonna hear a conversation I had with Kamaria Scott at Transform. You might remember Kamaria. She's a friend of the show, and she's gonna talk about why managers are about to become a bottleneck. Though your organization may have rolled out AI with a well-funded strategy, and now you're tracking adoption, the answer to the question of who controls people's day-to-day work is becoming less clear.
Is it HR, business line leaders, operations teams? Who are the people who decide whether your employees get slack time to experiment or if every minute of the day needs to be billable? The tools are evolving fast. Agents can now do what LLMs couldn't, and the people who are learning the most amidst this shift aren't learning it from leaders.
They're learning from each other, from other people who do what they do. And despite this, we see skill atrophy. Not just communication skills eroding because people use AI to write emails, we're talking about the ability to judge quality, to look at AI output and know whether it's good. There's a rising concern that Gen X and millennials might become the last generations with deep expertise, because the next generations are outsourcing so much work, they're not getting foundational skills to evaluate what they're producing.
So today we're gonna cover why the passion project model is the adoption strategy you're missing, the human interface problem becoming a pass-through for AI outputs instead of an expert, what performance management looks like when agents do half the work, why organizations failed to cultivate learning agility before this moment, and how to make sure people develop expertise to judge AI output quality.
I'm David Rice. This is People Managing People. And if you've been expecting adoption without creating capacity for experimentation, this conversation shows you why your strategy is stalling at the manager level. So over to me and Kamaria.
All right, well, we're here at Transform. I'm with Kamaria Scott, who you know from previous podcast episodes.
We're here at Transform. It's not a surprise that we're here. We knew we were coming. But this is a surprise that we're sitting down for this conversation. But I wanted to start, I wanted to ask you, like, what are you excited to, to look at this week, and, like, what are you hearing so far that you're finding interesting?
Kamaria Scott: Yeah. Well, I think anybody that knows me knows that managers are my passion and my jam, and their experience is really important to me. So specifically this week, I am listening for all the conversations that intersect the manager experience and AI. So how are we helping them to roll out AI with their teams and helping with what really is a large scale change in most organizations?
David Rice: Yeah. So what have you been to so far, and like what did you get out of it?
Kamaria Scott: Yeah, so interestingly enough, so yesterday, and I posted this on LinkedIn, my favorite thing that I went to was the AI game show senior chief-
David Rice: Oh, I didn't make it ...
Kamaria Scott: C- yeah, CHROs- Yeah. ... you know, Compete to Transform or something like that.
And what I took away from it, what I really love, was that one of the panelists said the origin- the original question was like, what is there, how many companies do you have a strategy?
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: And one of the panelists said, "It doesn't really matter if you have a strategy, and even if you're funding the strategy, if you're not allowing people enough time in their general work-
David Rice: Yeah
Kamaria Scott: to experiment with these tools, to figure out how to use them, you're failing at adoption." Yeah. And so as she was talking about some of the things that y- it required, the ability to have an idea and say, "AI can help you with it" - Yeah ... all of that to me was saying, yes, everything she described happens at the team level.
It's where the managers are. Yeah. But my question during that session was, this is great, we're sitting here looking at, as CHROs talk about these things, but a lot of times HR does not control people's day-to-day work. Yeah. Business line does, senior operations leaders. So my question was, how are you all influencing or having conversations with senior business line leaders to allow the time that people need for experimentation of these tools that we're expecting them to adopt?
David Rice: Yeah. One of the things I think I found interesting yesterday, and I'm starting to notice this more and more in conversations that I'm having, is that there's more of a building narrative that like get out of the way a little bit and like let them teach each other. Because actually who you are gonna learn the most useful things from are the other people on your team that do what you do.
Yes. Yeah. Like, you don't need to be shown, and it's never gonna stick that way anyways.
Kamaria Scott: No.
David Rice: And we're seeing that happen like all the time now.
Kamaria Scott: No. I mean, I think people are experimenting with their real lives, but what they do need is capacity.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: Right? These tools are changing literally by the hour.
Couldn't do something yesterday, can do it today. And even, I mean, personally, by the time I run back and forth between like what's Claude doing, what's Perplexity doing- ... you could spend all day going back and forth, but you also have real work to do. Yeah. Other things.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: So the best thing they can do in my opinion, is to give people what I always call, like, the slack time to- Yeah
be able to experiment, play. One of the things I've always advocated for on my team is people having passion projects. So way before AI was even a thing, I was always say, "If you're on my team, I'm giving you 10% of your time for a passion project." My two rules were, one, I'm not checking up on you, 'cause this is for you.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: And two, it has to benefit both you and the company, so you can't be a bread baker on my time, right? And I think this is a perfect opportunity for managers to have these passion projects for their teams and say, "Listen, find something that you do every day and figure out how AI can help you do it better."
And eight weeks from now, let's do a show and tell together.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: I don't care if you work together in teams. Find something that benefits you and benefits me. So if building your ADD butterfly taming task list- ... thing helps you at home and at work, I am here for it. Go do it.
David Rice: Yeah. I attended a session yesterday.
It was, you know, really centered on skills-first strategies. But it was, they were talking about if you wanna do that, though, like, you've gotta put the skills sort of front and center. And, like, what is front and center for an employee? Yes. It's not the CEO talking. It's the people that they're experiencing their work with.
Kamaria Scott: Yes.
David Rice: And so that's really, like, why I think we're hearing more and more of this peer-led AI experimentation-
Kamaria Scott: Yes ...
David Rice: and education.
Kamaria Scott: Well, I think that senior leaders who themselves are not implementing and adopting cannot teach people.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: And I find in a lot of times, the gaps that I have seen, even when we first started rolling out AI and I'm listening to senior leaders talk, I was almost like, "Oh, they're not using it."
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: You could almost tell.
David Rice: And only 10% actually admit that they use it.
Kamaria Scott: Right, exactly my point. And so if you're not really leading at the top, then how are you teaching people skills down? And I think that what's so amazing is that we are in the middle of this revolution where there's really not a lot of people who have so much experience that they can teach someone else, right?
Yeah. We're all learning and growing together. A few weeks ago, Lovable had a, an event for International Women's Day, and there were all these Lovable She Builds events. And we all sort of convened together and got with our laptops, and we were vibe coding things that were in our heads. And so I'm, you know, was, had been working on this sort of manager support dashboard.
And sitting there with other people, we were sitting there going back and forth, and, "How did you do that? Oh, how did you... You connected an API. Well, tell me, how did you do that?" Yeah. And we were peer learning. But I think we're in this almost global event of peer learning.
David Rice: Wow.
Kamaria Scott: So it's a really exciting time.
And if people can think about how do you harness that at work- Yeah ... so that you're having these sort of peer learning opportunities, that can be a, an amazing part of your adoption strategy.
David Rice: A key part of it, too, I don't know if you have advice for our listeners on this. But you've got to, you've gotta be able to create the psychological space-
Kamaria Scott: Yes.
David Rice: Where, you know, because, like, the world right now, to put it lightly, is overwhelming, right?
Kamaria Scott: You know.
David Rice: Things are a bit chaotic out there. They are. And people are bringing that to work.
Kamaria Scott: Yes.
David Rice: And then you're telling them, "Well, you've gotta experiment." And it's like, "Can I just do my job?" I think that's a little, how a lot of people feel.
Yes. It's like, can I just go to work, do the job, and go home, and, like, try to live a life that's, feels sane?
Kamaria Scott: Yeah.
David Rice: You've got to account for all of that. And I but I think you've gotta create the space where the experimentation feels natural. It feels like it's part of the work. It's not like I'm asking you to do anything extra.
And I don't need you to reinvent the wheel, but I want you to rethink what's possible about your role.
Kamaria Scott: Yeah.
David Rice: That's a hard question to ask, especially if you don't actually embody that yourself as a manager or a leader.
Kamaria Scott: You know, I think that- Maybe if we rephrase that to the world is kind of chaotic, there's a lot going on.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: How can you learn to use this in a way that it's gonna make life easier for you, or make work easier for you?
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: So, you know, we talked in before we started this about I had this idea, and I was like, "I wanna write a white paper." I hate writing white papers.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: Right? I was able to use AI to, like, crank it out, get it done, and I was like, fantastic.
And so if there are things that I don't enjoy doing, that I'm not good at, are those things that I could use AI support for that then can give me more time to do the things I do like of my job. Like, I love people-ing. I wanna be with people. I wanna talk. I wanna train. I wanna coach. I don't necessarily love the administrative things.
So if I can figure out how to have AI help me with the administrative things, that's amazing, right? Yeah. So even, you know, I'll tell you, one of the things I was so excited about was, in prepping to come to this conference, I wanted to meet with certain people. Yeah. And I wanted to send outreach messages, but I wanted them to be thoughtful and not just like some canned, generic, let's compare notes nonsense.
And so I was able to use both Claude and Perplexity to do deep research on the people I wanted to meet, and it generated customized output of the notes that I sent to people.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: And so what would've probably taken me weeks, I was able to do in a couple days.
David Rice: Wow.
Kamaria Scott: And get back to my people-ing, and it made me happy, and I would have great conversations when I got here.
So I would say yes, the world is chaotic, but think about how can you find a way for this to take some of that chaos away so you can spend more time doing the things you wanna do.
David Rice: Well, I would echo that. Like, I've been trying to encourage our teams internally to use it for, okay, you don't need it to write for you because you were hired as a writer.
Kamaria Scott: Yes. You already write really- So you already- I don't write that well.
David Rice: Well, like, if you don't, like, well, what do you need it for? Like for me, for example, one of the things I sometimes struggle with is sort of finding that editorial through line that runs through everything. And helping me create a message that's more cohesive.
Kamaria Scott: Yes.
David Rice: And it's great at this little strategy piece, right? So it strengthens this weakness of mine. I love the opportunity behind that.
Kamaria Scott: Yes.
David Rice: And, like, you used it to plan this trip, and I kinda did the same thing, where I was like, "Here's the things I'm interested in looking at."
Kamaria Scott: Yes.
David Rice: Can you help me tie this back to the core concepts that we've been driving anyways?
Kamaria Scott: Yes.
David Rice: It does a great job of, like, helping me realize, here's where this possible connection is. You can naturally link these two concepts together and build off of it. And so, like, I think it's- About all of us just sort of thinking about, like, what's the way that's gonna benefit me the most? 'Cause it's not gonna benefit me as a writer that much.
Kamaria Scott: No.
David Rice: You know what I mean?
Kamaria Scott: Yeah, no, but I love that you said-
David Rice: And is that really valuable is the other question.
Kamaria Scott: No, it's not. So first of all I, w- so interestingly enough, in the session I went to, it's, they think human writing's actually gonna become a commodity, like a- Oh, yeah ... really highly valued skill because we're all tired of em dashes, and I've been thinking about here's what stopped me in my tracks, and all those-
David Rice: You've been on LinkedIn recently, right?
Kamaria Scott: Oh, my goodness. If one more person has been stopped in their tracks...
David Rice: Or just one more person w- goes on and on about how much they hate this content.
Kamaria Scott: I just... I, so I feel like that's actually going to be a, like, a highly valued skill going forward, but I do think, like, when you think about what am I not good at, and how do I use it to bridge the gap on things I'm not great at, I'm absolutely a butterfly of a human being, so when I start a project, I start in the middle.
And so even being like, "Help me organize the approach to this"-
David Rice: Can we automate the beginning?
Kamaria Scott: Yeah, precisely. Like, like-
David Rice: So I can jump in the middle.
Kamaria Scott: Like, get me started. And so I think if we can think about it that way, it can help people be better versions of themselves at work.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: And I do think...
That's why I love the idea, though, of the passion project because it's not you saying, "Find something for the company that you wanna, you know, and force me into it," it's, "What are you naturally interested in?"
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: So when I, you know, pre-AI, and I had my team doing them, I remember we, we had an LMS, and the LMS had workspaces.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: And so someone on my team for her passion project was like, she wanted to create a workspace builder 'cause she- Okay ... wanted to test her coding skills. And I was like, "What are we... Like, what does that even mean? But okay, sure." And what she did was she built this thing that we could give to our internal clients, so instead of us having to individually build their workspaces, she was able to deploy the workspace builder, and they could build them for themselves, and we just kinda coached them, right?
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: I was like, "That is amazing." And she was so excited because she was able to, again, test her coding skills, figure out what she wanted to do. I was able to be like, "Look at this wonderful thing that she's done." Right. And it helped our clients. So if we could think about, I think, AI adoption in that way, where, like, have you...
Do you have an idea? Like, what interests you? What do you like?
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: How do we create a win-win for people where doing something that's gonna make them happy with it- Yeah ... and the business?
David Rice: personally incentivizing it, right? And like part of like one of the drums I've been trying to bang a little bit lately is like I was at this conference a few weeks ago.
Kamaria Scott: Yeah.
David Rice: And I'm listening to all these HR leaders, they're kind of griping about the fact that people are writing emails with it.
Kamaria Scott: Yes.
David Rice: Right? And I get it, right?
Kamaria Scott: They sure are.
David Rice: They sure are. And they're getting annoyed by, you know, the lack of like development that's happening in people's communication skills, and the fact that like their colleagues can all tell, and they're sort of checking out on-
Kamaria Scott: Yes.
David Rice: What the person is saying. And my question was, well, did you tell them not to do that? At any point did you guide them and say like, "As a business, we don't believe that this is a valuable use of this technology," and you have a responsibility to the business. And also, like you could go further if you wanted and say to society, like is it worth consuming the amount of energy that a small business consumes to write your emails? Like, is that really-
Kamaria Scott: Is it really a good use? Yeah.
David Rice: You know, I feel- You know, so we have to ask ourselves that question. Like, what is the usage that we want people to u-
Kamaria Scott: Yeah ...
David Rice: to have, and then get that, and start getting that into like how we talk about it. How- And into our culture. Yeah. You have a comp philosophy that goes beyond just like pay bands, right?
Well, why don't you have an AI philosophy that goes beyond just don't use ChatGPT, or don't use this or that, or don't do this, that, and the other thing. Like, a policy tells you what you can't do. I- What's gonna tell people what's possible?
Kamaria Scott: Yeah. So I think for me, people are still in the experimentation phase, so I think they're hesitant.
Just, I mean, outside of like please don't, you know, give it our trade secrets. I think most people are kind of just figuring out, like letting people f- find their way with it.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: The challenge though to what you're saying for me is not so much the writing of the emails as much as it is the skill atrophy of thinking.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: I had a moment where I wrote an email, and I said to myself, "Oh my gosh, I wrote an email," because I wrote it myself.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: And it was such a weird moment to be like, girl, you've been writing emails all these years. Why? But I had got into the habit of being like, "Hey, I wanna write an email- Right
to I need you to say da, whatever."
David Rice: Yeah. "
Kamaria Scott: Thanks." Cut, paste, right? And then I was like, "Well, why?" Like, "Why? Why did you do that?"
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: When you could have just written the email. And I was like, have you lost your ability to write or to get your thoughts written down? And I do think, you know, bringing it back to why I think it's so important to think about like the managers in all of this, it's a manager who's gonna catch that email and go, did you write that email?
Okay, was it a good email?" Because if you're not ter- if you're terrible... And I'll tell you why actually I do love it for email writing. Again, being the ADD butterfly that I am, my eyes do not see typos. I don't see missing words. I don't see missing letters. I see none of those things. So I used to actually have real anxiety about sending out important emails- Because inevitably there was going to be an error in it.
Yeah. And so I prefer verbal communication, and I even have a LinkedIn post I wrote many years ago about, like, how my ADD makes it really hard for me to write things because I get anxiety about them- Yeah ... being, you know, in error. So when I have an AI write, I verbally dictate it and I have AI write it, then I'm like, I don't have to worry about whether or not there's a typo, whether or not
Then I go back and I tell it, "I didn't want it to say that." But even though it seems like it's a silly use case, for me it's actually really good- Of course ... because it's bridging my gap.
David Rice: I'm guilty of, like, framing it as if it's silly, right? Because, you know, as we're sitting there talking about it, it does sound silly, but then, like, I think about myself and my professional journey- Yeah
and how I've developed over the years, and there was a time where, like, I was probably too reactive. And so, like, I would write emails that I look back on and go maybe shouldn't have said that." And so, like, I would've loved to have had an AI thought partner that could be like, "You should tone this down a bit, David."
Or, "
Kamaria Scott: Here's what I thought you ... This, I know what you said."
David Rice: This is gonna get lost. "Here's what you really meant." "This is what you mean," you know? Yeah. And so, like, it would've been good to have that, but I think what the reward for me over the years has been to learn to not be reactive, to make that part of my professional journey.
Yes. And to learn to communicate in better ways, more effectively, right? That's largely what that crowd is complaining about is, like, well, they're not learning how to ... The critical thinking is not there, and then they're not learning how to communicate in this way. And so it goes back to, like, it sounds kind of, like, antagonistic the way I'm framing it.
Maybe we have to antagonize ourselves just a little bit. Just a
Kamaria Scott: bunch. I think here's what I'm hearing, 'cause, like, because honestly, and I experience this on my own current team with people that I lead, and I have a colleague that we were having this conversation about a very simple thing, the development of a newsletter.
And you can use a newsletter as another way to say email, right? Yeah. But knowing that AI was used to produce it, and so in fact, check, there were words on the page. So technically you did it, but it was terrible. For whatever reason, it didn't do what it needed to do. And I think what happens is people forget that behind everything that you produce is a thought process.
There's- Yeah ... a reason or rationale for almost every decision. Even if I were to say, like, and I'll take it out of newsletter and put it in my own language, in instructional design, there is a reason, a rationale, there is a thought process between everything that I create. Every learning objective, every activity, I've really thought it through.
And so if I then delegate that to AI and say, "Build me a course on X, Y, and Z," first and foremost, the learning objectives, nine times out of 10, say things like learn or something that's we all know is not a good learning objective The examples may be shallow. It does something- ... but it doesn't have all the nuance that I would put in it.
And so if I'm looking at someone and I can tell that they used AI to generate those learning objectives or those activities, I have to now have a conversation with them where I say, "Okay, so it spit this out. You tell me, is this good? Is it not good? Why?"
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: If we put this in front of clients, are they going to have the outcome that we want them to have from this?
So what is the standard? So I don't mind if you use AI for your email, but did it convey the right message? Did it move people to action? Did it give what we need it to give? Like, is the nuance there? So I think it's really up to people leaders and organizations to enable people leaders to think about the coaching and the support that's needed- Yeah
so that people aren't just giving us AI, they're not thinking it through anymore.
David Rice: It's, you know, the way I kind of put it in my mind was, like, you don't wanna be a human interface of this thing's outputs.
Kamaria Scott: Oh, I like that.
David Rice: You know what I mean? Like, you want it to be a thing that accentuates your expertise.
And makes it more articulate. Yeah. That's what you want out of it.
Kamaria Scott: Yes.
David Rice: That, again, gets back to having a conversation with folks and saying, like, "I need to feel Jessica come through."
Kamaria Scott: Yeah. Where is Jessica? Yeah.
David Rice: Yeah. Where are you? Because I can see this chat. It m- d- all of this makes sense. There's a reason to say all of this.
Kamaria Scott: Yes.
David Rice: But I don't feel your experience, your reasoning. I'm not understanding why you sent me this email. I understand- Yes ... what it says, but I don't understand why
Kamaria Scott: you sent it If you're a sous chef and it's a, and you're letting it be the head chef- Yeah ... that's the problem.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: Where, like, I am paying for your expertise, your experience.
But I think the larger problem that we are going to encounter is that as we give AI more and more of our work to do, people are losing their expertise. They're losing- Yeah,
David Rice: absolutely ...
Kamaria Scott: the ability to look at the output and judge it. So, like right now, and I would say, you know, for us Gen X millennials, we're probably the last generation that's going to have deep expertise in our work.
Because when we talk about skills right now, right, the skills are, well, you know, are you a good prompt engineer?
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: Well, being a good prompt engineer is not the same thing as are you a good instructional designer, right? And so are we now outsourcing so much of the work that, like, people are not getting those foundational skills that are gonna help them look at the output and say, "That's actually not quality output"?
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: When I use it, right, I, for marketing or I use it for other things, I have no idea whether or not what it's giving me is right because it's so confident-
David Rice: Yeah ...
Kamaria Scott: that it is right that I have no idea. So how are you making sure that people on your team have the right experiences so that they can judge whether or not the output is right?
So you, they need to write some manual emails So that when they are looking at the email they can go, "Oh, I would never say that," or, that's not a well-written email." Yeah. Yes, words are on the page. A newsletter was produced. But my experience tells me this is good because of this, and this is not good because of that.
Yeah. And that's where I come back in, and I either re-prompt it, or I write the sections that need to be written, or I do whatever I need to do to it. But making sure that people are having the right developmental experiences to be able to judge the outputs is super important.
David Rice: Absolutely. Well, if we're gonna talk about skills so much, 'cause that's a big focus here, right?
Everybody's wanting to hire based on skills, develop people for the skills that they're... We go on and on about skills, but then we're immediately putting into place something that's going to erode most of those.
Kamaria Scott: We've been doing... But, so here's... We- we've been doing that for years.
David Rice: Yeah. Okay? This is true.
Kamaria Scott: I, and I- This is true ... I think this is where organizational culture comes into play. Because I was in a learning team many years ago when we first started. We bought a product, I won't call it out, but one of the features was, like, it'll suggest to you what you need to learn. And a large part of learning is for you yourself to identify the gap.
And so just because a technology can do something doesn't mean you should have it to do it, because if you stop thinking and identifying your gaps, and you're only taking it because a platform was like, "Hey, your role is blabbity, you should take this course," you're really not identifying the gap and closing it yourself.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: And so I think as we have tried to sort of automate more things and stop people from doing things, we are seeing skill erosion. And part of the challenge, going back to sort of not giving people slack time to learn, is that we have not cultivated learning agility in people. So as somebody who has led learning functions, I have constantly fought the battle of, "Well, we've decided that people should have, you know, 40 hours of learning time," and the business line going not with my money you won't.
Not with my billable hours you won't." And so you really have not developed a true learning culture, and now we're in this large scale learning moment-
David Rice: Yeah ...
Kamaria Scott: and people don't have learning agility. That's part of the problem.
David Rice: Absolutely, and it's like, you know what? I'm I'm just gonna applaud that one.
Like Mic drop. What
Kamaria Scott: else do you say?
David Rice: Right. Well, so what else are you excited for here? What's your next conversation?
Kamaria Scott: I mean, more of the same, honestly. I mean, clearly AI is the theme of the day- Yeah ... no matter where you are. The intersections of people leaders is always gonna be where my heart is, so I'm excited about that.
I mean, I'm sure there's great conversations about benefits and stuff like that. But...
David Rice: The folks at Novant are upset that you're, like, just I'm just kidding. I'm sure
Kamaria Scott: there's great conversations about benefits happening. But I think this is the one that I'm really looking forward to all day, to see the different ways.
So there's, I think, another session on, you know, the foundations, because I think- And in order to lead change, managers still need the foundations.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: They still need to know how to coach. They still need to know how to develop. As a matter of fact, those foundations are gonna become even more important.
I think there's one about, like, you know, our manager's gonna be our bottleneck. You just talked all about that. So manager enablement. At the end of the day, every single strategy goes through people leaders. And so I'm tuned into all the conversations to hear how companies are thinking about supporting and enabling their people leaders, because it's where the strategy's gonna fall apart, honestly.
David Rice: Yeah, I think I'm looking forward to there's a lot of chat around, like, all right, now we're having AI review all the resumes, and that's turned into a disaster.
Kamaria Scott: Yeah. '
David Rice: Cause now they're using AI on the... What are we gonna start looking at? Like, there's a lot of, like, what is the data that we need to look at?
Yes. And then, like, how are we assessing people? Because there's a lot of resentment out in the job market right now. Oh, sure. People are annoyed with the fact that you're making them do these assessments and you're not paying them for it. Yes. They're going through seven, eight rounds of interviews, and then getting ghosted.
Like, I mean, you know? Yes. There's all kinds of things going on right now that have to be addressed. And so I, I am interested in a little bit in the recruiting conversation- Yeah ... and how that's gonna evolve. And yeah, you know, you know me. I'll- just AI.
Kamaria Scott: AI everything. You know what else I'm actually really interested in?
I'm really interested in performance management with AI. Yeah. So I went to an event called AI Salon in Tampa a few months ago, and one of the topics of conversation was, like, well, what does seniority mean now if you have democratized information? What does performance look like if people themselves aren't doing the work, or agents are doing half the work?
Like, how are you now going to evaluate my performance as a person for work I'm not even doing fully myself anymore? Yeah. So I- I'm really interested to see how people are approaching that topic, because when it comes time to give me your performance review next year, am I gonna simply ask you, "Did you learn AI?"
And be like, "Excelling"? Or am I gonna look at the total output of what you did? What does good performance look like now in this new environment? That's one thing I'm very excited to see and, and- Yeah ... look for sessions on.
David Rice: Yeah, I've been on a little bit of a performance management with AI kick lately, because there's a lot of, so I just found it interesting that folks think that the outputs are more effective, like, of the performance review. They actually think it's more more valuable, the feedback is better. But if they find out that it's AI, they don't like it. They don't trust it. Which is interesting. Like, it's- Yeah. I mean, that's g- a bit of an older study, but, like, I was having a chat with Kate O'Neill, who we met at- Yes
Running Remote last year- Yes ... from Opry.
Kamaria Scott: Yes.
David Rice: And she was like, "Just don't ever lie about it you know?"
Kamaria Scott: Yes.
David Rice: You have to be- Yes ... transparent, and just tell them, like, "Look, we're gonna use this." And I really think, like, the way that she's approached it with her tool where it- spits out something that the manager and the person discuss-
Rather than it being, you know, the single source of truth. It's like, "Do you agree with what this thing's saying?" And then you have a conversation around it. I think that is valuable.
Kamaria Scott: It absolutely is valuable I think because it's a data point, right? Right. And if you think about it, that's how performance management should be, and it should have always been.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: It is a conversation that is, creates alignment and shared understanding around what your year was like.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: And quite often what ends up happening is that at the end of the year you say I was a five," and I go, "Nope, you were a three." And now- ... we are in disagreement with one another.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: And so something that says, "Hey, this is sort of a neutral place for us to start.
This is what- Yeah ... the data in our conversation says," it's a starting place for a conversation. And what I always tell people, anytime you're using something that is a an assessment, the assessment is not the end goal. The assessment is the conversation starter. And so even in performance management, it's an assessment of your performance.
It's supposed to be a conversation starter, and then you come to the middle.
David Rice: Yeah.
Kamaria Scott: I've had many conversations with people where it was I, again I was a five, and you're like you were a three," and I have to, "Excuse you." And so we have to now bring our data to the table, and but I think now we have a stronger data set- Yeah
and that's what it's given us, is a stronger data set, and it's a little bit less subjective. So now we can have a different conversation that's not just, well, David's opinion of Kamaria this year versus Kamaria's opinion. Yeah. We kind of have this bridge in the middle.
David Rice: I know I've had a few myself where I was like, "Look, I only put four 'cause I didn't want to have a big ego, okay?"
Well, I, there's lots of, to look forward to for both of us. I'm excited, and it's good to see you here as always.
Kamaria Scott: As always.
David Rice: All right. Well, we're gonna wrap there for this episode. Join us on the next one. And as always, if you haven't done so, make sure you're signing up for the newsletter and following us on the YouTube and all the social media so that you get all this right into your feed.