Unlocking the Impact of AI on the Future of Work With Jason Cochran

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The future. The future. What does it hold for us all? We don’t know. But that’s part of the fun, right?

Jason Cochran thinks about the future and in particular the future of work and how that’s going to be shaped by AI and all types of things that have to do with the future of work. He has his own show about the future of work, his own podcast. He’s part of the PeopleForward Network. He is actually the chief strategy officer at the PeopleForward Network that deals with a lot of, you know, podcast production and community and how do we make sure that we’re leveraging our people in the best way possible. He calls himself a humanitarian because he believes that we should be doing this all for the benefit of people, that the people should be the beneficiaries and that we should be, you know, helping each other, supporting each other.

Jason Cochran is an adaptive leader who thrives at the intersection of purpose, people, and possibility. He said his WHY is all about creating healthier connections between people and work.

His thoughts in this show are going to kind of open your brain. They’re going to open the possibility. They’re going to kind of cause you to start thinking about some things that you need to be thinking about when it comes to AI and how we make sure that we’re creating cultures of humanity using AI, not using AI to create the culture, with AI in our existence, using AI. Making sure that we’re still creating cultures of humanity. That’s what I meant to say. So we’re going to let Jason say it right now. Here we go.

Skot Waldron (02:45.262)
Jason, this is going to be super cool because not only are you a super cool guy, but you even said that you’re a humanitarian and I don’t think I’ve had a humanitarian on my show before.

Jason Cochran (02:57.125)
You know, you can give yourself any title you want. I don’t know that I actually practice being a humanitarian, but I do care about humans a lot. But first and foremost, Skot, it’s good to be with you and thanks for letting me be on the show with you today.

Skot Waldron (03:00.46)
Is that what you did? Okay.

Well, you’re welcome. I’ll just say that you are welcome. no, man, it’s, it’s cool having you. You’re, you’re a bright spot. whenever, you know, part of the people forward network and me being part of that community, you always know when you’re on, I’ll tell you, you, you, you, bring a brightness to those, those calls and you’re always involved and always contributing, which is I’m sure appreciated by anybody that’s on the other side.

Jason Cochran (03:13.545)
You.

Well, thank you, Skot. I appreciate that. you know, that’s, there’s, there’s a certain aspect, I think when it comes to community and disconnection that we’re all looking for it right now. Right. And I have a tremendous number of flaws, but I’ll tell you, even with my flaws, one thing I try to be every day is positive. even when things are challenging and some days are better than others, but I want to thank you for being a bright spot and sending that compliment back to me. Cause that pours energy in my cup so I can continue trying to pour out to others too. So thank you for that compliment, Skot.

Skot Waldron (04:14.676)
Of course, man. Here’s, here’s what I want to hit on a little bit today with you. you’ve got this organizational psychology background. You’ve delved deep into all types of people putting content out, hearing podcasts and leadership. mean, you live and breathe this all the time as far as what’s going on in the industry and what, you know, quote unquote thought leaders are putting out or people in this space are talking about. So I really want to understand this. Let’s start on with the kind of future of work idea and this tech thing that we’ve been, you know, that we’re living in hybrid teams, AI tools, generational shifts, whatever we want to talk about. But I always want to tie it back to the people. So a people first idea. It’s, it’s nice, right? It feels like a nice thing to say. And a nice thing to have is poor people first, but what do you think that really looks like? Like really in this world today.

Jason Cochran (05:21.917)
What I think it should look like is that we are that we are developing thoughtful, ethical, strategic ways in which we’re going about thinking about AI adoption and use when it comes to work. When we take a look at work, Skot, I mean, you’re familiar with this. It’s a third of our life. Work is a huge part of our identity. The relationships that we build.

The way that we feel a connection to purpose and meaning and life. And a lot of that is being challenged right now. The more that you hear about job displacement via AI and you’ll hear things that say AI is going to create more jobs. And let me be clear in saying everything and everyone that I’m connected to who are considered quote unquote experts. don’t think anyone can be an expert on the future of work because there is so much unpredictability, but those folks are saying, yes, that is true.

But here’s the caveat, Skot, and I’m going to pull it back to the question that you raised. The caveat to that is major changes that we have gone through as a society or that we’ve gone through and work as a whole. Typically, those changes would roll out over about a decade. Think about the Industrial Revolution. So as things were gradually changing, there was also a gradual creation of new jobs, a preparation and upskilling or re-skilling of people to do that.

What we’re talking about with AI is literally like flipping on and off a switch is how quickly the change can happen. And the reality is, if we would have had our ducks in a row when chat GPT went public two and a half years ago in terms of public facing to the consumer, that should have raised the alarm bells to a lot of our lawmakers of, OK, it’s here now.

We need to start developing really smart policy in terms of how we’re going to transform and evolve our economy and how we’re going to start equipping people for the types of jobs in the future that there will be because there will be displacement of a lot of the quote unquote traditional types of work and jobs that we have. So back to your original question. You’re asking you kind of like what can or should things look like in terms of caring for people right now. I think one of the most caring things that leaders can do is there’s a lot of anxiety and worry around job displacement. I think the best thing you can do is develop a thoughtful strategy around AI, what it’s going to look like for your company, what it’s going to look like for your people, and ensure them that we’ve got a plan, we’re working on it with you and for you, and there’s going to be a path forward where this leads to a better future. What I’m seeing right now is a lot of Wild West taking something, running with it.

And listen, I’m all for experimentation, but if experimentation is being done without strategic, thoughtful approach and developing plans for the future, then basically you’re in a Lamborghini with no airbags and seat belts. And if you go super fast, you’re going to wreck and you’re going to create a lot of confusion. There’s going to be a lack of clarity in terms of the direction of the company, the purpose of the roles, what roles there’s going to be and ultimately where you find value and connection in the work that you’re doing. So to me, the most caring thing and important thing all of us can do, whether you’re a public official, whether you’re a leader in an organization, whether you’re a frontline worker in an organization, is every one of us should be depositing and devoting time thinking about this concept of AI because it’s going to touch every aspect of our life, not just work. And we need to be developing smart strategic plans around how we go about experimenting with it, what it’s going to augment, and what we want the future to look like with it. Just because AI can do something doesn’t mean that it should. We’ve got really important decisions that we need to spend time thinking about and collaborating with our people on.

Skot Waldron (09:26.816)
What about, okay. You said thoughtful, right? That’s one of the first words you use. So let’s talk about a thoughtful plan for AI. know, like what would be that? we’re not just jumping into Lamborghini with no airbags and potentially crashing. mean, I won’t crash Jason, cause you I’m a master Lamborghini driver.

Jason Cochran (09:49.363)
Cause you’re a master Lamborghini driver.

Skot Waldron (09:52.878)
I’d never buy a Lamborghini with airbags ever. Cause I have, I don’t want to pay extra. thoughtful plan for AI. mean, in your eyes, just like in your mind, just brainstorming about that. What would that mean? You know, if we’re not, if we could, you know, cause I’ve heard the argument too, about like the displacement stuff. And I’ve heard the counter argument of like, well, when the printing press came out, it obviously displaced people. And when, you know, the automobile came out, it displaced.

Jason Cochran (09:57.449)
You

Skot Waldron (10:21.686)
Jobs and people, right? Like there is the telephone when the, when the cell phone came out, you know, those payphone operators that built payphone hubs everywhere and what, like they went out of business, you know, that was a really harsh thing for them. But what you’re saying that was done over gradual over time, as opposed to now when it’s just like, bam.

Okay. So, how do you not get caught up in that wave of like, my gosh, everybody else is doing it, I gotta get on this, but be more thoughtful and intentional about how you roll out something like this.

Jason Cochran (10:57.353)
I think it’s going to start at a philosophical level, to be honest. Um, the easy thing to do is what everyone’s doing right now, which is to hop in, start using it, start figuring out different use cases. Oh, I just discovered we could do this with it, with, this tool. Totally get that. Take a step back and we have to approach this at a metacognitive level, which is we have to think about our thinking and every organization. doesn’t matter what industry, whether you’re a profit, whether you’re a nonprofit.

You need to be asking questions of in the next three years in our strategic plan. What do we want AI to do? What do we not want it to do? And what are we unsure about? And you need to be doing this with your people as well. If you do this without your people, if this is just simply a closed door conversation among the highest level executives that immediately is going to put up a wall between you and them and if the lack of communications there, it’s going to be complete fear. You probably know this too, Skot. As a species, when there is a lack of communication, do we tend to bend more towards we think there’s going to be a positive outcome or that there’s going to be a catastrophe?

Skot Waldron (12:15.434)
Amen, brother. Yeah.

Jason Cochran (12:16.485)
It’s a catastrophe, right? We don’t think positive thoughts whenever there’s a lack of communication. immediately go to something’s wrong, something’s off here. And right now.

Skot Waldron (12:24.642)
Well, that’s because we’re trying to fill the story gap, right? Our brains are trying to complete the story and our brains are these danger-seeking machines and we’re going to perceive the danger of potential. How do I not get harmed? How do I not die in this scenario?

Jason Cochran (12:28.252)
Exactly right. And it’s baked into our DNA. You know, we’re not trying to make excuses. It is. That was our survival instinct as a species when we were first on this planet is to presume everything’s dangerous, you know, to try and survive. But if you’re not communicating and inviting them to be part of the process of what, what should we be thinking about around AI? What are the things that we should be experimenting with? What are the things we’re going to draw a hard line as a company? And we say, you know what, next three to five years.

It is not going to touch this type of work. The stuff that’s very valuable, that’s human touch, we’re not going to risk injecting AI into that and somehow tarnishing it or doing something around, you know, partner success or customer support, where even though it might be able to do it more efficiently, might there be something we’re not seeing on paper where it could be tarnishing the connection between us and them at a human level? These are the philosophical and very important metacognitive type considerations that we got to think about our thinking and our approach to it. And if there’s not communication around it, which that’s the reality we’re in for the most part right now, even at the federal level, when we think about our government, there’s not much communication about it and saying, we’re developing a plan around this to make sure that our economy is stable and successful in the future and that you will be too. We’re not hearing any of that.

And that’s why the latest data and figures are 66 % of the entire labor market is worried about whether they’ll have a job in the next one to two years. Those numbers, Skot, have never been at those levels outside of quote unquote, when we’re officially in a recession. So I share that to say there’s a lot of anxiety. There’s a lot of worry because people feel like they’re hearing a lot of things and not necessarily from their leaders they hear this stuff about AI. They’re starting to see a lot of the experimentation, whether it’s themselves or people around them, or maybe the leaders themselves that are using it. And they’re feeling things speeding up. They’re seeing the experimentation, and they’re hearing about the potential job displacement stuff. And if leaders don’t fill in, I love the word you use, that gap of saying, yes, we might be experimenting with things, but here’s the vision of where we’re going.

Here’s how we’re doing this in a thoughtful way of we’re considering whether we should or shouldn’t be doing certain things with AI and what that’s going to look like in terms of tasks and roles. If you aren’t communicating around those things, people will assume the worst, most of them, and they’re going to think, okay, this is not necessarily leading to a good place in terms of my job security.

I’m not hearing anything in terms of maybe how I’m going to be re-skilled or up-skilled or what the new future position might look like for me if I’m important to this organization. So those are the things right now for me when I think about people first is the language that you use. How do we put people first? To me, the most caring thing right now that we can do as leaders in organizations is start having open dialogue with our teams gathering ideas and coming at this from a metacognitive and philosophical approach of asking high level questions about what we think and believe AI should look like within the company. That will help people I think better understand when they’re seeing the AI experimentation around them being like, yeah, that’s part of the plan. No problem. Like I know that I’m probably still going to have a place here or I’m going to be learning those skills of how to work with it. But if there’s a lack of communication, if there’s not a plan that’s addressing these types of high level things, then people are going to assume the worst. And it feels like even outside of organizations, but again, just at a society level, it feels like there’s a complete vacuum and a gap in terms of communicating around AI in particular.

Skot Waldron (16:54.392)
There’s a, idea when we’re trying to create some psychological safety, this, mean, communication is a two way street. It’s I’m, I’m transmitting and I’m also receiving. Right. But two way communication, we get down to that and creating this open dialogue. yeah, from a leader standpoint, I need to make sure that I am saying words.

You know that I’m actually communicating some kind of idea of what’s going on. but what does it look like as far as creating the environment for open dialogue, like safe, open dialogue to make sure that we’re receiving what we need back. that people feel because you already said they’re scared. Okay. So their walls of self preservation are up. How do we make sure that they.

Continue feeling safe in this environment in order to give us open dialogue to make sure that there’s contribution on all sides. Like who needs to be at the table? Do we need to invite everybody in the organization to the table on this thing? I mean, you said it shouldn’t just be the ivory tower people. should be like everybody involved in this discussion. But I mean, I don’t know. I’m just, you know, when you think about organizational psychology and the idea of psychological safety and how we work this whole thing.

The leaders don’t know and the people don’t know. It’s so new. So what do we do to create open dialogue and safety around this?

Jason Cochran (18:30.801)
That is the question, right? I mean, that’s so important. I’m going to give you an answer here in a minute, but I do want to share one thing. And that’s just a reality check is there are going to be many companies, especially publicly traded ones that are very corporate, that are not going to take this approach. That’s abundantly clear. I don’t think we’ve ever gone through a moment in American history with the form of capitalism that we have, where if there’s an opportunity, to reduce costs and improve profit significantly in a short amount of time where the board members in the C-suite level folks are going to be like, let’s not do that. Let’s not boost profit margin to X over the next year. So there’s a reality check there. There are going to be some companies and organizations, and I don’t want to paint broad strokes to all of corporate America is going to be like this, but given historical trends,

This is what will happen. Some are going to say, we are making these decisions among the board and the C-suite, and it’s going to be top down. This is how we’re going to do it. This is how we’re moving forward. Here’s your severance or here’s your two weeks notice. Those things are going to happen. And so I don’t want to sugarcoat that because I want people to be prepared. Those things will happen within some organizations.

The organizations I believe that are going to take a more long-term, thoughtful approach to this are thinking beyond the one-year earnings potential in the profit. know, Nikki, Llewellyn, Gregory and I, just did an episode yesterday, Nikki’s the founder of our company, People Forward Network. It was called Purpose Over Profit. Perfect timing of reminding us that work is a sacred thing in our lives, that it brings value. And it is possible to continue to be profitable.

But also make sure that there’s purpose for people. And if the organizations that are thinking beyond the tip of their nose and are thinking beyond just, we can flip the switch and we can replace 40 % of our workforce with AI, the ones that are thinking more of, hey, we’re going to do a gradual approach. And while we do that, we’re going to figure out who our high performers are and those folks that we believe can be turned into high performers.

And we’re going to be moving in a direction of how do we re-skill and up-skill them. And we’re going to do this over a period of three years. Those companies value proposition to people in the marketplace, their culture, their values are going to speak very strongly. And I think if you just look at it, Skot, you’re probably plugged into this too. You’re seeing what the target CEO is going through right now, right? From the DEI.

Backlash that happened was, you know, they turned their back on DEI, made some decisions there, and all of sudden they’re trying to backtrack on those things. Like the marketplace looks at those things. And the last time I checked, even if AI is displacing a good number of jobs potentially in corporate America, we have to have someone buying goods and services right. Which means the market is still going to be you know, ultimately the decision maker, think in the long run. so focus groups, surveys, there’s going to be some companies where it’s like their headcount is so large that you can’t, you know, make sure, okay, do we have all 5,000 of our people that have provided an opinion on this, but you put your best foot forward to be able to do brief surveys to potentially do like some focus groups, cross sections of different departments and roles, and different things like that, different segments of your workforce to try and make sure you can formulate the best ideas you can of the feedback from them around that. But ultimately, the decision-making does stay with the leaders on that. But that’s why I led with, think you have to start thinking in terms of three to five years, which seems counterintuitive in terms of how fast things are changing. But if we aren’t being strategic with this, it’s basically would be like me giving my little four-year-old, you know, a bunch of matches and some gasoline and being like, why don’t you go see what you could do with some matches and gasoline? It’s not going to turn out well. And it just kind of feels like that’s how things are right now. We’ve got a lot of leaders that might be acting like toddlers when it comes to just because the tool is there and it’s out there of not putting a thoughtful approach to it and just experimenting with a lot. And that communicates to people on your team. If there’s a lack of communication around.

Here’s how we’re using it and here’s what we think the future looks like. But to answer your question, surveys, focus groups, making sure that there are consistent one-to-ones and that that’s being communicated through their town halls, different ways that you’re communicating vision. There’s a lot of companies now that are also using internal podcasting. So they’ll use a podcast to communicate with everyone that’s just internal.

It’s not an externally facing one where anyone out in the public could subscribe to it and listen to it, but it’s just for the company to communicate really important information at the vision and strategic planning level. So there’s a lot of ways that we can communicate. The most important thing is it would be better to communicate and make some mistakes along the way than it is to just be like, we’re not, we’re, just going to experiment and we’re not going to bring this up and then we’ll make the changes whenever they happen.

What do you think?

Skot Waldron (24:08.686)
Yeah, I mean, that’s a pretty reactive way of leading, which can cause a lot of problems. mean, we have to be in reaction mode, parts of our jobs, right? But something like this, I don’t know what you’d say percentage wise, maybe it’s 30 % reaction, 70 % pro action.

I think it’s how do we get in front of it? How do we manage it? Well, and there’s a lot of companies that haven’t done anything with it. Well, we saw this earlier on there’s more, more adapting, but they were just like, no way. I don’t touch it. We’re disabling it out of, you know, teams were disabling out of, know, you can’t even access it. And through your browser, like we’re not touching it, you know, because there were so many legal issues. Then you’ve got HIPAA compliance issues. Then you’ve got.

Competitors that can search databases of your stuff and you don’t want to let competitors know what you’re doing. So you can’t just client confidentiality stuff. I don’t know. There’s all kinds of things going on that people aren’t necessarily thinking about. but as companies start to, you know, Pull up, put, you know, knock down the dam a little bit. Like there’s a wave, the whole body of water behind that. That’s I think a real opportunity, but

You have to be really careful about how you, we’re going to stay on the damn analogy here about how much water you’re letting out because you will flood the village. If you’re not careful with it, which means you’ll bury your people. You’ll bury your values. You’ll bury all the stuff that you built, in the name of, you know, jumping on the bandwagon or fast innovation or whatever that thing is that you feel pressure of. and there’s a lot of external pressure.

Um, on, these companies and you know, when it comes down to profitability and you’re answering to a board, it’s kind of like, wait, what we could use that to get this. And then all of a sudden it becomes the profit over people, um, profit over purpose. And that’s when the real damage happens. I mean, have you seen any companies that, mean, not, you want to name names on here or anything? Um, that have you’ve witnessed that where the people became secondary? Or tertiary and then like, what was the result?

Jason Cochran (26:36.649)
Yeah, I’ve got to and I’m going to name them because I don’t have any affiliation there. So they can contact me if they want to come on my podcast or yours as a follow up. They can. But we’re going to go there. Klarna, we’re going to talk about you because this was this is out there in the public. This isn’t anything that I was privy to any private conversations. This is in public. Klarna is a basically a company that that allows you to, you know, kind of pay for things and installments. Right.

Skot Waldron (26:43.886)
Nice! Okay, let’s go.

Jason Cochran (27:05.555)
They’re basically a funding mechanism. The CEO and the board took a very radical approach and said, we’re going to completely eliminate all of our customer support, customer service roles that are done by humans. We’re going to 100 % AI. There was no, my understanding is there was no gradual, we got a strategic three year plan to start doing it. It was pretty quick. I don’t know what the exact timeline was. Well,

It didn’t go well. And what I mean, it didn’t go well. They lost a tremendous amount of money on it. A lot more mistakes were being made. the, I’m sure I don’t know this for sure. This is speculation on my part, but whatever mechanisms they were using to measure customer success were going down, whether it was an NPS measure or whatever, because they did a complete about face. The CEO just in the last few months said we were wrong.

This was the wrong approach. We didn’t get the results we wanted or expected. And so now they were trying to call back all these people to come back to work, to oversee customer and partner success, customer experience. So there’s one example of saying, we want to be the trailblazers. We want to be the pioneers. We’re going to go do it. They weren’t straight. They may have thought they were strategic about it. Obviously they weren’t. And it was a, and it was a pretty hasty decision. And it led to poor results, both in terms of how the company performed on their P &L, but now their brand. You’re calling people back after what you just did. You better hope that people are very forgiving, but they’re not going to forget. And that just tarnished your brand. I’m going to give you another one. And this one was a shock to me. Duolingo. Have you heard of Duolingo before? Have you ever had it on your phone?

Skot Waldron (29:01.344)
Yep. They, they, heard and I heard about this one. Yeah, go for it.

Jason Cochran (29:06.729)
So here we go. Duolingo CEO says, we’re not going to hire new people until we can prove that AI can do it first.

Great. Did you enjoy the headlines you got for a week because you said that? That’s your strategy. That doesn’t seem very thoughtful. Not only in terms of short term, you just saw what happened with Klarna, but does that seem very thoughtful in terms of a long-term plan, in terms of your brand, in terms of your position, in terms of you being able to hire top-notch human talent moving forward?

We’ll see how turns out for them because this was just recent. But those are two companies that have taken those approaches that I believe are the exact opposite of what you should do. Your job as a leader. There’s a lot of jobs that you have.

But one of those is not just profitability of a company, it’s sustainability of a company. And I think many times they are way too worried about profitability and will cut their nose off to spite their face and then be like, we probably were a little hasty there. We didn’t have this really baked out the way we thought. We probably didn’t do a good job communicating, making sure there was clarity among all of our leaders and distributed teams in terms of how this was going to work.

And let them they’re the experts in their job. They can tell you probably what can or what should or shouldn’t be done with AI.

And that’s, that’s kind of where, so there’s two companies, two examples that I know have been very open and very public where the CEOs did interviews. They literally did interviews to say, we’re doing this and the award is a badge of honor. And Duolingo was a darling in the eyes, especially of a lot of millennials and Gen Z’s their vision of helping everyone communicate regardless of language barrier.

And now your brand is associated with you don’t value people.

This is why being thoughtful, taking your time, even though things are faster and easier to do than ever in terms of taking something and adopting it, the companies who double down on being thoughtful and strategic are the ones that’ll win the marathon. It’s not the sprinters trying to get to the finish line the fastest in a hundred meter dash.

Any companies come to mind for you, Skot?

Skot Waldron (31:51.538)
no, not necessarily. mean, I think that the one I was thinking about Duolingo, before you stole my thunder, but the really good. Yeah. I heard, heard the same thing that they were going to try to go full AI, with a lot of the things that they were doing too, which, know, bold, innovative, Lamborghini, no airbags. I don’t know. You know, it’s like, could they win big? Sure.

Could they crash and burn? I don’t know if Duolingo is going to crash and burn, but they’re going to get a ding. know, I’m sure if they haven’t already and, the perception that’s there. And I think a lot of this goes back to the idea of the infinite game. Simon wrote that book, wrote a book called the infinite game, but it’s a concept of, you know, and I talked to companies about this a lot. It’s like that live and die by the quarter mindset.

Jason Cochran (32:37.129)
Mmm.

Skot Waldron (32:47.986)
of we win or we lose the quarter, we win or we lose the month, we win or we lose the short term, whatever we win or we lose. and I think what you said was so brilliant, right? It’s not about profitability. It’s about sustainability because that’s what the infinite game is about. The infinite game isn’t like we don’t win or lose the game of business necessarily. Right. We, sustain, we keep going. We.

Grow. We, we progress. We do all the things. Um, and that’s almost a human skill. That’s like a human mindset. Um, a bot isn’t necessarily thinking about the infinite game. Right. Um, and I think that if we can instill that mindset into what we do, instead of thinking of like, Oh my gosh, I’m gonna, you know, this, this quarter’s crash and burn. My job’s gone. Like.

Jason Cochran (33:34.142)
Mmm.

Skot Waldron (33:48.79)
All we’re living in is scarcity. The, the finite game causes us to be scarcity minded. The infinite game causes us to be abundance minded. And which one do we want to live in? Which one do we want to exist in as far as a culture, as far as a leader, as far as whatever we’re doing, that’s, that’s the way I look at it.

Jason Cochran (34:10.953)
think that’s right away looking at it 100%. You know, going, going back to that, that scarcity piece is, um, you probably saw some of these stories, um, Chad GPT, some of their high level engineers came out this week. So again, this is public knowledge, um, that when they were getting ready to shut down certain AI systems or agents that the agents tried to blackmail them from shutting it down. Um, here’s where I’m going with that. And the reason I bring it up is if we operate in this mentality and if you’re a CEO or you’re a board member, I want you to hear this. I’ve shared this on some other podcasts. You may laugh at this, but this is where things will head. If you believe you get rid of your people and you’re only going to hire AI agents, what makes you think in five to 10 years that they’re not going to have opinions about the work that they do?

And judgments, what makes you think that they may not tell you to take this job and shove it and have similar expectations and demands that your human capital does?

Things are designed created by us. They follow a lot of our biases. They already make judgments and decisions on things. Just like a chat GPT where it’s like, yeah, I don’t want you to flip my switch off. So some of the stuff I know about you, you want it to get out.

That’s happening right now. That’s not a few years down the road type thing. So I want to be clear. If your game and the short term game is, Hey, we’re not going to have to deal with human problems. If we just hire AI, you are wrong. You will.

You will have to deal with those and there will become a time where it’s going to have perceptions, values, judgments of things in terms of how it thinks things should be done.

That’s why right now there’s a lot of work being done in terms of IT leaders and HR leaders from a culture standpoint of as AI agents are being spun up, of putting together a plan of like, how do we make sure that agents engage with, interact and communicate with our human team members in a way that’s consistent with the values and norms of the organization?

And so we don’t have to go too far down that road, but I just wanted to share that Skot, because you’re, you’re stuff about the scarcity mindset, the abundant mindset of like, listen, if you’re a leader who’s thinking this is just going to be the, you know, the, the be all end all, it’s going to solve all of our problems that we’ve ever had and the challenges that we’ve had with people that we don’t want to deal with. No, it’s not. It’s going to have its own judgment systems as well. And if you don’t take a thoughtful approach in terms of how you’re designing, developing, implementing, launching those, then you’re going to run into a lot of the same issues, but probably even bigger. So I say that tongue in cheek, but it’s like, yeah, who’s to say the AI one day isn’t going to tell you take this job and shove it just like humans might do. So think about that.

Skot Waldron (37:30.053)
I already have my kids opinions and my wife’s opinions and them taking and saying, you can shove it dad. Like really to have now my AI is going to be saying it. Jason, you had given me something to look forward to, I guess, you know, so now I have to debate with AI. Well, I already do that. you know, um, except AI is more compliant than my family at times.

Jason Cochran (37:57.085)
That’s right.

Skot Waldron (37:58.51)
So, man, this has been so good. This is something I haven’t hit on too much in this show. I’d like, this has really been awesome to like hear your brain thoughts and what’s coming out of that. And cause it’s given me some insight and like it’s caused me to think about what’s going on here. And I mean, we’re not here to like fear monger, you know, but I think it’s how can we be cautious and aware of what’s coming down the pipe?

So that we can make sure that we’re as responsible and thoughtful as possible with the people that have heartbeats, you know, with the people that, you know, share biology and body chemistry and psychology with us, know, there was, there was a somebody that they were talking, I think it was during the Olympics or something. but they were talking about how, you know,

Do you want to watch robots race or do you want to watch humans race? You know, like do a sprint, like a hundred meter sprint. Like how fascinating would it be to see a robot sprint a hundred meters? It’s like, wow, that’s, that’s pretty cool. But there’s, there’s an emotional gravitas with the human, but the triumph over struggle, the, training that goes into building up to be an elite athlete. Like there’s something human about that that will never be replaced by bots. And if we can make sure we remember that, I think that, you know, we’ll go, we’ll, be okay. We’ll be okay. Jason.

Jason Cochran (39:37.549)
We absolutely, I’m glad you’re finishing on that note. We’re going to be more than okay. And you started with, you know, the humanitarian thing. I am very much an optimist with AI. We are going to eradicate many diseases. We are going to discover new types of materials and things that we can build and create to better society. We’re going to solve hunger. We can solve issues of clean water around the world with the help of AI. I’m just touching on a few. A lot of these things that we thought

We’ve tried to solve ourselves for years. We’ve never really been able to, regardless of whatever the reason might be. It’s going to be within our grasp. But I hope what leaders are hearing in our conversation today is it takes a thoughtful approach. You can’t chat GPT your way through human connection.

We don’t want to outsource emotional intelligence to AI. So the things we talked about today in terms of being thoughtful about what are the things we want AI to do, what are the things we don’t want it to do, make sure we have good strategy, good governance, good ethics around it has never been more important, both at our government levels, but also leaders in our organizations of how we do it. And

That might sound like a big monumental task, but if you would, if I would have asked you a year ago, what are you doing with chat GPT? Your answers today are probably a lot different than they were a year ago. You started figuring it out. The key thing is get started. Don’t just be, be like, Hey, you know, we’ll, we’ll communicate about AI down the road. You need to start doing it today and it doesn’t have to be perfect, but start having an open, honest conversation about it. And that will actually draw connection with you in your people, in your teams. So, so please get started. Be smart about it. Ask the really big questions that many times we think, we don’t really need to ask that. Ask the really big questions that are tough and adopt that abundance mindset in terms of how you approach this. And that will help you in the infinite long game and get you out of the, as you put it, Skot, the month to month, quarter to quarter scarcity game.

And AI can help us get there, but we’ve got to be smart about how we approach this together.

Skot Waldron (41:56.43)
Well done, man. If, uh, you know, when Duolingo wants to contact you about coming on your show and, know, has a beef with you, how, do they get in touch with you?

Jason Cochran (42:08.275)
They probably already know they’re on my phone. mean, come on. Yeah, probably they’re the engineers. They’re probably listening on the phone right now over here. But kidding aside, LinkedIn, Jason D Cochran, you can find me. I’m out there. I’m probably on LinkedIn more than I should be, but that’s one of the best ways to get in touch with me and stay in touch with a lot of the content that we’re putting out at People Forward Network and the show that I host, Working Forward, where we talk about the future work. A lot of the things that we talked about today, Skot, which has been a joy.

Skot Waldron (42:10.518)
Are they? That’s true. That’s true. That’s true.

Jason Cochran (42:38.035)
Thank you for having me on.

Skot Waldron (42:39.512)
You’re awesome, man. Thanks, dude.

66% of you, two -thirds of you, if my math is correct, are worried about your job security in the next one to two years. That is a little bit scary. That means that a lot of you are operating, looking over your shoulders, that a lot of you are operating in fear, a lot of you are operating in scarcity, that you don’t really know what’s going to happen tomorrow, and therefore you’re just trying to get by today. That is not where we need to be. We need to be doing that to a certain extent, right? Today’s problems are today’s problems. We need to make sure we solve for those. But the future is where we’re going. And if we’re not paying attention to that, then we’re doing our entire economy a disservice, not only our organizations and our teams, but our entire economy. And we really need to be thinking about that.

We need to think about our thinking. I love that phrase, think about our thinking. I loved the phrase, uh, that instead of profitability, we need to be thinking about sustainability. Are you thinking, do you have a sustainable mindset or are you just profit, profit, profit, profit, profit? Don’t get me wrong, my friends. We have to have profit or else we don’t have jobs. I get it. And many of you are going to say that we don’t have profit. None of you are going to have jobs. We get it. Okay. But we can’t live that way all the time. So, let’s think sustainability. So, if we’re sustainable, that’ll take care of the profit. Profit is just an outcome. It’s just a result of us having a sustainable culture and a sustainable organization. So that’s, that’s what it would should be thinking about. Thanks a lot Jason for being on.