Adaptability is essential in today’s rapidly changing world, especially with the rise of AI. This episode explores the importance of adaptability and features Ann Reilly, a renowned expert in leadership, emotional intelligence, and AI. Ann and Rosie discuss the reasons behind the recent explosion of AI, the challenges it presents, and the opportunities it offers. They also delve into the skills needed to thrive in this new era, including adaptability, critical thinking, and problem-solving. Discover how you can embrace AI, develop your adaptability, and navigate the future of work with confidence.
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Master Adaptability: How To Stay Ahead In The AI Revolution With Ann Reilly
Are you feeling like you’re running to catch up with the world because it’s moving faster than ever? Trust me, you are not alone. Our guest is here not only to help us figure out how to keep up but to thrive. I am so happy that you can join us. We are diving into one of the hottest topics in the workplace, AI and adaptability. We’ll explore why AI is changing the game faster than ever, how you can ride the wave instead of feeling overwhelmed, and the exact skills you’ll need to stay ahead.
My guest is Ann Reilly, a Certified Adaptability Coach helping organizations thrive during the fastest pace of change in our lifetime. She helps leaders and teams identify the changes impacting their business, with a focus on how AI will alter the landscape of their industry, job, and the skillset needed to survive in the workplace. Stick around because what Ann has to share could totally change the way you look at your career, and trust me, you don’t want to miss this conversation.
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Ann, thank you so much for being here. How are you doing?
I’m doing great. Thanks, Rosie. I’m very excited to be here with you.
Me too. We’re going to talk about adaptability, which is a perfect topic because, as you well know, the world is changing very quickly. One of the things that you and I talked about in the introductory session is that AI has been around since the ’60s. However, it’s only recently that it’s exploded with ChatGPT. I would love for you to explain why that is.
Why AI Is Exploding Now
No problem. I think it’s been around since the ’50s, so even a decade earlier. We’re coming up to this point where it just seems to be exploding everywhere. There are a couple of different factors that brought us to this point. Two of the main things are that there’s enough compute power to manage large datasets, which AI needs in order to be useful to us in our daily lives. Also, ChatGPT, when it launched, created this interface for individuals to be able to use that.
Before, companies and engineers were using AI in terms of their programming, supply chain, and things like that. With this interface, it’s a very clean, easy-to-use interface. They put it into the hands of millions and millions of people around the earth all at once. That was the big event, the interface, that made it possible and created this explosion. On top of that, people just started creating tools to tap into and overlay on ChatGPT. You saw the explosion of marketing tools, sales tools, and any type of tool you can think of. Now, it’s a daily event where more and more ChatGPT or AI tools are coming out.
I know that AI has been around for quite a long time because even when I was younger and I would go on my Aetna app, there would be a chat box. It’s been around for a long time, but I didn’t realize it was around since the 1950s. That’s incredible. The reason why I invited you to come on to the show is because people are struggling. Some people are like, “AI? It’s not going to stay around.” I beg to differ.
I’m sure you do, too, because this era reminds me of the Industrial Revolution when we were starting to see all this machinery and factories opening up. The reason why I wanted to talk about adaptability, and you are an adaptability coach, so I’ll have you explain that in a second, is that people are hard-pressed to adapt to how quickly things are changing. As you well know, people don’t like change to begin with.
Generative artificial intelligence, like you said, with the interface of ChatGPT, is absolutely incredible. I’m using AI a lot to show people how to optimize their job search because you can use AI for every step of the process. How do you see AI disrupting the workplace from your perspective as an adaptability coach? More importantly, how are people supposed to be able to adapt so quickly to all of this?
There are different ways you can think about it in our lifetime. We had the internet come out in the mid-’90s. If you were in the working world then, thinkm about how that changed your life. There’s a desktop or a laptop on every desk, and your productivity surged. You had access to any type of information in the world. That was a big step from how we were working before or how we were learning at school as well.
We were going to the library and getting books out, those of us that were doing that. Now, kids and students don’t have to go to the library necessarily. AI has also been compared to the age of electricity because it’s that profound. Think about when people didn’t have electricity, what their life was like then, and how it just changed everything in their day-to-day life. This is a seismic shift in our working and personal lives. There’s a phrase, “Today is the fastest it’s ever been, and it’s the slowest it will ever be.” Think about that a little, be like, “I got through today. Tomorrow’s going to be faster.”
Embracing The Speed Of Change
Peter Diamandis, who’s the head of Singularity University, has also said that we’re going to see more change in this next decade than we’ve seen in the last 100 years. That also gives you a bit of perspective on how much change is coming. The AI genie is not going back in the bottle. It’s out there. We do need to figure out how to work with it, what its strengths are, what its weaknesses are, what the dangers are, and what the opportunities are.
It’s so interesting. You were explaining history. You said that in the next ten years, it’s going to be the fastest that things change from previous history. I always think of history, like in the early 1900s, when the car came about and things came about. From these last 125 years, it has just gone up exponentially. You’re saying the next ten years are going to go up again. It’s insanity as to how things are going.
I use an application called Swell AI. I don’t get any affiliation or anything like that from them. They are specifically for podcasters. They help me come up with a lot of different copy components and content for the production of the show, which just makes things so much easier. Instead of me having to sit there and transcribe, it’s transcribed for me. It’s just an incredible tool. There’s practically an AI tool for different industries now, and more are coming out. How are people supposed to deal with all this change?
I would just like to say, before that, to give another reason for this speed, because I think this might also help, and to think about how to deal with it all. There are so many different technologies out there. There’s blockchain, there’s AI, there’s solar, and lots of different things are going on. They were all being developed on their own path, but now, particularly with AI, the technologies are converging. They’re all speeding up because of this convergence. They’re not in their own lane anymore. Things are all merging and picking up speed together. I think that’s also important to know. That’s a big reason for this acceleration in the velocity of change. How do we deal with all of it?
I think the first thing is to be aware of it and accept that this is happening, and we’re not going back there. We’re not going back to a slower time. Things are going to continue to progress and go faster. For women, particularly in the working world, I think we have to take charge of our careers, which are great at helping women do in this new AI world. Realizing that there’s going to be a whole new skillset needed at work and trying to identify what those skillsets are, LinkedIn has reported that by 2030, 65% of the skills needed for a job are going to change. That’s essentially a whole new job. What does your job look like today, and what might it be in two years and five years? What are those skillsets that you’re going to need?
This is happening now already. Intuit laid off 1,800 people who did not fit with their new AI strategy. They said that they’re going to hire 1,800 people who can help them to implement this strategy. I feel that that needs to be a wake-up call to employees, that this strategy planning is going on at the executive levels. We, as employees, need to take charge of it and understand, asking the questions such as what are we thinking about AI? How is it going to impact our business? What do I need to reskill and upskill on? Start asking questions like that.
CEOs And Adaptability In The Workplace
You mentioned before that 45% of CEOs think that their companies are not going to be viable in the next ten years. Back to the Industrial Revolution or when the internet came about, there were things that AI is going to save time to do, but there are still things that AI is never going to be able to do like a human being. When these CEOs are thinking that their companies won’t be viable in ten years, where are they coming from, from that perspective?
They’re coming from the fact that the world is changing so quickly that if they stay on this same trajectory, if they stay with the same marketing, the same product development, the same supply chain, even how they communicate to their customer base, if they don’t adapt to this new world and at the speed that they need to, they’re going to get disrupted by a startup, by somebody in an adjacent industry, by another black swan event, something like that. These 45% of CEOs, which I think probably should be higher, are thinking about what they need to do in order to change the trajectory of the company.
On the flip side, I’ll also point out that employees are already exhausted by change happening at the company. In 2016, there were two planned enterprise changes per year that employees had to deal with. In 2022, there were ten. That’s a big leap. There are big workloads, there’s “do more with less,” and, “We have another change coming through the door. Deal with that as well.” You have this gap between CEOs who are like, “We need to change. We need to go faster. We need to do things differently,” and employees who are exhausted and near burnout.
I experienced everything that you said. I ended my corporate career. We noticed, as managers, when I was the first manager, we could remember the majority of the content by heart, and we would know it, and we could answer it. As time went on, exactly what you said happened: more initiatives. I was in the insurance industry coming from the product, then the actuary, then marketing, and then big strategy changes.
After a while, you couldn’t keep up with the information. You had to be looking things up because your brain can only retain so much information. We wondered, when we went to audit the files, why people missed stuff because we were changing things constantly. It wasn’t their fault. I definitely experienced that.
I just want to be clear that the CEOs who think their companies are going to be obsolete in ten years, that’s because they’re not changing with the times. That obviously would be a huge contributor. I know now that some companies are going to have firewalls for AI. How, then, can an employee ask to adapt to that change if they don’t have access to that AI? It might just be those companies that are not willing to do any changes. What’s your perspective on that?
Bring Your Own AI: A Workplace Trend
I think that’s very interesting. I think that is part of how an employee needs to take charge of their career because they do need to develop those skills. There’s a trend now called BYOAI, which is bring your own AI to work, meaning that employees, whether or not it’s sanctioned, are using AI at work. They might be using it on a different device or laptop, but they’re recognizing, “I can get my work done faster if I use ChatGPT for this type of work.” However, they can’t do it on their work device because of these firewalls. It is something where I do think that employees need to talk to managers, and managers need to talk to leaders like, “How we are going to manage this?”
This is because if you have employees who want to upskill and reskill, and the company is not supporting them, then your most curious employees are probably going to leave. It is because they recognize, “I want to learn. I want to be a part of this new AI revolution, and I can’t do it here.” It is, I think, a leadership issue at a company of how are we going to elevate the skillset of our employees while protecting the systems at the company?
I could just picture some basic analysis, not even anything in-depth, like the actuaries, would be doing a lot of analysis, but an underwriter at the desk, they’re trying to figure out, “How’s my book doing?” They can pop in some of the reports that they get and then ask AI to help them analyze that information. It’s a game changer because then you don’t have to figure it out, wonder, what should I analyze? Once you get that analysis, then the thing that I love about AI is that you can volley back and forth with it.
It’s like, I need more numbers, whatever the situation is, but to me, it’s fun to be able to figure out what path you want to go down. One of the other things that I think is so important to mention is that the prompts that you use are so critically important because we have garbage in, garbage out. If you know how to write good prompts, then that alone is a big skill.
You mentioned that 25% of skills at jobs have changed already and are going to continue changing. That example that you gave with the 1,800 people that are being let go, and then they’re being replaced with 1,800 people that are more up and running on AI, what would you say to someone that is in that situation who is trying to figure out how to skill up, and they have no idea what to do? As an adaptability coach, what would you say to that person?
The Adaptability Framework Explained
In terms of adaptability, we do look at the basics, the core of adaptability. We look at adaptability as how you react to new information, uncertainty, and changing circumstances. We look at it in three different pillars. The first is your skillset. That’s around things like mindset, grit, mental flexibility, unlearning, and resilience. In terms of your mental flexibility, are you out searching for different opinions, different points of view, different ways to do things and incorporating that into your thinking at work? That’s a type of skill that we look at in adaptability.
We also look at your character. How do you adapt? That looks at things like introversion and extroversion. Both introverts and extroverts can adapt to change, but they do it in very different ways. The introvert might need to process a lot of information first and then come back and discuss it, whereas the extrovert will want to talk all day long about the change, have multiple opinions, and talk to everybody in the group about it. You also need to communicate with introverts and extroverts about changes in different ways. That’s important for leaders as well.
We also look at your motivation style, play to win, play to protect, your emotional range, and your hope, which is very important as well. Where is your optimism level in this? That does have an impact on your ability to change. Do you have hope in the future and in yourself? Do you have agency? Do you have multiple pathways that you can think of for solving problems? We also look at the environment, which is important, and we touched upon it with the firewall issue.
Overall, does your environment support change, or does it hinder change? I have had the experience of being in environments where people on my team brought great innovative ideas to me, and we implemented them as an experiment. We presented them to a larger group, to the more senior staff, and we got told to shut it down, even though it was helping us run our business well. That was soul-crushing. That was an environment that was not supportive of change. In fact, people responded like, “Why should I bother? Why should I bring these innovative ideas that will help our business if it’s not going to happen?”
Did they give an explanation as to why they didn’t want to go forward with those ideas?
One of the reasons was that they were going to implement something at a larger scale down the road in a couple of quarters. We suggested that they look at the solution that we had already proved out was working, and that got shot down. It was something at the corporate strategy level that we were disrupting, and they didn’t like that disruption.
You said a lot there, but I think the bottom line for me, as far as people dealing with that, is that adaptability has a lot to do with their mindset, and their growth mindset specifically. You need to identify where you’re holding yourself back and try to skill up and figure out where you can be better, all that stuff. You also said agency. I’m a certified high-performance coach. When we talk about agency, it’s like, “How are you behaving? What actions are you taking that are or aren’t making an impact?”
The Future Of Work: 65% Of Skills Will Change By 2030
That’s exactly what we’re talking about here. It is because, again, if you’re reading and you haven’t gone into ChatGPT, then I will put a link on how to go and sign up for a free ChatGPT account. You can obviously Google it. You are going to be falling behind very quickly. I know you said earlier that 65% of our skills are going to change by 2030. How are they going to change? Can you talk a little bit about that?
That’s part of the uncertainty that we need to be able to navigate because we don’t know yet. There will be job losses due to AI, but there’s also going to be job creation. One of the things that I would advise to do is staying on top of these trends in your industry and understanding where it’s heading and what skillsets you need to develop.
“There will be job losses due to AI, but there's also going to be job creation.” – Ann Reilly Share on X
You can talk to other people on your team or people at different companies, what are they doing to gear up? Certainly, talking to your manager and your leaders about what’s going to be required, what is our strategy? What type of skillsets does the CEO think we’re going to need? Also, talking to different industry groups about what’s happening in our industry, diving into the trends, and taking advantage of the courses that are being offered to learn these new skillsets in this AI age.
How do you build that plan? Where do you start? There are so many people. I do a lot of coaching for some clients for resumes. When we start talking about it, I always ask, “Have you used AI ever?” Nine out of ten times, they haven’t used AI, people that are coming through different or various organizations. When you’re in the co3rporate world and you’re trying to figure out, where do you start? How do you build that plan to become adaptable? Trying to talk to your manager and keep up with, again, how fast all of this is exploding, where do you start?
When I’m working with individuals on an adaptability plan, I do start with, what are their career goals? Do they want to get promoted? Do they want to shift into a different role? Do they want to do something completely new? Do they want to be a manager? It’s understanding what’s your career goal in the next one to two years. We’ll look at their level of adaptability through an assessment. When we look at career employability, there are three dimensions that we focus on. Those are mental flexibility, unlearning, and hope.
As I touched on before, mental flexibility allows you to explore different points of view, look at competing tasks and competing demands, and, importantly, not have this drain you. This is something that is energizing to you, that you’re taking in this conflicting information and conflicting demands, and that you are able to handle it well. Unlearning is related but different. How do you stop doing things? How do you let things go, whether it’s skills, processes, or habits that aren’t useful to you anymore? How do you stop those so that you can learn new things for today’s world?
Hope is about, are you confident? Do you have that belief in yourself that you can do this? Can you think of multiple pathways in order to solve these problems or overcome these challenges? We take those in combination with your career goals. If it’s, “I need to be a manager in the next two years,” or, “I want to be a manager,” what’s your mental flexibility around that? You might need to manage multiple generations. Those are different demands and needs that are coming from those employees. How do you do that? How are you going to incorporate AI into your management and into your development of the team? If you want to be a manager, what specific skills do you need to develop there?
We’ll do that building plan and help the person understand what are the skills, they need to go out and explore? What are the skills they need to develop? We do talk a lot about, what are the habits that are going to support this skill-building? Is it, “I’m going to spend fifteen minutes a day on ChatGPT, and I’m going to learn about management techniques through this interaction with ChatGPT,” or whatever is related to the new skills that they need to acquire?
Are those three components part of the adaptability quotient? Is that the assessment?
Yes. Correct.
If someone were trying to figure out how to get an adaptability assessment, how would they be able to do that?
They could certainly contact me, and we could do the assessment. They are very comprehensive results. This is all about building awareness in your skills, what type of person you are as you relate to change, but also talking about the environment, as I mentioned. Making sure that you are in the right environment, or how do you also talk to your manager about creating a change in the environment? I’ve also been a part of that. I got into an environment that I felt was a bit toxic, and I changed my mindset around it to be like, “I’m going to approach this in a different way.” It freed me up and changed my whole experience there. There are ways that you can also change your environment, even if you’re in a big company.
A lot of it is just how we react to those external triggers. In certified high-performance coaching, it’s like, your husband’s still going to do whatever they do, or your wife’s going to annoy you, but it’s up to you to be annoyed or not be annoyed, and that can change your whole experience, like you just said. I want to shift the conversation a little bit to your story. How did you become an adaptability coach? For those people that didn’t get it, can you explain a little bit more about what an adaptability coach does and how you got there from your work and where you are now?
From Corporate Career To Adaptability Coach
I spent most of my corporate career in advertising and sales and had an international career. I started off in Hong Kong, and then I was in Singapore doing sales for a media company in Southeast Asia. I, with my husband, moved to California, where I worked for Intuit. That’s why I’m very close to that story, I helped launch one of the first personal finance websites, Quicken.com. I worked for Yahoo, doing sales leadership both in New York and then over here in Europe.
I’m based now in Barcelona. Following that, I worked for a startup, opening up their international offices. Along the way, I encountered a lot of change. I got laid off more than once and had to take charge of my career at multiple points in order to find a new job and things like that. At one point, I had a pivotal moment in a client meeting where I thought, “I can’t do this anymore. I needed to pivot.”
I pivoted into the innovation and disruption space and worked for a company called OpenExO, which helps companies grow ten times faster than their peer set by looking at an exponential organization framework. How do you incorporate emerging technology into your workflow? I’m still working on ExO work, but as I dove into it, I realized that it was more about the business model.
I wanted to get closer to the team and the leadership because that was where my passion lies. I always loved helping people develop skills and empowering people on my team to perform, grow, and learn new skills. Through the OpenExO community, I met the founders of AQai, who developed this adaptability framework. That spoke to me. This just makes so much sense because I lived in that corporate world. I lived in the internet world. I saw all of this technology developing so fast.
This converging technology, which we talked about, seeing that and being in a community that is talking about that all day long, when I go back to the normal corporate world, I’m thinking most people are not ready for the change that is going to happen. It’s going to shock a lot of people in terms of job loss, not having the right skills or things like that. I thought this was a way for me to help people adapt to these changing times. I find it a very exciting time, but I know that change is hard for a lot of people. I thrive on it, but I understand that it is difficult, and stability is where a lot of people revert to. We’re not in a stable period of time at the moment.
I remember even back in the day when we had VCRs, and I had VHS tapes. At the time, my grandfather was like, “I don’t know how to deal with that.” All this stuff. Me being a kid back then, I’m like, “Grandpa, it’s no big deal.” As you said, the same thing happened in the Industrial Revolution. It’s been happening our entire existence as human beings, but it’s just so fast nowadays. When we went from horses and buggies to cars, people resisted that, but it’s just a matter of accepting that the world is changing. How much and how fast do you want to embrace it so that you don’t fall?
Adaptability As A Key Skill For The Future
That’s why I’m doing my adaptability coaching work, and LinkedIn has named adaptability the top skill of the moment. They’re seeing all of this data, they’re talking to all of these companies, and it’s a skill that companies and hiring managers want. Who are these people who can be flexible, seize new opportunities, and get the project, these difficult projects, across the finish line? Will they jump back when they have a setback, get up, and move forward? How are they also going to learn these new skills? It’s a skill that is going to be so valuable. I also think it helps people when they’re looking for a new job or when they’re asking for a promotion. Thinking about these different dimensions of adaptability can help you showcase your value to your boss and your company.
To me, this is fun. I’m by no means a guru in technology, and it does take me a little bit longer to figure things out, but I always end up figuring it out, probably the hard way. Sometimes, even when my daughter’s over here and I’m doing something on my phone, she’s like, “Mom, what are you doing?” I’m like, “Why didn’t you tell me that? You knew.” Obviously, she doesn’t know what I don’t know. I don’t know what she knows, so a lot of times, she’s observing me doing something, and I’m trying to do it the hard way. She’s like, “Mom, you could do it better this way.” I’m like, “Okay.”
That’s a good point, Rosie. I think we talk a lot about women having mentors at work, and I believe that everybody should, but they should also have a reverse mentor, somebody younger than them. The younger generation, they’re digital natives. They do things differently, they talk differently, they communicate differently, and having that reverse mentor can help you get through, understand, and adapt to these changes faster and easier.
For anybody out there reading, if you’re interested in learning, I said this to somebody, go into ChatGPT and create a free account. There’s a free account and a paid account, and then just start asking, “ChatGPT, give me a tutorial on how to use you.” ChatGPT will give you a step-by-step tutorial. If you don’t understand, say, “Please re-explain it to me in a different way.” You can ask it a million inquiries, and it’ll give you a million answers, without attitude, without getting mad at you, all that stuff.
I think it’s a phenomenal technology. I think a lot of people are afraid that it’s going to take over jobs, for example, copywriters, but copywriters are just going to be able to evolve and do more difficult things. There’s always a way to reinvent yourself in spite of anything new that could potentially take over some of the tasks you’re doing. I don’t think people have a lot to worry about as long as they are willing to adapt, right?
Yeah. Adapt, upskill, reskill. One of the things that I’m hearing a lot about with ChatGPT or with AI is what’s called soft skills or human skills. These are going to become more and more important. What are your communication skills? What are your storytelling skills? How do you get better at that using technology? How does AI plus human become better than human only or AI only? Those skills are also things to focus on, as long as you’re learning about the technology skills as well.
“With AI, what's called soft skills or human skills are really going to become more and more important.” – Ann Reilly Share on X
There are some industries, for example, copywriters or authors, who may feel a little bit more vulnerable with AI versus, say, a mental health therapist. AI will never be able to replace a mental health therapist because of that interaction, communication, conversation, empathy, and emotional support. I think there are some industries that are a little bit more vulnerable than others, for sure.
Maybe, but there are also cases already where people are developing relationships with AI. They have an AI friend, AI girlfriend, or AI boyfriend, and they’re getting that emotional support from this AI that tells them everything they want to hear.
I had not heard that, although there was that movie, I think it was called Her. It was exactly that, where the actor was falling in love with this AI phone or whatever it was. It was exactly that. I’m not surprised, but I wondered about that, and now it’s happening.
There’s also the healthcare industry, particularly dealing with elderly people who are less mobile. There’s an epidemic of loneliness, and there is advancing use of robots as companions and caretakers. I don’t know if any industry is immune to it. I thought, “A massage therapist,” but there is a new machine out where you program in what type of massage you want and where you need extra attention.
Practical AI Use In Everyday Life
If you think about it, when you go get a pedicure, you sit in those chairs, and it has all that program. To take a matter of taking that programming and incorporating the generative AI there, that is so interesting. I love how we are evolving and changing and doing things completely differently. One of the things that I wanted to make sure that we talked about is, I think it was FlexJobs, did a survey, and they surveyed 5,600 people. Twenty-four percent, so almost 1 in every 4 people, are using generative AI to optimize their job search.
If 1 out of 4 people are using it, that means that the other three people who are not have no chance because these people are using a Jobscan for the applicant tracking system optimization. If you submit a resume in Jobscan, which is an AI tool, it’ll give you a score, and it’ll be like a color green, “This is good for you to apply for this particular job.” Gone are the days when people used one resume and submitted that same resume to all jobs.
As career coaches, we’re now recommending that you optimize each resume you submit for that specific job. If you’re not doing that, then you’re going to be one of those 3 out of 4 people who are not applying successfully for a job. There’s so much you can do with AI, and it’s not very difficult. If you have no experience using AI, you can still use it successfully, pretty much instantly. For all those reading this episode, you can go create a free account and just start playing with it. You will see pretty quickly the power of this technology, which, with no qualms, is taking over the world, as it already is.
I’ve also used it and it might be helpful to your readers, even if you have a meeting coming up, give ChatGPT a brief description of your meeting, what your goals are, and have it write an agenda for you. You’ll see how quickly that happens. You’ll probably need to tailor it and say, “That’s not right. I forgot about this.” You might also have suggestions that you like that you hadn’t thought about. It’s going to give you a first draft for a meeting in a couple of minutes, including your prompt. I think just doing that, you’ll see the productivity increase and the potential for it, like, “I didn’t have to spend half an hour thinking about this and writing it, and I got it in a couple of minutes.” You can go on from there.
I don’t remember if I said this to you last time we spoke or not, but I had ground beef, onions, and tomatoes, and I was like, “ChatGPT, what can I do? What recipe can I make with this?” I put it in, and it gave me a whole recipe. I used it, and it was great. I’ve also heard parents of young kids are using it to write stories for them. It is because, a lot of times, you’re tired of reading the same kids’ books, so you can have it write a story for you, particular things that are specific to that child’s liking. It is just astronomical. Ann, you have given us an incredible amount of amazing information. If you were to leave our readers with one final actionable tip, what would that be for them?
I would say accepting that we’re in a new phase of our lives and being proactive about what’s one thing you’re going to do in order to upskill or reskill. Start with one thing. Maybe it’s spending fifteen minutes a day on ChatGPT. Maybe it’s talking to your manager about what skillsets you’re going to need in the next couple of years. Maybe it’s joining an industry group where you can participate in identifying trends, but I would start exploring.
I would put some time on your calendar to start exploring the new skillsets that you’re going to need. That will open up many doors for you so that you can then start to make a plan. In relation to your goals, what are the things that you need to learn? What do you need to unlearn? How are you going to go about that process, take charge, and be a part of this AI revolution?
I think one of the things that stood out for me there is the part about what we need to unlearn. It is because we’re so programmed in our brains.
It’s important.
Wonderful.
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That is a very insightful conversation because it’s all AI-related. I’m going to quickly break down some of the key highlights for me about the conversation that I just had with Ann. The first one is that change is non-negotiable. AI is here to stay, and adaptability is no longer just a buzzword. It is a must-have skill for every professional. The second key takeaway is it is time for us to skill up or level up. Ann says that 65% of the skills needed for our jobs will change by 2030. Start exploring and training on new tools now. The third key takeaway is that unlearning is a key skill, meaning letting go of outdated habits and mindsets is just as important as learning new skills.
Ann leaves us with one actionable tip. She says to block fifteen minutes a day to explore ChatGPT or a new AI tool. Start small, stay curious, and watch how quickly you build momentum. As a reminder, don’t forget to take the Promotion Readiness Quiz to see where you stand in landing your next big promotion.
I invite you to check out our Unlock the Leader Within Membership. It is your ultimate career accelerator, but more than anything, you will grow alongside other ambitious women. This episode gave you a quick start on what AI and adaptability are going to be like in the future. You’ve got the tools, so now go and make it happen. That’s it for now. Remember to be brave, be bold, and take action.
Important Links
- Ann Reilly
- Ann Reilly on LinkedIn
- ChatGPT
- Quicken
- Unlock the Leader Within Membership
- Promotion Readiness Quiz
About Ann Reilly
Ann Reilly is a certified AQai Adaptability Coach helping organizations to thrive during the fastest pace of change in our lifetime. She helps leaders and teams identify the changes impacting their business with a focus on how AI will completely alter the landscape of their industry, job and skill sets needed to survive in the workplace. With the A.C.E. framework, she guides teams to measure and improve their adaptability to drive performance, productivity and well-being.
Ann began her career at Leo Burnett and STAR TV in Asia and went on to senior leadership positions at Intuit, Yahoo!, Adara – a travel data startup, and OpenExO, a global community of innovators and disruptors. She’s passionate about tech for good and empowering individuals to overachieve.