No Brainer Podcast: AI as Culture, Not Just Code

We joined Geoff Livingston and Greg Verdino on the No Brainer podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about what happens when you treat AI as just another software upgrade.

The short answer: you run your people into a brick wall.

We talked about the cultural shift that's happened in how organizations talk about AI—from creativity and innovation just a year ago to productivity, efficiency, speed, scale. That shift has nothing to do with what these tools can actually do. It's a cultural phenomenon, driven largely by companies selling AI and venture capitalists saying the quiet part out loud: the returns are going to come from replacing labor.

We pushed back hard on the AGI preparation narrative and the reductive productivity studies that keep contradicting each other. The signal in all that noise? People are confused—even the ones who think they've got their hands around it.

The conversation got into some of our core research concepts: why moments matter as the unit of analysis for understanding human experience with AI, what we mean by symbolic plasticity (your ability to constantly reframe what these tools are and what they mean to you), and why the "Design Illusion" of LLMs—they look like consumer tools but require professional-level training—creates so much organizational dysfunction.

Helen's take on trust: "Guaranteed way of stalling out your AI adoption—you don't trust your employees."

Our message throughout: this is culture change, not technology adoption. Leaders who skip the human questions will find themselves solving the wrong problems.

Listen to the podcast here.