EP252 Turning Prompts into Real AI Workflows with Jason Dea
Release Date: 12/02/2025
EP281 Your Team's Nervous System Is Infrastructure - Sira Laurel on Load-Bearing Trust
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Most of the leaders Sira Laurel works with look like they're winning. Inside, they're exhausted. Sira is an executive coach and facilitator who works on leadership, organizational design, cognitive load, trust and nervous system capacity. She has watched organizations get very good at making work faster while getting worse at deciding what the speed is for. AI raises the stakes on that question. Her starting point is that capacity covers far more than time. It includes attention, decision-making, emotional bandwidth and creative energy. A tool can hand back hours on the calendar while draining...
info_outline
EP280 Faster Than a Generation - Ian Alden Russell on Change That Outruns Us
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
This episode skips the tools, the prompts, and the latest model release. It goes somewhere more philosophical. started out as an archaeologist and anthropologist. He was the kid who loved museums and Indiana Jones. Since then he has worked across history, contemporary art and culture in Dublin, Istanbul, Beijing, Hong Kong, Pittsburgh and Doha. Now he works as a strategist helping organizations make sense of complexity and line up around change. His starting point is that change itself is old news. Humanity has absorbed huge technological shifts again and again. The new part is the speed....
info_outline
EP279 How higher ed moves from AI interest to governed use with James Hutson
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
A previous president from Lindenwood University (a former IBM executive) stands up in town halls and tells people he uses Claude - that it helped him organize the financial report. HR follows and says they used Gemini for an employee questionnaire. Then James Hutson PhD. goes and asks employees whether they understood that as permission. The answer? 'No. The policy says I'll get fired if I use it.' That gap is the subject of this episode. James is Senior Professor and Director of AI-Enabled Academic Transformation at Lindenwood University, with two PhDs - the first in art history, the second...
info_outline
EP278 AI Governance in Higher Ed with Dr. Eugene Chan
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Most organizations govern AI the same way cities govern speeding. They set a rule, then punish people who break it. Dr. Eugene Chan thinks that's the least interesting tool available. He's a behavioural scientist - founder of the consultancy Behavieural and Professor of Business at Tyndale University - and his argument is that punishment is a lagging response to a problem you could have designed out. His analogy is a speed camera versus a speed bump. Both reduce speeding. The camera does it by fining you after the fact, and it needs maintenance forever. The speed bump does it by making the...
info_outline
EP277 Is AI Going to Take the Gift of Failure Away? asks Julie Cole
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Episode description Julie Cole and her co-founders started Mabel's Labels in a Hamilton basement 23 years ago, back when customers were still nervous about typing a credit card number into a computer. They figured out early that they weren't really running a label company - they were running a tech company that happened to make labels. Nothing off the shelf did what they needed, so they built it themselves. Which is why her read on this moment carries some weight. She's watched every technology wave since. She's not a skeptic and she's not a cheerleader. She uses AI, has a clear personal rule...
info_outline
EP276 Your AI Strategy Is a Hammer. Where's the Nail? - with David Cohen
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
"We need AI" is the most common brief in business right now. David Cohen's read on what it means: usually nothing in particular. David is the founder of Superposition, a consultancy for data and AI consultancies - a meta consultancy, as he calls it. He's spent his career inside both big and boutique consulting shops, which makes him refreshingly blunt about what's actually happening in the services world right now. His diagnosis is that we're still in the solution-in-search-of-a-problem stage. Everybody's curious. Everybody's excited. There's enormous movement, enormous hype, and very few real...
info_outline
EP 275 "Do I Trust Myself?" Grace Gravestock on the Real Reason AI Adoption Stalls
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Episode description Everyone's arguing about whether AI can be trusted. Almost nobody's asking the harder question underneath it. Grace Gravestock has spent more than twenty years leading change management on some of the highest-profile technology projects around - including the team that set the stage for the $67B Dell EMC integration. Her verdict on why AI pilots stall is unsentimental: it's the same reason ERP stalled, and CRM before that. People aren't using the technology the way it was intended. You can have the best tools in the world, and if people don't use them, it doesn't matter....
info_outline
EP 274 The Human OS - AI Adoption With Curiosity, Safety, and Monday Ease ft. Melissa Penton
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
In the final episode of the Podcast-to-Book series, host sits down with change leader and AI education lead (Sun Life) for a human-first conversation about what actually makes AI adoption work. They talk productivity vs room-for-life, why one-prompt culture is snake oil, the shift from prompt engineering to context engineering, and the simplest enterprise question that changes everything: “What would make Monday easier for employees?” Episode summary Susan closes out the Podcast-to-Book sprint with a conversation that feels like the point of the whole series: AI isn’t a tool problem....
info_outline
273 - Future-proofing your organization through continuing AI literacy
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Most companies do a few AI trainings, run some pilots, and then stall. In this episode, host argues the only real future-proofing strategy is continuous AI literacy. She breaks down what “continuous literacy” actually includes (skill, judgment, workflow, norms), the predictable failure modes of the AI literacy divide, and a simple flywheel you can run monthly so capability keeps compounding. Episode summary Susan opens with a familiar pattern: a burst of AI excitement, a deck called “AI Strategy 2025” a few clever workflows… and then reality hits. Tools change. Policies shift....
info_outline
EP 272 - Mindset, Sales, and AI That Actually Helps with Gazzy Amin
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Host sits down with sales strategist , founder of Sales Beyond Scripts, to talk about the real ways AI is changing revenue, planning, and scale. They cover AI as a thinking partner, how to use it across departments in a small business, why audits matter more than hype, and how mindset quietly determines whether you treat AI as a threat or an advantage. Episode summary This episode is part of Susan’s 30-episodes-in-30-days “podcast to book” sprint for Swan Dive Backwards. Susan and Gazzy zoom in on the selling process first. Then they zoom out to the whole business. They talk about three...
info_outlineMany teams have a Notion page full of prompts. Very few have real, repeatable AI workflows. In this episode, host Susan Diaz and product/go-to-market leader Jason Dea dig into how to move from playing with prompts to designing workflows, building tiny specialist agents, and avoiding a new wave of shadow AI inside organizations.
Susan is joined by venture studio and SaaS veteran Jason Dea from Coru Ventures in Toronto.
They unpack why AI is not a magic wand or a single feature, but an enabling technology that only delivers value when it’s wired into actual workflows.
Jason shares his “swarm of bumblebees” metaphor for AI, how he builds small specialist agents to clone his own work style, and why enterprises are about to repeat the mistakes of shadow IT if they don’t get serious about orchestration and governance.
They close by talking about leaders using AI in their own day-to-day work, and Jason’s personal experiments with family apps, coding, and even a butterfly-catching game for his daughter.
Key takeaways
Prompts ≠ workflows. Collecting prompts in a shared doc feels productive. But until you map the 8–10 steps of a job and decide where AI fits, you’re just doing experiments, not transformation.
AI is not a magic one-shot. It’s an enabling technology. The real gains come when you see your work as a chain of small tasks and let AI take over the repetitive, boring, or “toil” links in that chain.
Think “swarm of bumblebees.” You are the queen bee. AI is a swarm of tiny worker bees, each doing one specific task very well (emails, slides, requirements, research), not one mega-agent doing everything.
Documenting workflows doesn’t have to be fancy. A workflow is just “tell me the 10 steps.” Start with the human sequence. Tools come second. Once it’s visible, the friction points where AI can help become obvious.
Shadow IT is turning into shadow AI. Cheap, bolt-on AI features and swipe-a-card tools make it easy for every team to spin up their own stack. Without orchestration, you recreate silos, risk, and tool sprawl at AI speed.
IT should govern, not own everything. Governance, security, and guardrails matter. But AI also democratises small bits of “coding” and automation, letting non-technical teams build more, faster—if they have guidance.
Leaders need hands-on literacy. The fastest way out of the hype is to use AI yourself for your own toil. Drafting emails. Planning. Decomposing big tasks. You get more realistic about what it can and cannot do.
AI is an “unstuck” tool in work and life. From relearning to code, to building tiny family apps, to cataloguing knick-knacks and designing games for kids, AI opens up projects that were unrealistic even five years ago.
Episode highlights
[00:01] Jason’s background in startups, SaaS, product, and go-to-market, and his role at Coru Ventures.
[02:00] Where we are on the Gartner hype cycle and why the trough of disillusionment is inevitable and useful.
[04:40] Why some people can’t imagine life before ChatGPT—and why that’s not true for everyone inside organisations.
[05:50] Mapping work as a sequence of steps instead of hunting for a single “magic” AI prompt.
[08:01] The “swarm of bumblebees” metaphor: you as the queen, AI as many small worker-bee agents.
[09:59] How to define a workflow in plain language: “tell me the 10 steps,” tools aside.
[11:00] Paperwork and OCR as a classic example of where generative AI finally unlocks messy, grey-area tasks.
[13:50] Using AI first to remove the tasks you hate and identify the links you should outsource to machines.
[15:20] Jason’s “digital clone” AIs trained on his own content and patterns.
[19:00] Building multiple mini-AIs: one for social posts, one for slide decks, one for product requirements.
[21:10] Bolt-on AI features everywhere + messy workflows = amplified confusion and risk.
[22:10] From shadow IT to shadow AI: why orchestration and shared understanding of workflows is critical.
[24:40] Startups’ speed vs enterprises’ risk aversion, and what each can learn from the other.
[27:10] Why IT should set guardrails while letting departments experiment and build more on their own.
[30:10] Jason’s advice to leaders: use AI yourself to see where it really helps and what it really takes.
[36:00] Personal-life AI: relearning to code, family apps, cataloguing home items, and a butterfly game for his daughter.
[38:00] Susan’s idea: vibe-coding a family recipe app as a way to preserve memories and workflows.
If your organization has a folder full of prompts but no clear AI workflows, this episode is your sign to pause and rethink.
Share it with:
-
The person who keeps buying new AI tools.
-
The leader who thinks “IT will figure it out”.
-
The teammate who’s already acting like the queen bee and quietly building their own swarm.
Then ask as a team: “Where are our 10-step workflows, and which links should really be done by AI?”
Connect with Susan Diaz on LinkedIn to get a conversation started.
Agile teams move fast. Grab our 10 AI Deep Research Prompts to see how proven frameworks can unlock clarity in hours, not months. Find the prompt pack here.