EP 260 Human-First in an AI-Forward World with Helen Patterson
Release Date: 12/15/2025
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...
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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....
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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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....
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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....
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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_outlineWhat does it really mean to build an AI-forward company that is still deeply human-first? In this episode, host Susan Diaz and senior HR leader and mentor culture advocate Helen Patterson talk about jobs, guardrails, copyright, environmental impact, and why mentorship and connection matter more than ever in the age of AI.
Episode summary
Susan is joined by Helen Patterson, founder of Life Works Well, senior HR leader, and author of the upcoming book Create a Mentor Culture.
They start with a Y2K flashback and draw a straight line from past tech panics to today’s AI headlines. Helen shares why she sees AI as the latest evolution of technology as an enabler in HR - another way to clear the admin and grunt work so humans can focus on growth, development, and real conversations.
From there, they dig into:
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The tension between “AI will kill jobs” and tens of thousands of new AI policy and governance roles already posted.
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How shadow AI shows up when organizations put in blanket “no AI” rules and people just reach for their phones anyway.
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The very real issues around privacy, copyright, and intellectual property when staff feed proprietary material into public models.
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The less-talked-about environmental impact of AI and why leaders should demand better facts and more intentional choices from tech providers.
In the second half, Helen brings the conversation back to humanity: mentorship as a counterweight to disconnection, her One Million Mentor Moments initiative, and how everyday “micro-mentoring” at work can help people adapt to rapid change instead of being left behind. They close with practical examples of using AI for good in real life - from travel planning and research to late-night dog-health triage - without letting it replace judgement.
Key takeaways
This isn’t our first tech panic. From Y2K to applicant tracking systems, HR has always framed tech as an enabler. GenAI is the newest layer, not an alien invasion. Looking back at history helps calm “sky is falling” narratives.
Jobs are changing, not simply disappearing. Even as people worry about AI-driven job loss, platforms like Indeed list tens of thousands of AI policy and governance roles. The work is shifting toward AI-forward skills in every function.
Blanket “no AI” rules don’t work. When organizations ban external tools or insist on only one locked-down platform, people quietly use their own devices and personal stacks anyway - creating shadow AI with real privacy and IP risk. Guardrails and education beat prohibition.
Copyright and confidentiality need more than vibes. Without clear guidance, staff will copy proprietary frameworks or documents into public models and re-badge them. Leaders need simple, well-communicated philosophies about what must not go into AI tools.
Environmental impact is part of human-first. Training and running large models consumes energy. The real solution will be systemic (how tech is built and powered), but individuals and organizations can still use AI more efficiently, just like learning not to leave all the lights on.
Mentorship is the ultimate human technology. Helen’s work on Create a Mentor Culture and One Million Mentor Moments reframes mentoring as everyday, one-conversation acts that share wisdom, reduce fear, and help people reskill for an AI-forward world. Tech should support that, not replace it.
Upskilling beats layoffs. When roles change because of AI, the most human-first response isn’t to cut people loose, it’s to invest in learning, mentoring, and redeployment so existing talent can grow into new, AI-augmented roles.
Use AI to simplify life, not complicate it. From planning multi-country trips to triaging whether the dog really needs an emergency vet visit, smart everyday use of AI can save time, money, and anxiety - freeing up more space for the work and relationships that actually matter.
Episode highlights
[00:01] Susan sets the scene: 30 episodes in 30 days to build Swan Dive Backwards in public.
[00:39] Helen’s intro: Life Works Well, heart-centred high-performance cultures, and her focus on mentorship.
[03:43] What an AI-forward and human-centred organisation looks like in practice.
[04:00] Y2K memories and why today’s AI panic feels familiar.
[06:11] 25–35K AI policy jobs on Indeed and what that says about the future of work.
[07:49] Jobs lost vs jobs created—and why continuous learning is non-negotiable.
[15:19] The danger of “everyone is using AI” with no strategy or safeguards.
[19:25] Shadow AI, personal stacks, and why hard bans don’t stop experimentation.
[21:13] A real-world IP scare: proprietary material pasted into GPT and re-labelled.
[23:06] GPT refusing to summarise a book for copyright reasons—and why that’s a good sign.
[24:03] The case for a simple AI philosophy doc: purpose, principles, and communication.
[25:24] Environmental concerns, fact-checking, and the server-room-to-laptop analogy.
[30:17] New social media laws for kids and what they signal about tech accountability.
[30:41] One Million Mentor Moments: why one conversation can change a career.
[31:22] From elite programmes to everyday mentor cultures inside organisations.
[35:01] AI for mentoring and coaching: bots, big-name gurus, and internal use cases.
[36:30] Using AI for travel planning, research, and everyday life admin.
[37:35] Susan’s story: using AI to triage a dog-health scare instead of doom-scrolling vet sites.
[38:37] Life Works Well’s roots in work–life harmony and simplifying with tech.
[39:35] Where to find Helen online and what’s next for her book.
If you’re leading a team (or a whole organization), use this episode as a prompt to ask:
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Where are we treating AI as a tool in service of humanity - and where are we forgetting the human first?
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Do our people actually know what’s OK and not OK to put into AI tools?
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How could we use mentorship - formal or informal - to help our people navigate this shift instead of fearing it?
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.
You can connect with Helen Patterson on LinkedIn and follow her work on Create a Mentor Culture and One Million Mentor Moments via lifeworkswell.ca