EP 266 - Literacy, Leadership, and the ‘AI for the Sake of AI’ Trap with Shona Boyd
Release Date: 12/20/2025
EP281 Your Team's Nervous System Is Infrastructure - Sira Laurel on Load-Bearing Trust
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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_outlineHost Susan Diaz is joined by Shona Boyd, a product manager at Mitratech, a SaaS company, and a proudly AI-curious early adopter, for a grounded conversation about what AI literacy actually means now. They talk about representation, critical thinking, everyday meet-you-where-you-are workflows, shadow AI, enterprise guardrails, and why leaders must stop chasing AI features that don’t solve real user problems.
Episode summary
Susan introduces Shona Boyd - AI-curious early adopter and SaaS product manager—whose mission is to make AI feel less scary and more accessible.
Shona shares how her approachable AI philosophy started in product work: she used AI to build audience insights and feedback loops when job seekers weren’t willing to do interviews, and quickly realized two things: (1) AI wasn’t going away, and (2) there weren’t many visible women or people who looked like her leading the conversation. So she raised her hand as an approachable reference point others could learn from.
From there, the conversation expands into what AI literacy has evolved into. It’s no longer just “which tool should I use?” or “how do I write prompts?” Shona argues that today literacy is about critical thinking, learning how to talk to an LLM like a conversation, and choosing workflows that benefit from AI rather than chasing hype.
They also get practical: Shona gives everyday examples (Medicare PDFs, credit card points, life admin) to show how AI can meet you where you are, without requiring you to build agents or become super technical.
Finally, Susan and Shona go deep on organizational adoption: why handing out logins without policies is risky, how shadow AI shows up (hello, rogue meeting note-takers), why leadership sponsorship matters, and what companies should stop doing immediately: AI for the sake of AI.
Key takeaways
Representation changes adoption. When people don’t see anyone who looks like them using AI confidently, they’re less likely to lean in. Shona chose to be a visible, approachable point of reference for others.
AI literacy has shifted. It’s no longer mainly about which model or prompt frameworks. It’s about:
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learning the language (LLM, GPT, etc.)
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staying curious
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building critical media muscles to evaluate what’s true, what’s AI, and what needs sources.
Workflows aren’t just corporate. A workflow is simply: tasks + the path to get them done. Shona’s examples show AI can help with day-to-day life admin (PDFs, policies, benefits, points programs), which makes AI feel more approachable fast.
The first output is not the final. “I can spot AI content” usually means people are publishing raw first drafts. High-quality AI use looks like: draft → critique → refine → human judgement.
What good organizational training is NOT: handing out tool logins with no policy, no guidance on acceptable use, and no understanding of enterprise vs personal security.
Shadow AI is already here. People are adding unapproved AI note-takers to meetings and uploading sensitive info into personal accounts. Blanket bans don’t work - they push experimentation underground.
Adoption needs product thinking. Shona suggests leaders treat internal AI like a product launch:
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run simple feedback loops (NPS-style checks)
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analyse usage patterns to find sticking points
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apply AI where it solves real pain, not where competitors are hyping features.
Leadership ownership matters for equity. When AI is run department-by-department, you create “haves and have-nots” (tools, training, access). Top-down support plus safe guardrails reduces inequity and increases psychological safety.
Spicy take: stop doing AI for the sake of AI. If you can’t explain how an AI feature improves real user life in a non-marketing way, it probably shouldn’t ship.
Episode highlights
[00:01] The 30-day podcast-to-book sprint and why leaders are still showing up in December.
[01:14] Shona’s origin story: using AI to build audiences and feedback loops in a job board context.
[02:17] The visibility gap: not many women / people who looked like her in early AI spaces.
[05:55] What AI literacy means now: critical thinking + conversation with an LLM + workflow selection.
[07:16] “Workflows” made real: Medicare PDFs and credit card points examples.
[10:13] Three essentials: foundational language, curiosity, and critical media literacy.
[12:23] What training is NOT: handing out logins with no policy or guardrails.
[15:49] Handling fear and resistance with empathy and a human-in-the-loop mindset.
[23:27] Product lens on adoption: NPS feedback loops + usage analytics to find real needs.
[28:14] Shadow AI: rogue note-takers, personal accounts, and why bans backfire.
[31:17] Policies at multiple levels, including interviewing and candidate use of AI.
[36:49] “Stop AI for the sake of AI” and the race to ship meaningless features.
[39:13] Where to find Shona: LinkedIn (under Lashona).
Connect with Susan Diaz on LinkedIn to get a conversation started.
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Connect with Lashona Boyd on LinkedIn