EP 270 - From AI Awareness → AI Readiness → AI Adoption with Jennifer Hufnagel
Release Date: 12/24/2025
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_outlineHost Susan Diaz sits down with Jennifer Hufnagel (Hufnagel Consulting), an AI educator and AI readiness consultant who’s trained 4K+ people. They break down what “AI readiness” actually means (spoiler: it’s not buying Copilot), why AI doesn’t fix broken processes or dirty data, and how leaders can build real capability through training programs, communities of practice, and properly resourced AI champions.
Episode summary
Susan Diaz and Jennifer Hufnagel met in “the most elite way possible”: both were quoted in The Globe and Mail about women and AI.
Jennifer shares her background as a business analyst and digital adoption / L&D consultant, and how she pivoted when clients began asking for AI workshops right after ChatGPT’s release.
Together, they map a simple but powerful framework:
-
AI awareness (practice + play, foundational learning, early change management)
-
AI readiness (software stack, data quality, workflows, current state, and - quietly - the “people audit”)
-
AI adoption (implementation, strategy, and ongoing integration)
Jennifer explains why “audit” language scares people, but the work is essential - especially talking to humans about what’s frustrating, what takes time, and where fear is showing up. She shares what she’s seeing after training thousands: AI fluency is still low, people obsess over tools, and many assume AI will solve problems that are actually process or data issues.
The second half gets practical: what “workflows” really mean (step-by-step checklists), how AI now makes documenting processes easier than ever (voice → SOPs), why prompt engineering isn’t dead but “100 prompts for your bookkeeping business” is mostly snake oil, and why one-off training sessions don’t create real fluency.
They close with how to build sustainable AI capability: proper training programs, leadership-led culture, communities of practice, and protecting champions from becoming unpaid help desks.
Key takeaways
AI readiness is the middle of the journey. Jennifer frames AI maturity as: awareness → readiness → adoption. Most organisations skip readiness and wonder why adoption stalls.
Readiness includes software, data, process… and people. You can call it a software/data/process audit, but you still have to talk to humans about their day-to-day work, pain points, and fears. That’s where the truth lives.
AI fluency is still lower than the headlines suggest. Jennifer questions rosy “90% adoption” stats because many rooms she’s in still show low real-world usage beyond basic experimentation.
Stop obsessing over tools. Companies are writing AI policy around tools and forcing everyone into a single platform. Jennifer argues the real goal is discernment, critical thinking, and clarity - not “pick one tool and pray”.
AI doesn’t fix broken processes or dirty data. If your workflows aren’t documented, AI will scale the chaos. If your data is messy, the analysis will be messy too. Readiness comes first.
A workflow is just a checklist. Jennifer demystifies “workflow” as step-by-step instructions and ownership: who does what, when. Sticky notes on a wall is a valid start.
Process documentation is easier than ever. You can dictate steps into a model (without passwords) and ask it to produce an SOP/checklist - getting knowledge out of people’s heads and into a shareable format.
Prompting isn’t dead, but promise-all prompt packs are mostly hype. Prompting differs by model, and the best move is often to ask the model how to prompt it - and how to troubleshoot when output is wrong.
One-off AI workshops don’t create fluency. AI changes too fast. Real capability requires programs, practice, communities of practice, office hours, and change management - plus leadership modelling and culture.
Don’t burn out your AI champions. Champions need dedicated time, resources, and leadership sponsorship. Otherwise they become unpaid AI help desks and the entire initiative becomes fragile.
Community of practice is the unlock. Jennifer shares her in-person “AI Chats & Bites” group and encourages finding online + in-person + internal communities to keep learning alive.
Episode highlights
00:01 — The 30-day podcast-to-book sprint and why people are saying yes in December
00:40 — Susan + Jennifer meet via The Globe and Mail “women and AI” feature
01:21 — Jennifer’s origin story: business analyst → digital adoption/L&D → AI readiness
04:09 — The three-part framework: awareness → readiness → adoption
05:03 — Readiness: software stack, data quality (“dirty data”), and mapping current state
06:13 — “People audit” without calling it that: interview humans about pain + fear
08:02 — What Jennifer sees after ~4,000 trainees: fluency still low + stats don’t match reality
09:38 — AI doesn’t fix broken processes; it scales whatever is there
10:55 — Workflows explained as checklists; “won the lottery” handoff test
12:18 — Dictate your process into AI → generate SOPs/checklists
14:24 — Prompting isn’t dead; ask the model to help you prompt + troubleshoot
17:50 — Why one-off training doesn’t work; AI fluency requires a program + practice
22:15 — Burning out champions and why AI culture must be top-down
27:49 — Communities of practice: online + local + internal
31:00 — Common mistakes: vending-machine mindset, believing output, not defining the problem
35:31 — Women and AI: opportunity, fear, resilience, and “be in the grey”
39:51 — Where to find Jennifer: hufnagelconsulting.ca + LinkedIn
Guest info
Jennifer Hufnagel
-
Website: hufnagelconsulting.ca
-
Email: [email protected]
-
Best place to connect: LinkedIn - Jennifer Hufnagel
If AI adoption feels stuck in your organization, don’t buy another tool first.
Start with readiness:
-
Map one workflow end-to-end.
-
Talk to the humans doing it daily.
-
Clean up the process and data enough that AI can actually help.
Then build fluency through a program - not a one-off workshop - and protect your champions with real time and resources.
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.