Transcript

Brandon Carson
AI is not just technology; it is wholesale transformation. That’s what it’s bringing to the workplace and also to our lives.

Sylvie Milverton
Hi, I’m Sylvie Milverton, CEO of Lynx Educate. This is Talent is Everywhere. We are here to talk about how to keep talent and how to develop talent in order to build a strong business. We’ll interview leaders to hear their best experiences of how they invested in people.

So today we have a special guest, Brandon Carson, who is currently the Chief Learning Officer at Docebo. And before that, VP of Learning at Starbucks and Walmart, and then learning leader at Delta, Home Depot and a few others, also mentioned you’re the founder of L&D Cares, which is a lovely nonprofit dedicated to offering no cost, you know, coaching and mentoring to talent development professionals. So, thank you, Brandon for joining us.

Brandon Carson
It is my pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Really excited to talk to you today.

Sylvie Milverton
Uh, great. And so today I’m like actually super excited about our conversation. Um, we’re prepping for this. I really talk about why the CLO Chief Learning Officer role needs to change, why you feel it needs to change, uh, due to the impact of AI.

And I thought we could anchor the conversation around a publication that you recently authored with Marcus Bernhard called the AI Driven Workforce, the CEO’s roadmap. It’s a competitive advantage, um, and you go through, you know, six actions to prepare for the new era of work. And I love like a practical podcast.

So maybe we’ll, you know, dig into some of those specific things. Um, people can, uh, use. Um, you open the article with some big numbers like PWC forecasting, the AI will add 16 trillion to the global economy, which is like more than 10% by 2030. You know, CEOs from World Economic Forum talking about 39% of workforce skills will be, you know, outdated in the next really, you know, few years.

So just pausing from your perspective, you know, how, what do you feel like when you hear those numbers and how does, how right away did that inspire your thinking?

Brandon Carson
Yeah, we’ve been actually having this conversation because it’s a great question. Silly. We’ve been having this conversation for a few years now about this surge of transformation that’s been happening.

I mean, we’ve had. A couple of decades of the technology tsunami that’s been overwhelming us just coming at us so, so quickly. We’ve also had a global health crisis a few years ago that we all remember as the pandemic. And so, we’ve had all of these rapid accelerated changes and transformations, uh, in that, that impact work and how work gets done.

In transformation is itself hard work, and it usually brings around a paradigm shift. And so, we’ve been going through this journey of the digital transformation, and then all of a sudden, we experience a surge in acceleration around artificial intelligence. And so, the three huge conflating forces that came together to enable this, right?

It was just the ability of computing to have the power. It does the, the move to the cloud that we did over the last several decades and, and our, um, access to big data to train all of these AI models on all of this has come together to send us even more exponentially into massive transformation, if you will.

And so, the paradox of that is that not only are is this is AI becoming a general-purpose technology, it will become one, um, that’s going to reshape how work is done. And so, what we’re talking about in this article and the article that just came out is the introductory article.

There will be a series of articles based on each of the six actions that we’re saying business executives should take to future ready their workforce and drive their competitive advantage for their business as AI reshapes work. So, there’ll be a seven series, seven article series that eventually comes out. The first article’s out now.

And what we’re really talking about in this first article is setting the stage for, okay, we’re in this transformation. Every company now is on a path of maturity as it applies to artificial intelligence, automation and intelligence in the workflow. Uh, all of these things that are conflating to really drive the reshaping or re-architecting of work that I was talking about.

And the current paradox that the workforce is undergoing is that every half year skills are changing. And even, even as they change for that period of time, which is about six months, a lot of those skills are still necessary and useful. So, this paradox of change puts skills in flux and how we train the workforce historically as we front load them with learning, and then we expect them to take that front load of learning into action in the workplace.

And with so much change happening and going on, that’s just really not sustainable anymore. So, what we’re saying in this article is, look, here are six actions that we recommend you take to make sure not only are you rewiring your workforce, but you’re rewiring your business as well and we think these are really important actions to take to, uh, prepare for the age of AI and ensure that you are ready as the new era of work changes.

Sylvie Milverton
And, uh, you also speak about, um, AI as a workplace transformation rather than simply a technological one. And I suppose, I mean, it makes sense if we’re talking about like how work gets done, but you know, more concrete, like what, what is the difference with the technological change of AI? That, that it’s more than just new skills and new tools, but it’s like so fundamental, um, that it’s like the biggest like transformation that we’ll all go through.

Brandon Carson
Here’s the thing. Yes. This is not technology. AI is not just technology. It is wholesale transformation. That’s what it’s bringing to the workplace and also to our lives. If you think about it, we’ve always undergone transformation, though. I mean, it’s not new to humans. The acceleration and exponential advancement of this one is unique.

In that, if you think about it, it took the telephone over 80 years to become ubiquitous. It took the internet about 40 years for us to wire almost the entire globe on the internet. We sold a million palm pilots in six months, but guess what? We sold a million iPhones in 24 hours. And then, as we all know, when ChatGPT was released, we got to a hundred million users in just three months.

And so, you’ve seen this, uh, rapid acceleration of general-purpose technology, and, and humans usually accelerate their, um, connection to general purpose technologies when it does actually improve their life or impact, impact their life positively.

And so, what we’re seeing with this transformation is, um, it’s completely rearchitecting how we think about work, and a lot of that’s not necessarily just driven by the acceleration of AI over the last several years. A lot of it is also driven by going through the recent pandemic and rethinking what we want from work and what we want work to mean to us, and we have that opportunity in this short window of time.

To make those declarations and you see we’re having those conversations. Uh, between employer and employee on those basic fundamentals of work, we hear about return to office and do we wanna, how do we want to conduct work? So, yes, this is a transformation. It’s not just driven by AI, but AI is definitely the accelerant in it and it’s uncomfortable to be in transformation at times.

We must rethink patterns and we have to learn new things and we have a fire hose of those things coming at us, and it just shows the challenges that we face when it comes to the new paradigm shift, right? Of work and everything it means. So, this, this. Exposes. A lot of the vulnerabilities too, in our systems and in our infrastructures in today’s corporate learning functions aren’t really built for radical change and the AI economy.

Tells us that and is showing us that the most important workforce skill is to keep learning new skills. And so, this will more than likely be the single largest job transformation in human history. And we can see that, um, as long as the accelerants are there, as long as LLMs don’t get too commoditized or as long as we can keep building.

Exponentially on what AI means for us, what intelligence in the workplace means for us, then this will impact all jobs and more than likely impact nuances within jobs, the tasks that we do versus the tasks that we have in intelligence do and to augment us as we go through our, our day-to-day work. So yes, I would say this is a transformation, but it isn’t necessarily unlike.

Past transformations we’ve had in the 18 hundreds during the first industrial revolution. You know, we brought machines forward, for example, in construction to help us in building buildings and commercial construction and doing it faster, and it took a lot of those unique, specific craftsmen like skills.

Away from people and they had to learn new skills. And we’ve done that throughout human history. So, the, the challenge for us will be how do we go on this journey in a way that makes the most sense for both. The business and the workforce and our quality of life and those kinds of things, and that’s one reason we talk about this, this as transformation rather than just another technology being integrated into the workplace.

Sylvie Milverton
And I guess, yeah. I love that you say that because I feel like there’s such cliches. I mean, part of it is true, like the speed of transformation, like unprecedented speed of change, which if you watch a video from, you know, 1980, they say to 1990, they say now, and it’s true, like when we look at the uptake, as you said, like of ChatGPT, certain things are going faster, but certain transformations like this is just like at, you know, as technology evolves, we, you know, need to learn new things, which shows, given that this one is going fast, you know how important it is for learning leaders. Um, and I’m wondering why do you bring up this idea of the difference between like AI literacy and AI fluency? Um, why was that important to like, think about that difference and, you know, getting it, it, um, integrated into an organization?

Brandon Carson
Yeah, it’s really, I mean, it’s a really good question, Sylvie, the, here, here’s the bottom line. We are, you know, working really it assertively, if you want the word I’m looking for. CEOs and executives are assertively integrating intelligence into the workplace because they’re seeking two things from their massive investments that they’re making in automation and intelligence in the workplace.

And they’re going to seek a return on that as quickly as they can. And so, there’s, if you ask any CEO, they’re really focused on productivity and efficiency in the work now to get to gain those returns from the investment they’re making. And what we’re saying is, let’s take the workforce. On this journey as well, so that we can build the, the literacy, the AI literacy if you will, so that the maximum optimization and return can be had on what, you know, what the strategies are that are being formulated, uh, to, to use this, um, investment, if you will, in the right ways that the companies are making.

So, companies are investing heavily. And that is not at parody though with their investment in skilling the workforce. And so, what we have to do is make sure that the tension between those two, you know, doesn’t, uh, doesn’t result in that lack of return, if you will, because although you think about, oh, we’re gonna bring a lot of automation and, and intelligence into the, into the workplace.

The actual workforce still needs to be kind of that, what we call that human in the loop, right? We have humans in the loop here who will need to work with it and maximize its potential. And we do know though that the difference isn’t the technology, it’s the foundation of AI literacy that will enable the innovation that comes out of all of this intelligence and automation bringing into the, or coming into the work workplace.

So, but if you really look at it, only 4% of companies that are investing in intelligence in the workplace and, and automated systems and AI in the workplace. Only 4% of them are developing AI capabilities that themselves are generating business value. So, if you look at gen AI, as those tools become increasingly accessible to the workforce, the greatest threat isn’t, you know, malicious actors operating, you know, on their own.

That is a threat, but the but the bigger threat is a workforce. That early adopts or gets creative with this, this, um, with these tools and without adequate knowledge or guardrails, starts using it. And we’ve seen that in, in some early examples. There’s a law firm that, you know, we’ve all heard about the several lawyers used ChatGPT.

In creating some of it, some of their arguments that they actually submitted into court, and it was discovered that they had used ChatGPT on all of that, which, you know, as we know, AI in its current state, especially gen AI in its current state, can still hallucinate or not everything is, is accurate and it was actually citing cases that didn’t exist in those types of things.

So, every company needs to take their workforce on the journey from AI literacy to AI fluency. And they also need governance built around, uh, their AI systems that they bring into the, into the workplace. So, what we’re saying is a robust foundation for success in integrating AI into the workplace requires you to also develop core competencies and clear oversight structures for your, for your workplace and your workforce. And that AI literacy will equip employees with the essential knowledge to interact safely with AI.

Sylvie Milverton
Mm-hmm. And then, yeah, and then that thinking of L&D as like the, you know, ideal function in a company like playing a critical role. Um, you know, in driving all these things. Because as you say, the first step, it’s like using it in your own job, but then thinking even, you know, about business, um, development strategy.

And another thing I like in your article. It’s also like how can learn the chief learning officer or the learning function like be this aligning, you know, you have one like align training solutions with business development strategy, consolidate scattered initiatives under strategic alignment and governance.

Like do you see this difference? like that, now the learning officer can have a different role in somehow bringing this together and I mean different, even like if I think great resignation and other recent times when like HR and learning is so critical to, to business success. Like how do you see this sort of alignment and consolidation role now?

Brandon Carson
Yeah, I think it’s a great opportunity for the executives at companies to really look across their enterprise and take a broader kind of click up view, if you will, of how they need to become a learning company overall because like I said earlier, the, the key skill in this era is to keep learning new skills.

And so how do you take your HR and learning function from a somewhat transactional, uh, activity based, cost center model, operating model to one that really focuses on the broader view of driving competitive advantage in the workforce. And so, I, and, and you know, those, and that can sound a little jargony in some respect, but what it says is that the.

It’s no longer really about job task training and a lot of learning organizations are set up to drive job task training, uh, which will be democratized and federated more when you have an agentic system that will be integrated into the work to augment performance support in that moment of need. That’s, that’s really will.

That, that really is what will be a powerful driver of productivity and efficiency and innovation in a lot of respects, uh, in the workforce as they’re doing their work. We’ve talked about embedding, learning into the flow of the work for years. The problem with that is HR in L&D have always looked at.

That as an overlay to the existing work structures of both physical and digital work structures. And what we’ve done is we’ve gone into these work structures regardless of whether or not the work structures were really designed appropriately. We’ve just placed an overlay, we call it performance support or you know, whatever names we have for it, but it could be a deficient work system already.

But we have just provided an overlay onto that to provide performance support, job aids, you know, these kinds of things. Or literally shoulder to shoulder, standing there showing people how to do things right? And we’ve called that embedding, learning into the flow of the work. The opportunity we have in front of us though is to more deeply embed learning into the actual work construct itself.

And to help redesign how the work gets done and to have L&D and HR, uh, in that conversation as primary architects of redesigning those work structures for, because what we wanna do, and John Hagel talks about this a lot, a lot of our work constructs are structures, both physical and digital to a large degree.

Are still based on the manufacturing age operating model of kind of, you know, building widgets and like workers are building widgets and they’re doing repeated tasks over and over. Well, automation and intelligence take that away from the humans. So, we have a great opportunity here to move out of supporting a, uh, an outdated and outmoded way of working and way of training people in the work to building in the intelligence into the work systems that motivate the workforce to learn while they’re working and to provide them the augmented support they need. And, and we’ll see a lot of this manifest itself when we get agentic systems integrated into the flow of the work. And that’ll be a first catalyst, if you will, for, for evolving how we align our training solutions with the business outcomes that we need to drive value.

And I really think, and we talk about this in the article, we really do think that, um, this is going to get down to competitive advantage for businesses because businesses with a future ready workforce that are, you know, getting that motivation to learn and are getting that augmented support in the work and are being paired with agents in doing their work and separating tasks and letting humans focus more on the innovative and creative components that will go to competitive advantage because the businesses that do that first will take products to market faster, for example, will build solutions that customers benefit from faster.

And, and that adoption, that rapid adoption speed is going to really, uh, you know, differentiate uh, companies from each other. And so, what we’re saying is similar to back in the day when we had, you know, when Covid was occurring and we realized, oh, our global supply chains. Are very vulnerable to things like pandemics. And, you know, we noticed most of our, all of a sudden, we learned most of our prescriptions, our medicine was, you know, originating from supply chains in China. And when everything shuts down, it’s really hard to get the supply chain moving again. And so, then there was a, an effort to build resilience into supply chains and to rethink supply chains.

And a lot of that work, although it takes a while to do, it, takes several years to do these kinds of things. That work is going to build a moat around a lot of companies so that they can kind of future proof themselves, if you will. You can’t predict disasters at every level, right? But you can, you can do things to help arm yourself for, um, you know, unknown consequences that may happen. What we, we know this is coming and we know this is going to re-architect how work gets done, so let’s rethink the role of the learning leader. Let’s rethink the role of HR in L&D across the enterprise. Realize that they don’t need a seat at the table as my friend Mark Ramos likes to say, they are the table and so, let’s bring them into the right level of discussions as we re-architect work, and then we can build in that augmented support into those actual work constructs and work environments. And so that’s what we’re talking about. When we say it’s really important to align training solutions with the business development strategy, right, and even to consolidate, um, you know how we look at training across the enterprise and there are some companies who are doing this now, the rethinking their HR in L&D functions and elevating them to really drive more of the employee experience. And a part of that is also how work is, uh, designed and rolled out to the workforce.

Sylvie Milverton
Mm-hmm. And I love that. Yeah. That idea. Not a seat at the table, but you know, they are the, the table and this whole idea of like AI is, you know, enhancing performance support, augmented performance support. Like I can really relate, you know, like here I am, like CEO of a startup. Like I’ve never done this job before. Okay. I’m getting good at it. But then I, every day, every day I do the things that I’ve never done before that I don’t really know how to do or that I need help with.

Um, and little by little I’m like, you know, using different AI tools to help me and it just. Actually, a joy to have, you know, assistance to do just certain tasks or to think through like, what is the outcome I want of this thing? Or what’s this technical thing I have to do? Or how could I even approach this problem? Or, you know, without having to like, you know, call someone or look on LinkedIn or who else do I know and organize a call. And it’s definitely made me be able to learn things faster. So, I definitely see the vision you have of like, you know how you can use these tools and, you know, kind of create that environment where people know where to go and that we’re, you know, putting a structure around, you know, that kind of, um, that kind of support.

Uh, it’s actually like super exciting. And I’m wondering, you know, we’re talking about like the change role, the CLL, so like what about you? Like, okay, you’re now working on a, a tech provider, so it’s, you know, different maybe than working in some of the, um, you know, Walmart or Starbucks, but still, like, what are you like doing differently now in your job than you did five years ago? Um, you know, even just maybe in the past few months, like how are, how has this impacted your day to day?

Brandon Carson
Yeah, I love that. Uh. Question what? I started my career in Silicon Valley and as the internet was rising, right, and the internet was becoming what it became, and it, it was another one of those inflection points candidly, uh, where we knew everything about work was going to change. We were looking at, I mean, it was like the Wild West in some regard. I was in Silicon Valley during this time. It was very heady. Times. And, but we knew that the change was going to bring about, you know, transformational, uh, shifts, if you will. And, and look what’s happened in the last, you know. Almost 30 years with that. Right.

And it’s, it’s pretty wild. And I was involved in tech back in the, you know, back in those days in Silicon Valley and worked for tech companies primarily because that’s, you know, that’s who was hiring me at the time because there was so much growth going on. And then I went more into just the larger corporate world for, um. You know, the after that and spent a lot of time navigating the complexities and complications of work in some of the world’s largest companies. Right. As it as it was evolving, you know, and, and we have to understand too, the impacts of these changes over the last 20 to 30 years. It’s not like, oh, some change happens and then everything is fine, and then you go along for a while until another change coming comes candidly It’s like this change has been consistent and concurrent, and so it’s, it’s really, it’s really challenging when you have, like I mentioned earlier, a lot of these larger corporations have had real challenges in updating their infrastructure and gaining the right investment areas and taking risks where, you know, in some regard, I remember back in the day, we were thinking, well, will the internet really be good for training?

I, you know, the bandwidth problem? You know, so sometimes you have to take risks and sometimes they don’t work out and then, but a lot of times they do. Right? And then you have that, uh, competitive advantage that we talk a lot about. So, it. It’s, uh, I navigated that complexity and those complications, but I really had a desire to get back into tech, especially Ed Tech, which is, there’s so much going on in this space right now, which is mapping the future, and, and then work with companies to help them on the journey to transformation that candidly, every company is going is on this journey. They have different levels of maturity on the journey. They have different levels of needs, and obviously all contexts are different. So, in this role, I get to work with our customers in our potential customers on helping them define what their unique journey is to, drive the transformation that’s occurring in the work. And it’s interesting having been in this career for 20 plus years, almost 25 years now, I’ll say, like I said earlier, this is the toughest time to be in this practice, but it’s also one of the most magical times because there’s just so much promise that can be, uh, brought by a lot of this technology that’s happening and the transformation it’s bringing.

Because if you think about it, people who look back on this time, 50 years from now, a hundred years from now, they’re going to look at us and go, wow, that was pretty wild that humans did that kinda work for so long. And then automation took a lot of that toil and trouble away from them so that they could focus on solving the bigger challenges, you know, climate change and cancer and all of these things that humanity really needs to solve. And so, I’m excited about it, getting back into this space where I can, uh, work with multiple clients, lots of our clients, on helping them through their journey. Uh to their, their transformation. And it was fine when I was the CLO or the learning leader at these other companies working through our own context but I’m really excited now about how we are building. We’re constructing what we call AF first learning platform and helping our companies, our customers, redefine what it means to be a learning company in today’s age.

Sylvie Milverton
Oh, that’s amazing. Yeah. And um, yeah, it is. I find it the same thing. It’s like super exciting and inspiring to work on these problems. Um, yeah. Now in this critical time, yeah, it’ll be interesting what our, what our kids think later, um, what we had built. Um, and so what, what are your favorite, like one or two, like AI tools, uh, or different hacks that you use in your day-to-day? You who are very techie and walk around with multiple iPads and phones and other in your day to day?

Brandon Carson
And sadly enough, I have like three phones. I have the RayBan Smart glasses. I just go, to love because you can just be looking at something and ask it what it is. I mean, I love this sort of overlay onto my physical world of this technology that supports me in the moment, but it doesn’t kind of overload you, you know, and that candidly, this, I’m addicted to my phone and so I’m trying to wean myself off of that a bit. Um, but the tools are really great. When you think about what’s available to you, I do a lot of time, a lot. I spend a lot of my time writing. I create content, um, creating presentations, for example, or sharing information. Like we’re doing here. And it’s kind of funny on that article I was talking about that we submitted, we submitted it to the, uh, editor and it’s kind of funny, one of the comments that came back said, well, I wanna, I wanna change these two lines because it just sounds like AI wrote it.

I laughed when I got that edit back because I’m like, AI didn’t write any of this article, but like what impact is AI having on us when some of us think that, oh, that sounds like AI wrote it. Right? And so, I. It’s, it’s, we’re in an interesting time right now where, where we’re integrating a lot of tools into how we work now and exploring and discovering and figuring things out. Um, but these AI assistants are lovely because you can brainstorm with them and you can have conversation with them. And now that they’re, they have memory, they can remember who you are, they get to know you in your context. And then you think about when the when the age agentic systems really come forward to help us with multiple tasks and doing things, and they get to know us individually, that’s going to have a significant impact on leadership development and how we, how we build leadership capability across organizations and stuff like that. It really is going to be the manifestation of hyper individualized care and attention and learning and conversation and back and forth. So, I’m using those, you know, the Gen AI assistant, Claude’s one of my favorites. Um, but I, I have yet to do too much writing with them, I’m asking them basic questions, but if I go into writing mode, I’m still kind of old school where I just bring up my word processor.

Sylvie Milverton
I think writing requires like some level of soul, but I don’t know. I haven’t yet felt it from AI one until I started using, I use perplexity a lot, especially I keep, I have done a lot of Excel. Um, I dunno. What are the different metrics for knowing like when your startup has fully succeeded. My one will be when I am hired someone to do the Excels instead of me. Um, but so I use perplexity to figure out all these really complicated formulas that I don’t remember or ever knew how to do it. It’s super helps. Um, and another one I like is called fixer.ai, where it like manages my inbox for me. It really helps organizes and drafts and, I mean, I still write the mails obviously, but it kind of keeps me, keeps me organized. Um, so those, those are a few.

Brandon Carson
I love that one too. And if you think about it, if we were to probably list the biggest scourge of the last 30, 40 years, right? In the workplace, it might be email because I can remember Sylvie life before email in the workplace, and I remember the first time I saw it when my boss. Showed it to me. She’s like, you’ve gotta look at this thing and this is fantastic. It’s called CC mail. We can literally email people and, and work. And I’m like, and it was amazing. We were like, wow. But now look at the load that it, we spend on average 37% of our workdays in email and 50% of our work is our workday is spent in meetings and email when you think about it, right? And so has that given us what we really need and if AI and if agent systems can help us with that. Hallelujah. I’m all over that.

Sylvie Milverton
Right, exactly. I guess it’s better than when we used to write a, what? A, a mimeograph. Mimeograph thing that you’d have to mail. Mail around. Um, now Brendon, this has been such a pleasure and you have so many smart ideas and I love reading your article. So, if other people wanna find it, where do you recommend that they go? We’ll also link in the show notes, of course.

Brandon Carson
Yeah, right now it’s being published. Like I said, it’s a seven-part series. The first part is out. Now it’s being published by ATD Association for Talent Development in their ATD Talent Development Leader blog. And so, you’ll link to it, but if you just go to td.org and uh, you can search for the AI powered workforce, a CEO’s roadmap to competitive advantage. Not an easy title, but the AI powered workforce, a CEO’s roadmap to Competitive Advantage. You’ll find the article there and obviously it’s free for everyone to look at, and we’ll have subsequent posts for the six actions we recommend, uh, on a three-week cadence. So, bookmark it and you’ll get to see when the, uh. Articles all come out.

Sylvie Milverton
Amazing. Well, thank you so much.

Brandon Carson
Thank you. It’s great talking to you.

Sylvie Milverton
Thanks for listening to this episode of Talent Is Everywhere. Make sure to subscribe if you like what you heard, and give us a follow-on LinkedIn to continue the conversation on all things career mobility and talent development. Is there a topic you’d love for us to cover in a future episode or a guest you’d recommend?

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