Now is the time to lean into all that AI has to offer. In the latest installment of Transform Your Workplace, Jennifer Dulski, CEO of Rising Team, shares her perspective on the undeniable impact of AI in today’s workplace. Drawing from her own experience, Jennifer highlights the power of AI when combined with human passion. Although leaders might be hesitant to jump in feet first, embracing AI is the key to maintaining a competitive edge in today’s ever-evolving business landscape.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Jennifer Dulski currently serves as the CEO of Rising Team, a prominent software organization. Jennifer has held executive roles at three of the most influential tech companies—Yahoo, Google, and Facebook. Before her role at Rising Team, Jennifer served as the President of change.org for five years, during which she played a pivotal role in scaling the company from approximately 10 million users to nearly 200 million users globally.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
THE ROLE OF AI IN MODERN LEADERSHIP
According to guest Jennifer Dulski, CEO of Rising Team, AI is nothing less than a transformative force in leadership, specifically when it comes to team management. What simply couldn’t be done in 2020 is now more than possible due to incredible advancements in AI. The exponential growth of AI capabilities, doubling every six months in the past decade, has made these previously unattainable ideas feasible.
Although AI doesn’t have a “soul,” it’s certainly a huge help when it comes to the six leadership principles that Jennifer Dulski considers essential to business success: creating a compelling vision, communicating a clear path to success, coaching each team member to their best performance, competing by delivering effective results, connecting people so they feel like a team, and finally, committing to keep going when things get hard. But to reap these benefits, leaders must embrace AI instead of fearing it.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
AI and Vision
“I originally thought AI wouldn’t really be able to do this because vision is something that has to be unique and differentiated, and a lot of what’s in AI is existing information. So I played around with it. I asked questions like ‘Help me create an inspiring vision statement for a new startup that helps people sleep better.’ It was like 30 seconds… Not only did I have a vision statement, but I had the name of a company. I had a tagline. I had some values. I had a mission statement. It was incredible. And so I think where we’re heading is a real partnership, if you will, because what it can’t do is tell me what I’m personally passionate about, right? Like I can’t say, ‘Come up with a vision for anything.’ I have to pick something I care about and that I want to be working on. And ideally, I have to have a problem that I want to solve and some ideas on how to solve it. And at that point, AI can be an enormous help.”
The Right Combination
“I think the winning formula for leadership going forward is AI plus human connection. So as you point out, AI doesn’t have a heart — at least not yet. I think it’s getting there. […] AI will help us with so much of the rest of what we do today — thinking of ideas, and executing, and coming up with communication, and certainly coding faster, translating faster, writing faster. All of those things. What will be left for leaders to really be great at is empathy and deep trust and connection-building with other human beings. And so the best leaders will be those who are strong at that and know how to leverage AI to help them do everything else.”
AI is for Everyone
“The amazing thing about AI, though, is that you don’t have to be tech-savvy to use it. If I think back on my career and the various changes in technology that we’ve seen in my lifetime and yours — in my lifetime, I’ve seen the dawning of the internet in the first place and then mobile phones and so forth, and for each of those, you needed to be a little bit tech savvy to figure out how to use them in the first place. And then you certainly needed to be tech savvy to build on top of that, like to build a website or to build a mobile app. You essentially had to be an engineer or teach yourself how to code.
AI is completely different because you don’t have to be an engineer to use it. You just need to learn prompting.”
“At Rising Team, I had AI in the vision from the beginning, and I knew that we needed to train the whole team on AI, so we did an AI Bootcamp for everybody on the team — not just engineers, but every function. And then we did an AI Hackathon for three days where people pitched ideas, joined together in teams, and built things. And again, most hackathons in tech historically have been just engineers and designers and maybe product people, but marketing and salespeople and so forth don’t usually participate. In this one, everybody was in, and everybody played a part, and the things that got built were incredible.”
Just Take the Leap
“You don’t have to take a class. Just dip your toe in. Start asking some questions. And then there are a bunch of tools. We used learnprompting.org, which is a free tool that anybody can use to practice and learn how to use it. The magic is in the prompting. When I say you don’t have to be an engineer, it is true that there are technical people required to build the models in the first place. But once the models are available, then anyone can use them. And the key skill is, as you point out, how to ask a good question.”
Broadening the Field of View
“Where AI can be extremely helpful is in helping us think about alternatives because we just don’t have the full suite of possibilities in mind. And it has so much more data than we do. So you can put in the problem, ask AI for the alternatives, and then use the grid with your own data and instinct and your own objectives in mind to make a better decision.”
Riding the AI Wave
“People are scared that AI will take over their jobs and so forth, and there are some jobs that don’t look the same anymore because of AI. There will also be so many new jobs. And so this is the thing for anyone who’s scared of it, including senior leaders: the best way to be unscared is just to get started, get on the yoga mat. […] Imagine what the last year of AI has looked like. You know, we went from no ChatGPT to access to ChatGPT, to all the graphic sites, to now it’s multimodal. People have headphones in their ears where ChatGPT is acting as a therapist. Like we can’t even probably envision the next one to two years, much less the next ten years of this. And so if we aren’t in it using it now, we will be left behind.”
LEARN MORE
Get more info about Rising Team by heading over to their website or connect with Jennifer Dulski, CEO, on LinkedIn.