Full Transcript for Scaling Genius, Not Replacing It: Redesigning Work for the AI Era

artificial intelligence and you know, artificial intelligence, ironically, has been around for decades, many, many years, right? I can say, you know, more than a decade ago when I was working at Google, I mean, we were talking about machine learning, artificial intelligence, all these things. So but in certain industries and certain organizations, it's always existed. What has changed is that three years ago it's become open source, it's become open to everybody. And so there's always been this misnomer. Nomer that you have to be some sort of techie or technology like tech savvy or truly be some sort of coder or builder or engineer in order to be able to leverage the AI. And that's the furthest thing from the truth. And so getting people to understand that you don't have to be the techie or have some sort of you know computer science degree to leverage AI, you know, getting them to feel comfortable and having a safe space to start to test and learn is you know how you help the human. Believe that they can start to adopt AI and use it in different ways. And so, so it's really starting to how do you create that safe space to allow people to test and learn? And you know, ironically, you know, about borrowing from my you know previous wearing my previous hats, when you think about diversity and inclusion and all of these things, it's the psychological safety of feeling safe to be able to reinvent the way you work. and what I love to say is that part of it too is this identity box. Bottleneck, right? The identity piece of I'm not a techie, or I've been always taught, which is this is a new one that we're starting to see come out quite a bit because it's a it's more hidden, it's more subconscious, because we have these deep grooves over the course of 10, 20, 30, you know, 30 years working in in your careers that Effort equals success. So there's these conditioned beliefs and cultural norms, right? I can say as a Latina, as a female, I was I've always been taught you have to put your head down, work twice as hard to get half as far. And so for me, working hard was what I would pride myself on, is that I was first one in, last one out, I would burn the midnight oil, I was really kind of grinding and and doing the work and success, there was a level of sacrifice, you know, for success, and you get rewarded for all those things. But the reality is when you start to use AI and it feels a little auto-magical and all of a sudden what used to take you three hours, you get it done in ten minutes, you start to question subconsciously, wait a minute, effort equals success. using AI felt effortless. So then you start to question your worth and you're like, okay, if this is effortless, it's not gonna equal success. And so you fall into this thing of like, there's something wrong here. I don't trust it. I'm not going to use it. And so that's why we're seeing high levels of hey, companies really investing in the AI, but then you have less than 40%, 30% of your people

actually adopting it because they're so used to this effort equals success equation. So it's helping them reinvent themselves and Adopt a new equation. So pre-AI, effort equals success. Post-AI, it's impact equals success. How can you have more impact with the tool? And so those are some of the things that are breaking down of this identity bottleneck and people not seeing themselves use the AI. And then the other is the managers not creating the safe space for people to be able to break things and to maybe reinvent the way that they did work. And part of it is, you know, we hear many. the organizations we work with. We work with large enterprise, small, companies, small private equity firms. And sometimes we hear the leader saying, we don't have time. I still have to make my numbers. We still have quarterly, quarterly reports and KPIs that we have to meet. And so why break what's broken, right? Like if it's not broken, why are we going to go fix it? And the reality is is because there's going to be another organization, another team, another leader who is taking two steps back, slowing down to reinvent the workflow and introduce AI, then they're going to leapfrog you. and when I say leapfrog you, it's by, you know, it's just like 10x, leapfrog you because they're using the AI to produce more and you know, if they do it right, higher quality, more impactful outputs. And so we're trying to get it to the point where leaders understand that yes, it may feel like you're slowing things down and reinventing workflows and and going slow for a bit to allow people to test and learn and pivot and realize that you know what what works and what doesn't to to leapfrog. And so sometimes we call those leaders guardians on, you know. We have a proprietary diagnostic that puts people in four different, archetypes. And those are the guardians who are like they know that they need to use AI, but they're afraid to break something, they're afraid to slow down, and they feel like they don't have time to reinvent. And then you have sometimes what we call these pioneers who are taking the AI and they're kind of just like throwing the AI on top of their current workflows. But if there's flaws in those workflows, you're just gonna exacerbate those flaws. And so it's getting them to say slow down a little bit. It and say what risk are you introducing? How do you like it's great that you want to adopt it, but let's let's you know slow it down a little bit and become what we call orchestrators or agentic humans? How are you, you know, thinking somewhat, you know, AI first, but always having judgment in the loop and human in the loop. And so that's where we're seeing kind of middle managers being the bottleneck themselves of, you know, being the guardians. And then, you know, when we really start to think about you know, the AI and the tools, it's it's a little bit of getting to understand that The technology is not the issue. the technology is fantastic, but you have to drive the technology, you have to inform the technology, and so that's where your contextual knowledge and a lot of people are so worried, like I'm gonna lose my critical thinking, or you know, people are gonna forget how to think for themselves. And but the irony is that the output. only gets better with your contextual knowledge, with your expertise and all of those things. So training the AI to think like you, to understand your frameworks and your decision frameworks and what's right and the contextual knowledge is really what's gonna help people get ahead. So we're seeing a lot of those things where people aren't bringing the context or they're not giving the AI the context in order to take the artificial generic you know intelligence that the outputs it gives to turn it into truly authentic intelligence. And that's where the human comes in, where the judgment, the discernment, the taste, right? The preferences, the taste, then kind of really starts to create this amazing output that nobody else can create because the the fingerprint of the individual is actually put into the work. And so that's where we're seeing people not really pulling those levers. And when they kind of put it all together, it just like there's this aha moment and this like imagination unlock that happens that we see that we love to see with with the people we work with where they truly become agentic humans. They become people squared. It's almost the old adage where, I don't know if you ever said this, but it's just like I wish I could be in two places at once, or I could clone myself. The reality is you almost actually can, right? You can have digital versions of yourself working on different tasks at the same time, and that you are kind of coming in just doing the high-level thinking strategy and bringing in that contemporary. Yeah. Dr. Sara Ashwood: Absolutely. There's so many workflows and things that you can set up that are working. Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: Yes, yes. Dr. Sara Ashwood: I have certain workflows that for myself work four times a day. They Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: Yeah. Dr. Sara Ashwood: run and I get notified once it's run. I get, action items that come out of it, drafts, and then I can literally go in at any point and I obviously I review everything, but I add, I think about it, I like you know, but I've trained it or I've set it up in a way that it is running regardless if I'm sleeping or if I'm in a meeting Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: Yeah. Dr. Sara Ashwood: or we're shooting the podcast, it will run. So absolutely. And I and I I think just to kind of bring it back a little bit, you know, we talked about this a little bit earlier. You know, we sometimes in organizations will give someone access to a chat GPT, a co-pilot or another AI tool, but we're not necessarily changing that the way they work. Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: Yes, you're exactly Dr. Sara Ashwood: So Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: right. And that's what's

happening. I mean, what we've seen with a lot of organizations that we've run, and you know, I was in people management, talent, the people space, talent management, for more than two and a half decades in in my career. And we what we're seeing now is, you know, a lot of my peers and my, you know, my colleagues who are, you know, holding leadership roles like CHRO or head of talent or head of leader, you know, L and D and things like that are coming to me saying, What is going on? We've rolled out, they all have access to these tools. But we are seeing really low adoption rates, what's happening. And we treated it like, many of them treated it like it was this IT rollout, like IT's just rolling out, everybody's getting a new laptop, right? And they're gonna just you know subconsciously know how to use this laptop. the technology, artificial intelligence is very, very different. you can't just, you have to direct this tool opposed to the tool directing you and you just, punching a few keys and getting something. It's like you truly have to, almost treat it like a a a some sort of being, right? It's like there's a human being and then there's the hu the doing, right? The the tool is doing, but you have to direct it. And so I the best kind of way where I try to get people to shift their mindset is like treat your AI tool like it is this brand new intern. And you know, and it is a brilliant intern from an Ivy League school that can like is super super smart. But unless you kind of guide it and and teach it, you know, and give it the contextual knowledge and do a transfer of knowledge from you to them and they learning from your experience and your mistakes, you have to treat your AI in the same way. And what's happening is we see a lot of people who will, are a bit jaded. They're like, no, I tried AI, I tried Chat GPT when it first came out and it was horrible. It hallucinated, it did all these wrong things. And it was just like, yes, but it has advanced dramatically from like the first, you know, the first rollouts, the first models that came out to now, where you know, it's 80% right, you know, 90% right. and actually probably. more right than you are as a human. there's always human error. we probably are making more mistakes than the AI is now. And so it's, you know, really kind of getting them to understand that you need to really truly become a practitioner, kind of get under the hood and under and kick the tires and and then tell it when it's wrong, no, you're wrong. And it'll it'll self-correct. Like this is an intern who's gonna remember everything that you tell it and course correct and course correct and course correct till you Can tell it this is good, right? And so we tell a lot of people sometimes start with the intern and say, hey, this report, this is good, this is great, this is what I want you to produce. Let's reverse engineer what it is that you need, you know, what you need from me in order to produce this great output. That's what you have to do with the AI. And I don't think people understand it. It's not it's not just this, you know, intuitive, you know, way of working with technology. And so we're telling people you have to truly reinvent the way that you do. And until you start to play around with it, you're not gonna understand. I mean, my background educationally it was is in higher ed. and it was more adult learning, you know, just this whole student development theory, how do we learn? And but I also go back to you know. In college, you remember being in lecture and hearing the theory and listening to the lecture, like, okay, I understand it in theory, but it's not until you got into the lab that you you know mixed the two things together and you had this reaction or this, you know, that this this thing that it clicked for you. I feel like AI is the same way. You have to give people permission, you have to give them this lab where they can experiment and test and learn, and then they have the aha moment when things click and they get the they get the you know reaction where the two things connect. And then they start to realize how much more they can do with it. Dr. Sara Ashwood: Mm. But then when it is introduced, how should a leader then decide what part of a role AI should handle, what should actually be redesigned, and what should Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: Mm-hmm. Dr. Sara Ashwood: remain distinctly human? Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: And that's and that's the the the hard part, right? It is a little bit of test and learn of it's it's really thinking, taking a workflow and and in some cases The real unlock is strategizing and using the AI to kind of break this down with you. I mean, you know, you can create a really great thinking partner with AI and have it poke holes in what you think is is good. And many times it's just having a conversation, you know, with AI of using the microphone. And I encourage people to truly, you know, we edit when we type. Like when we t type, we're constantly editing and we lose a lot of context. I'm constantly People think I'm talk I'm I'm having a meeting and I'm really just talking with my AI because I'm giving it the context and really saying, hey I'm thinking about, how do I how do I do this task much more efficiently? Here's what I normally do. I usually go here, pull these resources from here, I pull this data from here, I synthesize it, I will, you know, spend a little bit of time doing this. I have to clean up the data, I have to do all of this, and then ultimately I have time to then look at trends, blah blah blah, whatever it is. But almost tell it soup to nuts, what do you do? and how can I improve on that? And where where are my blind spots? Where where what am I like not? doing enough of and it'll tell you here's here's how you can rework it. Here's I can get all this stuff for you and then you can focus on this. And so sometimes it's pulling your team together and almost kind of like brainstorming and

whiteboarding, but bringing the AI in to help you all understand where are those, you know, where are those kind of those those holes. And you'll start to see where you've seen in the headlines, right? Like right now you're seeing Goldman Sachs is pulling clod from all their investment bankers. But here's What people are missing. They gave the bankers a a blank slate to play and to start building tools and vibe coding and all of these things. And now they're like, okay, we need guardrails, we need security, you know, there's we want to make sure proprietary information, all of this stuff. But now what the engineers are doing is saying, What did they build? And they built what they needed. So now let's build it in the right way and give them the tools that they needed. But The engineers or the IT teams didn't know what the bankers needed. Only the bankers knew what they needed. But when they had time to play and start like, here's what I really would like, then it's like, okay, now let's build it. Let's reverse engineer and take what it is that you wanted and we can build something you need. Now they had a case study. They had like this, you know, they had a reference point or a benchmark to say I'm informed now, I'm a more educated kind of investment banker of like what could AI actually do for me now help me turn on her turn on these things and connect them in the right way so that we can have better work. So you do have to give people a little bit of agency and a little bit of room to play. In order to, in order to truly understand what is capable. Because if they have a limited frame of reference, it's like having a Lamborghini but never getting it out of second gear. and yes, you'll go you'll go from A to B, but not as fast as you could, or not as, you know, great of a ride as you could, right? Dr. Sara Ashwood: Mm-hmm. And but then what changes for an experienced employee that spend maybe fifteen to twenty years becoming excellent at something and, mastering their abilities or their skills, they suddenly hear that AI can do part of their job. Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: Yes. Dr. Sara Ashwood: So how do you generally see employees react or respond when they somebody has put the time in and has this level of mastery, but now they're being quote unquote replaced, part of their job is being replaced Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: Mm-hmm. Dr. Sara Ashwood: by AI. Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: Yeah. And that's where I tell them to step back because this is where our ego and our identity are getting in the way, right? because we've been taught all along and we've been rewarded all along. By effort equals success. And so yes, you may be this expert in subject matter expert in something, but we all have been there, right? It was just like, ugh, I hate this part of my job. if I could like and and we've done it in reality where you bring in these junior people or interns or whatever and you pass off this work, but you you can't just not do the work. The work has to get done and you have to make sure that it's done at you know at a high caliber. But if you could pass this piece off, you You would pass it off so that you could focus, you pass off the $10 task so you can focus on the $10 million task. AI can actually be the tool that does all the $10 tasks or the things that drained you that you don't want. And it's just like it's not gonna replace you, it's actually gonna liberate you. It's gonna release some capacity so that you can actually start to build or use the muscle that you have and build it so that it can actually elevate you and augment your intelligence. And so that's where we start to get them to understand of like AI is not gonna replace you. What you need to do is think about the AI as a tool that's gonna liberate you. and do the things that truly drain you and really start to think about what are the pain points like in a day-to-day workflow, what are the things that I love the output, and I love to go get on stage and talk about the output, but getting to the point where I can take the presentation and go give it to my client is painful. Well those painful parts can actually be delegated or done it much more efficiently with AI. So getting them to understand that it's not replacing them because at the end of the day, AI is not table stakes. Everybody could, you know, tell AI go create this deck for me. But it's going to be like tap water, right? Everybody has this tap water. And you start to see that there's all these bottles of water, but people are buying this one because it's been packaged differently, because there's been some essence added to it. There's been some taste and some different things added to it. And I like to say because I'm Latina, agua fresca, I've turned it into I've added watermelon and fruits and all these things to it. That my glass of water looks very different than this person's, and they're gonna want and trust this one more because of the authenticity I brought with it. It doesn't look like all the other, bottles of water out there. So that's what we try to tell people is that it's the that human creativity, your taste, your contextual knowledge, your lived experience, all of these things where you can take that artificial intelligence and make it authentic intelligence. That is where when some leaders start to realize that they can. Take their secret sauce and amplify that, then they start to have this, okay, I understand what you're saying now, it's it's not going to replace me, but it's actually going to help me be better. and so that's where we start to get to people to you know to get away from the the idea that like it's it's gonna replace me. It's like, no, it's gonna do all the things you never wanted to do that you don't want to do, and it's gonna liberate you to do do more. Dr. Sara Ashwood: Yeah. And what work do you believe should stay deeply human even as AI becomes more capable? Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: I think it's

definitely the the strategy like the the strategy work, the the judgment work, the even the curiosity piece too, right? You can you can really start to start to think bigger. The what ifs the things that I tell people like you're not giving AI hard enough problems. you know you're you're giving it the old the old things that you like here's what we have this is what we do but we do it because we've always had this human capacity limitation. Now if you could remove that capacity it's almost kind of like It's almost like when you tell people if money wasn't an object, what would you do? Right? If you know if you had a if you picked a career follow your passion, realize your dreams or dream bigger, if you didn't have that constraint, what would you do? And that's what we try to tell people. If you had no constraints and no headcount constraints, and you what would you want to deliver to your clients? And Reverse engineer that because if you start to leverage AI in the right way, you may be able to start to realize and do that for your clients. So getting them to kind of think, you know, the old adage of thinking outside the box of like, you know, think outside the machine. It's just like, you know, start to realize some of those things that were on the back burner, like, That's something we wanted to do, but we put it on the back burner because that was a pie in the sky idea. What we're starting to see is that some of these pie in the sky ideas are actually much more realistic when you start to leverage AI to get you there. and so Dr. Sara Ashwood: Mm-hmm. Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: I use AI like a thinking partner all the time of like what if. And and that's what we're seeing is that you know, now some of these what ifs are are coming to reality. And so it's getting people to start to realize, like, my god, I could build one more thing. I could do, and so that's where we're starting to get scope. creep right where people are starting to feel so unleashed that almost they're getting burned out because they're doing more than they ever have done before but there's a level of excitement and kind of drive and like this kid in a candy store type of thing that we're starting to have to tell people whoa like let's you know like now you know don't don't lose control of the car you know because you're going too too fast. Dr. Sara Ashwood: And what do you think the best leaders will understand about AI and people three years from now that many leaders still miss from today? Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: I think that the, that leaders don't realize that the, I would say the the best techno the best technology in the world is still the human brain and the human mind, right? and so humans are at the core. you know, and I try to tell people that like, yes, it sounds all great, like AI, bells and whistles, we're gonna get all of these, you know, tools to do the thing, but that is where, you know, it will become like a lot of the same if you aren't leveraging the human to take that artificial and turn it into something authentic. And so I think that, you know, it comes back down to the thought, the the the diversity of thought, the the diversity of the human mind and the the diversity of the human perspective is what's going to, you know, really take your product or your output to the next level and really distinguish your work from the others, right? So you may have somebody who is going to like, you're always gonna have, you know, we come from talent, right? People, you're gonna have all kinds of people, some who are gonna coast, some who are just gonna, you know, lob it over and you we're already starting to hear about it, right? The work slop or the They're just taking the output and not doing anything to it. Well, the people and the high performers who are gonna get, you know, who are going to kind of distinguish themselves from it are the ones who are going to use the most unique human qualities to make their work more authentic. and so that's where we're gonna tell leaders, you know, three years from now they're gonna realize that it is those people who don't lose that curiosity and the creativity and really the hunger to keep learning and to keep. evolving and reinventing are the ones who we're going to see are the ones who are going to be really coveted. Those are the people that that you're gonna the talent that you're gonna want to really tap into. Dr. Sara Ashwood: Now before we wrap up, where can listeners learn more about you and Flipwork? Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: Yeah, so you can always go to flipwork.ai. You can learn more about what our company does. For myself personally, my website is themonicamarquez.com and I have a weekly newsletter. It's called Ay Ay Ay AI. And and part of it is because you know as this AI kind of like wave started happening, I've always been a very curious person and always kind of early adopter and trying to understand like how is this gonna impact you know and and how can it really the through line is always how can you really you know pull. out the the success for people how can you help really amplify people's you know success and so I remember talking to my family about it and you know going and visiting my grandmother and you know she's 96 and talking about it and when I was talking about AI she was like you know aye aye aye and I was like my god that's that's exact like that's the perfect name because people are overwhelmed by it so my newsletter comes out weekly every Sunday and it tries to be very practical of like how can you start to To really start to take AI and do one thing that week that can help you realize, what it can do for you. So I share workflows, tools, insights, things like that to really help people move along. But you can always connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm really good about, you know, following up with people and responding to DMs as well. Dr. Sara Ashwood: Awesome. I'll definitely sign up for your your newsletter and use those workflows. And I think it's it's such a great opportunity, even as somebody who constantly uses it. There's always different ways of thinking and different ways to use it that I haven't Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: yeah. Dr. Sara Ashwood: thought of as well. So Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: I I can't tell you for me, I I it's just every day I'm in like in awe of my god, I can do this now. I could there were so many things that ideas where you felt blocked because you're like, I I don't have that tech, that in that that I don't know how to do this. Now there's ways of like figuring out how to do it and getting it 80% there. And then yeah, I still go to the expert to say, hey, this is what I brought it this far. I brought my idea to realization. How can you help me? make make sure that it is sound. but yeah I use every single tool. You know, I don't just use one platform. I've realized too that each platform has its own zone of genius, right? Chat GPT is really good at, you know, logic and certain things. Claude is really good at, you know, learning design and and curriculum design and different things. Perplexity is really great for research. So I'll take output from one and give it to the other and say like poke holes in this and back and forth to make sure that like I'm getting a very holistic, you know, view. But but yes, once you start playing with it, it's just like you have this kind of like aha moment of of like wow, this has really unleashed me. Dr. Sara Ashwood: And Monica, what I'm taking away is that the real opportunity is not to make people disappear from work. It's to make more of what people know and notice and decide usable at scale. Right? But that Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: Yes, absolutely. Dr. Sara Ashwood: yeah, it really only happens though if if leaders are gonna redesign the work and help people see where their value is a moving or evolving and then build that capability. that AI is gonna help strengthen judgment instead of replacing it. Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: Absolutely. You you you nailed it. You summed it up perfectly. Dr. Sara Ashwood: That's exactly, the human side of AI that we want to show and that exists and that we want to explore. Thank you so much for joining me. Monica Marquez, FlipWork, Inc.: Absolutely, and thanks again for sharing your platform.