Are your AI licenses sitting unused? Ready to build AI champions inside your organization? Book a free discovery call with Modern Workery 👉 https://modernworkery.com/book

Most organizations budget for AI licenses. Very few budget for the people who make those licenses worth it. In this episode, Adam and Chevelle make the case for AI champion programs, starting with a lesson from youth football about learning from people who have actually done it. They get into why AI is the hardest rollout Chevelle has seen in 20 years of change management, how to spot the naturally curious people already in your organization, and the two questions every employee asks about AI. They also cover why executives can chart the course but can't answer the how, why so many champion programs stall after launch, and how to make being a champion something people actually want to do. Plus a detour into the best corporate swag they've ever received.

0:00 Welcome and a late night with a new AI tool
1:00 What youth football teaches us about AI adoption
3:00 Why we lean on people we trust
3:50 Why AI is the hardest rollout yet
4:30 Finding AI talent when experts are purple unicorns
5:00 The curious people already in your organization
6:00 Scaling from your cubicle mate to 50 people
7:00 How to spot your champions
8:00 Look in every corner, not just leadership
8:45 Adam's early Copilot experience and generic training
10:00 Corporate jargon detox
10:45 The two questions every employee asks about AI
11:45 Teach them to fish
12:50 The adoption gap and the problem of scale
14:15 Why leaders can't be your only champions
15:15 How the work really gets done vs the SOP
16:45 Why organizations rarely budget for champion programs
18:20 Where to start, and why not to over-engineer it
19:30 Launching is easy, sustaining is hard
20:45 Why champion programs stall
21:45 Keeping champions current as AI keeps changing
22:15 Protect your champions' time and make it easy
23:45 Recognition, certificates, and what champions get in return
25:45 Swag people actually want
28:00 Reward your champions

ABOUT MODERN WORKERY
Modern Workery is a Metro Detroit-based AI adoption and strategy firm and official Microsoft Partner. We help small and midsize businesses roll out AI tools like Microsoft Copilot in a way their people actually use, through strategy, training, and ongoing support.

🌐 Website
https://modernworkery.com

💼 Modern Workery on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/company/modern-workery/

MEET THE HOSTS
Chevelle Bedra, Founder and Principal AI Strategist
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chevellebedra/

Adam Espinosa, Co-Founder and VP of Development and Client Growth
https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamespinosa2019/

LISTEN ON
🎧 Apple Podcasts
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id6798381232

🎧 Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/show/03421I71FQOF81FjIdaacB

🎧 Amazon Music
https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/629d33cb-6b17-43bd-8fd5-cf1d3f60a1f7

#AIAdoption #AIChampions #MicrosoftCopilot #Leadership #claude #Muse #Copilot #AI #Anthropic #OpenAI #ChatGPT #Futureofwork #AIpodcast #Modernworkery

Bought Copilot. Nobody uses it? Modern Workery helps organizations build AI Champion networks and gives champions the practical support to keep adoption moving.

Book a fit call 👉 https://bookings.cloud.microsoft/book/ModernWorkeryDiscoveryCall@ModernWorkery.com/s/3OSHFvPMm0eRGXe97ckzkg2

Turn on the news or scroll social media and AI is either saving the world or ending it. Inside your organization, people feel both. Adam and Chevelle dig into the wonder and the worry of AI, why it hits so much harder than learning a new spreadsheet tool, and why research shows the more people use AI, the less they worry overall and the more specific their concerns become. They share the stories that never make the headlines, from an employee whose work life turned around with Copilot to Microsoft's Seeing AI app to a washer and dryer saga that saved Adam real money. Then they get practical about what leaders can do. Acknowledge real concerns, be clear about your intentions, give people a place to share their AI wins, and walk side by side with your team through the change. That's exactly the kind of local, trusted support a champion network is built to provide.

0:00 Welcome and corporate speak at home

1:40 The wonder and the worry of AI

2:00 Why AI is more emotional than learning Excel

4:20 Work, identity, and the fear of being replaced

7:50 Why we only hear the bad news (the Tesla example)

10:15 Using AI without knowing what a prompt is

11:10 How reactions to AI have evolved

12:15 The more you use AI, the more specific your worries get

13:20 When a networking event turned into a cage match

15:00 Y2K and our history of fearing change

15:50 In the absence of knowledge, we create our own narrative

17:15 "What do you do?" and being seen as part of the problem

18:30 How Copilot changed one employee's work life

20:00 Microsoft Seeing AI and the stories we don't hear

22:00 Adam's washer and dryer Copilot win

23:15 AI as a homework helper for parents 24:50 How leaders can balance worry and wonder

27:30 Don't pile on more work, celebrate the wins

28:15 Walking through the haunted forest together

ABOUT MODERN WORKERY

Modern Workery helps organizations build and empower AI Champion networks. We give leaders a practical operating model and give champions the playbooks, coaching, and ready-to-use resources to help colleagues apply AI to real work. Process first. Small wins first. Then build from there. Practical AI. Real work. Real results.

🌐 Website https://modernworkery.com

💼 Modern Workery on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/modern-workery/

MEET THE HOSTS

Chevelle Bedra, Founder and Principal AI Strategist Chevelle brings experience leading a large enterprise Microsoft Copilot rollout. 77,000 users. 93% adoption. 2 months. https://www.linkedin.com/in/chevellebedra/

Adam Espinosa, Co-Founder and VP of Development and Client Growth https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamespinosa2019/

LISTEN ON

🎧 Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id6798381232

🎧 Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/03421I71FQOF81FjIdaacB

🎧 Amazon Music https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/629d33cb-6b17-43bd-8fd5-cf1d3f60a1f7

#AIChampions #MicrosoftCopilot #Leadership

Episode 8: AI and Kids, What the Classroom Can Teach the Boardroom School is back in session, and so is the debate. Adam and Chevelle open this one on back-to-school stress and end up somewhere bigger: New York City just put a one-year moratorium on AI in K-8 classrooms, affecting roughly 600,000 students, while a small district in Michigan quietly replaced a specials class with digital literacy. Two very different bets on the same question. Along the way, Adam and Chevelle get into cognitive atrophy versus cognitive foreclosure, why banning a tool never actually stops people from using it, and why every argument playing out in schools right now is the same argument playing out in boardrooms. What We Cover [00:01:00] Back to school, and the Copilot use case that saved an hour. Chevelle drops her kids' school calendar into Copilot and gets every date on her calendar in about 20 seconds. [00:02:30] New York City's K-8 AI moratorium. A one-year pause covering the largest school district in the country, with limits on teacher use too, announced days before the school year started. [00:04:30] The other side of the coin. Chevelle's district cut a long-running specials class and replaced it with digital literacy, starting in kindergarten. [00:07:00] Cognitive atrophy vs. cognitive foreclosure. The distinction that should be driving every AI policy conversation: losing a skill you already built vs. never building it at all. Chevelle applies both to org design. [00:09:00] "You won't have a calculator in your pocket." Adam on the technology warning every one of us got in school, and how well it aged. [00:10:30] AI's PR problem. The health teacher who assigned a deliberately strange writing prompt and got back 30 versions of the same Mission Impossible story arc. [00:12:00] The numbers on student adoption. 62% of students middle school and up reported using AI as of December 2025, up from roughly 48% six months earlier, and they're getting more skeptical, not less. [00:13:00] The leadership parallel. Adam asks the uncomfortable question: if credentialed executives are still hesitant to adopt AI, how are parents supposed to teach it? Chevelle's answer: you can't teach what you don't use. [00:17:30] Differentiation and the 30-kid classroom. Why a blanket yes or no misses the kids on both ends of the curve. [00:20:00] Shadow AI, the K-8 edition. The exact dynamic Modern Workery sees in organizations. Ban the tool and people don't stop, they just stop telling you, and they pick worse tools with fewer protections. [00:21:30] A real client story. Sensitive company data going into general-purpose models, and what that costs. [00:22:30] Cognitive scaffolding in practice. Learning through narrative, getting the model to challenge you, and the kid whose math problems all became soccer problems. [00:24:00] What Adam and Chevelle actually tell their own kids. Tool, not crutch. Question everything. Ask for the sources. [00:27:30] The take-home math quiz that broke the AI. Multiple choice, wrong answer, a hallway full of parents the next morning who got the same wrong answer. [00:29:00] Bringing it home. Why the lessons from a group of 10-year-olds transfer cleanly to a group of 40-year-olds, and why the kids are often the easier audience. Favorite Quotes "Just because we ban something doesn't mean that students aren't gonna use it. They're gonna use it, but probably hide it." — Chevelle "You can never teach something that you don't understand yourself." — Chevelle "You're not gonna have a calculator in your pocket throughout life. Well, guess what? We do." — Adam "Use it as a scaffold, as a tool to get you to the answer, not to get you the answer." — Chevelle "Most times it's easier to teach the children than it is to teach adults, because they don't have years and years of programming." — Adam

AI Just Trying My Best — Episode 7: The Claude Watermark Story Hosts:

Adam Espinosa & Chevelle Bedra (Principal AI Strategist, Founder of Modern Workery)

Episode Summary

Claude recently announced it's rolling out watermarks on AI-generated content — and the internet immediately panicked. In this episode, Adam and Chevelle unpack what the watermark actually is (embedded metadata, not a visible stamp), how it connects to the EU AI Act, and why the real issue isn't the watermark itself but the fact that most employees still don't know when and how they're supposed to use AI at work. Along the way: the "Holy AI" road-trip game, AI-generated termination emails, and why nobody wants to be the only one wearing the guardian cap.

Timestamps & Topics

[00:00:00] Cold open and catching up [

00:01:00] The "average user" banter continues

[00:02:00] What is the Claude watermark story?

[00:03:00] How business leaders should respond to the news

[00:04:00] The EU AI Act and the intent behind it

[00:06:00] It's metadata, not a visible watermark — and what it does/doesn't track

[00:07:00] What this means for students, professors, and AI detection tools

[00:08:00] The real disclosure test: "human in the loop"

[00:09:00] Does the EU AI Act actually affect US companies?

[00:10:00] Why the EU tends to regulate AI ahead of the US

[00:12:00] High-risk use cases: hiring, firing, credit decisions

[00:13:00] Why employees hide their AI use (and hide the em dash)

[00:14:00] "Holy AI" — the new car-ride game for spotting AI-made billboards

[00:16:00] A simple framework: AI Expected, AI Supports, Human First

[00:17:00] AI in recruiting and hiring — losing the human touch

[00:18:00] Using AI for "the work around the work," not the work itself

[00:19:00] Why AI adoption stalls when you're the only one using it

[00:20:00] The Guardian Caps analogy: normalizing AI use like NFL concussion protocols [00:21:00] Why fancy AI policies and dashboards aren't enough

[00:22:00] The whiteboard exercise: "Yes AI / No AI"

[00:23:00] A real debate about whether using AI in an email is a bad look

[00:24:00] AI-generated termination emails — happening more than you'd think

[00:25:00] The real solution: common sense, empathy, and good judgment

[00:26:00] Closing thoughts

Key Takeaways

Claude's watermark is embedded metadata in text and images, not a visible tag. It doesn't collect who used it or how much — no personal data is attached. Most current AI legislation doesn't directly impact everyday knowledge workers using tools like Copilot for personal productivity, but it does apply if you interface directly with EU customers or business. The bigger workplace issue isn't legislation — it's that employees don't know what's acceptable, so they either avoid AI or use it and try to hide it.

The disclosure line under emerging regulation centers on "human in the loop": actively reviewing and editing AI output is different from having AI create content unsupervised. High-risk activities to watch: hiring, firing, and credit decisions — places where human judgment and oversight matter most. A simple framework for teams: sort tasks into AI Expected, AI Supports, and Human First.

Adoption sticks when it's the norm across a whole team, not when a few people use AI and feel like outliers (the "Guardian Caps" problem). Skip complicated AI governance decks — a simple whiteboard exercise mapping "Yes AI / No AI" tasks saves more time and confusion.

Notable Quotes

"It's essentially like metadata that's embedded... That's not it. It's actually metadata that's included into the text, and also in the images." — Chevelle Bedra

"If everybody wore the damn guardian caps and were required to use the guardian caps, it wouldn't be a big deal, 'cause everybody would wear them. It just becomes the norm." — Chevelle Bedra

"That's the solution right there: common sense, empathy, and good judgment." — Adam Espinosa

About the Hosts

Adam Espinosa — Co-host of AI Just Trying My Best. Co-Founder or Modern Workery

Chevelle Bedra — Principal AI Strategist and Founder of Modern Workery, helping organizations build practical, human-centered AI adoption strategies.

Ep. 5: AI in Pop Culture, From the Terminator Effect to WALL-E

On this episode of AI'm Just Trying My Best, host Adam Espinosa and Modern Workery founder Chevelle Bedra dig into how pop culture shapes the way people feel about AI, from the doom and gloom of the Terminator effect to the more hopeful robots showing up in Toy Story 5 and Big Hero 6. They talk about why a single sensational headline about an AI "escaping a sandbox" can do more to scare people off than any real risk actually justifies.

Chevelle also shares a powerful story about rolling out Copilot to a neurodivergent employee who went from struggling to communicate to thriving at work, plus why she personifies her own AI tools ("Chatty"), how AI can work as your invisible wingman before a big presentation or client call, and a story about a job candidate who got caught reading his interview answers straight off an AI chatbot.

What We Cover:

[00:00] Welcome to Episode 5

[01:00] Why people default to comparing AI to the Terminator

[02:00] The OpenAI "sandbox escape" headline and why it got blown out of proportion

[04:00] How AI has quietly been part of everyday life for years, through Netflix, Spotify, and bank fraud detection

[06:00] A real-life example of AI catching fraud on a debit card purchase

[07:00] How Copilot changed the game for a neurodivergent employee at Chevelle's former company

[10:00] Unpacking the "Terminator effect" and why fear hurts AI adoption

[12:00] Personifying your AI tools to make them feel more approachable

[13:00] Positive AI representation in pop culture: Toy Story 5, Big Hero 6, and WALL-E

[18:00] Using AI as an "invisible wingman" to prepare for calls, presentations, and speeches

[22:00] The job candidate who got caught reading his interview answers off an AI chatbot

[27:00] Why AI might actually be making people's cognitive skills sharper, not lazier

Favorite Quotes:

"It's not gonna kill you in your sleep. It's not the Terminator."

"Copilot doesn't have a soul. It's not thinking. It's just pattern recognition."

"If you use AI to cut corners, it's gonna make the lazy people really appear lazy."

"You can't trust your little sister to write your book report."

Got a topic or question you want the team to cover? Drop it in the comments.