Mike Sullivan is co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at OneDigital, an insurance and financial services organization with roughly 6,000 people across the United States and Canada. He is also co-author of the bestselling book Workforce Intelligence. He came on to talk about what three years of deploying AI inside his own company actually taught him, and the answer is not what most executives are being sold.

The turning point was a single sentence. When OneDigital stopped thinking about AI as technology and started thinking about it as talent, and began hiring it, everything changed. Their people mentor the AI, teach it the job, and then hand it the work it genuinely does better. Each AI coworker has a name and a personality, and it becomes the repository of institutional knowledge that used to walk out the door when a 35-year employee retired.

Mike is direct about the condition that makes any of this work, which is trust. You cannot lay off ten thousand people in the name of AI and then tell the survivors you are all in on them. He also names the question almost nobody has answered yet: when a growing share of your workforce is AI talent, who manages it, and how do you measure a blended workforce? Michael and Mike also get into the disappearing bottom rungs of the corporate ladder, why Gartner expects a wave of companies to table AI projects over missing ROI, and why Mike now jokes that his father, a union ironworker from Buffalo, would finally call him pro-labor.

• The reframe that changed everything at a 6,000-person company: stop treating AI as technology and start hiring it like talent
• What a capacity dividend is, and the question to ask once AI hands your team their time back
• How to build AI coworkers that capture institutional knowledge before your longest-serving people retire
• Why trust is the precondition for AI adoption, and how layoff headlines destroy it
• The management gap nobody has solved: who owns AI talent when your org chart only knows human capital
• Why the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder are disappearing, and what that does to early-career hiring
• Why AI projects stall on ROI when leaders expect an immediate return from something that needs cultivating

Mike Sullivan is co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at OneDigital, an insurance and financial services organization operating across the United States and Canada with roughly 6,000 employees. He is co-author, with Vinay Gidwani, of the bestselling book Workforce Intelligence, written deliberately for non-technical leaders who are trying to run companies through AI adoption without losing the trust of their people.

• OneDigital: https://www.onedigital.com
• Workforce Intelligence by Mike Sullivan and Vinay Gidwani
• Breakfast Leadership Network: https://www.breakfastleadership.com

Note: The Breakfast Leadership Show includes occasional paid partner episodes, in which the guest has paid to appear.

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