Sacha Connor has been coming to Running Remote since 2019, when the conference was held in Bali, and this episode marks her third appearance on Work 20XX.

Please join me in welcoming Sacha Connor back to the Work 20XX podcast.

In Austin for the second year running with the team at Running Remote, we sat down with Sacha, founder and CEO of Virtual Work Insider, to trace how the conversation at this conference has evolved since that first trip to Bali, from synchronous versus asynchronous communication debates to what's dominating the room now: AI adoption inside distributed teams.

Sacha admits she was scared of AI at first. She never worked at a tech company, never learned to code, and did not see herself as a technical person. That changed when she took a Lead with AI certification program and realized the skills translated more directly than she expected. Now she has built her own custom GPT trained on the five-piece meeting framework she teaches clients, purpose, product, process, pre-work, and people, and uses it to prep every agenda she runs.

The conversation also digs into her sharpest observation of the day: AI adoption inside a company follows the same spectrum she has spent 15 years mapping for remote and hybrid work. Some organizations are virtual-first and moving fast, some are still figuring out basic policy on which LLMs employees are even allowed to use, and Sacha works both ends of that spectrum at once, from the executive suite down to the team actually trying to get the tools to stick.

Her advice for anyone intimidated by the mandate from on high to "go use AI": experiment in your personal life first. She has used LLMs for her own family scheduling. Once it clicks personally, bringing it to your team gets a lot easier.

We also cover her fifteen-year remote-iversary, the ERG she helped build at Clorox that grew faster than any other in the company, and her hot take on scheduled send.