In this episode, Julie Stone shares how she is reinventing learning and development for a 50,000 person workforce as Group Vice President and Chief Learning Officer at TTEC, a global customer experience company operating in 22 countries. With a background in linguistics that shapes how she thinks about the way humans learn, Julie explains why practice, spaced repetition, and real feedback are the elements most training programs have been missing for decades, and how AI simulated practice finally solves for them. She walks through how letting frontline agents rehearse live customer conversations with AI builds confidence, shortens training duration by around 20 percent, and speeds up time to proficiency, all without the awkwardness of traditional role plays.

Julie and Andy also dig into the bigger picture of AI in the enterprise: the proprietary wizard suite her team built to redesign the entire curriculum discovery, design, and development process, the redesign of jobs and workflows that comes with it, and why she believes L&D is now mission critical rather than optional. She makes the case for L&D professionals becoming work design architects, explains why skills are the new currency inside organizations, and offers practical advice for anyone trying to build a skills-based approach or drive real AI adoption on their team.

I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website (andystorch.com) or LinkedIn. And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon.

Connect with Julie Stone: LinkedIn

In this solo episode, Andy Storch shares the top 10 lessons he has gathered on AI transformation over the last several months, drawing from podcast interviews, private one-on-one conversations, industry conferences, and the virtual roundtables he has been hosting with L&D leaders. The picture that emerges is consistent: the technology is rarely the hard part. What determines whether an AI rollout succeeds is training, time, psychological safety, and whether anyone bothered to address the very human fears sitting underneath the initiative.

Andy walks through why employees are simultaneously hungry for AI content and lost about how to apply it, why the tools budget and the training budget are so wildly out of balance, and how one company took adoption from 45 percent to 97 percent by naming the fear out loud. He covers the two distinct fears holding people back, why the traditional instinct to teach fundamentals first may be backwards, the growing risk of outsourcing critical thinking, and a cautionary pilot story where five weeks of rollout produced ten minutes of total usage.

In This Episode, You'll Hear:

• Why employees can be in a feeding frenzy for AI content and still be completely lost
• Why people need a Sherpa, not just a mountain to climb
• The three Ts of adoption: training, time, and tools, and why most companies deliver only one
• How the tools budget and training budget got so out of balance, and the 70/30 split that explains it
• Why psychological safety is the real adoption lever, not a nice to have
• The second fear nobody names: that using AI feels like cheating
• Why we might be teaching AI backwards, and the case for building before learning fundamentals
• The death of critical thinking, and one leader's refreshingly low tech fix
• Why the technology curve is outpacing the people curve, and what that means for L&D
• How to meet resistance where it actually lives, sometimes outside of work entirely
• The AI pilot that got 10 minutes of total usage in five weeks, and the three mistakes behind it
• Why employees are three times more ready than leaders believe, and why only 21 percent of CHROs are in the room early

Episodes Mentioned:

• Christa Hill on AI adoption and the messy middle
• Alex Zubko on the three Ts and why availability isn't adoption
• Antonia Bowler on AI adoption at Exclaimer
• Julie Stone on AI enabled learning at TTEC
• Joshua Remerowski on measuring impact and the death of critical thinking

Work With Andy:

Andy runs hands-on AI Kickstarter workshops for teams who need to move past fear and into real usage, getting people actually using the tools during the session so they experience the aha moment for themselves. He also delivers a keynote on career ownership in the AI world for audiences who need to understand what all of this means for their own careers.

Reach out at andy@andystorch.com or connect on LinkedIn

About The Talent Development Hot Seat:

Hosted by Andy Storch, this podcast connects talent development professionals with insights, ideas, and inspiration to grow their careers and their organizations. With over 600 episodes published since 2018, the Hot Seat is your resource for what's next in L&D.

In this episode, Njabulo Mashigo shares how deliberate culture work has helped make Vodacom South Africa the number one top employer in the country three years running, a first in that market. Njabulo is HR Executive Director at Vodacom South Africa, the largest market in the Vodafone Group, and describes herself as a people strategist and culture evangelist.

Across 24 years and three industries, from Unilever to South Africa's National Treasury and the JSE to Heineken, she has developed a clear view that culture is not something that simply happens to an organization. It can be orchestrated, measured, and treated as a strategic asset. She and Andy open on the tension facing large companies right now, the pressure to keep growing while cutting costs, and why HR has a role on both sides of that without becoming the hangman.

Njabulo explains how her team documents the lived experiences of specific groups inside the business and turns that into an action plan, how they expanded their listening beyond the annual engagement survey, and how data on attrition revealed a leaking bucket problem with retaining women that attraction numbers had masked. She also shares Vodacom's approach to AI, from early instincts to block the tools to running AI immersions in HR, why leader resistance is usually about confidence rather than unwillingness, and how their firelighters hold leadership accountable from the grassroots. Throughout, she makes a practical case for connecting people patterns directly to business results.

I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website (andystorch.com) or LinkedIn. And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon.

Connect with Njabulo Mashigo: LinkedIn

In this episode, Katie Tonda shares how she is leading a company-wide AI transformation and rebuilding leadership development from the ground up at ECI Software Solutions. Katie is Global Senior Director of Learning and Development at ECI, a private equity backed software company supporting around 2,400 employees globally, and she came there deliberately after building her career at two of the largest employers in the world, Verizon and Walmart. She and Andy talk about why she made that move, what best practices transfer from massive organizations to a lean team of three operating as a center of excellence, and her philosophy of being brief, being brilliant, and being gone.

Katie walks through ECI's three-phase AI enablement strategy in detail, from a required baseline covering terminology, prompting, and hallucinations, through software-specific hands-on integration, to department-level work led by internal champions. She explains why her team builds custom AI apps in-house rather than buying off the shelf, including a career development tool that maps an employee's skills, values, and interests against future roles and generates a development plan. The conversation also covers how AI competency is now built into job descriptions and interviews, why L&D has to treat measurement like any other business decision, and her belief that the window to build a future-ready workforce has shrunk from five years to about eighteen months.

I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website (andystorch.com) or LinkedIn. And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon.

Connect with Katie Tonda: LinkedIn

In this episode, Sue Bethanis shares what nearly three decades of executive coaching have taught her about leading people through disruption, and why AI adoption is as much a human challenge as a technical one. Sue is CEO and founder of Mariposa Leadership, author of Leadership Chronicles of a Corporate Sage, and host of Wise Talk and Wise Space.

She has coached more than 400 executives at companies including Amazon, Apple, Cisco, LinkedIn, and PayPal, and co-teaches a course on moving from director and VP roles into the C-suite. She and Andy discuss what she calls the uncollar economy, why knowledge workers feel more exposed by this wave of change than any before it, and how fear and overwhelm are showing up in her coaching conversations at every level, including among leaders themselves.

Sue walks through the three pillars of her framework, role, mindset, and practices, and makes the case that leaders need to consciously take on the role of change agent rather than letting change happen to them. She shares her sandpile metaphor for expecting disruption, the shift from blame to aim when teams push back, and why executives modeling their own learning, including the mistakes, matters more than any mandate.

The conversation then turns to executive presence and influence, where Sue offers a practical framework for being heard in meetings, advice on interrupting gracefully, and her view on what actually separates leaders who get promoted from those who stall.

I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website (andystorch.com) or LinkedIn. And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon.

Connect with Sue Bethanis: LinkedIn | mariposaleadership.com

In this solo episode, Andy Storch makes the case for why AI fluency isn't optional — it's the new baseline for employability. While the macro debates around AI (government regulation, ethics, AGI timelines) are worth following, Andy argues that the wave is coming regardless. The real question is: will you be ready?

Andy draws a powerful analogy between the early days of listing "proficient in Microsoft Office" on a résumé and what AI proficiency means for today's workforce — except the stakes are exponentially higher. He shares what he's hearing from talent development professionals, company leaders, and frontline employees, and explains why the biggest gap isn't technology — it's adoption.

He also shares exciting news: Andy is launching an AI Kickstarter Workshop (available this fall) — a hands-on 90-minute session designed to get teams not just learning about AI, but actually using it and producing real output during the session.

In This Episode, You'll Hear:

• Why the AI wave is happening whether we embrace it or not — and why that matters for L&D
• The Microsoft Office analogy: how AI proficiency today mirrors a skill that once set candidates apart on résumés
• What Andy is hearing from leaders and talent development professionals about low AI adoption rates
• The "60% in the middle" — why most employees aren't anti-AI, they just don't know where to start
• Why employees who avoid AI fluency risk being left behind in hiring — and what you can do about it
• How organizations are paying for AI licenses that no one is using, and what to do instead
• The two types of speaking engagements Andy is now booking around AI enablement and career ownership
• Details on Andy's upcoming AI Kickstarter Workshop — a 90-minute session to get your team actually using AI tools

Resources & Links Mentioned:

• Andy's website: andystorch.com
• Email Andy directly: andy@andystorch.com
• AI tools mentioned: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini

Work With Andy:

Ready to get your team AI-fluent? Andy is booking two types of engagements:

1. AI Kickstarter Workshop — A 90-minute hands-on session to get your team using AI tools and producing real output. Available this fall.
2. Career Ownership & AI Keynote — For teams that have already started AI training but need a session on owning their careers and taking advantage of the opportunities in front of them.

Reach out at andy@andystorch.com or visit andystorch.com.

About The Talent Development Hot Seat:

Hosted by Andy Storch, this podcast connects talent development professionals with insights, ideas, and inspiration to grow their careers and their organizations. With over 600 episodes published since 2018, the Hot Seat is your resource for what's next in L&D.

In this episode, Alex Zubko shares what she is seeing inside organizations trying to make AI transformation actually work. Alex has been in the AI trenches since 2022, when she pivoted a company into AI right as ChatGPT launched, and she now works with private equity firms, fintech companies, and beyond, doing everything from education to hands-on consulting to executive coaching. She and Andy dig into the gap between the headline statistics on AI usage and what is really happening, and why making a tool available is not the same as people using it. Alex lays out her three Ts, training, time, and tools, and explains why organizations that skip any one of them will not see the adoption or the returns they expect.

Alex and Andy also explore the pressure CEOs feel from their boards, and the irony that the leaders asking the biggest strategic questions about AI are often the ones using it least. She unpacks the J curve of productivity, why treating AI like a new intern is a more useful mental model than treating it like software, and why so many teams struggle to hand work to AI when their own processes were never written down. The conversation covers what the best companies are doing, from ambassadors and centers of excellence to hackathons and channels where people share AI fails, and closes with practical guidance for L&D professionals on leading by example, anchoring AI change in the organization's mission and values, and remembering that the human judgment is the whole point.

I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website (andystorch.com) or LinkedIn. And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon.

Connect with Alex Zubko: LinkedIn | alextalksai.com

In this episode, Tatiana Goldberg shares insights from more than 20 years in HR, talent management, and leadership development. She explores how the employer-employee relationship is evolving, why career growth has become the most important retention factor, and how organizations must rethink talent mobility, leadership development, and performance management in a rapidly changing world.

Tatiana also discusses the impact of AI on early-career talent, the importance of business acumen for talent professionals, and why performance management systems are among the strongest drivers of organizational culture. Throughout the conversation, she emphasizes that behind every business challenge lies a talent challenge—and that talent leaders sit at the center of business success.

I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website (andystorch.com) or LinkedIn. And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon.

Connect Tatiana Goldberg: linkedin