Today, I'm talking with Chris Williams, Head of Operations at Walk-On's Sports Bistreaux.

When Chris joined Walk-On's almost ten years ago, the company had 11 restaurants. Today it has 80, and about 95% are franchisee-owned. Chris started as a general manager after years running restaurants, became a turnaround specialist, led new restaurant openings and training for the whole company, and now oversees training and operations.

In this conversation, we go inside how Walk-On's trains frontline employees who can't step away from guests, how a 13-person opening team trains up to 150 new hires for a brand-new restaurant, and how they keep training and culture consistent across restaurants they don't own. Chris also shares why recognition comes before accountability, why managers should care more about responsibility than authority, and what it takes to build a culture that outpaces your growth.

In this episode, Chris shares:

• Why he always wanted to be the manager, not the player, and how that shapes how he leads
• The "toss the keys" problem: why great individual performers often struggle as managers
• How Walk-On's documents what already works so it can be taught the same way everywhere
• Inside a new restaurant opening: a 13-person team, mock services, and up to 150 new hires
• "If it's not written down, it's not a standard," and how trainers add to the standard without inventing their own
• How to win franchisee buy-in when you don't own or control the business
• Why your culture has to outpace your growth, and what culture means in practice
• Why recognition is the foundation of accountability, and the red-sneaker story that proves it
• A three-pronged approach to frontline training: LMS modules, on-shift workbooks with certified trainers, and proficiency sign-offs
• How shared language tied to core values makes training stick
• Walk-On's University and being the manager your team is pumped to see in the parking lot
• "Your authority matters very little. Your responsibility matters greatly."
• Building a team like a coach: offense, defense, and special teams

Resources mentioned:

• Walk-On's Sports Bistreaux: https://walk-ons.com

Connect with Chris Williams: [add LinkedIn link]

Work With Andy:

Is your organization's know-how stuck in people's heads instead of written down where everyone can use it? Andy's AI Kickstarter Workshop is a hands-on session that helps teams move past fear and into real, everyday AI use, including capturing and standardizing the knowledge that keeps the business running. And his Career Ownership and AI Keynote helps people take charge of their growth in a changing world of work.

Reach Andy at andy@andystorch.com | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andystorch/

Thanks for listening! Be sure to subscribe and share with your colleagues and friends.

This episode is part of FutureReady, a special series produced in partnership with Emeritus, exploring how organizations are rewiring themselves for performance in the AI and skills economy.

Andy Storch talks with Dr. Carole Bennett, Vice President of Talent Management and Development at Sutter Health, the large integrated health system serving Northern California. Carole leads Sutter Health University, where participation has jumped 120% and senior leaders now teach much of the coursework themselves.

Carole makes the case that managers are where transformation either takes root or quietly stalls. She explains why change and transformation aren't the same thing, why talent development may have lost sight of the "management" side of leading, and how Sutter is bringing AI into leadership development without losing the human heart of healthcare, including an AI agent built into performance reviews that made those conversations feel more human, not less.

In This Episode, You'll Hear:

• Why Carole's PhD research on self-awareness still shapes how she develops leaders, and why self-awareness is "the practice of leadership"
• How Sutter Health University is built around three pillars: leadership excellence, career growth, and continuous learning
• The leader-as-teacher model: why alumni and senior leaders now teach, and how "learn one, do one, teach one" turns teaching into development
• Why managers are the ones who translate culture, strategy, and mission into daily work
• "Change is doing something different. Transformation is believing something different."
• What happens when organizations drive change through senior leaders and email alone
• Why managers need both sides: operational and financial rigor, and the human side of leading
• Why judgment becomes more important the more knowledge AI puts at our fingertips
• How Sutter partnered with its chief of AI to start AI training before licenses were even in place
• The AI agent built into Sutter's performance management system, and what employees said about the reviews it helped create
• Carole's three words for leading with AI: clarity, judgment, and mastery
• A low-cost way to develop managers without a corporate university: learn on your own, then come together to make meaning
• Why talent leaders need to keep changing, but never stop

Resources Mentioned:

• Sutter Health: https://www.sutterhealth.org
• Emeritus: https://emeritus.org
• LinkedIn Learning
• Own Your Career, Own Your Life by Andy Storch
• Connect with Carole Bennett on LinkedIn: [add link]

About FutureReady: FutureReady is a podcast series produced in partnership with Emeritus, featuring HR and talent leaders navigating the shift to skills-based organizations and AI-enabled work. Full episodes are also available on the Emeritus Insights app.

Work With Andy: Are your managers expected to lead AI change without the skills or confidence to do it? Andy's AI Kickstarter Workshop is a hands-on, 90-minute session that helps managers and teams move past fear and into real, everyday AI use. He also delivers a Career Ownership and AI Keynote for audiences figuring out what AI means for their own careers. Reach out at andy@andystorch.com or visit andystorch.com.

Connect with Andy: andystorch.com | andy@andystorch.com

In this solo episode, I'm sharing the biggest lessons on AI adoption from my four most recent conversations — Christa Hill, Giovanni Giamminola, Violetta Drobot, and Clémentine Al-Elimat of Schneider Electric — along with what I'm seeing in the AI workshops and client work I'm running right now.

Whether your organization started its AI journey years ago or is just turning on Copilot, the tools are accessible to everyone, and you can catch up fast. But turning on licenses isn't the same as transformation. Andy covers how to tell real adoption from login counts, why you should bring problems to the technology instead of the other way around, the three stages of AI maturity, why adoption is a team sport, and why the era of prompt engineering is giving way to something more important: teaching people to think. He also shares how to measure whether it's working, so you have a real answer when leadership asks, "Are we getting our money's worth?"

In This Episode, You'll Hear:

• Why HR and L&D need to be in the room for any AI rollout, and why Andy is starting a new client engagement with the HR team first
• Christa Hill's "logins aren't adoption" — and the three levels of real adoption, from individual use to team-wide breakthroughs
• Why you should bring problems to the technology, not technology to the business ("Don't spread AI over the whole company like peanut butter")
• Giovanni Giamminola's reminder that nobody was hired to build PowerPoints — they were hired to make good business decisions
• A simple prompt anyone can use today to find where AI can help in their own job
• Clémentine Al-Elimat's three stages of AI — doing existing work faster, reinventing the process, reinventing the business model — and "AI plus, not plus AI"
• Why adoption is a team sport: AI champions, intact-team training, and pairing early adopters with beginners
• Why leaders need to participate, not just sponsor
• The three fears employees bring to AI, and why leading AI change takes coaching skills
• Why it's time to teach thinking, not prompting — plus Violetta Drobot's two rules for keeping a human in the loop

Work With Andy:

Ready to move from "we turned on the licenses" to real adoption you can measure? Andy helps organizations run focused AI pilots — starting with one team, mapping and redesigning key workflows, and training people to use AI with confidence and good judgment. His hands-on AI Kickstarter Workshop helps teams move past fear and into everyday AI use, and his Career Ownership and AI Keynote helps people take charge of what AI means for their own careers. Reach out at andy@andystorch.com or visit andystorch.com.

Connect with Andy:

• Website: andystorch.com
• Email: andy@andystorch.com

Today, I'm talking with Drew Goodrich, Talent Development Executive at Intuit, the global financial technology company behind TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp.

Drew's team has been leading AI upskilling at Intuit for more than two years, and this conversation goes well beyond theory. Drew shares how he approaches building a skills-based organization, how Intuit's upskilling has evolved from prompting basics to real workflow redesign, and a story about a teammate who used a Claude skill to cut a daily task from about thirty minutes to two. We also talk about why the human skills matter more than ever, what managing a team of humans and AI agents asks of a leader, how to measure adoption without turning metrics into the goal, and how Intuit is using AI to make career growth easier and more personal.

In this episode, Drew shares:

• His rule for skills work: think big, start small, learn fast, and point it at a business problem worth solving
• How he separates evergreen skills (critical thinking, judgment, problem-solving) from fast-changing ones like AI
• Why any learning product has to be "done for me, not to me" if people are going to use it
• How Intuit's AI upskilling evolved from prompting basics to personal and company-wide workflow redesign
• The real story of a teammate who built a Claude skill and turned 30 minutes of daily approvals into two
• Why time and change are the biggest barriers to adoption, and why you should "keep falling in love with the problem"
• His Little Caesars analogy: knowing when to scale a proven recipe and when to experiment
• What leaders need to keep human when they manage a team of people and AI agents
• How to measure AI adoption (usage, depth, time, cost, quality) without letting the target become the goal
• How his team built a Claude skill that recreates a career coaching conversation and connects people to the right learning
• Why Intuit's Responsible AI principle of "enhancing human talent" guides hard decisions

Resources mentioned:

• Intuit: https://www.intuit.com
• Intuit's Responsible AI principles:

Connect with Drew Goodrich on LinkedIn

Work With Andy:

If your organization has rolled out AI tools but the work itself hasn't changed yet, Andy's AI Kickstarter Workshop is a hands-on, 90-minute session that helps teams move past fear and into real, everyday AI use on their own work. And his Career Ownership and AI Keynote helps people understand what AI means for their own growth and take charge of it.

Reach Andy at andy@andystorch.com | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andystorch/

Thanks for listening! Be sure to subscribe and share with your colleagues and friends.

This episode is part of FutureReady, a special series produced in partnership with Emeritus, exploring how organizations are rewiring themselves for performance in the AI and skills economy.

Andy Storch sits down with Clémentine Al-Elimat, who leads HR for Schneider Electric's Power Systems business — a €9 billion, 13,000-person global organization. Before this role, she led the people side of building Schneider's Energy Management Software and Services division from scratch: an AI-native, digital-first business of more than 7,000 employees.

Clémentine shares her three-stage model of AI adoption, why "AI plus" beats "plus AI," and how Schneider has organized around AI with an AI leader, function-level AI champions, and even an AI steering committee. She gets candid about the three fears employees bring to AI transformation, why HR and leaders need to own the company's AI narrative, and why cutting graduate hiring in favor of AI would mean sacrificing a generation. It's a practical, grounded look at what it takes to move from AI skilling to genuine AI-enabled work redesign.

Resources Mentioned:

• Emeritus: https://emeritus.org
• Connect with Clémentine Al-Elimat on LinkedIn

About FutureReady: FutureReady is a podcast series produced in partnership with Emeritus, featuring HR and talent leaders navigating the shift to skills-based organizations and AI-enabled work. Full episodes are also available on the Emeritus Insights app.

Work With Andy:

Is your organization stuck between "we rolled out the AI tools" and "people are actually redesigning how they work"? Andy's AI Kickstarter Workshop is a hands-on, 90-minute session that helps teams move past fear and into real, everyday AI use. He also delivers a Career Ownership and AI Keynote for audiences figuring out what AI means for their own careers. Reach out at andy@andystorch.com or visit andystorch.com.

Connect with Andy:

• Connect on LinkedIn
• Website: andystorch.com
• Email: andy@andystorch.com

What happens to the HR role when AI takes over the data crunching? In this episode, Andy Storch talks with Violetta Drobot, a Boston-based consultant who leads organizational transformation and systems projects at the intersection of HR, project management, and AI. Violetta explains how AI flips the traditional HR workload so that the strategic part of the job grows from 10% to 60%. She shares a simple rule for deciding where AI should stop and human judgment has to take over, and she explains why project management skills are becoming essential for HR. She also walks through how any HR professional can build a first AI agent this week, with no technical background required.

In This Episode, You’ll Hear:

• Why Violetta added a PMP to her SHRM-SCP, and why she believes project management is the future of HR
• The 60/30/10 flip: how AI moves HR from spreadsheets and data handling to strategy, governance, and trust-building
• The courtroom rule: why any decision that could end up in front of a judge needs a human decision, not “AI told me to”
• Why the first answer from any AI tool is never the final answer, and how to push back to get better results
• Three ways Violetta sees AI changing HR: flatter organizations, faster performance feedback, and diversity of thought as a competitive advantage
• How to pressure-test your ideas by asking AI to play your CFO, your CEO, or your legal team before you present
• Why HR leaders will soon be leading people and leading agents
• How to build your first HR agent in Copilot, including an onboarding agent that answers new hires’ questions from your own documents
• RAG explained with a living-room rug analogy, and why it keeps answers specific to your company’s policies

Resources Mentioned:

• Wispr Flow (voice dictation)
• PMP certification (Project Management Institute)
• SHRM-SCP certification

Connect with Violetta on LinkedIn

Connect with Andy on LinkedIn

Work With Andy:

If your team has AI licenses but isn’t really using them yet, Andy’s AI Kickstarter Workshop is a hands-on session that gets teams past the fear and actually building with AI. Andy also delivers a Career Ownership and AI Keynote for audiences working out what AI means for their own careers. Reach out at andy@andystorch.com or visit andystorch.com.

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Please take thirty seconds to leave a rating and review. It helps more people in talent development find the podcast.

Connect with Andy:

• Website: andystorch.com
• Email: andy@andystorch.com

Christa Hill is back on the Hot Seat, four months (a lifetime in AI years) after her first appearance. Christa is Chief AI Learning Officer at LearnIt and co-founder of Tacit Edge. She tells Andy what she's seeing inside companies now. Organizations are tired of rebuilding workflows every time a new model drops. Boards are in the "show me the money" phase. And the definition of AI adoption is changing, from a few power users to whole teams getting better together.

Christa explains why logins and token spend tell you you're getting bills, not results. She shares how she measures real adoption by baselining the actual work first, and why she now only trains teams, not individuals. She also covers why the prompt-engineering era is over, and why anyone leading AI implementation needs strong coaching skills. She offers a simple way to take the fear out of data. And she shares how she's raising a 14-year-old who built her own business with AI. If you've been worried your organization is behind, Christa's message is clear: you're not too late. You're right on time.

Resources Mentioned:

• Christa Hill on LinkedIn
• LearnIit: https://www.learnit.com/andy
• Christa's first Hot Seat episode (Episode 623)
• Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick
• Holy Moly Goalie, built by Christa's daughter: holymolygoalie.com

Work With Andy:

Did your team get the AI tools but still isn't seeing the value? Andy's AI Kickstarter Workshop is a hands-on session that helps teams move past fear and into practical, everyday use of AI on their real work. He also delivers a Career Ownership and AI Keynote for audiences navigating what AI means for their own careers. Reach out at andy@andystorch.com or visit andystorch.com.

Enjoying the show? Take thirty seconds to leave a rating and review. It helps more talent development professionals find the podcast.

Connect with Andy:

• LinkedIn
• Email: andy@andystorch.com

This week I'm speaking with Giovanni Giamminola about using AI to strengthen (not surrende) human judgment.

Giovanni explains the difference between cognitive offloading and cognitive surrender, why AI fluency can create false confidence, and how cognitive governance helps organizations decide when people should lead the reasoning and when AI can productively support it.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• The distinction between delegating a task to AI and delegating your thinking.

• Why fluent, confident AI output still requires human evaluation.

• The four AI work postures: exploratory, generative, critical, and operating.

• How “System Zero” creates a deliberate pause before a decision is made.

• Why job redesign should focus on decision ownership, not just automation.

• How L&D teams can move beyond tool training and build real cognitive capability.

• The difference between model risk and cognitive risk.

• Why leaders need participation—not merely sponsorship—to lead AI adoption.

• How AI can give people more room for relationships, trust, values, and judgment.

Giovanni Giamminola is an AI transformation strategist focused on the human and organizational side of AI adoption. His work explores cognitive governance, decision-making, and how leaders and learning teams can build the capabilities needed to work thoughtfully with AI. Giovanni is also the author of The Augmented Manager - get here on Amazon.

Enjoy the episode? Follow Talent Development Hot Seat and share it with a leader or learning professional navigating AI transformation. You can also follow Andy on LinkedIn for more insights.

Looking for a dynamic speaker for your next event or someone to inspire your people to own their careers in the age of AI? Check out my website or reach out to me today: andy@andystorch.com