Erica Farmer, TEDx Speaker | AI Future Skills Specialist, EricaFarmer.ai

Erica Farmer is an AI and future skills specialist with over 25 years of experience in corporate learning and development. Having led talent, L&D, and apprenticeship functions at organizations such as British Gas, LV, Specsavers, and Virgin, she now runs her own consultancy that helps businesses navigate AI adoption. Erica is known for her engaging, honest, and practical approach—blending human psychology with hands-on AI implementation. She focuses on winning hearts and minds while driving real behavioral change in organizations. A professional speaker, podcast host, and author of AI for People Professionals, Erica is passionate about making AI accessible, human-centered, and impactful for the future workforce.

Nolan Hout, Senior Vice President, Growth & AI Strategist, Infopro Learning

Nolan Hout is the growth leader and host of this podcast. He has over a decade of experience in the Learning & Development (L&D) industry, helping global organizations unlock the potential of their workforce. Nolan is results-driven, investing most of his time in finding ways to identify and improve the performance of learning programs through the lens of return on investment. He is passionate about networking with people in the learning and training community. He is also an avid outdoorsman and fly fisherman, spending most of his free time on rivers across the Pacific Northwest.

AI can save time, but what do we do with that time? In this insightful episode, Erica and Nolan discuss this through the lens of the “AI dividend,” exploring how well-being, autonomy, and human-centered design are crucial to making AI adoption meaningful, sustainable, and truly valuable for individuals and organizations alike.

Listen to the episode to find out:

  • What the “AI dividend” is and why it matters for adoption.
  • Why most AI rollouts fail to engage employees.
  • How to win hearts and minds—not just teach tools.
  • The biggest mistake companies make when measuring AI success.
  • Why productivity gains alone won’t drive long-term value.
  • How Erica uses AI personally to manage workload and health.
  • The role of curiosity and ownership in successful adoption.
  • Why future skills matter more than technical AI skills.
  • How organizations can balance efficiency with employee well-being.
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Helping people identify their own AI dividend—what’s in it for them—is the real unlock for adoption.

Erica Farmer,

TEDx Speaker | AI Future Skills Specialist, EricaFarmer.ai

Introduction

Nolan: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Talent Equation podcast, formerly known as the Learning and Development podcast. The episode is sponsored by Infopro Learning and as always, I’m your host, Nolan Hout. Today we have Erica joining us, who is an AI and Future Skills specialist, a brand-new author, book coming in May. We very much look forward to that and a fellow podcast host, so this should be super fun.

If you don’t know who Erica is yet, I’m going to read her bio. Normally I read the bio and then I do a little tweaking, but I just thought you did such a good job that any manipulation of that seems stupid. So, Erica is a fun, honest, oversharing, which I’m very excited about, professional speaker and trainer who excels at engaging people on the topic of AI, focusing on how to win over hearts and minds, while at the same time being able to get into the weeds and hands-on workshops.

If you couldn’t guess what we’re going to be talking about today with Erica, it is AI and something called the AI dividend and then the adoption strategies. And don’t worry, if you have not heard of the term AI dividend, you are just like me. So don’t worry, you’re not behind the eight ball, we’re going to catch you up and get there. And when I say we’re going to get you caught up, I just mean Erica. So, let’s go ahead and meet our guest, Erica Farmer. Welcome to the podcast.

Erica: Thank you so much for the invite to be here and have this conversation, particularly enjoy transatlantic conversations as well, because I think they bring a different lens to the conversation. So, I’m excited to see what happens over the next 60 minutes.

Nolan: So, you’re catching, if you don’t like this podcast, I’m going to say so be it, because you’re dealing with the end of the day for Erica and the start of the day for me, because I’m on the West Coast, she’s obviously in London or somewhere around the UK. So, you’re catching us at our worst and our best, maybe, I don’t know. So, with that, before we begin though, Erica, I always like to just start with a little bit of a context setting. Tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got started in this field of human talent development in the first place.

Erica’s Background in Corporate L&D

Erica: Sure, absolutely. So, I’ve got 25 years’ experience in corporate L&D. I’ve headed up learning and development. It’s been a long apprenticeship really. Every day is a school day, right? But I’ve been lucky enough to head up functions, learning and development, talent development and apprenticeship functions in organizations like British Gas, LV, which is a financial services company over here.

Nolan: So, you’re a newbie.

Erica: Specsavers, which is an optometrist company and Virgin. So, I’ve had some amazing experiences, some big challenges, and I decided to start working for myself probably about six or seven years ago now, pre-pandemic, and I haven’t looked back. So, I’m excited to be doing what I do now. I love working with the clients that we work with. I love being my own boss. I think I’m completely unemployable now, so the thought of ever having to have somebody again makes my skin crawl. But I love what I do. And I think hopefully my clients will say that that comes as well.

Nolan: You know what’s interesting, Erica? I’ve noticed there’s been a flood of consultancies over the past couple of years, specifically post COVID, just because obviously there’s a lot of changes in the workforce. But then there’s the other half who kind of started at this a long time ago and have a solid client base and have been at it a while.

And I always feel like it’s good to get both perspectives, but I think you always offer a unique perspective, having built this pre-COVID because you’ve gone with companies through this transformation. You’ve already experienced and helped those clients navigate, let’s call it like the first bend of the curve. And so, you’re now in a better position to steer them through the next bend of the curve. I’m really looking forward to your insights. Let’s get into it.

What Is the AI Dividend?

Nolan: We talked about this term I’d never heard of before called AI dividend. Tell us what this means.

Erica: And I’m glad that you haven’t heard of it before, because it’s a term that I’ve coined through my research and my work, and I’m in the process of trademarking it.

Nolan: Lovely. I love the word. I read it on a blog post or a LinkedIn post, just the definition, but I love it.

Erica: And I guess it’s the culmination of all my work through corporate, through understanding human psychology, through learning and development, HR, and more recently over the last four to five years through generative AI and skills. It filters down to the what’s in it for me, that WIIFM factor that we talk about quite a lot. And particularly in AI, let’s get right to it.

In AI, organizations are struggling at the moment because they’re rolling out AI tools, they’re talking about AI strategies, and they’re just expecting people to get excited about it, even though there’s a massive tension around the negative narrative they tend to hear around, is it going to take my job and job displacements, and AI is not going to take your job, but someone who knows how to use AI is going to take your job. I just think none of that is helpful.

What we need to do is take a step back and really think about people as people before we think about them as tech users or workers or even worse, employees or staff or numbers or human capital or whatever phrase you want to use. For me, the unlock with this, the way forward is helping people identify their own AI dividend.

And what I mean by that is working with this technology in a way that makes our personal lives and our professional lives easier in a certain way. And that’s going to be different for probably all of us. And if organizations can tap into that, we get excited where we can see a personal incremental benefit in using and collaborating with artificial intelligence.

Erica’s Personal AI Dividend

Erica: Now, my AI dividend, as someone who runs a very busy business, I run two businesses, very busy. I have fibromyalgia, which means my energy is very limited. It’s a chronic condition. You might’ve heard of it before. It’s one of those things that the doctors can’t give you a pill for it. There’s no way to switch it on or switch it off. You tend to struggle with energy. You must limit your capacity for doing certain things. And what comes with that is extreme fatigue and tiredness, aches. It’s one of those conditions that everybody’s got it slightly differently as well. I manage my fibromyalgia through rest and sleep. I’m running two very busy businesses and doing a lot of travel. Obviously, there’s quite the issue with that.

Nolan: Speaking at conferences, my gosh. Us stupid Americans, God, we’re the worst.

Erica: Podcasts with Americans at different times of the day. But using AI technology allows me to have things happening overnight or during the afternoon when I’m slobbing around on the couch in front of Star Trek, which is my normal downtime.

Erica: I have a ChatGPT running as a speaker agent for me. So, scanning the internet and sites like LinkedIn to look at speaker opportunities, TEDx’s, what are clients doing in the industry around this kind of technology? So, I’ve got a thinking partner, I’ve got a research partner, I’ve got automation with stuff that five years ago would have probably taken me an extra five to 10 hours in my working week. That five to 10 hours in my working week, I can now rest. That’s my AI dividend.

Personal Adoption Stories & Finding Your Own Path

Nolan: It’s such a simple, I think impactful strategy. I speak on AI topics, and I’ll tell you my adoption story. And it is very similar. I was talking to the COO or CHRO, I can’t remember, of Salesforce at a conference and he asked, so are there any questions? And I was like, I feel like I’m a smart guy and I’m an executive in my company. I feel like I’m almost too smart to use AI. Isn’t that why the company hired me for my brain, not for my ability to use AI.

And he’s like, I hear you. I thought the same. Just have it open. Just keep the tab open, start your day, keep whatever you’re using, Claude, whatever, just have it as a tab open. Start using it for any task that you can really think of. You’ll see what works for you. What doesn’t work for you. And just let yourself adopt as you want to.

And I realized that that’s really all it took for me. I had to figure it out for myself. And when I’m giving my presentations, that’s the same advice I give. And I had a lady come up to me the next day after one of these sessions at these two day events and she said, listen, I downloaded Claude right when I left the session and I want to tell you that I asked it, like I run a Bible study for my group, it’s once a week and I need you to map out the next four months for me of verses. And she’s like, it did 99% of this work for me. I can’t believe how valuable and how easy it was to use.

And so, if I’m reflecting on that story and my own personal journey, and then just what we’ve seen from trying to have people adopt AI, it’s always our advice. If you just teach people the tool, you’re in a load of hurt because those tools are changing so quickly. You’re never going to stay on top of it. And it almost has to come from an innate curiosity within the person, because if it doesn’t come like the hearts and minds, as we talked about, as you have in your bio, if you don’t win over the hearts and minds, adoption is going to go up and then down and it’s going to look like a heartbeat and the valleys are going to be when you’re not forcing people to use it.

Because you’re going to force them and then they’re going to stop and then you’re going to force. So that’s a very long-winded way to say, I think I love the idea, and I think you’ve nailed it spot on.

Erica: Thank you. And it’s great that you’ve coupled that with adoption stories, because you’re right. That’s what we’re talking about from that personal perspective. And I get on my soapbox quite a lot. And probably now, there’s a weekly rant on LinkedIn from me about certain things when it comes to AI.

The Email Rewriting Trap & Misguided AI Success Metrics

Erica: Last week, I think I was reviewing the Department of Work and Pensions, so the UK government department. We have a .gov website here which is everything to do with the UK government, and they published, hey, look at our success in rolling out Microsoft Copilot, 100% adoption rate. Okay, so what were they using it for? They were using it to rewrite emails.

That might be a hundred percent adoption, but where’s the innovation? Where’s the scale? Where’s the benefit? Where’s the productivity? Is it because you’re now writing emails in different ways? Is it you’re writing emails quickly? That isn’t a success in my book. And I was quite frustrated reading that. So, I put my response on LinkedIn, and I linked the study and said, go ahead, people read it yourself, see what you think. And the volume of responses I got, people were like, we must do better.

We can’t just have our political leaders and Department of Work and Pension industry leaders in this country. We’ve got the Labor Party and our Prime Minister saying, “I want to be an AI superpower. We’re going to rule the world in the UK and be one of these big players when we’re just celebrating rewriting emails with Microsoft Copilot. Surely there’s got to be more to life.

Nolan: I’m an American, so I can’t relate to that. Obviously, our government is nearly perfect. I mean, I don’t know what to say, except I’m sorry that your government isn’t run so smoothly like our government.

Erica: Absolutely, it’s strange times.

Nolan: Somebody had said that. They said, they had somebody and they’re asking how do you adopt AI? And they’re like, I wrote an email and then I was like, hey, AI, is this the right tone? And then it changed it. And then they’re like, after you did all that, how long did it take? Like an hour.

Erica: Like five minutes when you just write it yourself. If you have a bad problem with self-awareness and you frustrate people in the way that you write and you communicate, then there’s maybe a use case in that. I’d like to think most of the population doesn’t fall into that.

For some reason, we’ve just lost a bit of common sense with this stuff. And that’s why we need to major even more on things like hearts and minds.

Implementing AI Adoption at Scale

Nolan: So how do you, because it sounds so common sense to me, and then common sense isn’t common. But how do you, because I know a lot of what you focus on is implementing these things in corporations, right? That’s what you do. How do you take something that seems so simple, but we all know simple is usually done out of complex, somebody’s spent so many hours making a complex thing so simple. How do you do this at scale?

Erica: And simple is the key. So a very simple framework, get people understanding how to prompt in a clear, concise way, get them to think about AI as a junior team member or an intern or an apprentice, instruct it in the right way, don’t overcomplicate it, check in with it to see if it’s got all the information it needs and then iterate, just like you would do with a team member. So, you kind of get the mindset around digital colleague.

This isn’t just another technology. And then you get the benefit of literally another headcount, another person. Like I said, when I’m slobbing out in front of Star Trek, I’ve got somebody researching my next opportunity to speak. So, it’s the mindset, it’s the skillset, and it’s also getting people to bring their own workflows, their own tasks, their own choice of what they want to work with in terms of AI and giving them the responsibility and the onus to go off and do that.

And that’s how we’re going to transform jobs and work. If people need to own that rather than just being told, here’s a bunch of cases of how you create a spreadsheet, people are not going to innovate. That’s not creative thinking. You’re going to put them in a box and they’re going to think, well, that’s the only way that I can use AI.

So, I’m just going to keep doing what I’ve always done, but I’ll just use AI a little bit for it. And I guess email is a good example of that when people said, hey, you can rewrite emails. All we’re going to do is rewrite emails.

Nolan: I feel like sometimes when that becomes, I’ve seen my adoption arc follow a similar adoption of many that I’ve had on the podcast or that I’ve just met in personal life. And I feel like when your mindset is going to use AI to do this job, it does really close you off from the real value behind it because you get so caught up in that job that it doesn’t help unlock these bigger things. I do think that it is one of those odd things where you almost must teach the importance of adopting it and a framework of how to use it in a safe, secure, reliable way.

Whereas really you almost would want to say, okay, if you’re a coder, use Claude Code and save yourself 50% of your time. That’s going to instantly make people be like, oh great, I’m just going to adopt Claude Code, but it doesn’t work. I haven’t really seen much success in telling people to use this to rewrite your emails, let’s see how fast it is. Every time I end up doing that, I must retell that and retell it. So, when you do it task driven, it does seem like it takes away some of that curiosity.

The Tension Between AI and Job Displacement

Nolan: There is a softer side to AI adoption right now. Anthropic just did a huge report on labor market impacts of AI.

Erica: Yes, I’ve seen it, top level about the types of jobs lending into and gender equality.

Nolan: There’s that, and I feel like it is an interesting thing where there is a weird dichotomy of you must know this tool to keep your job, or else you’re going to be the only one writing letters and everybody else is writing emails. And you’re going to say, how are they getting the responses done so quickly? So, you must learn it for your job.

But it is going to take your job, possibly. And it’s not like it’s only happening to a very small set of people. It is rewriting the labor workforce. So, do you feel like you must address that? Or do you feel like if you just make it a personal journey, that works for you?

Erica: A bit of both, if I’m honest. So in my keynotes and my workshops, we often take ourselves back in terms of let’s look at other things that have given us that emotional response to change and rocked the labor market, the industrial revolution, the internet, the calculator, robotics, PC, you can just keep naming technologies which have moved the workforce in one way or another.

And I do think there will be job displacements. I think there will be people who will exit the job market because AI is just a step too far for them, either morally or from a skills-based perspective or a mindset perspective, or they just can’t get their head around collaborating with it.

And I always say to people, look, I’m not religious, but I’ll use a couple of religious metaphors and references in this conversation, because I feel that they work. At the end of your time, when you’re at the pearly gates, you’re not going to get the medal for the hardest life lived.

It’s not going to happen, right? So why do some people feel they have to do the struggle, and I’m not going to adopt it because I’m cheating or I don’t want it. You’re going to be the dinosaur because of your mindset. And if you feel that you must have the strife, the struggle, and you are going after the medal for the hardest life lived, then good for you. That’s certainly not where I want to be.

Future Skills & Preparing for Jobs That Don’t Exist Yet

Erica: And the other thing is we forget to emphasize the importance on future skills. So, I do AI and I do future skills. And when I did my TEDx in 2022, I talked about reforming education with the digital first mindset. And it was a couple of months before OpenAI brought ChatGPT to market. And I was talking about machine learning and personalization and working with technology.

And one of the stats I used from the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs reports was that 65% of eight- to 11-year-olds at school will go into a job that doesn’t even exist yet. So, two thirds of our children in school, and this was a couple of years ago, so I can imagine this number is going to get bigger, we can’t even fathom the vocation, the requirement of what they’re going to be doing in their careers.

So that gives us the precipice and the blueprint for what those skills need to look like going forward to ready them for the workforce of the future. These people who may be displaced, who will certainly change in terms of the requirements of the job, need to be supported with what does that critical thinking look like? What does that learning agility look like?

How do I put down my old skills and pick up new skills and apply those in record time? Because that’s what I’m going to have to do going forward. And I’m not talking about prompt engineering. I’m talking about the skills that we don’t even know exist in the jobs that we don’t even know exist yet. It’s a bit meta. It’s a bit conceptual. But that change readiness piece, now more than ever, is important.

And you talked about the pandemic and the impact that it had on work and mindset. That was a mere apprenticeship. That was a drop in the ocean compared to the tsunami that we’re going to get with just the beginning of what AI is going to mean to us and how we live and how we work and what that means going forward. So, I think it’s difficult for us to fathom at this point because it’s going to be so different.

Nolan: What are those skills that you feel, I mean, there’s skills that we don’t know exist, right? A good example, 20 years ago, the idea of a social media marketing team. What the hell is that? Content creator, podcast host.

Erica: Content creator, podcast host.

Nolan: I must admit, my wife is one of the podcast OGs. There was a podcast that followed the Harry Potter series. And she listened to it probably more than 20 years ago. So, it did exist, but it wasn’t even a business. It didn’t even become a big business until Joe Rogan’s and SmartLess’s of the world. But you don’t even have to look back that long to think of it. No kid would ever have imagined the job of social media marketing manager. AI engineers did not exist five, seven, eight years ago.

What Do You Do with the Time AI Gives Back?

Nolan: But I have an interesting question for you. You mentioned with your fibromyalgia, the AI dividend you get back is time.

Erica: Yes.

Nolan: And everybody is going to have their own thing, but a lot of it, in my opinion, is time as well.

Erica: But I’d say it’s time, but what do you do with that time? That’s the evidence. So, for me, it’s rest and managing my health.

Nolan: I’m interested to hear where do you think that we’re going to head? I had an interesting conversation with a gentleman who had his PhD in psychology. And he had some data points about it. Right now, you use this time to watch Star Trek and it’s your own company. So, who cares? But my company, once they find out that I can do much more with my time than I’m giving. There was one school of thought that said every single time this has happened in corporate culture, modern business, eventually that becomes the new norm.

It’s very rare that we go so far, then we kind of fall back. So, the new norm is going to be eventually that yes, you used to be able to produce 10 widgets an hour. After AI you can do a hundred. For a little bit of time there, you can do those 10 widgets, but it’s only going to take you an hour. So, you’re going to have seven hours back in your day. This guy says, go fly fishing. Go take a vacation, enjoy it, because eventually the business is going to come back and demand those 100 widgets to be created. Where do you stand? Where do you think it’s going to go?

Burnout, Productivity Pressure & the Wellbeing Crisis

Erica: I’m already talking to people who are saving time and the manager’s gone, that’s great, you can now do this, that’s great, you can now do that. And they are the most unhappy burnt-out people that I’ve talked to. I think businesses will learn the hard way. It will be a temptation because whenever leads come in to me, clients come to me, the CTO, the CEO, the CFO has gone productivity, efficiency. That’s why we’re rolling this out.

And it’s a sunk cost fallacy. You’re going after the wrong thing. And people will learn the hard way on this because the number one-use case for Microsoft Copilot in 2025, according to a Microsoft report, was queries around mental health. That’s what AI tool was used for most by people in 2025. We already have a mental health crisis. We already have a wellbeing crisis. We already have the highest, in the UK certainly, the highest unemployment rate, the highest number of people on benefits because they can’t work physically or mentally.

Nolan: We’re perfect in America. How many times do you have to hear from our leaders how perfect we are until you’re going to believe it.

Erica: I just think the companies that are going to win in the future aren’t the companies that are going to burn out their people. They are not. And we see it now post pandemic. The companies that are losing great people now are the ones saying you have to go back into the office full time because people created their own dividend off the back of that, whether that’s doing the school run and spending time with their kids or going to the gym at nine and starting at 10 or doing a Sunday afternoon because that works for them.

We must do more around this output-based benefit system. You manage me on the outcome of my work. You don’t micromanage me in terms of when I clock in and clock out. That needs to be a consideration. And I think employees need to push back. Employees need to educate as much as people need to push in.

And I still must be at the mercy of when my clients want to speak to me or when they need a quick return. And sometimes I’ll say I don’t work Fridays. Fridays are not a normal working day for me, but my business partner works. I can speak to you on Monday. Sometimes when you just have a conversation with people, we’re all human and we forget that the CFO is a human.

We forget the boss is a human. Yes, you might work for some awful people. But I think you just need to protect your own peace sometimes. And that sometimes might mean deciding that that job or that employer isn’t right for you anymore if they’re piling on the pressure and burning you out. Because we’ve got one life here as far as we’re aware. And if you’re working your guts out, slogging your guts out until you’re 65, 70, 75, 80 and then you croak it, that’s not a lot of fun either, is it?

The Reality of Rising Expectations

Nolan: Well, I think I would push back on this idea that it’s so easy to just say no. If I’m in marketing and I must produce 10 emails a day, and that’s what I could do pre-AI, I can literally produce a hundred a day now. If I’m going to say, I’m not going to do it, they’ll say, fine, then we’ll go somewhere else. And then you go try to find a job somewhere else.

And you say, I’m only here to write 10 a day. Good luck to that person. I agree, I hope that somehow there is some type of equilibrium, but it never ends that way. Because at the end of the day, I gave you this tool. It’d be like saying, I know that now you can write a hundred emails a day, but I’m just going to write letters, because that’s what I like to do. A person doesn’t have the power to influence them at that scale.

But it had me thinking a lot. In the same respect, we have seen organizations that kind of value this idea of, maybe we’re not going to have you write 100, we’re going to have you write 50. And that’s where we’re going to land. And we’re not going to force you to go to that extreme, because we saw that pay off a lot. I think Google became such a big proponent of this love where you work mentally that it ended up becoming the butt of many jokes.

But the reality was people were like; I want to work at a place that values me and cares about me. They happen to also pay very well, but if they didn’t, I mean, if that many people are searching for mental health, you better believe that they’re putting a dollar value on that.

And I will say, when I leverage AI to work, it is incredibly mentally exhausting for me because you can pivot so quickly, but I feel like every time I pivot, it creates such friction in my neurons. There’s got to be some science behind it. It does use so much energy.

Erica: And pace, it’s the time, quality, cost triangle, isn’t it? And we need to figure out where we sit on that. And part of this is if you’re negotiating with your employer to write more emails because you’ve got more time, as part of that, I want to do more of the job that I love doing. So that could be the human connection, that could be the consulting, that could be the conferences.

Let’s have a conversation. I’m leaving early on Friday. So, you’re going to get a bit more out of me, but I’m not filling those four hours with another 400 emails. I’m going to go and spend some time on my personal development or go to that conference or a pet project or whatever it might be. And interestingly, we’re already seen Gen Z and Gen Alpha operate in this way. It’s us millennials and Gen X’s that were brought up in that weird analog to digital, we’re all middle managers, we need to chase the career, we need to chase the dollar type thing.

The generations that have followed us are not in that mindset. So, I think sometimes we can look at this stuff through our own glasses. But in terms of how you look left and how that person’s thinking about stuff could be very different based on their generation, their experience, their employer, all those things really. So, I think it’s a real fascinating sociological study about people’s perceptions of what it is to collaborate with AI in an employer, in a role, and what that means for them.

AI Glasses, Fishing & Life Balance

Nolan: I’m a big advocate for working as little as possible and fishing as much as possible. I will work as much as you want, but I also would love to fish. And unfortunately, those are two things I can’t do at the same time. I can’t have something running in the background. It’s just not waterproof enough. I thought with the AI Ray-Bans, this is cool. While I’m fishing, I cannot even use my hands, but even that is not quite there yet. I’m sure that eventually they’re going to get there.

Erica: I don’t think the tech is quite there yet, but it’s getting there.

Erica’s Upcoming Book – AI for People Professionals

Nolan: Before we wrap, I want to touch on something I’m genuinely interested in. Your book’s not out till May, so this will probably be launched, this podcast in late March, early April. But you can pre-order it. You can pre-order this book. It’s called AI for People Professionals. Understand how to use artificial intelligence in your HR role. Can you tell us a tiny bit about what this book is about and what compelled you to write it?

Erica: It’s about taking professionals. And what I mean by that is you could be a HR business partner, head of people, an L&D consultant, a talent consultant, and starting with yourself and how you feel about your relationship with this technology right through to what are the key changes that we need to make in our operating models?

How do we need to work with stakeholders? Right through to breaking down the different disciplines in the employee life cycle. What does L&D look like now? What does recruitment and talent acquisition look like now? What does wellbeing look like now? And what are the opportunities that we have to make things better for people?

We’ve all onboarded in organizations where you’re trying to find out how do I get paid and how do I speak to this person and what happens if my laptop needs fixing. Simple things like we should have been automating this stuff years ago. ChatGPT has a store of pre-built agents that you could deploy tomorrow to do that stuff and upload your general FAQs. It’s not rocket science what I write about in the book, but it’s a practical handbook and guide. Someone called it a blueprint the other day. I thought it was a nice term. A blueprint for getting yourself to be AI savvy as a HR practitioner and how you do that for your business and your stakeholders.

Nolan: That sounds like a bestseller to me.

Erica: People were messaging me constantly saying, where do I start? What does it mean to me? What does it mean to my job? That’s why I wrote it. People still are and still will be for a while asking those questions.

Nolan: That is the number one thread I think I see across every webinar or whoever I talk to. It’s just, you’ve described literally Star Trek for me and you’re asking me to build Enterprise and I’m an HR manager. I’m not making light, I’m saying, I’m literally an HR manager and it sounds like you’re asking me to build Enterprise. This seems just too technical. This seems like science fiction. And they overestimate how far the gap is from HR professional to what might seem like a start to get into this.

Closing & Where to Find Erica

Nolan: This is amazing. Again, you can pre-order the book today. “AI for People Professionals,” how to use artificial intelligence in your HR role. Also follow Erica Farmer on LinkedIn. If you’re not already, she’s a great follow, posts some really good content. So please do that. Thank you, Erica, for joining us on this podcast. It’s been loads of fun.

Erica: I can’t believe how quickly time has gone. I love these kinds of conversations. So, thanks again for having me.

Nolan: Of course, we’ll talk again soon. Thank you. Bye.

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