The real AI risk is not losing your job

Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.

I love that that's where you started. So so talent boost was born out of, I spent about 20 years within corporate America. you know, spent the better part of my early career in full-time employee roles. and then in 2011, and I'll kind of keep this short because I know you like to keep this podcast pretty tight, but in 2011, I was at the the top of my game in in in corporate and on the rise in in my company. and a cancer diagnosis forced me to take time off to deal with my health. And that was really a the biggest challenge of my life, but also the biggest gift because it forced me to reevaluate was I on the path that I was meant to pursue? Was I passionate about that journey? And when I finally acknowledged to myself that the answer was no, I focused on my health, I got better, I beat cancer, I went back to work. And I quit. and so I spent the first couple of years really trying to figure out what my entrepreneurial journey would look like. And so I formed Talent Boost two years later in 2013, really around the idea that talent isn't born, it's boosted. And in fact, that became the tagline for the company. And it was all around this central belief that everyone, every person. every organization, every team has it within them to be amazing and to, you know, build a life and a world and a business and a journey that lights them up. And so Talent Boost was formed to help organizations of all sizes tap into what makes them amazing. Fast forward to now, I rebranded the company to Chandler Advisory Group when I took on my husband about two years ago as my partner. So that the the core of that is still true, but my husband brings in a different lens. So where my background is in leadership and talent development, human resources, communications and marketing, his background is around growth, development, operations, and efficiency. so we've truly now built out an advisory practice where, as I like to say, one plus one equals three.

Yeah, so so growth on purpose is the is the title of my most recent book, which came out about a year and a half ago. and it's also the the the title, if you will, of this framework that I've applied to helping businesses. the the subtitle of the book is you know, how to how to expand your business without losing your best talent. One of the things that we find with companies that are growing. first of all, you have to make a conscious choice to grow because the alternative is to start to die off, right? Businesses cannot just sustain status quo anymore. Like it just it just doesn't work. but most organizations run through some issues in terms of, you know, when they hit that next growth plateau, they either lose the ability to attract the right people, they certainly lose the ability to retain. the right people. They start to see cracks in terms of engagement, levels of trust between teams, excuse me, among teams within, you know, employees trusting their leaders. And then of course there's the overarching, how this all builds toward underperformance in an organization. A lot of organizations are now growing through acquisition, through mergers, through involvement with private equity. and other investors. And of course, the first focus is how do we multiply our growth? It's not just incremental growth anymore, it is exponential growth. And even on the private equity side, there's this disillusionment that happens during growth because it never happens at the pace that we want it to. And almost always it boils down to how you are bringing in and how you are bringing up. the talent in your organization. And so the book and the framework are an exploration of how organizations can attract, retain, advance and grow the right talent to help them to fulfill their mission and to grow in sustainable ways.

I mean, I think it boils down to no one grows alone. Right? If if I had to if I had to just say skip the book, save the time, it's that. It's no business grows alone. No founder can grow alone. No organization can grow without the right talent, doing the right things in the right ways and in the right direction.

The the first place that I always start is with a little bit of diagnosis. it it it's sort of like going to a doctor and you have some symptoms, some things that aren't feeling quite right. No doctor is going to say, here, take this pill and we're gonna solve everything. Every business owner wants that magic pill, right? But no doctor worth their salt is going to have you walk in with just a list of symptoms and say, Don't don't even give me your list. Here, here's how we're going to fix the problem. They ask a series of questions, they run you through tests, they they look at the data and they try to understand, you know, what what is the data telling us, you know, both quantitatively and qualitatively. And so the first step that I always do is some combination of a diagnosis and a conversation. And it's not to prolong the solution, it's actually to find the right solution, right? Because I don't know about you, but everyone who promises a magic. Pill, it doesn't actually work. But if it did, we would pay top dollar for that. And really, the way through those growth spurts and then those inevitable dips in growth are through having the right partners, having the right conversations, and then finding the right way through by learning from people who have come before you, understanding that there are best practices, and really. Kind of getting it in your head as a founder or as a leader that the problems you think are super unique to you have actually been faced by other people who came before you and have actually been conquered. So being open to that conversation and understand that we need to diagnose here what the symptoms are telling us so that we can, you know, address the root cause and then really build the right path toward the solution. So it was a long way of saying, you know, that the framework of growth on purpose and the building blocks of growth on purpose. Are never one size fits all. It starts with a diagnosis of, you know, I really believe in meeting people where they are. So really understanding what are your unique symptoms and how do those translate into some quick wins and some bigger underlying problems that we need to address as soon as possible.

I would say doing things the way they've always done them, right? What is that definition of insanity to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result? one of the things I'm a big believer in is if you are going to grow your organization and grow your team and grow yourself as a leader, you also have to grow out of yesterday's thinking and thinking that, you know. The the way that we've approached this client, this market, this problem in the past will always be the way that we do it in the future. Actually, it stunts your growth more than you think. And so it's really important for people to understand we have to evolve our thinking. We have to invite people into our decision making. We have to make sure we don't have tunnel vision. You know, I always say, and I and I've come up against leaders who And I'm sure you have two who think they're the smartest person in the room. And what I say to that is if you truly believe you're the smartest person in every room you walk into, then you're in the wrong rooms. You said something to me right before we started recording this about, you know, one of the reasons that you do this podcast is because you want to learn from the people ahead of you. That's what growth is all about. Personal growth, business growth, professional growth. It is about learning from the people who came before you and kind of standing on the shoulders of those best practices and those lessons learned to reach for a higher branch than you could have reached on your own.

Yeah, I love that question because AI absolutely is a it is a game changer. I I am one of those people who embraces AI. I know a lot of people fear AI, but the reality is it's here, it's not going anywhere, it is only going to evolve and become even more embedded in our daily professional and personal lives. One of the watch outs me when it comes to AI is. We we see a lot of we hear a lot of talk in organizations about how AI is going to come in and generate efficiencies and replace a lot of the tactical transactional work. And then of course that that plant seeds in employees who fear them, well, you're going to take away my job. The bigger risk is not that it's going to replace people. The bigger risk really is that AI is going to replace those early experiences that we all have in our career. where we learn foundational skills. And so it will be more important than ever not to just let AI replace our own thinking and our own learning. And so one of the things, you know, and I'm and I'm sure you see this too, there there's sort of this fear that AI is going to make us dumber, right? there's this concept that GPS in, you know, in cars makes us less skilled at finding you know our way to a destination. Now for me, I've always been directionally challenged. So I was glad when GPS came into my life many years ago because prior to that, which predates you, we had paper maps if we were lucky, or we printed out directions from MapQuest. Look it up. It's no longer around. But now we have GPS. And

We still need to be able to check that the directions we get from GPS are valid, right? That they're up to date, that they're not going to send us down a dead-end street or send us, you know, to a road where a bridge is under construction and the detour is not accounted for in GPS. So, as drivers, as navigators of that journey, we still need to practice a level of discernment. About the directions we're being given. It's the same thing we have to hold on to with AI. AI can absolutely become a thought partner, can absolutely help us get, you know, brain dumps out of our head and make it more cohesive and reflect back to us some order to that chaos. But we can't just accept that and say, okay, I'm gonna run with this and just trust AI. Could you imagine? But that's what people do now. We just blindly trust what AI tells us to be reality when we wouldn't trust a human telling us the same thing. And so it is going to be more and more important as AI becomes more and more embedded in our lives and our daily work that we practice discernment about what we are told or what we receive from AI.

You know, since this is being recorded, I want to be really careful that I have a that my answer has a shelf life. And I say that because there are certain things that I would think just reflexively in answering that question that no way AI would ever replace. But we've we've already gone from generative AI to agentic AI, and I don't even know what the version of AI will be a year or two years, five years from now. It will it will blow our minds because it's something that you and I can't even contemplate yet. sitting here today, I think that the the number one thing it cannot replace is that discernment that I talked about, that human layer of judgment and evaluation of whether what we are being given from AI is real, is true, is is something we would stake our brand, our reputation, our lives on. but having said that. I don't know when we play this back in five years if even that is going to be a foolish statement, because AI will have evolved to the point where, you know, even individual decision making will be less and less necessary. To me, that's a scary thought sitting here in 2026, but maybe in 2031 that will be commonplace.

Yeah, I I hope you're right. I hope you're right. That's right. two years rebranded as Chandler Advisory Group, but really it's an extension or an evolution of the same company talent boost. So we're, you know, we're what is it, 13 years going strong, right? I I would say the vision for the company, candidly, I'm not getting any younger, right? None of us are, but I have I'm at the point where I can acknowledge I have fewer years ahead of me professionally than I have behind me. And what do I really want that journey to look like? And for me, it's always been about impact. And the definition for me of what that looks like has evolved over the years, right? Impact when I was younger, and especially my early days as a founder, was really about measurable productivity, right? measurable return on an investment. Did the the efforts that I made as an advisor and a consultant? translate into teams that were more cohesive, engagement ratings that were higher, you know, growth that was more measurable in a positive direction. And all of those things are still important. But really, what I love and my vision for the company is that my husband and I, as we continue to build this out, that we can remain at the top of our game at the highest level, advising the right businesses and the right leaders. To grow their companies in the right way. Especially as AI starts to take over a lot of the foundational tasks and activities and groundwork. Leadership teams really have to evolve the way that they work together, the way that they make decisions, and the way that they take calculated risks to grow in the right direction and make an impact on the world. And if we can help influence and affect that in a positive direction, we will have made a mark on the world through the efforts of of others, right? It just amplifies the work that we can do if we can be in those executive rooms and continue to influence and educate and advocate for the right leadership teams and the right organizations. So that's my that's my vision is that we just continue to evolve our own thinking so we can evolve the thinking of the of the organizations that we're proud to call our clients.

I love that. I love that. So the the the fast pass to to me and to some clarity is to go to chandler advisory group.com. You can learn more about myself, my husband, the type of work we do. But better yet, there is that fast pass button that they can click to, you know, remember when I said the very first step I I will take with a client is a is diagnosis. there is a relatively quick scorecard or evaluation or diagnosis, call it what you want, that they can take to measure how ready are they in their organization to grow right now. And they will instantly get feedback on a couple of things that they can do to improve that ability to grow without losing their best talent.

Thank you. It was an honor and I really appreciate you sharing your stage.