409. “AI Won’t Kill Us—It Could Make Us More Human” | Leadership in the Age of AI with Marissa Afton

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Marissa Aftoi:
In our world today, we have lost a lot of the humanness in our day-to-day interactions

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Hello and welcome to The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster. Food for the brain knowledge from the experts tools to win at life. I'm your host, Dr. Richard, Whoever you are, wherever you're from, and whatever you do, this is the show that is going to help you become the best version of yourself. Each episode, you will hear from some of the most amazing, talented, and successful people on the planet who followed their passions and strive to help others. Join our movement to get a million people each day to commit acts of kindness for others. Together, we're going to make the world a better place. Are you ready? Because it's time for your Daily Helping. 

Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Daily Helping Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. And our guest today is fantastic. Her name is Marissa Afton. She's the partner and head of Global Accounts at Potential Projects. She is a driving force behind leadership development and change initiatives at global companies. She helps leaders and organizations unlock their potential to create cultural excellence, superior performance, resilience and innovation. 

She's here to talk to us today about her newest book, which she co-authored called More Human: How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead. In addition, she is a regular contributor to publications like Harvard Business Review, Forbes, TD Magazine and Fast Company. A timely topic to be sure. Marissa, welcome to The Daily Helping. It is awesome to have you with us today.

Marissa Aftoi:
Oh, thank you, Dr. Richard. What a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Absolutely. This is an exciting topic, right? , because AI is everywhere. AI, you know, we were talking a little bit before the show, before we started recording, most of what we hear about AI is kind of terrifying, right? It's either gonna take our jobs or kill us. And so, I'm really not in favor of either of those being the case. So, we're gonna talk a lot about AI, our humanity, and all the different ways it impacts things. But before we do that, I wanna jump into the Marissa Afton time machine and hit 88 miles an hour. We're gonna go back in time. I wanna find out a little bit more about you. Talk to us about some of those seminal moments that put you on the journey you're on today.

Marissa Aftoi:
Yeah, thank you. So, my background is in the psychology of workplace health and wellbeing. So, I've really been on a journey for over 20 years now on how to support people having enhanced performance, as well as enhanced wellbeing in the workplace. My role at Potential Project for the past 10 years has really been to create more human workplaces by harnessing the potential of the mind. So, that's a lot of what I do. 

And my journey to get here started way, way back, many years ago when I started my own mindfulness and mind training practices, really, really inspired by my own dad. I mean, my father is somebody who was a corporate attorney in New York City, fast-paced, always on culture, and really was looking at how to find his own balance in his work and his life, and found mindfulness back at a time when it wasn't as popular as it has been in the past decade or so. And he passed it on to me. And I really ran with it in terms of my own education and my own professionalism. So, that's high level of how I got to be here.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
And I love that because we've certainly talked about mindfulness many times over the years, but as an ideological underpinning, if you will, to your worldview is phenomenal because you can't get any more human-centric than mindfulness, right? And we're going to talk about AI. So, let's do, kind of, an AI overview of where we are today. Most people are familiar with or have heard of things like ChatGPT. But we hear that this is impacting the business world, but we never really hear how. So, share with us a little bit about where the AI technology is today and how it's impacting things, certainly in all areas of life but in business first. We'll start there.

Marissa Aftoi:
Yeah. Thanks, Dr. Richard. You know, one thing I just wanna say from the get-go, I am not an expert on the tools of AI, although, of course, as part of our research for the book, we have been very much utilizing, and I wanna say we're adopters of AI. We use ChatGPT, we use Claude, we use Copilot, we use many different AI tools and potential projects, so that we're also learning about how AI can enhance the way that we operate and we lead efficiently. 

And then you asked me the question, where are we today with AI? And depending on when anybody is listening to this podcast, that could be a very, very different answer. So, I don't want to necessarily put something in the podcast that says, "This is where we are with AI today," but what I can say is, you know, at Potential Project, as I mentioned, our goal is to create more human workplaces by harnessing the potential of the mind. And I think in our pre-conversation, we talked a little bit about our previous book on compassionate leadership. 

And we've been in this decade plus collaboration with Harvard Business Review and Harvard Business Press, along with collaborations with other partners in research and academia. And we were already on track to publish a completely different book about two years ago. And Harvard came to us and said, "Have you heard about this thing called generative AI?" And we were like, "Yes, we've heard of it, but we're not sure we're the best people to write about it."

But what we soon realized is even if we're not experts in AI, we are experts in workplaces and, specifically, how to stay human in a fast-paced, technologically advanced workplace environment. So, where I see AI now is it absolutely is changing our workplaces. And if we're not on board with that, then we're going to be missing the boat. And I would say that to your point about it's going to kill us, it's going to take away all of our jobs, I mean, it will be a disruptor for sure. I don't believe it's going to kill us. I just want to say that. I hope that that stays true.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
I'm gonna hold you to that.

Marissa Aftoi:
I know, that's just where I'm sitting today in the time that we're having this conversation. And I will admit, I had my own skepticism about AI. We've been through so much, even in the last five years, from the time of the pandemic to creating more virtual workplaces, where we become more and more and more disconnected in our working lives.

And for me, when I first started thinking about AI, I was worried about that as another risk. Is this gonna make us more disconnected still because we're more attached to technology? And, honestly, if we look at history, we're really great at building the tools of technology to enhance us, but we're not always great at leveraging the tools of technology to enhance us. At the same time, I really see AI's potential. Paradoxically, AI has the ability to make us more human, not less human, but it's dependent on how we use it.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
I read last week that Bill Gates said that within X number of years, like I think he said within 10 years, expect to work two days a week because of AI.

Marissa Aftoi:
I saw that too.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Which I find pretty hard to believe. So, the paradox is fascinating. AI, as a technology, has the capability, if deployed properly, to make us more human. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Marissa Aftoi:
Yeah. And I love the kind of, I would say, utopian ideal of us only being able to work two days a week because we're more efficient. And a part of me says, I'll believe it when I see it. If we think about email, just going back to when email first came into the working world, we thought email was going to make us more efficient and would free up all this time because we just do everything over email. How has that been working for us? Most of us are constantly overwhelmed by our inbox. So, it really does come back to humans needing to be in the driver's seat with our technology. 

As it relates to AI, yes, it has the power to create great efficiencies for us. What do we do when we're more efficient? Do we have more human connections? That's the power of AI being able to allow us to be more human. If I use my AI companion to be able to help me go through reams of data, to be able to answer questions more effectively, to be able to summarize meetings for me, then I have time to decide, how am I going to have more human-to-human connections? Or conversely, it might just give me more information overload, and then I'm going to fill that void with more busyness and more work. So, it really depends on how we're approaching our relationship with AI, and then what we're going to do with the efficiencies we create.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
So, from a leadership perspective, my suspicion is that it is the belief of potential project that how it's deployed is really on the onus of leadership at corporations to use it properly, to get the most out of people, and to make sure that they're not just doing nonsensical things with that extra time.

Marissa Aftoi:
I would say that it's on the onus of leaders, and I would say also their talent development, HR and learning development leads. And so, what we know is a lot of companies are going deep with AI in terms of the tool, and they have all these systems and processes in place on how people can use the tool. And we say that's great and good, but it's not enough. 

You also have to develop the mind, the human part. How are we? Are we setting people up to still have good discernment about how they're utilizing the tool? Are we setting people up to still have those human connections to be able to use their critical thinking to be able to have self critical thinking, to be able to have self-mastery over the tool? Because there are a lot of benefits to AI, but there are also a lot of risks. And if we're not developing our own inner game for how we're using AI, then we can just fall into some of the common pitfalls that we've fallen into with many other technological tools today.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
It makes me think about something I recently saw in the news where a law firm got into some trouble because they were citing cases using AI and the cases didn't exist, right? And so, there's a danger when we put this algorithm essentially on a platform as this authority. Because a lot of times it could be like Wikipedia, just nonsense, right? So, where is the line? Where is the line between accepting what an algorithm spits out as the truth, and how much it should be questioned?

Marissa Aftoi:
Yeah. The thing is, in our time using AI as part of our research for the book, it's gotten smarter and smarter, it's gotten better and better, but we know it still hallucinates, right? Even though it's constantly improving itself, it's an active, live, listening, learning machine, it still has the capacity to hallucinate. And that's why I think I've said it once before, we still need to be in the driver's seat. We have to augment ourselves, augment our intelligence. 

And in our pre-conversation, Dr. Richard, we were talking about we can't, as humans, have the same intelligence as our AI bots are, just simply from the fact that we don't have the ability anymore to have the same level of information and all the data and all the insights. But we have this critical thinking mind. We have the ability to check, to discern, to fact-check. And I think that that's where we still need the best of the both ends, of human and machine, to work well together to get the best of both. 

So, I would say, yes. And as you said, there are a few funny, not funny stories about how people have just gone and let AI have the answers for them and not done their homework to check whether it's actually factual. That's the human part of the equation that we still need to be in control of.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
As you look back at your research, what were some of the things that stood out to you that you weren't expecting?

Marissa Aftoi:
I think the first one was what I started with, is that paradoxically, AI can make humans more human. I mean, as I said, I was a little bit cynical. I was thinking, okay, the bigger we get into tech, the less human we'll become. But part of our research included having a lot of one-on-one conversations with many C-suite executives and just hearing their perspectives and what they were doing in their organizations to enable more human leadership in the age of AI.

And you know, there's a huge spectrum. There's the early adopters who are kind of all in, and they've been testing, and using it, and they have it fully integrated into how they operate. You have a bunch of people in the middle who are playing around in it, but they're not really optimizing what AI can do for them. And then, you have a whole group of people who are waiting to retire, so that they don't ever have to use AI in their work. 

And what we found is, again, to your point earlier about, is it going to take all of our jobs? Well, it will be a disruptor. But we also know that it will disrupt people who aren't leveraging AI. That's really where it's going to disrupt the most. If you're a leader and you are leveraging AI to enhance your leadership and enhance your humanness, you're more likely to stay relevant in your work and your role today. 

And so, some of the conversations that we've had with leaders are leaders who have used AI where previously maybe, for example, during a performance review process, they would bookmark an hour of their time to prepare for this conversation that they needed to have with a direct report. And they'd spend that hour going through all of the data and all of the papers relating to that person's performance over the past six months or a year. And they'd only have five minutes to really prepare mentally, and I would say mentally and emotionally, for the actual conversation. 

Now, the leader that's leveraging AI to become a more human leader is letting the AI synthesize all that data. Instead of spending an hour sifting through all that data, there's a report for you that you only need 5, 10, maybe maximum 15 minutes to read through. But if you've kept that hour to prepare for that conversation, you can spend the next 45 minutes really thinking to yourself, how do I want to approach this conversation? What is it that I know this person wants in terms of their continuous development? How do I want them to leave feeling after we have this dialogue about where they are in their work and their professional life? And that helps us become more present, more connected, more empathetic, more human. So, that's one way that we see leaders really using AI to enhance their humanness. 

Dr. Richard Shuster:
So, that's effectively the Bill Gates dream, right? Like we're leveraging this technology to save so much time, then we can be meaningful and thoughtful around the human elements of business. 

Marissa Aftoi:
Exactly right. Exactly right. 

Dr. Richard Shuster:
You had said that there's these, kind of, different groups. You've got the early adopters all the way to the other side of the spectrum that just are like getting me to hell on a business side.

Marissa Aftoi:
Never AI, yeah.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
I'm curious, do you have rough percentages as to what parts of the workforce those make up and the age ranges associated with them?

Marissa Aftoi:
Oh, that's a really interesting question. I don't have a percentage breakdown in my own mind or just in my data off the top of my head, but what I can say is we do have data around the percentage of and this is kind of global leaders, global leaders across many industries, and we have millions of data points. We've assessed leaders across multiple countries, different industries. And in our research, 80% of leaders recognize that AI is here to stay, and it's going to be necessary for them to utilize AI in their leadership.  So, 80%. 

And actually, Dr. Richard, if you're asking me today, what's up with the other 20% that don't see that as, like, that's the curiosity to me. But the good news is 80% see, okay, super important. Downside, only 8%, according to our research, feel that they are actively utilizing AI to its fullest potential and know how to use it to its fullest potential. There's a big gap there.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
A tremendous gap. And I'm wondering within that, like the example you gave about the performance review, which I've never thought of, and I was like, "Wow, that's really brilliant." I'm wondering in what ways have you seen people leverage AI because we're talking about being more human to either enhance their own leadership or improve relationships within teams because I think that's where this should be going.

Marissa Aftoi:
Yeah. We've taken a lot of inspiration. Again, you know, my example around the leader who uses AI to enhance how she's doing. Performance reviews come from our conversations with Cisco. This is an example that I'll give from our conversations with Citi, Citi Group. And we actually were so inspired by this example that we decided to take it in-house ourselves, a potential project, which is really creating your own, and again, with AI, within your own protected, data-protected GPT that hopefully has been created in house, if you're in a big business, and create your own leadership persona. 

And there are many ways to do this. And you may have heard of, you know, you can create different personas for yourself, you can create a persona for yourself that's like your best leader day, you can create a persona for yourself of your leader of the future, what you want to aspire to be in 10 years or 15 years, and like asking your future self. You can create a persona for yourself of, you know, you on like the disconfirming person who's always going to challenge you and always going to push back on some of your ideas. So, you have a bit of a sparring partner here. 

And then, how this relates to teams is you can really start with permission, of course, always get permission from your team members, that if every one of us has a little bit of a persona through our GPT, then we can start testing the personas on different ways that we're brainstorming together, our ways of working, how we make decisions. And so, we can feed the GPT different things like our leadership values, our personality assessments, if you're in MBTI, for example, like what your typology is. We use the Enneagram a lot in potential projects, just to be able to get a sense of, "Okay. So, now, I'm going to have a conversation with my colleague, Jacqueline, but I'm not sure how she'll respond when I approach her with this very big decision that needs to be made. And knowing what you know about Jacqueline and knowing what you know about me, what recommendations do you have about the best way to approach it so we can get on the same page quickly?"

Dr. Richard Shuster:
This makes sense to me. And it is going to be curious as this evolves because this past year was the first year that an AI model is officially smarter than the average population. In three years, in five years, it's gonna be smarter than everybody on Earth combined, which is wild. I'm curious if potential projects looked at any particular data extending AI out of the workplace, but into the household. That is, how is AI affecting families, parents, relationships? Have you guys pulled any data in that regard?

Marissa Aftoi:
Our expertise really is in the workplace and in leadership, but even you and I were talking and you shared an example. And I don't know. Not to put you on the spot, Dr. Richard, about how you've used it even in your own household, but I think it's a brilliant example that could apply to any parents. And certainly I do use my GPT to help me with, for example, if I know I'm going to be having a challenging conversation with a loved one, or just to ask for what's a great way to approach this conversation. But I don't know whether you wanted to share what you shared with your family.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Well, I don't mind sharing, yeah. I mean, full disclosure, I'm good at a lot of things, but math is not one of them. And my son had homework that I absolutely couldn't help him with, but I told him to seek the wisdom of ChatGPT, and it told him exactly, formulaically how to do it. And not just the answer, but in a way to explain to where he understood conceptually how to do that kind of a problem. And I think that's where it's helpful, right? For me as a parent, I think that we're gonna get to a place pretty quickly. 

One of the things we talked about before is, really, this is the first time in modern history where knowledge is no longer as valuable a commodity as it used to be, right? Because now anybody can get on one of these large language models, whether it's Claude or Grok or ChatGPTs, whatever, and ask it anything, and it's going to pull the data. Or anybody can take, like you said, a 200-page document and feed it into the thing and say, "Analyze this.: And it does it, right? 

And so, I think the bigger question for us as humanity, and this is probably another episode, is that if knowledge is as freely available as air, what are we doing in terms of teaching people at all ages, right? Because we go to school traditionally from K through however far you want to go. It's the acquisition of knowledge to be able to do things. 

So, should we now really be focusing from when kids are… I guess the answer is yes, we should. Should we be focusing on critical thinking, right? Critical reasoning abilities, interpersonal connectedness, emotional intelligence. These are the things where we probably ought to be going as a society because it's just learning your 50 state capitals doesn't mean as much anymore as it did before when we were in this era. So, it is going to be wild to see this all continue to evolve.

Marissa Aftoi:
I couldn't have said it better honestly, Dr. Richard. You encapsulated exactly our perspective on all of this, which is, really, the knowledge is a different type of commodity right now in today's world. But what so far, even though, as I mentioned, the AIs are getting better and better and better at mimicking human emotions like empathy, like compassion, really, the superpower of the human is the heart still. And to be able to enhance those mindsets and those capabilities, as you said, around empathy, around adaptability, around critical thinking, around self-mastery, those are the places that we really need to continue to double down on.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Absolutely. Marissa, I have enjoyed this conversation so much and I looked at the clock and I cannot believe how much time has flown by. And for everybody listening to this, take heart, because Marissa Afton guaranteed to all of us that we would not be killed by AI. So, we can all be really grateful to her for that.

But in all seriousness, as you know, I wrap up every episode by asking my guests their biggest helping. So, Marissa, what is your biggest help? And that one most important piece of information you'd like somebody to walk away with after hearing our conversation today?

Marissa Aftoi:
You know, I hate to be too cliché or too much using our own book called More Human. But I do think in our world today, we have lost a lot of the humanness in our day-to-day interactions. Hopefully, we're still staying human in our communities and in our families. But in our workplaces and in our lives, I think we're just going at such a fast pace. We have abdicated a lot of our humanness to other people's perspectives and technology. And really to be able to keep coming back to our human connection will really, I think, help us in the long run for all of us. 

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Well said. The book is More Human: How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead is available everywhere. Marissa, tell us where people can learn more about you online.

Marissa Aftoi:
Yes. So, I am a partner at Potential Project. As I mentioned, we're a global leadership development and research firm. So, you can find us collectively at potentialproject.com. I am part of an authorship team, so you can find me there, but you can also find out more about us, our research on our LinkedIn page. And I have my own LinkedIn as well.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Perfect. And for those of you behind the wheel, we got you covered. Everything Marissa Afton and Potential Project will be linked in the show notes at drrichardshuster.com. Well, Marissa, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. I loved the conversation. 

Marissa Aftoi:
As did I. Thank you, Dr. Richard.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Absolutely. And I also want to thank each and every one of you who took time out of your day to listen to this. If you liked it, if you're inspired, if you're excited, go give us a follow on a five star review on your podcast app of choice, because this is what helps other people find the show. But most importantly, go out there today and do something nice for somebody else, even if you don't know who they are, and post it in your social media feeds using the hashtag #MyDailyHelping because the happiest people are those that help others.