141. What Matters Next: AI, Purpose, and Human-Friendly Tech with Kate O’Neill

Transcript – Episode 141: What Matters Next: AI, Purpose, and Human-Friendly Tech with Kate O’Neill

KATE O’NEILL: We have to bring a much more proactive idea of how do we focus on what truly is meaningful to us in the work that we do and in the organizations that we serve. How does the organization keep purpose front and center in the work that it’s doing and how does it kind of cascade that through all of the work that’s being done? And then how do we use automation to support the flow of that meaningful work, the purposeful work?

Introduction

JOE MULL: Welcome back friends to the show that is food for the boss’s soul. Here on Boss Better Now, we talk with leaders, experts, and change makers about their experiences in the workplace. All in the name of helping you understand how to create the conditions at work for people to thrive. Today I am joined by Kate O’Neill. Kate is known as the tech humanist and she works with some of the most widely known organizations on the planet including Google, IBM, Microsoft and the United Nations to help them make technology better for business and better for humans. She is the author of four books, host of the award-winning Tech Humanist podcast, and her work has been celebrated with a myriad of awards and honors across the globe. I’ve known Kate for a number of years now, and she is also one of the nicest, most generous people you’ll ever meet. When we revised the format for this show, Kate was one of the first people that I wanted to interview as a guest because she’s a brilliant thinker who has worked in a number of fascinating environments. And in this conversation, she shares a whole host of thoughtful takes and insights on this moment that we’re in where technology is dramatically shaping so many different aspects of our lives, especially in the workplace. Listen to her describe the key questions leaders should be asking to best support their teams and meet this moment. And be sure to stay for the end where Kate tells us the one thing that every leader and every employee should be practicing right now to ensure success in a technology-driven world. And now here’s our conversation.

Conversation

JOE MULL: Kate, welcome to the show. I am so delighted that you’re here and I’m so excited to talk to you today about a variety of topics. Thank you for being here.

KATE O’NEILL: Thank you, Joe Mull. You’re one of my favorite people and I love the show and I’m so glad to be here.

JOE MULL: You are so nice to say that. I was trying to think back in prepping for the interview to how we met and I think it was nearly a decade ago now in a private Facebook speaker community that eventually was doing like those Toronto based meetups. Do I have that right? Does that sound right to you?

KATE O’NEILL: Yeah, I think that’s right. So, you know, there’s a lot of folks that I know through that group and I think because we now share other connections and other networks, it’s always hard to go like, “Oh, it goes back there.” But yeah, there’s so many wonderful people that we know mutually through that group, right?

JOE MULL: And getting to connect with you usually once or twice a year at some of our shared conventions and whatnot in the speaking community is always amazing. And it’s been a thrill to watch you traveling the world and sharing incredible insights on how to solve human problems at scale and how to make technology better for business and for people. And that’s really the theme around many of the questions that I have for you today. And well, thanks selfishly. They’re all things where I find myself going, I just want to ask Kate about this. And so that’s what we’re going to do today. And so I apologize if it feels like we’re jumping around a bit. Because I just have like I have a couple questions for Kate.

KATE O’NEILL: Ask me anything, Joe Mull.

JOE MULL: Let’s do it. Let’s start with the premise of our show, which as you know, we explore the work experiences of our guests as a way to help others gain a deeper understanding of what it takes to create workplaces where people thrive. So, let’s go back to the beginning. Tell us the story of your very first job.

KATE O’NEILL: It’s so hard to remember which is the first. I don’t know if you know you have this too where you could measure that by a couple of different things, right? You could be like, oh, babysitting or you could be like a paper route or whatever. But for me, I think there’s a few different moments that really define how I feel about entering the workforce. One of them is I did construction site cleanup for a project that a family friend was doing. And that was really interesting because I think it really reinforced to me that I don’t necessarily have to have an interest in the subject that is, you know, kind of happening at the site. I’m just a systems thinker and I’m curious. And so like doing construction site cleanup was an incredible opportunity and as a fellow podcaster you’ll appreciate, you know, just kind of to be able to interview people to kind of go around like, oh, the plumber’s doing the plumber thing now. Like I want to understand like what has to happen in order for you to do the plumber thing. So what made you decide you wanted to be a plumber? Right. Yeah. Exactly. Like I’m like a 12-year-old little podcaster in training back then. So it was cool because it was like an off-the-books sort of thing. I was just getting paid in cash. But you know the ideal situation for a curious person to just sort of put together a working theory of the world and how systems work, you know.

JOE MULL: Yes, we have that in common. My dad built houses in central Pennsylvania. So what that meant is that for most of my formative years on weekends and nights and summers I was on a job site doing the grunt work and getting paid under the table, right? And it’s funny because when you ask like what was your first job? I always think like does the qualification when you got a paycheck and they took taxes?

KATE O’NEILL: Yeah. No, and I can even think like there were so many jobs that I did before officially getting like taxes taken out and you know getting a paycheck. My mom, I just wrote this in a soliloquy to her for her 80th birthday which just passed. But I wrote a little thing about how much she inspired me with her work life that she had kind of taken time off to raise us kids. I’m the youngest of three and so when I was about seven or eight or so, she went back to work in a part-time secretarial role. But she eventually she was so good at what she was doing that she made her way up through different, you know, sort of ascent into different roles and became the CEO of a chamber of commerce that served our town and three other or four other communities. And so I was her youngest little volunteer like stuffing envelopes and filing things at the office or whatever, but also doing things like at the business after hours mixers, you know, taking money and giving out name tags and all that. And when everybody was checked in, I was allowed to go to the open bar and get a little, you know, club soda with lime and go mingle around and like ask people about like, “How is the dry cleaning business these days, Mrs. Whatever?” Or like, you know, it was just it was so funny, you know, this little 10-year-old or whatever. I got to feel fancy. I got to, you know, what I said in the piece I just wrote was the important thing is not so much that my mom brought me to those spaces and made me feel like I could be there, but it was truly like a sense of belonging that was created for me in those spaces. Like you’re beautiful. There’s no one who does not belong in these spaces. And that I think is a really important thread that I carried through.

JOE MULL: Beautiful. And happy birthday, Kate’s mom.

KATE O’NEILL: Yeah. Yay, Georgia.

JOE MULL: Beautiful. Okay. So, as a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? Did you have a clear memory of having an idea? Was it always like thought leader and UN adviser on the intersection of technology and humanity?

KATE O’NEILL: You know what’s funny is the UN does figure into it because there were, well there were several things at the same time which I would imagine might be true for you too. You know, we have in common the construction site cleanup. I’m guessing that we also have in common that we had like five different things we would like to have been. And for me it was like, you know, rock star, movie star, you know, kind of songwriter, whatever. But there’s acting, there’s music, and there’s also languages. I’ve always been a total language nerd. And so I thought that maybe one of the ways I might go would be like to be kind of a UN interpreter or something like that. And so I was learning, I was teaching myself languages from a very, very young age. And my sister who is seven to eight years older than I was, she took German in high school and so I was helping with her flashcards. Eventually got really good at German. So like it was a really formative thing. And then only kind of after I was already teaching myself a bunch of languages did I learn that my dad had been a military interpreter. In the military he had been an Arabic interpreter and he had been in the FBI doing military intelligence. So super interesting that this kind of apple didn’t fall too far from the tree sort of thing that, you know, had this language background with my dad. So the UN figured in in that sense and then when some years later, many years later when I was invited to speak at the UN for the first time and I’m standing there looking around at the interpreter booths I’m like this is better. This is the better approach. Thank you. German flashcards helped me get here.

JOE MULL: How many languages do you speak right now, Kate?

KATE O’NEILL: So, I don’t know how to say how many I speak really because speaking is the hardest of the skills. You know, there’s reading, there’s writing, there’s listening, and there’s speaking. I’d say maybe a few that I speak, but I study 30. I study 33 or something like that in various levels of, you know, seriousness or whatever. But, you know, it’s like German, French, Spanish, Italian, Danish, like those are all in the top of the list. And then you throw in Chinese and Japanese and, you know, a bunch of others and they make their way down to the like I’m not sure I could really conduct a conversation in this, but I can read it and I can, you know, kind of make my way through it. So, it’s fun. It’s just like that has been a lifelong fascination for me is that there are different technologies in a sense that people use to communicate with one another. And I find that to be just a fascinating aspect of human existence.

JOE MULL: Yes. When you go to school to get a music degree, as I did, and one in particular in voice, you have to do pedagogical work in a whole bunch of different languages. And so I eventually learned how to sing in about a dozen languages.

KATE O’NEILL: Oh, sure.

JOE MULL: But I would have to go to the library to translate, right? You know, and you pick a few things up along the way, but so I can read it. I can pronounce it, but it doesn’t mean I know what I’m saying. Well, you ended up being one of the first 100 employees at Netflix. What did that experience teach you about what you did or did not want from your work or your career?

KATE O’NEILL: Well, I loved that company. I loved that job. It was like, you know, I’m a movie nerd through and through. And so it was just a brilliant thing to be in surrounded by other movie nerds in this environment. I didn’t get along too well with my boss and you know, she may run across this recording and I’ll just have to say, let’s be honest, we don’t get along too well. And so that was an unfortunate thing and it’s kind of created this thought experiment that I really think of when I think of your work, Joe. Whenever I first started encountering your work, I was like, “Oh, this reminds me very much of this sort of conundrum that I have surfaced for people many times.” Like, would you rather be in a company that you love the work of, but a boss that you just don’t get along with, or would you rather have like the best boss in a company whose work is kind of meh to you? And those are, you know, it’s a really tough trade-off. But I’ve had both of those situations. And I can say that, you know, there’s certainly good and bad to be had on either side of that spectrum. I loved working at such a fun and dynamic company as Netflix. But then, years later, I worked for a company that was doing, you know, less interesting things to me, but I had a really dynamic boss. Like a boss who really got me and, you know, sort of lifted me up and saw all this potential that I wasn’t using and challenged me in ways that were really important. So I think, you know, that’s still a very pivotal thought experiment to me and I don’t think there’s a singular answer. I don’t know if you have an answer to that in your own work. Have you had both of those extremes in your background?

JOE MULL: Yeah, I think that’s a very relatable experience. And I think especially as you progress from your 20s into your 30s and into a, you know, of the early first jobs into a longer career arc, I think a lot of people have that. I mean, around the work that I do, what I want to shout is it doesn’t have to be one or the other, right? And look what happens when you get both right. You know, you every metric you care about as an organization goes in the right direction. But what’s interesting to me is what are the micro habits that you remember thinking about the leader that you struggled with and the leader that was just a great boss. What habits do you remember that they had or were there any questions or phrases that they used that have stayed with you all these years later?

KATE O’NEILL: You know what actually stands out to me more than either one of those is that within Netflix, the chief talent officer, Patty McCord, who’s rightfully gone on to be sort of lauded for her influence. She was really helpful to me as a still relatively young manager at the time. I had a couple of difficult things that I needed to manage through. And I could go to her and I could describe the situation. She would listen. She would, you know, kind of workshop it with me and give me very solid guidance to leave her office and feel like, okay, I can go do this. And that’s just so rare, I find, you know, for a chief level, a C-suite position to have such an open door policy and someone to be just genuinely so helpful at every level of the organization. So, I don’t know about specific things she’s said or, you know, phrases or anything like that, but I just think that that’s such a takeaway for folks is that that willingness to be a true resource to people in a very, very useful, practical way.

JOE MULL: Yep. And it’s interesting to me because you use the phrase like an open door policy and I meet leaders every day who say, “Oh, I have an open door policy” and “Oh, I tell my people all the time.” I am willing to bet there were some other things that that leader did that maybe you didn’t even notice that made it safe for you to walk through that door and be vulnerable and say I don’t know the answer to this or I’m struggling with that because that’s really the missing ingredient that makes a quote unquote open door policy work or not.

KATE O’NEILL: Yeah. And I don’t know if I could even put my finger on it, but you’re right. There must have been like little sort of clues that this is not just rhetoric, right? This isn’t just like me saying I have an open door policy. This is me living that every day and kind of being out in the organization knowing that it was still a small organization, but the fact that it wasn’t just talk to be able to walk into our office and say like I really have no idea what else to do right now besides kind of talk this through with you and she’s like sit down, let’s talk it through.

JOE MULL: Yeah. You know, and maybe you were like there are some people who are just wired that as soon as their leader says, “Hey, open door. Whatever you need, come in and let’s talk.” Who go, “Okay, here’s what I need.” Right. And there’s some, maybe you were wired that way at that age and you had that kind of confidence, but we know that not everybody does.

KATE O’NEILL: Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know that I did and I’m sure as you say, many people wouldn’t. I think that when you find yourself kind of back against the wall and you really want to deliver, you know, a quality managerial product of sorts, you know, you want to be your best manager. That I think is where if you know that there’s a resource and it’s been offered to you, that’s kind of a path of last resort. And it turned out to have been one that I’m so glad I took because she was so helpful to me. And, you know, as I’ve watched her, she and Reed put together the culture deck that became so famous for so many years. And I watched her receive a lot of flowers kind of quote unquote in the industry for that for so long. And I just kind of feel so warm and glowy about that because, you know, she genuinely genuinely lived what was encoded in that culture deck.

JOE MULL: I love that. Thank you for sharing that with us. And we’ll have to try and find a way to maybe share this episode with her so she can hear about you talk about all the impact that she’s had all those years later. That’s really beautiful. I want to ask you about your work now and I want to ask you about this moment that we’re in where the acceleration and adoption of AI tools are having an evolving impact on the workplace in so many ways, on employment, on productivity, on the labor force and job market. And so in thinking about the best way to ask you what I want to ask you, I want to ask you to finish two phrases in the context of technology and work. At this moment, what I’m most worried about is blank. And at this moment, what I’m most excited or hopeful about is blank.

KATE O’NEILL: So, I think what I’m most worried about with sort of the future of work and everything around that discourse is that people don’t really understand what it is they’re looking at when they look at that question. Because it is a nested kind of topic, right? When we talk about the future of work, we’re also talking about the future of jobs and the future of the workplace and the future of productivity and the future of tasks. And, you know, all of these things deserve their own consideration and yet they get kind of mushed together into one neat talking point that would be impossible to say my biggest concern about the future of work is X without that being, you know, sort of averaged to within uselessness, right? You know, so I think when we think about the future of work from an employer-centric lens, it’s a very different consideration than the future of jobs from a very employee-centric lens. You know what people are feeling when they feel that sort of existential angst around automation and the possibility of displacement and replacement, those kinds of topics. And then, you know, within that too I think there’s a sort of separation that we need to do to say like, look, even within the employer-centric lens there’s a range of attitudes, right? There are those who are fearful about the risk that they take on when they bring in more automation and then there are those who are not even thinking about the risk and they’re just, you know, full steam ahead, right? That’s a total spectrum. And then on the employee side, on the individual side, you’ve got people who are trying to figure out if they can avoid AI completely in their lives all the way through to people trying to figure out like can I get OpenClaw to do all my jobs for me and then just like take a nap at my desk. Like you’ve got the full range of experiences there too. So, it is way too nuanced and complicated to talk about as one thing. And yet, I worry that we’re not doing a good enough job as thought leaders, as leaders in general at kind of understanding the richness of that landscape in order to navigate it well. And then what I’m hopeful about is that I think there genuinely are opportunities to create, not so much the rhetoric of years past is like we’re going to use AI and automation to do all of the meaningless stuff and the mundane stuff so that we can focus on the higher order and more meaningful stuff. I think that’s kind of bull and I think it was always bull and I’ve always said it was bull because there’s this way in which, first of all, that’s not what capitalism rewards. Like that’s not how we do things in this model. And I think there’s a sense in which you have to think it through at an experiential level. Like if all we did was automate all of the most meaningless things and then that built to scale, that would mean that we were all living in and surrounded by completely automated meaningless things and it would feel terrible and no one would want that. Even if it meant that you could personally do manually what you consider to be the most meaningful, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to think that what someone else thinks is meaningful is meaningful. So there’s a, you know, this possibility of disconnect on what we each consider meaningful. And it’s just going to be so oppressive to be surrounded by so much meaninglessness in the automated interactions that are everywhere that I can’t imagine how you bring sort of a creative spirit, a quirky present mindset to that. So I think we have to be very cautious about that sort of framing and we have to bring a much more proactive idea of how do we focus on what truly is meaningful to us in the work that we do and in the organizations that we serve? How does the organization keep purpose front and center in the work that it’s doing? And how does it kind of cascade that through all of the work that’s being done? And then how do we use automation to support the flow of that meaningful work, the purposeful work? Because purpose takes the shape in business. The shape that meaning takes in business is purpose is what I mean to say. And I think that’s too easy to overlook because purpose sounds too touchy-feely, too fluffy. Not like a strategic asset, and it is a strategic asset and it’s really, really important that organizations, that leaders think of it that way. So that is what I’m hopeful about, is that we can sort of create the right conditions where people would understand that and would create genuinely more rewarding and more meaningful work for people in years to come and that we’re paying attention to the parts of the human condition that need to be attended to in ways or that must be attended to in ways that technology or automation will never be able to achieve. Yeah. I think we’ll never be a, like what technology can never do or what AI could never do is always going to be this moving target and that kind of framing is one that I would personally steer clear of just a little bit. But I think like what matters to us, like the name of my book is What Matters Next for a reason because what matters is the distillation question that you get when you examine meaning at any level, whether it’s, you know, I talked about being a linguist all through my life. When we think about semantic communication there’s that level of meaning and what matters is at the core of that. But even at all the other levels of meaning like patterns and purpose and truth and significance and relevance all the out to the biggest picture, like cosmic existential what’s it all about and why are we here, that’s always essentially what matters. Every kind of meaning question is what matters. So when you think about how an organization understands what it’s trying to do in the world and what it needs strategy and operations to achieve, it is fundamentally about what matters. And that question can guide the future readiness of the organization, it can guide the operational implementation of technology within the organization, and it can certainly guide the way that it infuses like morale and culture within the organization.

JOE MULL: I so appreciate so much of this. I’m chuckling because you talked about that’s not what capitalism rewards. And I just wrote a piece that’s posting later this month about one of my chief worries, which is that it’s very unlikely that advances in efficiency and productivity in the workplace that are brought about by AI will be used to make life better for workers. That these are advances that are mostly used to increase shareholder returns. And that history tells us, for example, that when we become more efficient at work, employers rarely say, “Hey, these new tools and advances could allow us to give people less work and pay them the same,” right? Or when we see displacement and the supply of labor far out exceeds the demand, right? Employers rarely look at that robust labor market and go, “Let’s keep prioritizing higher wages and work-life balance.” And so I guess as a follow-up question, how do you make that argument that gains or improvements brought about by new technologies, while they could be maximized for profit, shouldn’t always be?

KATE O’NEILL: Well, there’s a societal argument, right? There’s a how do we think about an economy that’s future ready? You know, future readiness is kind of an underpinning of my work. And there’s kind of a bunch of pieces to unpack there. One thing is that I describe the economy as being people. Like when we think about the economy, what that is is people and how people, you know, make good for themselves, how people contribute, how people extract value. It’s not companies. Companies are an artifact, are kind of a construct within the interactions of people. And that is a really important distinction from my lens. Then when we think about like what does a future ready economy look like? It cannot be companies extracting more and more and more value all the time because we are already seeing that and all it leads to is an increasing amount of trillion dollar corporations and an increasing amount of people who just have no way to make enough money to live. And that obviously cannot be sustainable. It obviously cannot lead to people who are in a position to be consumers within that economy, let alone, you know, have a survival that’s worthwhile in any other way. So I think we have to think about this at a systems level and be able to think like pragmatically that just doesn’t work. So there must be a different way to structure this. So there’s that side of it. But then I think, you know, most leaders, and I think you’ll agree with this, I would be curious to know if you don’t, most leaders I find do want to do the right thing and they do want to have good people working around them. They do want to create jobs and create the kind of conditions where people feel like they can bring their best selves to the work and create something larger than the sum of its parts. That is very exciting to most of the people that I know in the executive roles in large corporations and small. Like I think people just would love to have the answers to how do we do this right? How do we do this where we can create good experiences for people in their jobs and create shareholder value and create, you know, good products and services that people are going to be delighted by and like serve all of these different masters, all these different stakeholders, right, in integrated ways? Wouldn’t you agree that is true, that people do want to do that if they can?

JOE MULL: From a leadership perspective, the folks in those roles, I absolutely agree. I think most leaders want that. I think too many, and it’s not entirely through their own fault, underestimate the role that they play in making that happen. I think that there are a lot of leaders who think it’s transactional, right? That this idea that, well, employment, a job and a paycheck is the exchange that you get for bringing your best self to work and that you’re going to give it all you’ve got. And that’s magical thinking because people aren’t robots, right? We have moods and opinions and emotions and forces at work on us at work and in our lives outside of work. And so what we have to help leaders understand is that that is something that’s not transactional. It’s something that has to be activated and it has to be nurtured and that the kinds of interactions that I have with my folks every day push us in one direction or another or make it possible or not possible for people to show up in that way.

KATE O’NEILL: Yeah. And I think the other side of what you’re saying too, that the ownership that leaders don’t necessarily recognize that they need to take or that they have is the push upwards too. There’s always this kind of excuse of, well, the board won’t let me, right? Or if you’re a VP, let’s say, like the C-suite won’t let me or whatever it is. You feel hamstrung by the accountability you have to shareholders and stakeholders who you perceive to be at a higher level of authority or influence than you. And I think that’s really unfortunate because I think that most of the time, or much of the time, people who are in those more senior roles are looking for good guidance from the people who are one level down or two levels down. They’re looking for vision. They’re looking for leadership to come up from below. And if it’s too timid, if it’s just, you know, kind of tell me what I need to go do and I’ll go do it, then, you know, they’ll fill in the void. They’ll fill in that gap with leadership. The higher-ups will say, “All right, well, clearly we can’t entrust this to you. So here’s what you should do.” But if there’s a strong vision, if there’s a sense of like I have an understanding of how we could do this in such a way that’s future ready, that could actually be cast a vision for how we can create an entirely new model for how culture is created, for how, you know, we’re accountable to people up and down and around throughout community. How we, you know, build sustainability into our organization, how we, you know, all of the things that we need to be thinking about. It’s a really hard ask, but it’s a well-paying job for a really hard ask, you know. So, we should really hold that kind of accountability of those roles 100%.

JOE MULL: Now, my friend, it is entirely possible that I invited you on to my podcast today to ask you a parenting question. I have a 15-year-old at home, a high school freshman, and they are vehemently opposed to all things AI, and their objections are predominantly twofold. Environmental concerns and impact on artists and creatives. And I actually love this, right? I want all of my kids to not just blindly accept tools that appear to create shortcuts or make life easier. I want them to be activists. I want them to have passionate beliefs. At the same time, I want Lily to understand that there are very few things in the world that are either all bad or all good. And so, I’m only kind of joking because I’m not asking you for parenting advice as much as I’m asking you for some perspective. I would welcome, you know, I guess what I want to know from you especially is how do you reconcile the benefits of evolving technology with the costs or the dangers that come with their proliferation?

KATE O’NEILL: Yeah. You know, it’s such a good question and it’s such a real tension and she’s right in her sort of recoiling from what she perceives to be those two factors are huge, right? The environmental cost of AI is known as being extremely high. And many of these models, including Anthropic, which is getting lauded in the media right now for pushing back on Department of War conditions, even they, you know, are documented as having trained on pirated content and my books, maybe yours, were included in that, right? So there’s good and bad in everything and that is a really important duality to be able to kind of recognize, live with, process in real time. Doesn’t mean that we should be complicit in it or accept it or not push back hard on where we think that it could be better. But I just don’t think there’s a whole lot in this world that doesn’t come a little bit tainted with, you know, where capitalism has rushed in to fill in, you know, kind of the incentives we’ve already discussed. And where someone has made some decisions along the way that we probably won’t agree with on 100%. That’s just a fact. So I think the reality is that there’s, just like with the future of work where it unpacks into so many different topics, I think this relationship of AI and creators or AI and the future unpacks itself into a lot of really important subtopics. One of those is, of course, creators can use AI in really, really powerful, innovative, expressive ways. And I was fortunate enough to be on a panel a few months ago with some really, really great creators who had a wide range of perspectives on this. And it was really refreshing to get to kind of hash ideas out with folks who are at the cutting edge of a lot of this kind of stuff. So I think there’s a lot that’s worth exploring in that space. At the same time, in 2019, I was at COP 25. I led a panel on how we can use AI to fight climate change and obviously 2019 is a few years before the ChatGPT moment of November 2022. And yet here we are three years ahead of that already talking about how AI can be fundamentally so significant in how we fight climate change. Like how we can use it to recognize opportunities to clean up ocean plastics, how we can use it to optimize wind farms, how we can use it for, you know, better agricultural yield, how, you know, all this kind of wonderful incredible rich kinds of uses. They have only gotten richer. They have only gotten more powerful as, you know, these last few years have progressed. So, I think that where we are with climate change is so far down this road of a lot of baked-in damage to the ecosystems, to everything that we’re dealing with that the only way that we can realistically think about mitigating some of these harms is through AI. Like through the tools and the scale and capability that AI affords us when applied in the right way is the only chance we have at sort of rolling back some of the harms that we see in the environment. So here you have two great examples of like creators can actually use AI, people who are fighting for climate remediation can use AI. There is very worthwhile investment of the costs of using these tools in using them in these ways.

JOE MULL: So using them for good.

KATE O’NEILL: You’re giving, using them for good. Yeah. Yeah. So, I think that’s the way to frame it in your mind is are you using them in a way that you genuinely could explain a generation ahead of you? Are you using these the right way? And so, if you are, 100% they’re the tools to use. Get familiar with them. Because we’re not slowing back. We’re not backing down from this. And it would really be helpful to have all hands on deck trying to solve the problems of the future. And it is possible to do it that way.

JOE MULL: I am going to play your answer back for Lily and I will let you know if they have any follow-up questions. I will tell you, Lily, respect though for having the hesitation that you do. Thank you for that. Well, I’m going to get you out of here on this, my friend. So many of our listeners are leaders who are challenged daily to nurture change adaptability and ongoing technology adoption on their teams, but they also feel like they can barely keep up themselves. What advice would you give these folks either in terms of mindset or best practices to help them perhaps not feel so overwhelmed by it all?

KATE O’NEILL: Yeah. You know, there’s a couple things. One is organizationally, I think one of the topics I’ve been talking about a lot lately is, you know, we talk a lot about upskilling and reskilling. Those are really important constructs, but there is what I call minimum viable skilling and that is prompt skilling. Prompt skilling is so important for literally everyone in the organization in almost every organization. So everybody benefits by learning how to generate better prompts, to write better prompts, to interact better with sort of generative tools and agentic tools because it looks like prompting is going to be one of the dominant modalities for interacting with AI tools for several generations of this tool to come. The other side of that though is that what are you doing well when you do good prompting? You’re articulating what you want. You’re setting success conditions. You’re sort of explaining what you have in mind for how you want this to come out. You’re delegating. So, it’s actually practice for how you manage humans, right? Like how you work in teams and set success conditions for what good looks like from the teams that you collaborate with. So I think that that’s a really, really, like, cannot go wrong, high ROI investment for people to make organizationally and to invest in themselves to really invest in that ability to do good prompting.

JOE MULL: Excellent piece of advice. And we, you know, we know there are folks out there right now who are still afraid of it, who are still avoiding it, who are still going, I don’t know that I am ready to accept this. And let me see how far I can go without having to force myself. And you know, I appreciate that you’re breaking it down to you don’t have to master a tool. Just start to understand how you talk to it and learn to interact with it.

KATE O’NEILL: Yeah. It’s just like you need to learn how to talk to Larry on your team.

JOE MULL: You know, that’s right. Larry is how do I get Larry to do what I need Larry to do? ChatGPT and Claude and they’re all the same way. Well, I am so grateful that you took the time and so appreciative of this conversation. Kate, where can folks learn more about you and your books and your work?

KATE O’NEILL: All of that is on koinsights.com, which is the website of my company, KO Insights. I’m also on LinkedIn prolifically. So feel free to find me there and I look forward to hearing back from folks. If you found anything in this particularly insightful or you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me with that.

JOE MULL: And tell us about What Matters Next. Tell us about the book.

KATE O’NEILL: Well, just so happens that I have What Matters Next: A Leader’s Guide to Making Human-Friendly Tech Decisions in a World That’s Moving Too Fast. Came out in January 2025. Was promptly added to the Thinkers 50 2025 Best New Management Book list. So very grateful for that. It was long-listed for the Porchlight Best Business Book Awards last year. It’s just been incredible this experience. I know that you’ve had some incredible success with Employalty too. So, you know, this feeling of when, yeah, the world tells you you wrote the right book at the right time and it’s needed. So, I’m really gratified that the reception has been so good and that people have told me they’ve gotten a lot of value out of it.

JOE MULL: Yes. Well, you are one of the most thoughtful, needed voices on these topics right now. So, thank you for the work that you’re doing in the world and thank you for being here today.

KATE O’NEILL: Thank you, Joe. You are a needed voice, too. Thank you so much for doing the work you do.

JOE MULL: Thank you.

Closing

JOE MULL: Well, there you have it, folks. My deepest thanks to Kate O’Neill for her time and her thoughtful insights today. If you liked this conversation, be sure to hit that subscribe button so that you don’t miss an episode of our show. And of course, I am always grateful for your reviews, your shares, and your feedback. Tell me what you thought of this conversation by dropping a comment in the box below our episode here on YouTube. Or you can email me at any time for any reason at bossbetternow@gmail.com. In the meantime, don’t forget commitment comes from better bosses. Visit joemull.com for more information. See you next time.

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