The Home Service Expert Podcast - She Predicted The AI Layoffs. Her Next Forecast Should Worry CEOs | Alexandra Levit

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

🚀 FREEDOM 2026 Get your Tickets Today! https://freedomevent.com Are the AI layoffs about to reverse? Workplace futurist Alexandra Levit joins Tommy Mello to break down blunt force automation: why CEOs who replaced their teams with AI are about to want them back, how every AI rollout quietly creates six new jobs, and what the 95% failure rate on AI investments means for business owners. They get into why the skilled trades are the safest bet in America right now, the return to office mistake, learning agility as the number one career skill, and how owners should actually be investing in AI training. Connect with Alexandra: https://alexandralevit.com Make School Work: https://makeschoolwork.org -- 🕐 TIMESTAMPS 🕐 -- 00:00 - Introduction 02:15 - What A Futurist Actually Does 03:44 - Is Every Desk Job Doomed? 04:32 - Six Jobs Per AI 08:07 - The Case For The Trades 12:51 - Blunt Force Automation 14:54 - The Rise Of Craftsmanship 18:14 - Building Learning Agility 21:10 - The 95% Problem 25:56 - AI's Energy Problem 29:19 - Cautiously Optimistic 32:05 - Psychology To Futurist 35:33 - Training AI To Oppose You 40:04 - Advice For Your 20s 43:10 - The RTO5 Mistake 44:51 - Flexibility That Pays 48:30 - Deep Talent Explained 51:30 - Simulations Beat Resumes 52:54 - The Training Gap 56:40 - Closing Thoughts 🚀 FREEDOM 2026 Get your Tickets Today! https://freedomevent.com Check Out My Social Media: Tiktok ⟶ https://www.tiktok.com/@officialtommymello Instagram ⟶ https://www.instagram.com/officialtommymello/ Facebook ⟶ https://www.facebook.com/thomasmello/

I think the displacement fears are real, but I do think they're slightly overstated, and I'll tell you why. We are seeing what I like to term blunt force automation. So CEOs are getting really excited about the potential for AI, and they are just letting go huge swaths of their human workforces to replace it whole scale with AI. AI in many cases is not as good as people think it is. And you can quote me on this, CEOs are going to be chasing, and we'll have to say, oh my gosh, I want my people that.

because I need people to actually oversee this technology. I would argue that we're going to see a retraction of these layoffs and that humans will be back in the mix. Today I got Alexander Levitt here. She's the author of They Don't Teach Corporate in College, Humanity Works, Deep Talent, Make School Work. She is a workplace futurist writer and the founder of Inspiration at Work, specializing and redesigning human workforces to integrate AI effectively and ethically, Alexandra, it's great to have you on today. Thanks for having me, Tommy. It's great to be here.

Let's just jump in and talk about what you're passionate about what project you were, where you're at today. Okay. Well, it starts way back in the late 90s when I graduated from college as a very high achieving student. And I moved to New York City and I thought I was going to be a VP in PR by the age of 30. And needless to say, I pretty much crashed and burned in my first several jobs. I had no idea that the skills that it takes to be successful in work are very different than the skills it takes to be successful in school. And it took me a few years to learn things like how to make a good first impression on people, how to collaborate with people that you don't have authority over, how to make sure that good work is recognized. And when I finally

learned those things, I then started getting ahead in my career. But there was a lot of pain and a lot of suffering before that happened. And so my goal in getting into this field initially was to help young professionals avoid some of the adjada that I experienced doing that transition. And really all of my work since then has been more or less in service of that goal, including the brand new book, makes school work, which is about ways that we can help younger professionals get really necessary work experience so that when they go to school or they go into a career, they have an educated idea of whether they're going to like it or not, what is it going to entail those things. So it goes way back 25 years to the initial passion.

And today, I just want to try to understand what a workplace futurist is. Okay, that's a good question. It's a good place to start. So a futurist is basically, it sounds like something out of science fiction, but it's really just someone who works with organizations. So in my case, I work with companies and governments to ascertain what has the greatest potential for disruption in the near future. And there are different types of futurists. You can have a political futurist, an environmental futurist. I am a workforce futurist, which means that my area of study is the world of work. And so for about the last 20 years, I've been doing scenario planning and trying to help organizations, as I said, figure out what's coming down the pike and how can we best prepare. Now, of course, I don't have a crystal ball. But by looking at patterns, you can more or less,

do a pretty good job at understanding what's going to be forthcoming. If you're willing to really take a look around and be honest about what we can expect to happen, I think it's work that really most people can do. I am certified in strategic foresight so that I feel like is an important part to at least get some scientific rigor to this. But what I try to teach people is that if you know your field really well, anyone can be a mini-futurist. I'm a little concerned about the future.

You know, I'm in the home service industry, and I think we got a job for a while. But when I was a kid, they said, go to school, learn how to develop code, you know, get into a good career like a doctor, a dentist, or a lawyer. And now they're saying within 18 months of right now, anything behind a desk is going away. I mean, if you go work well with things, AI one thing. And look, I'm not here to be doom and gloom. I'm just talking about the stuff that's all

over the internet. What is your take? Because you know this subject better than anybody I've ever met. Well, I do have a take on it. I talk about it quite frequently. So I'm happy to. And my take is that wherever you insert a piece of AI into a traditionally human-driven process, you still need a person to design the role of that AI, to manage it, to fix it when it breaks, to decide how it should be editored or redeployed, to explain how it works to decision makers. So if you think about it, that adds about six human jobs every time we put AI into a process. So while it's true that some positions, especially the more task-based repetitive ones, are going to be automated and already are in many capacities by AI.

There's a lot of jobs being created to work with AI. And what I like to tell people is in order to future-proof your own career, you need to be looking around at the parts of your individual job that could be automated and you need to then develop what we call adjacent skills. And the simplest example I can give you is I wrote a column for a few years for the Wall Street Journal. And at the time, my job was to interview people and then to write up what they said, basically. Well, if you think about it, all of that to date can now be done by AI. However, there are still aspects of being a Wall Street Journal columnist that can't be done by AI.

So, for example, some sources are really sensitive and they want to talk to a person, not an AI. That's one thing. There's also fact checking. AI still makes a lot of mistakes. And when you're fact-checking, the whole point is to get the sources material accurate. And then there's, of course, the fact that it needs to have eyeballs on the copy before it goes out. I think it's going to be a long time before the Wall Street Journal, let's copy go out that's written by AI without having humanized on it. So I just thought of three different skills that I could potentially develop that would still have me in the mix of that career.

but maybe they would be slightly different skills than what I was doing before. And this applies to every single person in any job today. So it's not that there aren't going to be any jobs. There are. But Tommy, my concern is for the people who bury their heads in the sand and say, this is coming. There's nothing I can do about it. And they just are almost in paralysis mode about it.

I think what we do need to do is be proactive and realistic. You know, I talked to the company that I hired, they're really good at a law firm. And I talked to one of the partners there, and they said, we're not going to hire anybody out of grad school that doesn't have the potential to become a partner. And that means all the interns, it's just, and then you're looking at doctors. And I talked to a doctor that said, yeah, now when I do surgery, I am using some AI microprimicons. And some of them could do surgeries from anywhere in the world. And if you were looking at the future, I mean, I doubt you'd say become a plumber. Obviously, I understand the way you're looking at things.

But let's say you've got kids. I've got a niece that just got into Madison. She's studying business. And I got two nephews going to be getting ready to go to college. where would you have them be looking? Well, to tell you the truth, I mean, you mentioned the plumber example, but I actually do think the skilled trades are where it's at, and it's not just because they can't be automated,

because in fact, a lot of them can, just like everything else. However, there is a massive labor shortage, especially in the U.S., but really globally, around skilled manufacturing in particular, and all of the trades that we still need people, people for. We simply do not have enough people to have these jobs. And the reason that we don't have enough people is because our education system, and this is what we talk about in the book, has been really pipelining everyone, regardless of aptitude or interest, into four-year college degrees. And then we have this excess or glut of kids coming out of school at 22, and there's not enough jobs for them because they're looking for those desk jobs, what we would traditionally call. white-collar employment. We're not calling that much anymore, but you know what I'm talking about when I say that. And that has become a huge problem because we have all this unemployment of college

grads. And meanwhile, we have, you know, tens of thousands of open positions in every city. And so what I would tell my kids is look at employment outlooks. And in fact, I am. My son is going to college in the fall as well. And he is, he is, uh, majoring in mechanical engineering, because that's one of the areas where there's a huge labor shortage. And in particular, aerospace, every country in the world is increasing their defense, whether we agree with it or not, it's happening. They can't fill those jobs fast enough. And so I'm like, looking at five, 10 years out, they're still going to need people to be involved. Again, and if there is a lot of automation, sure, but there's still going to be people who know the field well enough to work with and alongside

the automation. So looking at the employment outlook is really important. And also, I mean, considering things that maybe 20 years ago, there would have been a stigma against. You don't know what you're going to enjoy until you try it. And I think exposing young people to skill trades in particular is a really useful exercise because not only does it teach them about a trade, but it teaches them about work in general. So this is something that, this is the reason that I wrote my first book because I was never taught about how to work until I was like 25. And that's where we are running into problems. So I think when we talk about work-based learning, we are killing two birds with one stone, essentially. We are exposing kids to really, really high-quality work

experiences where they can learn about themselves and their interests. And we are pipelining them potentially into companies that desperately need that labor. And what I especially love about today's world is that even in things like skilled manufacturing, automation and AI is everywhere, right? And so what we have is we have a lot of people with institutional knowledge. So maybe they've been working on a factory floor for the last 20, 25 years. They know everything. But then a piece of robotics comes in and changes the whole thing.

And what I love about having young people on the front lines of this is that that they can grow up alongside the technology. They are learning with the robots as the robots become more and more sophisticated. And they will have a knowledge of those robotics technologies better than anybody who's been there for 20, 25 years, and they will continue to grow with that. So we're at a particularly interesting point now

where nobody has the skills in AI and robotics right now. And so everybody's learning from the ground up. And I think it's a real opportunity for our young people if we're putting them in the right places at the right time. Just off the out wall question here. So we are fairly low unemployment. I mean, it's not a record low employment, but there is going to be a massive amount more than the history of mankind displacement.

And I'm just curious, we've heard about universal basic income. You know, Elon predicts 10 to one robots to humans here in the next five to 10 years. You know, my big thing is I want purpose. And a lot of my purpose derives from accomplishment at work, whether that's EBITA, whether that's a record goal, whether that's watching somebody by their first house. Where do you think, if you're looking down the line three to five, seven years, we'll figure it out. But how does this kind of shake out? Yeah. And I think the displacement fears are real, but I do think they're slightly.

overstated and I'll tell you why. I think right now what we are seeing, at least in the workforce at large, it of course varies by company, but we are seeing what I like to term blunt force automation. So CEOs are getting really excited about the potential for AI

and they are just letting go huge swaths of their human workforces to replace it whole scale with AI. And that is starting to cause a lot of problems because AI in many cases is not as good good as people think it is. And in particular, we forget that it doesn't generate knowledge on its own. It's only as good as the knowledge that is provided to them by human experts. And so if you

remove the human experts, the AI is probably going to be wrong and may actually result in a catastrophe or a reputational crisis. So I think, and you can quote me on this in a couple of years, if this has happened or not, but I think we are just at the very, very beginning of some of the fallout that's going to happen from this blunt force automation where CEOs are going to be chasing and we'll have to say, oh my gosh, I want my people back because I need people to actually oversee this technology and make sure that we're directing it for the right purposes. So yes, there is going to be displacement, but is it going to be at the massive level that everyone thinks? I would argue that we're going to see a retraction of these layoffs and that humans will be back in the mix.

Again, though, what I said before is really important, that you have to know what your role is. And if you're going in to do administrative work or repetitive work or task-based work that AI can easily take over, you are not going to survive. But if you are willing to provide that really essential institutional knowledge and judgment and creativity that only humans can bring. to the table right now, then you'll be in a pretty good spot. You mentioned having purpose and universal basic income. One thing that I think is good to point out in response to that question is I think, and again, as a futurist, I make forecasts and sometimes they're accurate and sometimes they're not. But one thing I would say that we can expect is the rise of value of things like craftsmanship. This is particularly relevant for your field, right? Things that are

designed, created, loved on by human beings are going to go up in terms of desirability and value, because it will be more rare for something to be created by a person. So the rise of craftsmanship, the rise of, I don't know, art, and wow, you know, that's a really cool piece of music that a human created. It wasn't just AI generated. I think that that is where our society is going, that we are contributions will be further prized once they become rare and not as easy to get. Two things. Number one, I remember when every single major company, whether it was Verizon or Amex or whatever you could think of, took all the jobs overseas for their call center and then brought them all back 10 years later because everybody's like, this is horrible experience.

And I think that's exactly right. And last week, I was in Dallas looking at CalC, And the gal there, she's a designer, said, listen, the cabinets are not perfect because every single one of these cabinets, there's no machine cutting. There's no, you know, it's literally handmade. It's hand precision. Everything. And so you're going to look at the little imperfections. And these cabinets are not cheap. They're the most expensive cabinets probably in the United States.

I was like, why am I here? But I appreciated what you're talking about with craftsmanship because it just meant there's like character to it. it. And that's right. And it's like an old ninja sword that was like a guy spent his whole life building making this one sword. It's probably worth a million dollars or it's the one that came off the factory floor. Yeah. That's right. And we're going to see that in lots of areas where we didn't see it before. And I think that that will that will be the future. So there will be a role. But what you're saying is accurate in the sense that you have to be the person who's the craftsman. You can't just rely on, well, I can have these basic skills and go to an office and do a little bit of work and call it a day.

I do think it's going to be challenging, particularly for people who have been in the workforce a while to make this transition. Because it requires a lot more product. I was going to say productivity, which is true. But I met proactivity on the workers part to sit, to look around and say, okay, I need to be constantly learning. I need to be constantly evolving. I mean, learning agility is probably the skill that I would say is the most hot and highly in demand for human professionals. Again, doesn't matter your feel, doesn't matter your level, but the ability to take a step

back and say, look, I see the writing on the wall here. I'm going to need to develop these adjacent skills so that I can continually be gainfully employed over the years to come. Otherwise, it's going to be a pretty rough road, as you suggested. And how do you develop learning agility, reading books? listening to podcasts, experimenting, probably self-reflection, being aware of your surroundings. What other ways would you, like, just? Well, I like to, I mean, I do do a lot of reading, of course.

And especially in the world of strategic foresight, you are actually looking for contrary ideas because you don't want to be too much in an echo chamber of your own thoughts. You want to be looking for things that are going to push the envelope and maybe make you think a little bit differently. And so in addition to reading, I just talk to people. I have conversations like, what are you seeing? Like, does this make any sense to you? I mean, this is one of the things that happened.

I honestly did not see this blunt force automation being such an extreme response. I, to be very honest, Tommy, I thought CEOs and leaders in general would be a lot more careful with this stuff. I am shocked by the indiscriminate rollout of AI in large companies where intellectual property is being compromised. There's no security. We can't necessarily trust the data that we're putting out there. So if you had asked me as a futurist a few years ago, are we going to see this level of instant automation? I would have said no. But in talking to CEOs and leaders and learning how desperate they are for immediate cost savings,

that changed my mind a little bit. I'm like, wow, they really will do anything to save money. And even if it's dangerous. And so it's talking to people who have different opinions who are willing to help you see a little bit differently. That's how you have learning agility because you are constantly taking a step back and saying, okay, well, I might have believed one thing yesterday, but tomorrow, the calculus is completely changed. So I'm going, I need to believe something else. And humans are not good at this. We're not good at change. We're not good at reevaluating our own opinions and viewpoints.

And if you think about the political climate, I mean, this is a problem on a macro level in the sense that we have such a polarized society now where one side is just not going to listen to the other side. Well, learning agility would involve, let me see. what these other people are talking about because clearly they think they're on to something. And you just do not want to isolate yourself. That's how you ensure that you keep being relevant. Because once I picked up on the fact, oh my gosh, CEOs are just like throwing this stuff out there. I was able to better advise my community of stakeholders on what to do. Because the reality is, I don't think it's the right thing, but the reality is it's happening.

And even when we see the ROI on AI investments, for example, I mean, there was an off-sighted study came out around the third quarter of last year that said that 95% of AI investments have not resulted in any tangible ROI. Well, that's a huge failure. And yet, is it stopping us from still throwing it out there and going, you know, just full all in on this? It's not really stopping us, but yet we haven't seen any tangible results from it yet. So I think we are going to see a retraction of some of the excitement around AI. You're 100% about the data breach. And I was listening to something earlier this week about be careful. You're only making the agents stronger, those who contain their own data. And you've got to be very, very careful because it actually can delete stuff

in your CRM and change things. And you've got to be very careful about what you'll allow it to get into. And that's a very significant thing. I listen to this guy and part of his group, his name's Alex Epstein. And he's pretty smart when it comes to energy. He's got this energy summit. And he says, all right, guys, we're going to talk, we're going to stay within this box. No matter what you feel, we're going to talk about the facts about energy. I'm pro-green energy. He's what he said. Fossil fuels. Let's talk about that. And here's the thing. I don't care what view you had on it. He said, we're going to stay within this box and we're going to state the facts with evidence. And what I love about that approach is in this political climate we're in,

he said, we're not going to talk about feelings. We're not going to talk about assumptions. We're going to talk about what we know. And we know less human beings have died because of fossil fuels. We know this, this, this, this, this, and he stated some stats. And he goes, I love, and what I saw the room do was shift their perspective. And I think the best speakers and the best debaters that can, instead of ridiculing the left or right or your political views or whatever it could be, they say, we're going to talk about these things. And I'm not calling you a bad person. And so I called Alex up and I said, I want you to teach me how you were able to do that. where nobody was mad at you, nobody said F you to you, like, even though they might have thought you were

wrong, you literally changed a lot of people's decision in that room. You had them see through your perspective because you kept it contained and you brought facts. I'm just curious from your point of view, when you are having these, by the way, everybody in this company says, no, they don't agree with me. I'm like, I don't want people that just say, yes, sir, absolutely. We're on board. I'm like, no, find a reason why I'm wrong. Like, test me every day. And I appreciate that. And by the way, let's have an honest debate because I say I'm wrong a lot. I say never looked at it from that point of view.

I never thought about it that way. Then I got a couple guys that always say, what if this? And I'm like, let's do the 80-20. That can happen. But let's not worry about that. So how do we become better at that? Well, I think it goes down to having cognitive flexibility, which just takes practice and just purposely putting yourself in situating.

where you are kind of out of your depth. Or I mean, this is one of the things I did after the 2016 election was I actually went into some rural communities and I talked with people about why they made the decision that they made. And I learned just as an example that in rural communities, the way that they receive revenue from, let's say, farming, I mean, some of the democratic ideas

around that are actually pretty financially punishing to them. And so even if they don't like the person, they want to, they have to be able to make a living. And so that was just a quick example of a time when I was like, man, I did not see this coming. And I need to understand what people are thinking and feeling about it and why this is happening the way it is. So purposely putting yourself in those situations, I think we're less likely to do that than ever, which is why it's important that people like you and me say, like this is really, really critical to do for your own future and ensuring that you can stay ahead in your career because it's the same skill set as understanding politically what different types of people are believing in. In the workforce, you have to do

the same thing. It's interesting that you brought up energy, though. I thought you were going to be going in a different direction with that because one of the issues that's really not talked about at all, and I'm curious as to what your friend Alex would say about this, is how much energy AI uses. And the fact that right now, energy is a finite resource. So if we keep relying on AI for literally everything, there's not going to be enough energy to supply it. And we become even increasingly reliant on a system that could falter at any moment. I mean, this is a forecast I made that did not come to fruition, but during the pandemic,

I was very worried about everyone going to distributed work and systems not having the bandwidth to support all these processes going online. Now that turned out to not be that much of an issue, but I think the forecast was sound, and I think it's still sound when we look at the amounts of electricity and water that AI takes in order to operate.

It's astronomical. And it's one of those things, while we're busy having the debate, should humans do this or should machines do, this meanwhile we have these data centers going up everywhere that are just like sucking us dry and is this sustainable and the answer to that is probably no but no one's really talking about that yet but that's my job that's why i'm here i think elan's talking about it i mean he wants to put solar a gigawatt is what nuclear power plant does and fusion's here there's nine companies going after it every you know vc's going after fusion and nuclear is something we got to do we got to

got to go more green. I don't know about windmills, but definitely more solar. I just talking about putting solar in space because it's like a thousand times more effective. I think most people believe that China and the United States are going after who could win this AI race. Obviously, Italy's out of it because they said no to it a long time ago in Spain and some of the other countries. But it's like they believe that it'll become the new superpower. And it's going to take a lot of energy. It's going to take the chips in time. want, it's going to take a lot of things to come together. But I think some of the political movement going on, I mean, there's all these conspiracy theories. I can't even look at social media and look at the news right now because I'm like, they're going after the oil. It's pretty simple. I don't know if I'm right. Yeah, I think it's pretty simple too, Tommy. So I don't want to make it about this, but it's, it is. Energy is a real concern. And I'll tell you what, the human beings are so innovative. when I'm at these summits and there's governors and senators at these places, I met Mike Roe, which was awesome. And we're talking and I didn't know some of the things they could do.

Like it's crazy what we're on the precipice of creating and innovation. And human beings are so adaptable. There's so many great people. I talk about Isaac Newton and some of the people that have done such amazing things in this world. And I'm actually optimistic. I'm cautiously optimistic about that. the future. I would say that. How are you when you look at the next 10 years? I mean, I'm cautiously optimistic as well, especially because from my perspective,

there are things that we can do to co-create the future that we want. And so when I look at the rise of AI, particularly generative and agentic AI, I see opportunities for humans to do the work that they love and spend less time doing the work that they don't love and maybe spend less time working in general. I mean, what I use AI for is it's a shorthand for a lot of research that I would use to just Google things and like have to, you know, sift through a million different sources. AI can synthesize that for me. Now again, going back to the human oversight, I still have to review it to make sure that it's accurate. And the only reason I know it's accurate is because I've spent 20 years in my field.

So I can, I have a very discerning eye when it comes to AI output. But the time that I have saved on just having to research things and how to having to summarize meetings, I mean, it has cut my, the time it's taken to do the same work down from like eight hours a day to like five or six hours a day already. And we're just at the beginning stages of this. I consider myself probably a maybe slightly above average AI user. I mean, I'm not, I'm definitely not a power user, but I'm, I know something about it and I do use a variety of tools. And so I think there's an opportunity here for people to use it to become

their best selves. And the thing that I of course worry about, though, is that companies are just taking it too far. And I think that companies always take things too far. And that's where we see, we'll see, I think, a correction as more problems start to occur with things that are being done by AI that really shouldn't be. Because just because we can automate something doesn't mean that we should and doesn't mean that we won't eventually get dinged for it. So I think right now we're just at the very beginning of that and we're going to start to start to see some human jobs come back, especially those that are related to oversight. They're afraid of a winner take all, I think. I think it's not necessarily more profit. It's what if somebody does this and they can

spend more money in marketing and there's fiduciary responsibilities, but they got to look at the thing. And most people are sitting back saying let these guys make the mistakes, especially the big companies. I mean, Jeff Bezos is doing a lot of automation too. Where was it going to go with this? I got a lot of questions when it comes to just your undergrad was at Northwestern University. You majored in psychology. How did that influence your perspective on business and leadership? That's a great question.

I think psychology at the time was just something I'd always been interested in. I think when you grew up in sort of a problematic home situation, as I did, you really are curious about what makes people act the way they do. So I've been interested in psychology from a very young age. And while I didn't go directly into psychology as a field, everything that I have done since has involved a really critical understanding of how people operate. I mean, even that first book, I mean, I mostly researched it. I was only 26 when I wrote it. So I really didn't know much at the time. But really learning what young people need to do to be successful is a lot of psychology

because it involves having to collaborate with other people, learn what makes them tick, figure out how to get the win-win. And so it was extraordinarily beneficial. And then a few years ago, based on a forecast that I made for the U.S. Department, of Labor, I was awarded a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health to study the impact of COVID on unemployment and how we could help people suffering from mental health crises through the unemployment period. And in doing that study, I had to do a real randomized clinical trial or randomized control trial. And I mean, if I didn't have

a psychology background, I don't know how I would have made that leap into academic research. And in fact, that that is the bread and butter of organizations like NIH. They want to see if you're developing an intervention, we don't want to just take your word for it, that it's a good intervention. We want to see real hard evidence-based data that it works. And so I think psychology, having that background, I was like, oh, okay, I get this. I mean, I definitely worked with university professors and researchers on it, but I had a familiarity that became very valuable. So it's a good question. One other thing I wanted to tell you that I remembered what I was going to say is I started

using AI to ask me a lot of questions and I've changed the personalization to oppose my ideas. Yes, I do that too. And then I say, ask me 100 questions. Sometimes they say skip it. Ask me anything. Ask me about business. And then when I ask you questions, it actually's got the database because I'm like, listen, Google's getting to know me.

Meta knows me without me consenting to it. The phone's listening to me right now, so might as well train something that I could ask questions to to learn more about, it could be my personal psychologist, you know. I think it has huge potential for personal coaching. And this is controversial too because there's been a lot of news around people who are using it in a way that they don't continue to have human relationship. They over-rely on the AI for life guidance and support. And just like in the workforce, it has to be nuanced, right? I do think it has tremendous potential to really closely understand a person and provide very customized, tailored guidance about what they should do based on the history

that they have provided. And I do the same thing as you. I will prompt my, I have my own AI, it's the name of Silas, I will prompt Silas to present the situation from the other person's point of view. So I will give, the whole thing from my point of view and then say, if you were the guy, let's say in a dating situation, if you were the guy, what would you be thinking about this? And that is what,

it goes back to what we were talking about 15 minutes ago, about being willing to see the other side of things and look at something from all different angles. Because that's how you learn. And that's how you interact better with people when you can understand their point of view and where they're coming from. So I do the same thing. Emotional intelligence. And that's probably the main thing I look for when I hire somebody is how do you make people feel and do you understand their point of view? I literally did this this morning when I saw $25 minimum wage and I put all the reasons why I disagree. And I said, come to me with an opposing view.

And it was great. And I'm like, I can see that perspective. That makes sense looking from that perspective. And everybody lives in their own chamber. It basically said that. there's a lot of people out there that need to be able to provide for their families. And it gave all these reasons that I was like, well, that makes sense. And, you know, education does take a few years.

And you still got to make ends meet when you have kids. My old point was I was 12 years old when I got a minimum wage job. You can't say we've got the best free education system and we want to give high minimum wage in the same sentence. And I said, the people that get hurt the most are the people in the lower class that can't afford. Because think about it, if you rely on cheap groceries, the first thing that's going to happen, or if you go Taco Bell, if I'm charging $25, like, they're getting penalized. It's the lower, I can go wherever I want to eat. We can afford it. But there's so many reasons why it makes sense. But if I'm a capitalist, I'm passing that on. And the first people that are hurt are the lower class. I mean, you know. But yeah, I've got the whole thing right here.

And it literally said, well, there's a lot of opposing views and here's some of them. And it's so good to hear the other perspective. And that actually really does. And I've talked to a lot of my buddies at an opposite point of view. And I agree with them wholeheartedly on a lot of it. And I said, I never really thought about it that way. And here's what I learned in a relationship is instead of saying you're right, I'm wrong, or I'm wrong, you're right. is this is the way I feel and I didn't understand you felt that way.

And that's not saying you're right. It's just trying to understand where you're coming from and your feelings. Yeah, because no one can argue with the way that you feel. Yeah. Right. 100%. Robert Chedini. Have you ever heard of Robert Chedini?

He wrote the book, Influence. He's a famous influential psychologist. And I love when he talks because he's like, we did a study of 5,000. and it's a double blind and he goes in and everything he talks, he's adding in the facts throughout everything. And he's like, and I respect him so much more.

He's in his 80s. He's just the coolest guy ever. You got to read the book, influence when you get a minute. Okay. I think you'll really dig it. I'll put it on my list. Thank you.

So these are questions I asked during every podcast. What's one piece of game-changing advice you wish you knew in your 20s? That it doesn't matter what you do. It's how people perceive what you do. So essentially what you just, said that if you make people feel good about your participation in something, it really doesn't matter materially what the participation actually is. The output is not what's important. It's how

people feel about that output. You know, you said good work recognized one of the first things you said. And I wrote that down because that has a, how, I think I need to do a much better job of that. When there's good work, how do you recognize good work? How do you make that part of your day? how do you work on that communication stream? You mean other people's good work? Yeah, other people's good work. Yeah. I mean, I think just having, and this is one of the things

when 10 years ago we were talking about the changing performance management structures because that's part of my job's performance management in the workforce. And I think we were talking about the two-way dialogue, the real-time two-way dialogue that needed to take place between a manager and employees. And this can really,

really take any shape. I've actually seen it facilitated on Slack. I've seen it facilitated. And sometimes it's just regular text messaging, go figure, doesn't need a fancy app. But managers having much more of like kind of a real time exchange of information with the people that they're working with. And therefore, it's an easier thing to,

you're working so closely with someone, you're dialoguing back and forth, back and forth, to say, hey, like, you did a really good job with that. Or even if you're going to give constructive feedback and the person takes the feedback, you're like, hey, you know, I really like the way that you integrated that feedback. That's fantastic. But you have the infrastructure for it. I think the problem with a lot of organizations is there's so many layers and there's so many official bureaucratic processes that a lot of times you might not even hear from your manager outside of a performance review. And this is, by the way, gotten worse as we've moved to a distributed workforce, which basically I am in support of. But I don't think it's good. from the perspective of FaceTime and visibility with leadership. Because if you're not in the same office, you're not running into that person in the elevator. They're not walking around. You may never even meet them.

And so having this infrastructure to have the two-way dialogue I think is really important. And then, of course, just having channels at large to celebrate people's accomplishments. There was a time about 15 years ago when private intranets were, all the rage where each company would kind of have their own internal portal. We're seeing that go away a little bit. Some organizations do have it and they're very AI powered, et cetera, but I think going back to the roots of that, which is this is our online community where we're going to celebrate our people and making sure you have enough great information on there that people want to hang out and participate there. And then having just leadership visibility, one of the things that we're seeing

is a huge controversy is the return to work. I call it RTO5. I didn't make up that term, but that's a term that I like where CEOs are having this strange, I call it strange, knee-jerk reaction to, well, now that we can insist that people go back to work five days a week, we're going to do that. Let's do that. Let's send everybody back five days a week. And they're asking for my advice on how to get people to come back to the office. And I'm like, well, you know, are you as the CEO engaging with people when they're in the office? Are you having town halls? Are you going around and talking to people? What benefit do they get from an exposure perspective by being in the office? And that's, I think, a great way to get people there. And

by the way, I don't agree with RTO5. I think it's incredibly stupid. Aside from there are positions, of course, we have a tremendously large workforce, especially in the U.S. that does not sit behind a desk. And for those folks, going back to an office is an irrelevant concept. But I think the concept of flexibility is still an important one, even for the frontline workers. Because I hear leaders say to me all the time, well, they have to be there. So there can't be flexibility? It's like, yeah, but can't there be flexibility about when they're there and like where they're going? Like maybe they want to work in a different location.

Maybe they want to try a different skill set. Like for us to just wholeheartedly and just completely say we can't offer flexibility to our frontline workers. Just, I mean, talk about a lack of innovation and ingenuity there. So, I think. It's very, very, I love this. And I absolutely agree with you. When I started to realize that we don't need to sit behind a desk to say we're productive, I remember my manager, one of my main guys, VP, he walks up and he goes,

dude, my life has changed so much since you started letting me work from home on Mondays and be with my kids. He's like, I'm just a happier person and I'm more productive. And I said, I used to think you behind a desk was productivity, even if you were putting in less hours. And then I realized your output is 10 times more and to have some freedom. And he goes, we, and he really appreciates that and everyone in the company does. And I'm like, I'm on a plane half the time. So I'm not here. Why should you have to be here? I care about you did your job. I don't care how many hours it took you. I'm not measuring. You don't have to clock in or clock out. You can take as much vacation time as you want. But let's just hold each other accountable that we're

going to do what we say we will. That's right. And that's why you're in the position that you're in, Tommy, and other leaders are not because they're not willing to think flexibly about these issues and to recognize that productivity has many different definitions. And if people are getting their work done and they can be trusted and we should fundamentally trust our employees, then we can be more flexible. And like I said, it's not just for desk people. I have to say desk driven people. That's not exactly what I mean. But it's not just for desk people. It's for, really everybody can have some degree of flexibility. If we're willing to use and going back to technology and technology can help us facilitate more flexible work on kind of a wide scale. So it's good to

use for that. I should have invested in Zoom. The day that COVID happened, I learned what Zoom was. And I'm like, I should invest in this. Then all of a sudden, at 10x, and I'm like, oh, man, I missed it. What's your biggest professional dream at the moment? My biggest professional dream is that, and this is going to sound really simple, actually, but I want to get in really deep with one company. I've been working as a consultant for over 20 years, working with a variety of different clients in different industries. And I feel sometimes we were talking about a few minutes ago, you get in an echo chamber of your own ideas and you are considered the expert in every room.

And I miss the opportunity to engage with other smart people on a daily basis and to get very, very deeply into one business. And so I'm at kind of a strange age where it's like, wait, you've had a successful solo business for the past 20 years and you want to go work for a company. And I've always done things a little bit differently. I mean, I started a business before people were doing that too. So I'm no stranger to going against the grain and I would love an opportunity if one such came about. But of course, the organization has to be forward thinking enough to recognize the value of strategic foresight and somebody who's made accurate forecasts over time.

And sometimes I can say things that are a little bit jarring. And people are like, oh my gosh, we don't want that to come true. It's like, well, then let's think about steps one, two, three, four, five so that we don't have that outcome that you're afraid of and just facing it head on. You would be surprised, or maybe you wouldn't, but a lot of leaders aren't willing to do that, especially in this climate when everyone is pretty scared. They don't want to think about what else could potentially happen, but this is the way that we prepare and this is the way that we have a different outcome and one that we're

we might find more palatable. You know, you, you talk a lot, the co-author of deep talent, with eightfold AI. What does deep talent mean in an AI-enabled world, deep talent? Well, deep talent, we refer to that as really intelligent use of AI for recruiting purposes. And how I like to explain that one is, just and it goes back to the very first point I made about the gap that exists between the jobs that are available and the people who want to work. And so what deep talent or this kind of

technology, this AI-based recruitment technology does, is it enables us to look far more broadly at a candidate. So not just what their resume says, but what other skills they might have developed by being in a given role. So the simplest example I love to use, and I learned this from Eightfold, is a bartender. If you look at a bartender's resume, it shows basic bartending responsibilities. But what it doesn't always show is the customer service prowess that is associated with being a good bartender. And what AI-based technologies and deep talent can tell us is we see an association between bartenders and customer service. service representatives. So we're going to open up our talent pools to people who might not have

been customer service reps in the past. Maybe they were bartenders, but they would make excellent customer service reps. So it allows us to assess for adjacent skills and make connections that humans would not make when looking at a person's resume. And this is how we close the gap, because we stop saying, okay, well, you need to have that exact experience and start saying, you actually have the potential to have other kinds of experiences based on what you've done to date. But this is hard to figure out if you don't have billions of data points at your disposal, which is why you use AI for such a thing. And talent intelligence or deep talent is a pretty mature form of AI used in HR circles.

It's actually one of the more mature implementations. And I'm especially proud of the fact that we've seen governments using it, which governments are typically known for being pretty far behind the curve technology wise. But governments quickly saw, hey, we want companies to stay in our state. And we also want people to have jobs. So if we can get people into these jobs and the companies will stay. And so the companies will stay, the people will be happy. Everyone will win. But how do we make those connections?

We need to use AI to do that. And so that's what deep talent or talent intelligence is all about. What's the best tools that you found? Is it personality profiling into like some AI algorithm or something? I mean, I think there's a variety. It depends on what you're trying to do. I mean, I personally like, and this gets into a new completely other topic, but this doesn't have to do with recruiting necessarily, although it could for assessment purposes.

But I love the idea of using simulations to put people in real world scenarios to see what they do. Because anyone can talk a good game. Anyone can make up experience. Anyone can say they have skills. But when you put them on the job, that's when you really see what they're capable of. And a lot of times these are risky situations where we don't even want to put our existing employees in these risky situations because we're worried about liability. We're worried about safety.

And if we could put them in a single situation. where they would be completely safe, but they're showing us different characteristics and how they would respond. I think we need to be using this a ton more. And so as I said, it could be used on the recruiting side when you're trying to assess if someone has a given skill, but also for the purposes of training development in existing employees. Instead of having to send them into some really scary situation or even having to send them abroad for certain reason, and you can use simulations to put them there. And I'm surprised we're not seeing more of this,

and I expect that we will in the years to come. I'm going to just ask a few more questions, then I'll close out here. But how much should a company be training, or how much should a company be investing in training, as far as some of the new AI tools? I think what you said earlier is the individual's got to look around too. like they've got to be open to change.

But how much should a company be investing in helping reshape the skill set? I feel like we should be spending more money, training on the technologies we have, instead of let's invest in the next best thing all the time, because what's happening is there's still an adoption gap between, you know, you'll roll out something and then maybe some people will use it and other people won't. And again, you're not using it. it's not integrated into any core business processes necessarily. You're just having people experiments.

So you're not even getting real productivity or real ROI out of it. And so I think where we should be putting the dollars is we all have some degree of AI associated with either ourselves or our organizations. Let's teach people how to use that. And let's customize processes at the department level that use this existing technology to make that process better. And nobody knows how to do that better than the employees that are on the front lines of these processes.

And when people feel invested in a process, when they feel like they helped contribute to making sure the AI is operating effectively in this process, they'll be more motivated to use it. So it's a co-creation model that also serves as training. But the short answer to your question is, we need to do a lot better at this. And in particular, by the way,

we are seeing a very concerning development where women are not mastering AI-based technologies as quickly as men are. Now, we could speculate for the next hour as to why that is. That would be another episode. But that's a problem because we've spent all this time trying to get an equal playing field for women. And meanwhile, we have this massive factor that's going to be really problematic in the years to come. I didn't know that. Alexandra, I probably should have asked you a lot of questions that I didn't. Can you come up with a couple of things that I probably should have asked that I didn't?

I mean, I think you asked a lot of good questions. I mean, I would say, you know, what can the individual do to be prepared for careers in the future? And I would say that if you are a student, first and foremost, look for opportunities in your school or in your community for work-based learning to get concrete exposure to as many fields as possible. Learn what you like, learn what you don't like, learn how AI is being integrated into some of those fields, be on the front lines of that, and learn how work operates before you actually have to be full-time in the workforce.

If you're a person who's been in the workforce, you have to be looking around. You have to be looking for free opportunities to take training. You have to be talking other people about what they're doing with a particular process. I mean, I learn a ton when people explain to me how they're using AI in a given situation. I'm like, oh, I never even thought you could use it for that. Oh, that's a great idea. I'm going to do that. So don't be afraid.

Take the onus on yourself to be as prepared as possible, but recognize that right now we're in a situation where there's a lot of promise around the future of work related to what AI can do for us. provided we use it responsibly and ethically. And I think it's an exciting time. So try not to worry, but do be proactive. I really enjoyed this conversation. I got some close out questions, Alexandra. What somebody wants to reach out to you and learn more? What's the best way to do that? Well, on my personal site is alexandra levitt.com. I love to hear from people on LinkedIn or X. And for the new book, we have a website called makeschoolwork.org. And it's a great. resource for if you're just a company who you're like I need to find some talent in my

community I'm having trouble filling jobs which is a lot of companies that don't have big name recognition or are in that situation make schoolwork.org has a lot of great resources for even how to get started with a small work-based learning program it's a great way to convene different stakeholders in your community to to build something that will be good for the greater population and not just individually good for your company but everybody wins. So check that out and let me know what you think. Awesome. Is there a book that fundamentally changed the way you think about business, life, culture, anything that really just this book just is a must read. It could be fiction,

anything. Oh my gosh. Well, the two that I read early on that have really stuck with me are the seven habits of highly effective people. Cubby. Yeah. I actually had the opportunity to work with him before he passed away, which is one of the highlights of my career, honestly. And I was involved with the Covey organization for some time. They're still doing great work. And they're evolving with the time. So just like we talked about learning agility before, they have really mastered that because they have not stayed with their original message. They've taken it into the future.

And how to win friends and influence people is another one. Dale Carnegie. That's your favorite book? It's I got a shrine in my office. It's, yeah. I mean, it's still, again, still applies every word of it. Such a good book. Alexandra, I'm going to have you close us out.

Anything you want to leave the listeners with, the floor is yours. Well, just thank you for being open to listening to this type of conversation, because this is exactly what we're talking about. Tommy's podcast, and it covers a variety of different issues and things that really can apply to everybody, but also just give a different type of perspective. So the fact that you're even listening this in the first place, you're really on the right track with learning agility, keep looking for similar resources, asking around,

and being willing to take another opportunity to have a different opinion or listen to a different perspective. So good. Thank you so much for doing this today. Thank you for having me, Tommy.