The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Start with One AI Use Case | Foundations Friday S5EP1

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

This week’s Foundations Friday, Start with One AI Use Case, is a bit of a reset and reminder. If you’re in public safety or project management, you don’t need to become a coder. But you do need to understand where AI can help you lead smarter and deliver faster.

Welcome to the People, Process, Progress podcast, where public safety, project leadership, and reward execution collide. I'm Kevin Ponell, Navy veteran, emergency planner, and project leader in healthcare IT. Each week I share lessons from the field to help you lead smarter, operate with clarity, and progress with purpose. Whether you're running a fire ground, managing a project, or preparing for the unexpected, let's get into it. In the previous episode, AI for Project Managers and Public Safety, I shared how AI can assist department leaders and project managers. We talked about preparing our people,

identifying the right task AI can help with, and then measuring progress from practical outcomes. So this week's Foundation Friday is a bit of a reset and a reminder. If you're in public safety or project management, you don't need to become a coder, but you do need to understand where AI can help you lead smarter and deliver faster.

So think about that one task you dread, the one that eats up time or brings little reward. Maybe it's typing up meeting notes, pulling incident metrics, or manually updating a dashboard. That's where AI shines. Tools like ChatGBT, Notion AI, or built-in features in Microsoft or Google, like Gemini or Copilot,

can take that work off your plate, right? This isn't about replacing the mission, it's about making more space, more time, to focus on other things, and reduce that administrative burden that all of us face as either project managers or public safety leaders where we just have to sit there and be at the keyboard.

So my call to action for you all this week, and I think that I found helpful as well, is pick just one high effort, right? Low satisfaction tasks that this week, and test the tool on it, right? Just one, see how it goes. Plug in potentially some objective, plug in some data that you have,

and see how it summarizes it for you for a lessons learned report or after action review. If it saves you time or gives you cleaner results, think about how you can scale that up, right? Partnering with your information technology, your project management office or a few other project management office, making sure you're connected with your IT folks

and your information security folks. But it's really good opportunity, really, in a way to field tasks before you scale it up. Right, so in summary, we don't need to wait for top-down mandates, right, to modernize work. This is where our initiative comes in, this ownership that, pillar one, I talk about in the seven pillars.

So start where you are, focus on what drains your energy the most, and then use these tools to help you be more efficient, right, and then you can put that time that you would spend on administrative tasks toward your people, toward developing yourself as a leader, toward all the things that we wanna do when we don't have time

and we have to sit there at our keyboard. So start small, stay focused, keep building the literacy. Thank you for listening to this podcast, the People Process Progress podcast. Go to peopleprocessprogress.com for more, for all the back episodes, a few years worth now, some great interviews with some folks there, and also follow me on Instagram at xatpanelkg.

There's a Panel 5 Fitness YouTube channel if you wanna get workout ideas, which is our pillar three movement, right, from our stability equation, and also some cold plunge from Jiu Jitsu after action reports there. So thank you all very much, stay safe, Godspeed.