Women at Work - Season 10 of Women at Work Starts October 21

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

How are women using GenAI to transform their work? What can we learn from the listeners who identify as “AI power users” about how to boost our productivity, creativity, and confidence? Why is working while parenting a teenager so much harder than Amy Gallo expected, and how can she and other moms navigate this emotionally demanding phase of motherhood? If you’re mid-career and thinking about switching industries, what should you know before making the leap? These questions are at the heart of some of the conversations the Amys are having this season. As always, they’ll bring you expertise, stories, and advice.

Over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at Work. Amy G, we're about to start the 10th season of our podcast on October 21st. I sort of can't believe it. 10 seasons. It's great. We've been hard at work putting together eight episodes that speak to both the practical and emotional sides of women's experiences at work. Let's tell our listeners about some of what's coming up. Love to do that. Okay, so in our first episode of the season, we are asking the question,

what would it mean for those of us in the U.S. to have a woman as president for the very first time? We want to understand what at work we stand to gain or lose in terms of status, power, confidence about the future, social policy. We're also working on an episode about how women are using Gen AI to transform the way they do their jobs. Thanks to this custom GPT, I now managed to solve technical issues that before they were like totally outside of my expertise. And I feel honestly it's very empowering. Formatting. It can just make things flow.

So at work, if we are doing a daily stand up and we're trying to go over our project management, we can prompt it to what we're doing and how we want to do it and who's involved. Then just dump our notes into it and it'll format everything for us, which is just incredible. Rule of thumb, if I'm likely to overthink it, I'm going to generate AI. It wrote me every single piece of code that I needed, told me where to put it, told me how to execute it, helped me get set up with GitHub. I got Google Analytics. I did all of that with my fake team on Cloud. One woman created an entire committee of AI people with different perspectives for use in product development. Absolutely mind-blowing. They so inspired me that this weekend, I suddenly remembered I had to write a speech. And writing a speech for me can take hours and hours of agony.

I used Copilot and it took 20 minutes and then another 20 minutes of editing. That's amazing. Yeah, a little scary, but in the moment, so awesome. I'll be curious to see if that speech goes better for you than other speeches. You know what? It happened so quickly and without any anxiety. And for that alone, I am so grateful. I actually was inspired too. And I'm going to build a custom AI and Amy bot and share what I learned as part of the process. Will she be our third co-host?

She'll be your only co-host. I'm absolutely not. I'm going to go lay on a beach. I reject that. We'll also talk to some of our listeners and some experts about how anxiety disorders have affected them and how they can find success at work. There is an episode that is very personal to me, which is about why parenting teenagers while working is so much harder than expected, or certainly than I expected. So we brought back

friend of the show, Dana Greenberg, Babson College professor. And Dana validated my overwhelm and frustrations and uncertainty about how to be available to my 17-year-old who sometimes calls and texts around the clock about anything and everything. And that availability we know is really hard with adolescents and young adults, right? Because they have these moments where they want to talk and they want to talk in that very moment. And you can't say, oh, let me finish this presentation. I'll call you back in a half hour because the moment is left. And then we also turn to the topic of mid-career. How can mid-career women navigate the challenges of switching sectors while leveraging their skills and building new networks.

There's still time for listeners to contribute to the episode. So if you're contemplating changing industries mid-career, email womenatwork at hbr.org with any questions you'd like me to ask the guests. All right. So starting October 21st, you'll hear from us every Monday for the next couple of months. We're hoping that by the end of these eight episodes, you'll feel more confident, equipped, and supported, both personally and professionally. And if you haven't already, follow the show. Like, click the follow button on whatever app you're using right now. That way you won't miss any of the stories, the conversations, and practical tips that we are putting together for you. All right, Amy, saying goodbye until episode one. See you all then.