The Human Conversation with Doug Atkinson

Ben Tasker (AI capability and workforce transformation expert and former dean of AI at Southern New Hampshire University) calls the moment we're in "the AI between times": not yet out of the old way of working, not yet into the AI-enabled future, and moving faster than most organizations are prepared for. In this episode, he makes the case that the organizations winning at AI adoptio...

Dr. Rachel Wood, founder of the AI Mental Health Collective, makes the case that AI is doing something far more subtle (and dangerous) than eliminating jobs: it's quietly eroding the relational muscles that make us human. When people turn to a chatbot for emotional support, they skip the friction that builds patience, reciprocity, and the capacity to hold space for another person. She argues t...

Higher education has survived a lot, but it has never faced something that goes across the entire institution at once. Dr. Justin Lawhead, AVP for Career Readiness at the University of South Carolina, makes the case that the AI moment is different in kind. This time, it's commoditizing the thing universities have always sold: the faculty member as the purveyor of all information. In this episo...

The conversation about AI in K-12 education keeps happening in the wrong room. Jerry Almendarez (former superintendent of Santa Ana Unified and founder of the Creative Futures Collaborative) argues that while districts debate classroom policies and homework rules, the real governance gap is sitting one floor up: in the executive cabinet, where the people who set AI policy often don't understan...

Tim Sanders has a term for what's filling inboxes and LinkedIn feeds: sloppification. He makes the case to Doug that, in a world drowning in AI-generated average, the only defensible position is being the person who still does the Rick Rubin step: implementing distinctly human taste at the end. He shares a decision he made ten years ago that has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with what...

Neil Patel has the data and insight most marketing experts only guess at. In this episode, he brings it. He and Doug sit down to discuss the fragmentation of search, why GenAI content consistently underperforms human, and what AI is actually changing in marketing. Neil gets into what he's seen AI do (and not do) for productivityin his own company. Will you use it to augment... or to just coast...

Andreas Welsch has watched a new kind of problem arrive in corporate inboxes — reports that look like reports, summaries that look like summaries, and none of it says anything. The author of *The Human Agentic AI Edge* joins Doug to navigate the gap between AI promise and AI reality: why IBM reversed course and tripled its entry-level hiring after announcing 7,800 automated roles, why the DIY AI m...

Dr. Joe Perez has a warning: if we let AI do all our thinking, we won't be replaced by machines... we'll become them. The data analytics expert and international keynote speaker joins Doug to follow the economic logic of mass AI adoption to its quietly terrifying conclusion: companies eliminate every job, slash every cost, and discover too late that the people they fired were also their cu...

AI ethics researcher and keynote speaker Rebecca Bultsma joins Doug for an unflinching conversation about the seismic shift happening in AI right now, and what it actually means for workers, educators, and society at large. Rebecca shares why she can no longer in good conscience tell people there's "nothing to worry about," and what each of us needs to do to stay relevant in a world...

Social workers are burned out, understaffed, and drowning in paperwork. Is AI an unlikely lifeline? Dr. Marina Badillo-Diaz, founder of the AI Social Worker and professor at NYU and Columbia, joins Doug Atkinson to explore what happens when millions of people turn to chatbots for mental health support, whether human therapists are replaceable, and what the rise of AI means for a generation of kids...

Are students cheating with AI? Or are they just using their resources? Courtney Bock is a K-5 library and technology teacher and AI implementation specialist who spent the early part of her career training natural language models and building enterprise chatbots. Now she's watching those two worlds collide inside the American classroom. In this episode, Doug and Courtney dig into the ed tech l...

AI doesn't care about your credentials, your experience, or your billable hour. Doug sits down with BARC Research VP Kevin Petrie to ask the question nobody in enterprise tech wants to answer: what's actually left for us? They cover why data quality has vaulted to the #1 obstacle to AI success, how the arms race between OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google is going to force some uncomfortable bus...

AI regulation is lagging. Companies are either paralyzed or moving too fast. And somewhere in the middle, real people are watching their career paths disappear. Doug sits down with Asha J. Palmer (AI governance, ethics, and compliance leader at  ⁨@skillsoft⁩  ) to have an honest conversation about what responsible AI actually looks like in practice. They dig into why businesses can't resist re...

Is AI going to eat enterprise software whole, or are companies nowhere near ready to handle what's coming? Doug sits down with Sam Gupta, founder and CEO of ElevateIQ, to debate the real state of AI adoption in the enterprise. They cover the collapse of legacy ERP, the rise of AI-native platforms like Campfire and Everest, why 95% of companies are more inefficient than they realize, and whethe...

Tech influencer Evan Kirstel brings the optimist's view while Doug pushes back hard. Is AI a productivity boom or a Terminator that won't show pity? A spirited debate on job displacement, LLM limitations, and whether we're overvaluing human capabilities.

Dr. Priyanka Dave, workforce development leader at Oregon State University, joins Doug to explore the AI upskilling gap, why future leaders may never learn to lead, and whether humans can compete with technology that evolves faster than we can adapt.***********Priyanka Davehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/priyankadave-phd/***********The Human Conversation is powered by Insight JamJoin the human convers...

David Linthicum, former Deloitte Cloud Chief Strategy Officer and 35-year AI veteran, joins Doug to discuss why 90% of AI projects fail, which industries are most vulnerable to disruption, and what happens when the corporate ladder loses its bottom rungs.

I'm Doug Atkinson and I'll be talking with educators, researchers, practitioners, and thought leaders about the effect AI is having on work, learning, and society. Subscribe today! New episodes every Tuesday.