Talent, Culture, and Leadership in the AI Era
James Stovall spent Tuesday night at the Tech Series AI event in Sandy Springs, talking through what it actually takes to get a team to use AI, not just buy it. The core idea he left the room with: most companies don't have an AI problem, they have a people adoption problem, and that's what eventually shows up looking like a process problem. Teams can put the best tools on the market in front of a workforce, but if the mindset doesn't shift, the workflow underneath never does.
The Ratio That's About to Flip
Right now, most knowledge workers spend about 80% of their time on tasks and 20% on decisions. AI takes the tasks. The job becomes judgment. Stovall likes to frame it as the difference between a marching band and a jazz ensemble — a marching band works because everyone executes the same script in lockstep, while jazz works because everyone knows the structure well enough to improvise inside it. AI-ready teams look a lot more like the second one.
Where Rollouts Actually Stall
Individual competency has to come before process redesign, he told the room — get people personally fluent first, then rethink the workflows around them. Skip that step and the rollout usually stalls. The teams that make real progress start with the most painful problem instead of the most impressive one, tie it to a real business objective, and reinvest the hours they save into the next use case. They also track their use cases, unglamorous as that is, because it's the only way to know whether a team keeps going after the pilot ends or quietly lets it die. And they help the resisters instead of routing around them — a framework before a mandate goes a lot further. Only about a third of companies, Stovall noted, are genuinely reimagining how their work gets done. The rest are buying software and calling it transformation.
The Part Attendees Didn't Expect to Learn the Most From
The second half of the night belonged to Sara Branch of Branch Consulting Group, on the Art of Human Connection. Her core argument: networking is a marketing process, and companies that track every other marketing activity religiously somehow never apply that discipline to this one. One stat landed hardest in the room — an hour face-to-face is worth roughly five hours of online meetings, because on screens, facial processing drops, eye contact disappears, and synchrony weakens. The brain knows the difference even when the calendar doesn't. There's a real irony in an AI event delivering the sharpest reminder about human connection, but it tracks: as AI absorbs the tasks, the relationships and the judgment are what's left.
Thanks to Ethan Cortazzo and the GetNetworked team for putting the night together, and good to connect with everyone who came out.
Learn more about James Stovall, the co-founder of GA AI Alliance here and here.
Book a meeting with him here!
