🚀 Jess Von Bank has spent 20+ years on every side of the HR tech problem — vendor, buyer, analyst, practitioner. She co-founded Now to Next to close the distance between an AI strategy and human outcomes, and she's writing her way through it publicly with the Human Thesis, a seven-part Substack series, and her forthcoming book Work Like a Mother. In this conversation, Jess makes the case that most organizations are running AI adoption programs when what they need is embodiment — and those are not the same thing. Handing out licenses, counting logins, and calling it transformation is a procurement decision. Embodiment is when someone in a call center starts imagining the insurance products she could build from the data AI just unlocked. The gap between those two conversations is the gap between cutting costs and finding new markets.
⏰ Timestamps:
00:25 Guest Introduction: Jess Von Bank
01:24 Racing, Ragnar and Finding Your Amy
05:14 Founding Now to Next: No Old Answers
08:52 Why AI Transformation Keeps Failing
14:50 What Is Different About This Transformation Cycle
16:04 Automation vs Reinvention: The Hands, Heads and Hearts Framework
17:43 Where AI Goes Wrong in Talent Acquisition
21:36 Hiring Without Job Descriptions: A First Principles Experiment
24:23 Adoption Is a Procurement Decision: Defining Embodiment
27:18 From 5% to 30% Improvement: The Telecom Case Study
30:35 Too Much Choice and the Danger of Scattershot AI Rollouts
31:54 Paving the Path: Change Leadership and Cognitive Dissonance
34:14 Change Is the Strategy: Reframing Change Fatigue
37:21 Workforce Representation in AI Decisions
39:18 Human Gaps Are Transformation Gaps: Diagnosing the Wounds of Change
43:00 Skeptics, Pragmatists and Power Users: No Winners and Losers
44:25 Retaining Work Experts Over Tool Experts
47:12 Workshop Story: Innovation vs Substitution in a Call Centre
49:03 Writing, Storytelling and The Human Thesis Substack
51:58 Dear Daughters: Ten Years of Private Journals
54:34 Training Claude on Her Voice: The One Rule She Never Breaks
55:46 Work Like a Mother: The Book
59:56 Leadership Corner: Should I Take the Stretch Role?
⭐ In this episode:
- The adoption vs. embodiment distinction — why your ROI is missing and what actually closes the gap.
- The hands, heads, hearts framework for sorting work: what AI should own entirely, what it should augment, and where you need to create more human capacity, not less.
- Why "failure fatigue" is the real diagnosis behind what most leaders are calling change resistance — and what changefulness (adaptability as a default state, not a crisis response) looks like inside an organization that has actually built for it.
- The five wounds of change your AI rollout is landing on whether you're tracking them or not: fear of replacement, loss of mastery, decision fatigue, trust erosion, and identity disruption.
- Amy's take on the highest-stakes paradox of this moment — outsourcing your imagination to the very tool you're trying to imagine with.
- And the one rule Jess gave Claude when she trained it on her voice, and what happened the day she asked it to break it.
Jess Von Bank joins hosts Meg Bear and Amy Wilson for Episode 50. If you're leading an AI transformation and measuring success by adoption rates, this episode names what's actually in the way — and what it looks like when an organization builds for changefulness instead.
#AITransformation #ChangeManagement #HRTech #WorkforceTransformation #Leadership #MegAndAmyShow
Powered by the WRKdefined Podcast Network.
Sponsors
