The Talent Development Hot Seat - The #1 podcast for L&D Professionals

The Talent Development Hot Seat podcast is a show dedicated to helping you develop the most important part of your organization – the people! Each week, Andy shares interviews with Talent Development professionals, thought leaders, and experts to share best practices, learn about the latest trends and find out what has been successful in the world of talent development. This podcast and community are designed to enable you to be successful in the world of Talent Development. If you work in Learning and Development (L&D) this is the podcast for you Be sure to check out our website and join our membership community to learn more and connect with other exceptional talent development professionals. http://www.talentdevelopmenthotseat.com/

The Talent Development Hot Seat - The #1 podcast for L&D Professionals is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 300 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts The Talent Development Hot Seat - The #1 podcast for L&D Professionals, a business show with 300 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #630

  Rolling Out AI Enablement in Three Phases at ECI with Katie Tonda

  Sep 1, 202644 min

  In this episode, Katie Tonda shares how she is leading a company-wide AI transformation and rebuilding leadership development from the ground up at ECI Software Solutions. Katie is Global Senior Director of Learning and Development at ECI, a private equity backed software company supporting around 2,400 employees globally, and she came there deliberately after building her career at two of the largest employers in the world, Verizon and Walmart. She and Andy talk about why she made that move, what best practices transfer from massive organizations to a lean team of three operating as a center of excellence, and her philosophy of being brief, being brilliant, and being gone. Katie walks through ECI's three-phase AI enablement strategy in detail, from a required baseline covering terminology, prompting, and hallucinations, through software-specific hands-on integration, to department-level work led by internal champions. She explains why her team builds custom AI apps in-house rather than buying off the shelf, including a career development tool that maps an employee's skills, values, and interests against future roles and generates a development plan. The conversation also covers how AI competency is now built into job descriptions and interviews, why L&D has to treat measurement like any other business decision, and her belief that the window to build a future-ready workforce has shrunk from five years to about eighteen months. I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website ( andystorch.com ) or LinkedIn . And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon . Connect with Katie Tonda: LinkedIn

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  Episode #629

  Reengineering Culture in the Age of AI at Vodacom with Njabulo Mashigo

  Aug 24, 202640 min

  In this episode, Njabulo Mashigo shares how deliberate culture work has helped make Vodacom South Africa the number one top employer in the country three years running, a first in that market. Njabulo is HR Executive Director at Vodacom South Africa, the largest market in the Vodafone Group, and describes herself as a people strategist and culture evangelist. Across 24 years and three industries, from Unilever to South Africa's National Treasury and the JSE to Heineken, she has developed a clear view that culture is not something that simply happens to an organization. It can be orchestrated, measured, and treated as a strategic asset. She and Andy open on the tension facing large companies right now, the pressure to keep growing while cutting costs, and why HR has a role on both sides of that without becoming the hangman. Njabulo explains how her team documents the lived experiences of specific groups inside the business and turns that into an action plan, how they expanded their listening beyond the annual engagement survey, and how data on attrition revealed a leaking bucket problem with retaining women that attraction numbers had masked. She also shares Vodacom's approach to AI, from early instincts to block the tools to running AI immersions in HR, why leader resistance is usually about confidence rather than unwillingness, and how their firelighters hold leadership accountable from the grassroots. Throughout, she makes a practical case for connecting people patterns directly to business results. I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website ( andystorch.com ) or LinkedIn . And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon . Connect with Njabulo Mashigo: LinkedIn

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  Episode #628

  10 Lessons on AI Transformation: What's Actually Working Inside Organizations

  Aug 17, 202629 min

  In this solo episode, Andy Storch shares the top 10 lessons he has gathered on AI transformation over the last several months, drawing from podcast interviews, private one-on-one conversations, industry conferences, and the virtual roundtables he has been hosting with L&D leaders. The picture that emerges is consistent: the technology is rarely the hard part. What determines whether an AI rollout succeeds is training, time, psychological safety, and whether anyone bothered to address the very human fears sitting underneath the initiative. Andy walks through why employees are simultaneously hungry for AI content and lost about how to apply it, why the tools budget and the training budget are so wildly out of balance, and how one company took adoption from 45 percent to 97 percent by naming the fear out loud. He covers the two distinct fears holding people back, why the traditional instinct to teach fundamentals first may be backwards, the growing risk of outsourcing critical thinking, and a cautionary pilot story where five weeks of rollout produced ten minutes of total usage. In This Episode, You'll Hear: Why employees can be in a feeding frenzy for AI content and still be completely lost Why people need a Sherpa, not just a mountain to climb The three Ts of adoption: training, time, and tools, and why most companies deliver only one How the tools budget and training budget got so out of balance, and the 70/30 split that explains it Why psychological safety is the real adoption lever, not a nice to have The second fear nobody names: that using AI feels like cheating Why we might be teaching AI backwards, and the case for building before learning fundamentals The death of critical thinking, and one leader's refreshingly low tech fix Why the technology curve is outpacing the people curve, and what that means for L&D How to meet resistance where it actually lives, sometimes outside of work entirely The AI pilot that got 10 minutes of total usage in five weeks, and the three mistakes behind it Why employees are three times more ready than leaders believe, and why only 21 percent of CHROs are in the room early Episodes Mentioned: Christa Hill on AI adoption and the messy middle Alex Zubko on the three Ts and why availability isn't adoption Antonia Bowler on AI adoption at Exclaimer Julie Stone on AI enabled learning at TTEC Joshua Remerowski on measuring impact and the death of critical thinking Work With Andy: Andy runs hands-on AI Kickstarter workshops for teams who need to move past fear and into real usage, getting people actually using the tools during the session so they experience the aha moment for themselves. He also delivers a keynote on career ownership in the AI world for audiences who need to understand what all of this means for their own careers. Reach out at andy@andystorch.com or visit andystorch.com . About The Talent Development Hot Seat: Hosted by Andy Storch, this podcast connects talent development professionals with insights, ideas, and inspiration to grow their careers and their organizations. With over 600 episodes published since 2018, the Hot Seat is your resource for what's next in L&D.

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  Episode #627

  The Three T’s of AI Rollouts: Training, Time, and Tools with Alex Zubko

  Aug 10, 202636 min

  In this episode, Alex Zubko shares what she is seeing inside organizations trying to make AI transformation actually work. Alex has been in the AI trenches since 2022, when she pivoted a company into AI right as ChatGPT launched, and she now works with private equity firms, fintech companies, and beyond, doing everything from education to hands-on consulting to executive coaching. She and Andy dig into the gap between the headline statistics on AI usage and what is really happening, and why making a tool available is not the same as people using it. Alex lays out her three Ts, training, time, and tools, and explains why organizations that skip any one of them will not see the adoption or the returns they expect. Alex and Andy also explore the pressure CEOs feel from their boards, and the irony that the leaders asking the biggest strategic questions about AI are often the ones using it least. She unpacks the J curve of productivity, why treating AI like a new intern is a more useful mental model than treating it like software, and why so many teams struggle to hand work to AI when their own processes were never written down. The conversation covers what the best companies are doing, from ambassadors and centers of excellence to hackathons and channels where people share AI fails, and closes with practical guidance for L&D professionals on leading by example, anchoring AI change in the organization's mission and values, and remembering that the human judgment is the whole point. I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website ( andystorch.com ) or LinkedIn . And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon . Connect with Alex Zubko: LinkedIn | alextalksai.com

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  Episode #626

  Turning AI Anxiety Into AI Agency at Exclaimer with Antonia Bowler

  Aug 4, 202635 min

  In this episode, Antonia Bowler shares how her organization approached AI adoption by putting people first. Antonia is a people leader at Exclaimer, a private equity backed software company, where she has led an AI enablement effort grounded in psychological safety and the human side of the technology. She and Andy explore why trust has to come before adoption, how the company countered the common fear that employees are training their own replacements, and why being vocal about issues like the environmental impact of AI matters to the people you are asking to experiment. Antonia is refreshingly transparent about where they are on the journey, from a low pressure first sprint that took adoption from forty-five percent to ninety-seven percent, to the champions, e-learning, and showcasing that made it happen. Antonia and Andy also dig into the widening productivity divide between heavy AI users and those hanging back, the leadership layer that is easy to skip and expensive to miss, and the risk of quietly outsourcing your own critical thinking to the tools. She unpacks the idea of the human in the loop, the thinking behind their AI Careers Month, and why framing AI fluency as a portable, career building skill answers the question every employee is really asking: what's in it for me. It is an honest, practical conversation for anyone leading AI enablement inside a real organization. I hope you enjoy it! As always you can learn more and connect with me on my website ( andystorch.com ) or LinkedIn . And you can find my books - Own Your Career Own Your Life and Own Your Brand, Own Your Career - on Amazon . Connect with Antonia Bowler: LinkedIn

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