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Elevate Your AIQ

Elevate Your AIQ

Written by: WRKdefined Podcast Network
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 Bob Pulver is helping each of us navigate our respective journeys with artificial intelligence (AI) effectively and responsibly. Bob chats with AI and Future of Work experts, talent and transformation leaders, and practitioners who provide diverse perspectives on how AI is solving real-world challenges and driving responsible innovation.All rights reserved by WRKdefined Economics Management Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • Ep 118: Reimagining Marketing Operations and Owning the Buyer Journey with Lisa Cole

    Ep 118: Reimagining Marketing Operations and Owning the Buyer Journey with Lisa Cole
    May 15 2026
    Lisa Cole, Chief Marketing, Product, and AI Officer at 2X and three-time author, joins Bob to explore how AI is fundamentally reshaping the B2B marketing function. Lisa shares how 2X, a global marketing-as-a-service firm with 1,400 marketers worldwide, is navigating the shift toward generalist talent, AI-native roles, and human-centered AI adoption. The conversation covers her framework for "brand gravity," the case for keeping strategic thinking and brand voice uniquely human, and how AI enables the scale needed to be findable and chosen by buyers long before they raise their hand. Lisa also discusses her new book, The Limitless CMO, which offers a practical operating model for scaling marketing impact without skyrocketing costs. Keywords Lisa Cole, 2X, brand gravity, B2B marketing, marketing as a service, AI adoption, generalist marketers, AI-native roles, human centricity, prompt engineering, knowledge layer, synthetic personas, mock focus groups, omnipresence, The Limitless CMO, Brand Gravity, The Revenue RAMP, responsible AI, content at scale, buyer journey Takeaways AI is shifting marketing toward generalists who are adaptable, curious, and comfortable with continuous change, while also creating entirely new roles like AI automation specialists and prompt engineers Organizations fall into three categories of AI readiness: AI-forward with clear strategy, still figuring it out, and fully resistant; 2X leads with full disclosure and follows each client's lead The deciding of what to say and how to say it should remain uniquely human, as it is the source of competitive differentiation and brand trust Brand gravity is built by accumulating digital mass across all the places buyers research anonymously, making a brand findable and chosen before any sales conversation begins AI enables the scale needed to repurpose core thought leadership into derivative assets across channels, without outsourcing the underlying thinking Synthetic personas and mock focus groups offer a faster, lower-cost path to messaging development, though high-stakes repositioning decisions still warrant real human input Building a knowledge layer from unstructured organizational data, call transcripts, emails, and more, is the key unlock for eliminating AI slop and generating reliable, contextual output Quotes "Deciding what to say and how to say it, those points of view that you're putting out in the market, that should be uniquely human. That's your secret sauce." "It's the absence of guardrails that people are so afraid of. The guardrails are what's actually unleashing it." "We recruit about 80 to 100 marketers a month, and we now have to really focus on soft skills: are they open to an ever-changing environment?" "I used AI when I was writing my book, not to write the book, but to interview me." "If you actually know your workflows and can taskify it in such a way that you can explain it to an intern, then it's very easy to apply AI to accelerate it." Chapters 00:03 Welcome and guest introduction 03:46 AI's role across a 1,400-person marketing organization 06:12 Evolving roles and the rise of the generalist marketer 10:06 Client AI readiness and 2X's full-disclosure approach 13:56 Defining what should remain uniquely human 18:21 Brand voice, storytelling, and competitive differentiation 21:21 Brand Gravity and the anonymous buyer journey 23:41 The Limitless CMO and scaling without skyrocketing costs 28:40 Building the knowledge layer from unstructured data 31:31 Synthetic personas and mock focus groups 36:13 Good enough as a framework for AI use case decisions 41:34 Voice-first workflows and AI-assisted book writing 45:43 Global operations, offshore teams, and cultural dynamics 50:28 Closing thoughts and book resources Lisa Cole: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacole01 2X: https://2x.marketing “The Limitless CMO”: https://lisacole.ai/ For advisory work and marketing inquiries: Bob Pulver:⁠⁠ https://linkedin.com/in/bobpulver⁠⁠⁠ Elevate Your AIQ:⁠⁠ https://elevateyouraiq.com⁠⁠⁠Substack: ⁠https://elevateyouraiq.substack.com⁠
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    52 mins
  • Ep 117: Cultivating Curiosity and Amplifying Human Knowledge with Bob Danna

    Ep 117: Cultivating Curiosity and Amplifying Human Knowledge with Bob Danna
    May 8 2026
    Bob Danna, physicist, naval officer, former Senior Managing Director at Deloitte Consulting and Bersin by Deloitte, and author of the memoir "My Curious Life," joins host Bob Pulver for a wide-ranging conversation about a lifetime at the frontier of science and technology. Bob traces his journey from slide rules and nuclear reactors to agentic AI, sharing how he and collaborator Joe DiDonato built "Bot-Bob," a digital twin trained on his memoir, writings, and decades of experience. The conversation explores what digital twins can mean for knowledge workers, legacy building, and collective intelligence, including a live mastermind experiment where multiple digital twins, plus a digital Mark Twain, fielded questions from a live audience. Bob closes with an urgent call to bring more diverse human voices into AI development before the decisions that shape civilization get made without them. Keywords Bob Danna, digital twin, agentic AI, Bot-Bob, Joe DiDonato, My Curious Life, knowledge worker, collective intelligence, co-intelligence, legacy, mastermind, ElevenLabs, nuclear warfare, responsible AI, human centricity, future of work, STEM, Deloitte, memoir, Substack Takeaways Curiosity is the connective tissue of Bob's entire career, from nuclear physics and naval service to Deloitte consulting and digital twins, and he positions it as the essential human quality that AI can amplify but never replicate A digital twin is far more than a knowledge repository; it encodes values, judgment, and personality, making it a genuine extension of a person's thinking The "mastermind" format, where multiple digital twins deliberate together in real time, opens new possibilities for accessing cognitive diversity without scheduling constraints When AI models are trained by a narrow group (such as military strategists), the outputs reflect that bias, making diverse human representation in AI development a matter of consequence Knowledge workers who collaborate with their own digital twins can operate at dramatically higher capacity and quality, not by being replaced, but by being amplified A responsibly built digital twin can preserve the wisdom, voice, and values of an individual for future generations Quotes "I'm just a curious guy. No matter what I'm into, I'm always looking at other things." "When we free up tasks that human beings were doing, I think that is very, very positive. The real question is, what does the human being step up to do that only a human being can do?" "The definition of a knowledge worker is going to change. It's going to be that human being collaborating with the digital twin of that person." "It's very timely right now that we really start to have human conversations before we go down the path too far." Chapters 00:03 Welcome and introductions 01:21 Bob Danna's fascinating career journey 03:27 Early encounters with AI and neural networks 07:21 What makes us human, the evolution of calculators and computers 10:26 Joe DiDonato, soul-sinking, and the origin of Bot-Bob 14:41 Building Bot-Bob, memoir, voice, and guardrails 17:17 From chatbots to agents to digital twins, a practical framework 25:27 Brainstorming mode and collaborating with your own twin 28:16 Digital twins in consulting and the future of knowledge work 35:20 The mastermind experiment, Bot-Bob, Robo Lacey, and digital Mark Twain 41:14 AI, nuclear war scenarios, and the dangers of narrow training data 51:31 The workforce of 2030 and what it means to be a knowledge worker 58:55 Closing thoughts and how to connect with Bob Danna Bob Danna: https://bobdanna.substack.com/ “My Curious Life”: https://mycuriouslife.net/ For advisory work and marketing inquiries: Bob Pulver:⁠⁠ https://linkedin.com/in/bobpulver⁠⁠⁠ Elevate Your AIQ:⁠⁠ https://elevateyouraiq.com⁠⁠⁠ Substack: ⁠https://elevateyouraiq.substack.com⁠
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    58 mins
  • Ep 116: Evolving the HR Function Through Agentic AI and Human Potential with Laura Maffucci

    Ep 116: Evolving the HR Function Through Agentic AI and Human Potential with Laura Maffucci
    May 1 2026
    Bob Pulver sits down with Laura Maffucci, Head of HR at Globalization Partners, for a wide-ranging conversation on AI adoption, global workforce trends, and the evolving role of HR. Laura shares how G-P is deploying its agentic AI product, GIA, both externally for global employment compliance and internally as a pilot HR agent, while emphasizing the importance of grounding AI in trusted, expert-sourced data. They explore the growing disconnect between executive optimism and employee sentiment around AI, the durable human skills that matter most in an AI-augmented workplace, and why AI adoption without a clear problem to solve is a recipe for costly confusion. Laura also shares candid reflections on her own AI learning journey and what she sees ahead for the HR function. Keywords Laura Maffucci, Globalization Partners, GIA, employer of record, EOR, agentic AI, global employment, AI compliance, HR transformation, AI adoption, employee sentiment, AI literacy, early career roles, talent acquisition, deep fakes, AI governance, critical thinking, human skills, learning agility, shadow AI, AI Awesomeness Awards, internal mobility, cognitive diversity, compensation analytics, AI readiness, Gemini, NotebookLM Takeaways GIA has evolved from a compliance Q&A tool into an agentic platform that can generate contracts, audit company policies, and is now being piloted as an internal HR agent handling employee ticket inquiries The data behind GIA is grounded in over a decade of G-P's global employment expertise, offering a trusted alternative to general-purpose LLMs drawing from unverified internet sources A significant perception gap exists between executives who believe AI is driving efficiency and employees who feel it is actually adding to their workload or generating unreliable output they must clean up Entry-level roles are shifting toward managing and directing AI agents rather than executing tasks directly, with "taste" (the ability to evaluate AI output) emerging as a critical early-career skill Workforce hiring criteria must increasingly prioritize unteachable human attributes such as curiosity, learning agility, courage, and the willingness to relinquish control, because technical AI skills can be taught but these cannot AI adoption mandates without a clearly defined problem to solve create fragmented, siloed "shadow AI" that can undermine organizational strategy rather than advance it HR functions are being asked to lead organizational AI transformation without adequate resources, technical support, or direction, making the role both high-opportunity and genuinely demanding Assessing real AI usage requires creative mechanisms: GP uses a Slack sharing channel, quarterly performance check-in questions, and monthly AI Awesomeness Awards to surface how people are actually applying the technology Quotes "I know that when these things come out, whether you like them or not, you had best learn them and learn how to work with them." "If you have a legal or compliance question, I hope Reddit's not your first stop to get that answer." "You can't embrace AI and be a control freak. You have to be willing to let something go and let something do something." "The pitfall that I can see so many companies falling into is, we don't need people because we've got the AI to do this." "Being in HR right now is not for the weak. That I will say, for sure." "It should always be: what problem are we trying to solve? Because that's actually one of the biggest issues with AI." Chapters 00:02 Welcome and guest introduction 01:40 Employer of record explained 03:03 GIA overview and new agentic capabilities 05:27 Responsible AI and the importance of trusted data sources 08:47 GP research findings on AI adoption and executive-employee sentiment gap 11:50 AI as added burden vs. efficiency driver 13:45 Redefining early career roles in an agentic world 15:42 The human cost of replacing workers instead of augmenting them 19:05 The problem with AI mandates that skip the "why" 22:44 Human skills that matter most when hiring for an AI-augmented workforce 26:37 The AI-versus-AI problem in talent acquisition 27:39 Deep fakes, virtual interview integrity, and human oversight in TA 31:53 The evolving role of HR as a strategic function 37:13 C-suite dynamics and running HR as a pilot for GIA 39:27 Building an AI council, sharing culture, and identifying shadow AI 42:15 Measuring AI fluency through awards, check-ins, and community 45:14 Laura's personal AI journey and closing thoughts Laura Maffucci: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-maffucci G-P: https://www.globalization-partners.com/ For advisory work and marketing inquiries: Bob Pulver:⁠⁠ https://linkedin.com/in/bobpulver⁠⁠⁠ Elevate Your AIQ:⁠⁠ https://elevateyouraiq.com⁠⁠⁠Substack: ⁠https://elevateyouraiq.substack.com⁠
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    52 mins
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