How Do AI & Innovation Cohabitate?

Bryan Cassady is an author, professor, and all-around innovator, whether in book form or in classrooms, real and virtual, stretching from Europe to India. He is a professor, consultant, and a serial entrepreneur now with a mission: to teach 1 million innovators by 2027.

He has built companies in 6 countries and trained 40,000+ leaders. He’s also a former professional racquetball player turned mathematician, a United Nations professional who speaks four languages. A researcher who has published on innovation, alignment, and social-media addiction. He’s co-created books with 50+ experts worldwide, including the international bestsellers CYCLES and The Generative Organization: AI Playbook for Exponential Leaders.

There’s the question before the formal questions begin, and then there’s adding humans into the loop—and all across the innovation process, AI has an instrumental role to play. That’s the verdict of this week’s guest, Bryan Cassady, who, true to his word, has put together an outside-the-box book that has brought into the fold multiple co-authors. One of Bryan's main points in both his book and this interview is that AI is a brilliant co-pilot, but a terrible pilot alone. Good prompts are vital for establishing context, role-playing scenarios, and using synthetic-user personas to create a Customer Avatar that helps you tell whether your innovation is likely to find buyers in the marketplace. If there’s a more charming, thoughtful guest than today’s, we’d be surprised.

Bryan’s Offer

You can learn more about him at BryanCassady.com and take advantage of his offer to download a free book and toolkit here, helping him achieve his mission above!

Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out the website here.

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Does it seem like the business world is in its own version of an arms race to figure out AI?

It’s a moment when even a little wisdom, grounded in experience and expertise, provides relief.

But how do you get that wisdom?

If you’re KPMG, you turn to your own secret weapon, Stephanie Kim, who leads Signals & Strategy, to combine the firm’s intelligence AND the steady stream of data from the outside INTO a cogent worldview. Tracking, distilling, and interpreting signals has been Kim’s focus for years. If this were a superhero movie, her code name would be The SYNTHESIZER. In our interview, she outlines the implications of how AI is changing and will change the world of business, neatly bundled into the firm’s 2026 Frontiers Report. Its goal is to help leaders navigate uncertainty, identify opportunity, and make more informed decisions about growth, resilience, and competitive advantage.

To hear a singular perspective on the forces driving transformation and the connections between them, tune into this episode and get ready for the future barreling toward us at warp speed. You can download the KPMG Frontiers Report here.

Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops, and labs, check out Real-Transformation.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Pat Garland is an HR leader, author, consultant and Adjunct Instructor at Loyola University’s Quinlan School of Business (in Chicago). Her career has spanned senior posts at Jim Beam, Anixter Intl, where she played a leading role in the company’s success over several decades. Pat is also an equestrian who finds dealing with horses easier than dealing with people (whose motivations often aren’t as clear, even to themselves).

Too often the Human Resources (HR) function at a company gets reduced to being a “hall monitor” or “complaint department” in the words of today’s spirited and pragmatic guest: Pat Garland. HR, when it realizes its potential, should function not as some quasi-clerical payroll and benefits-focused operation (though those functions are vital) but as an enabler of business growth through respecting talent. Most importantly for HR, Garland observes, is starting by understanding the actual business, and then helping to design the flow of people and ideas that enhance its success. Note she doesn’t mention policies. Because she’s anti-policy. So she fit in beautifully at Anixter, which was high on accountability but allergic to running a business on policies. The Anixter culture understood, as Pat clearly does, that everything starts with trusting people. And building talent starts with getting people into roles where the work comes naturally because its a fit. For what kind of tasks are they best suited? Ultimately, the HR bottom line is pretty simple: back to “trust your people.” Enable them to grow, rather than creating rules that allow leaders and managers to cast the blame on HR when things don’t work. The real need in any business is for leaders to lead and coach people well. A great HR leader is part psychologist, part lawyer, part actuary, part accountant, and 100% a humanist. Pat clearly is the latter. And her book, 33 Ways Not to Screw Up HR (NetWorlding Publishing, 2022), proves it.

Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out Real-Transformation.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.