# 030 Who's Responsible for AI Upskilling? ![[images/brandy-schade.png]] Part of [[Pixels & Priorities]] (listed in [[Pixels & Priorities - Audio Episodes 015-031]]). - Show: Pixels & Priorities, hosted by Metsy Rose and J Schuh (RSS author field) - Episode: 030, published 2026-10-20 (RSS pubDate). Title "030 Who's Responsible for AI Upskilling?". Guest returns in episode 031 on resilience. - Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/brmb9vcqp8gu4mrb/Ep_036_Brandy_Schade_Part_1b9jtl.mp3 - Podbean page: https://pixelsandpriorities.podbean.com/e/030-whos-responsible-for-ai-upskilling/ - Length: 34:24 (2,063.8 s measured from the mp3). The RSS `itunes:duration` says 2063 s (34:23), essentially matching the file. - Transcript: faster-whisper (medium, int8, CPU) on the mp3; VAD on; not conditioned on previous text; beam size 5. Speakers are not diarized. Whisper mishears host/guest names ("Metzi Rose", "Jay Xu", "Brandy Shade" / "Brandi"); correct spellings are **Metsy Rose**, **J Schuh**, and **Brandy Schade** (she spells Schade S-C-H-A-D-E on air in the following episode). A few mid-episode stretches are thin or garbled in the Whisper pass (notably ~7:48–8:22, ~17:39–18:00, ~20:39–21:39, and ~32:47–33:23); outline and quotes below stick to what the Whisper transcript actually captured. ## Hosts - **Metsy Rose** - co-host; product manager and strategist (show open). Names her top CliftonStrength as futuristic / systems thinker; asks how that plays with AI-era uncertainty; later frames PM/design advocacy for speeding up or slowing the org on AI, and shares an in-the-moment Jira/Rovo agents peer-teach story. - **J Schuh** - co-host; design strategist, educator, and creative mind (show open). Connects strengths to multiplying natural value with AI; presses on overwhelm and model/tool choice; tells his Flash / animation studio origin as stop-and-learn under necessity. ## Guest - **Brandy Schade** - founder of Strengthology (RSS description and show open). Strengths work rooted in Gallup CliftonStrengths; studied teammates' strengths at Sabre while moving from individual contributor to leadership (math/technical background); later taught strengths and built a software platform for team strength visibility. Coaches executives; style she describes as "do it with them on Zoom/screen" rather than only guiding from the side. Continues in episode 031. Bio details below come only from what this episode and the RSS actually say—no invented résumé. ## Outline (timestamps are mm:ss) - **0:00 Intro.** Show open at the intersection of product and design. Frame: AI magnifies opportunity *and* uncertainty; pace of change can outrun understanding, governance, and emotional adaptation. Question for the episode: how to lead and decide when change outruns prediction. Guest intro: Brandy Schade, founder of Strengthology; leadership transformation and navigating change. - **1:28 What Strengthology is.** J asks for a primer. Brandy: based on the Gallup CliftonStrengths assessment. At Sabre with J she studied teammates' strengths to work better with them as she moved IC → leadership; math/technical background made a "formula" for understanding people valuable. Path: feel understood → trust → meaningful direction. Dove hard into strengths, taught others, then a software platform for individual and team deep-dives. Self-awareness *and* understanding the people you work with both required to move fast in today's workforce. - **3:50 Futuristic strength vs fear of AI.** Metsy: top strength futuristic / systems thinking about 2–3 years out; international events, economy, and AI disruption make forecasting harder—how does futuristic help? Brandy: for some people uncertainty is fear (everything that can go wrong); for Metsy's mix (futuristic + strategic) it can be stimulating and engaging—mapping a path into the unknown. Metsy sees a split: people double-clicking into AI vs people terrified; doom headlines do not help. - **5:39 Executive AI prep.** J: Brandy talks to executives—how should listeners prepare? Brandy: jump in and learn—course, IT teach-in for the department, immediate business pilots. Rejecting AI risks irrelevance; urgency to leverage AI for cost, revenue, or keeping money; also creation, not only elimination (freed capacity → do what you never did before). Leaders who learn stay relevant. - **~7:48–10:02 Strengths as motivation and method.** (Whisper patchy through the panic/overwhelm bridge.) Brandy uses a gym analogy: some go for the workout, some for friends—match the path to what actually gets you there. Different people *use* AI vs *direct* it; know which type you are. Drivers can include necessity (provide for family) even when it feels like obligation; then pick a strengths-shaped approach (learner → learn it; input → research; woo → join a group). Same required results, different motivation, execution, and social setting (solo / one-on-one / small group / conference). Coaching leaders on influence the same way: everyone must influence; paths differ. - **11:58 Multiplying natural strengths with AI.** J summarizes: if anxious about AI and employment, strengths guide how to use AI to multiply what you already bring. Brandy: also "how do I leverage AI in a way that works for me"; everyone will come at AI differently. - **13:01 Overwhelm, curiosity, and one action.** Metsy: required AI learning outside expected job scope; model choice (Gemini vs ChatGPT); layoff-adjacent stress; feeling you must take classes after hours. Brandy: under overwhelm / extreme uncertainty, take *an* action—any first action—then learn fast if it was wrong and switch (e.g. start in ChatGPT, move to Claude). Bigger orgs have switching costs; weigh stay vs go; decide with little information and pivot when wrong. - **15:18 Coaching the stuck person.** J asks how Brandy guides someone who is not a coder, comes from marketing/advertising, and freezes on model/task choice. Brandy: not a traditional sit-and-guide coach—she screenshares, googles top ways people use AI (or marketing-specific lists / course lists), and helps pick what looks good/fun/interesting rather than over-optimizing; "sign up and tell me how it goes"—fear drops after the first step, then the next. - **17:13 IP worry and flexible mindset.** Brandy example of researching AI IP ownership while writing/publishing; risk tolerance (e.g. hypothetical profit share) decides whether to use AI or write elsewhere; new publishing paths exist; stay adaptable—unknown future should not freeze motion. (Whisper thin in the middle of this stretch.) - **18:54 Advocating up and down the org.** Metsy: PMs and designers often advocate speed-up or slow-down; individual career learning plus helping the organization. Brandy: everyone needs to be looking at AI; knowledge stuck with one person is useless—teach others so tools can be leveraged. On "moving too fast": she doubts many orgs *feel* too fast. (Whisper has a ~1-minute gap ~20:39–21:39.) Then: if people do not keep up you eventually replace them with AI-fluent hires who may lack industry expertise—balance is old (bring people along via training). Dallas financial firm that cut its whole training team is "probably one of the worst things you could do right now"; startups/mid-market will overrun orgs that do not invest. Microsoft/Google cited as investing in AI tools, security, governance, and pilots—leading the market. Individual learning is not enough; bring everyone else along. - **23:13 Who owns upskilling.** J: some companies push AI learning to off-hours as a job-survival requirement; without internal training people wander into paths only partly relevant to the job (e.g. five books / courses, ~10% job-relevant). A learning function that defines tools, shared language, and strategic skill sets is the opposite of cutting trainers—"people should be hiring trainers like nobody's business." Brandy: biggest gap is business/product ↔ IT language; set expectations for what tools are for (content vs automated call center, etc.); collective knowledge and collaboration scale the workforce. Old pattern: train at scale whenever you need to scale an org. - **26:09 Leader accountability.** Metsy notes AI media covers self-learning more than prepared teaching paths. Brandy: if you hear yourself as a leader saying "why can't my team do this," training is on you—same as P&L literacy; self-study can miss org needs; "It's our job to upskill and train our people." - **27:58 Formal + in-the-moment training.** Metsy: training need not only mean months-perfect curricula—e.g. same day Rovo agents appeared in Jira she built agents, then hopped on a call with fellow PMs to share three tools. Formal training still matters; also peer "I just learned this—let's share this week." Brandy: you stated something important without realizing—"I stopped everything… learn… then teach others." Productivity culture treats stopping to learn as wasted time; she sees the opposite—hours saved and more client value; early adopters' responsibility is to train others so the org keeps up. - **29:51 J's Flash story.** Necessity: sold more animation work than capacity; a due project sat idle; team asked which current project to drop; he opened a Flash book and taught himself; ~18 months later extreme Flash user talking with Macromedia's development team; later own studio and university teaching. Stop-and-learn under promise-to-deliver had ROI. Brandy mirrors: others would not stop to learn the new thing; he gained differentiated value and led the shift—futuristic/activator energy. Message: just start learning; waiting only for formal training to appear is a weak posture—pick a way in and go. - **~33:23 Close.** (Whisper thin into the close.) Tease next episode on resilience / what we can rely on. Thanks to Brandy; subscribe CTA at the intersection of product and design. ## Standout quotes (verbatim from the Whisper transcript) - 0:31 "but it's also magnifying something else, uncertainty." - 0:57 "So how do we lead, make decisions, and move forward when change is happening faster than our ability to predict what comes next?" - 3:25 "from an individual perspective, the self awareness is necessary in order to navigate the change that we're talking about today, but it's also equally important to understand the people that you're working with." - 6:04 "I think you just gotta jump in and go learn it." - 6:23 "Anybody who's not doing that right now is probably going to become irrelevant pretty quickly." - 11:11 "We all have to do certain things in life. We all have to get similar results, but we all come at it very differently." - 12:38 "how might I use AI in a way that actually multiplies the value that I bring to the table with what I'm good at naturally." *(host paraphrase of Brandy's point; spoken "Jay"/"Matzi" in Whisper—hosts are **J Schuh** and **Metsy Rose**)* - 14:00 "Overwhelmer, extreme uncertainty. You just take an action." *(spoken "Overwhelmer"; sense is overwhelm / extreme uncertainty)* - 14:04 "It doesn't really matter what action you take. You just take one and you see what happens." - 14:56 "We have to be able to make decisions with very little information. And the minute we learn it's the wrong one, we have to be able to pivot immediately." - 16:54 "And I want you to tell me how it goes in the next week." - 17:05 "And you just take the step and then you take the next step and then you take the next step" - 18:43 "We don't know what the future holds. We don't know what it's going to be like. We can't let that stop us from just moving forward and figuring it out." - 20:22 "they need to teach everybody else knowledge with one person doesn't do anything" - 22:10 "You have to invest in training." - 24:36 "That seems like people should be hiring trainers like nobody's business right now, as opposed to getting rid of training teams." - 25:08 "What do I expect you to do with these tools?" - 26:01 "It's the collective knowledge and the collective contribution and collaboration that takes us much further" - 27:28 "If you hear yourself saying that out loud or in your head, it's on you to provide the training." - 27:53 "It's our job to upskill and train our people to do the things we need them to do as leaders." - 28:51 "which that you said, I stopped everything. I took the time to go learn this thing and then teach others." - 29:45 "If we're the early adopters, then it is our responsibility to stop and go train everybody so they can all keep up with the forward motion." - 32:05 "because you stopped and learned the new thing, you actually added more value and differentiated value" - 32:29 "just start and just learn something. Just start learning." ## Books mentioned None named with title and author. J says he "literally opened up Thorn Flash book and started" (~30:45)—Whisper likely garbled "a Flash book" / similar; no title or author given. Metsy hypothetically mentions reading "five books on AI" (~24:03) without titles. Nothing to send to Book Summaries. ## Good work, productivity and career ideas - **Jump in; do not reject AI.** Courses, IT teach-ins, and live business pilots beat waiting (6:04, 6:23). - **Creation as well as elimination.** Freed capacity can fund work you never did before (7:32 area). - **Match the path to your strengths.** Same destination, different motivation and social setup—learner / input / woo / strategic, etc. (10:50, 11:11). - **Use AI to multiply what you already do well.** Strengths-first framing lowers fear and raises leverage (12:26). - **Under overwhelm, take one small action.** Any first step beats model-choice paralysis; pivot when wrong (14:00). - **Decide with incomplete info.** Switching costs rise with scale; still weigh stay vs go and move (14:47). - **Coach by doing, not only advising.** Screenshare, list options, pick what looks interesting, review in a week (16:02). - **Knowledge stuck with one person fails.** Teach others as soon as something is useful to the company (20:14). - **Invest in training; do not cut it in an AI shift.** Shared language, tools, security/governance, and expectations beat off-hours "figure it out or else" (22:10, 23:13, 27:53). - **Formal curricula plus same-week peer shares.** Early adopters should stop, learn, and teach so the org scales (27:58, 29:45). - **Stop-and-learn can be career-defining.** J's Flash necessity story: differentiated skill, later studio and teaching (29:51). - **Do not wait only for training to appear.** Pick a way in and start (32:29). ## Claims check | Claim | Check | |---|---| | Brandy is founder of Strengthology; work based on Gallup CliftonStrengths | Stated in show open / by Brandy; RSS. Org spelling Strengthology (Whisper "Strength Aology"). | | Brandy and J worked together at Sabre | Stated on air by Brandy; not independently verified here. | | A Dallas financial company cut its whole training team | Anecdote from Brandy ("I heard"); not named or verified here. | | Microsoft and Google are leading via AI investment, training, security, governance, pilots | Illustrative market claim in conversation; not evidenced in-episode. | | J became an extreme Flash user in contact with Macromedia's development team, later studio owner and university teacher | Self-reported career narrative; not independently verified here. | | Episode length | RSS 34:23 (2063 s); measured mp3 34:24 (2,063.8 s). Mp3 is what was transcribed. | ## Added context - This is audio-only RSS episode 030 (not on the YouTube channel). File name on the CDN still says `Ep_036_Brandy_Schade_Part_1`; the show numbers it as 030. - Episode 031 is the continuation with the same guest (resilience as practice); that episode repeatedly refers back to this AI / uncertainty / taking-action conversation. - Whisper proper-noun corrections applied in the note: Metzi→Metsy, Jay Xu / Jay→J Schuh, Matzi→Metsy, Brandi/Brandy Shade→Brandy Schade, Strength Aology→Strengthology. Whisper remains the transcript source for quotes.