When I was hired as CIO at Pepperdine University, I stepped into a role shaped by crisis. I inherited a PeopleSoft implementation that was completely off the rails. Technically, the project was intact. It was on budget. The timeline still held. But across the university, the perception was clear: the project was a massive failure.Not because the servers were down—but because trust had evaporated.My predecessor had hired brilliant PeopleSoft engineers—some had written the product’s source code. But that deep expertise created a false confidence that success was about the technology. It wasn’t. I brought a sociologist’s lens, re-centered the project around empathy and communication, and made staffing changes to elevate people-first leaders. The turnaround succeeded—because we rebuilt trust.In today’s dispatch, we want to apply that human-centered lens to the question everyone’s asking now: What does AI mean for the future of work? Beneath the hype and hand-wringing lies a deeper shift: knowledge workers must up their game—in both value and versatility—or risk seeing their roles quickly made obsolete.

Episodes

AI and the Future of Work