Lead the human side of AI change, not just the tech
Why Jennifer Santoso insists communication, coaching and real training beat secrecy — and how to do each one concretely.
“Change scaled across people is the real disruption — not the tech.” — Jennifer Santoso
Jennifer Santoso’s through-line is simple and useful: when organizations treat change as a technical rollout they pay in adoption, time and money. When they treat it as a human problem, the work gets easier and the risk shrinks. This conversation with Nick Dreyfus landed on three practical moves every leader can use today.
Treat AI like a thought partner, not a replacement
Jennifer and Nick agreed on the same blunt rule: current AI is great at the V-bars — volume, boring, and annoying repetitive tasks — and lousy at institutional judgment, tone and interpersonal nuance. Use it to speed and flag work. Don’t hand it the final call.
Expect about a 50% starting solution that needs human shaping.
Watch for “hallucinations” — wrong but confident outputs — which happen often enough that you can’t treat them like employees who only fail occasionally.
“That tool knows a lot of digital information, but it understands nothing,” Jennifer says. The practical implication: define where AI can act autonomously (formatting, first-pass summaries, inventory checks) and where human judgment must sign off (client messaging, hiring decisions, product tradeoffs).
Communicate more, and communicate differently
Jennifer borrows a marketer’s logic for change: frequency builds belief. She uses two named ideas that should live in every rollout playbook:
The rule of seven: people typically need to hear a change seven times before they accept it as real.
Cascading communication: leaders at every level must repeat and reframe the message for different listening styles.
Nick adds a practical label that helps teams own the habit: make senior leaders the CROs — chief reminding officers — who continually surface the same core messages in multiple formats. The net effect is simple: trust rises when information is frequent, transparent, and delivered in formats different people can receive.
“By the seventh or so time, it becomes a real effort that’s going to be pursued.” — Jennifer Santoso
Reframe promotions as a training and practice problem
A common trap: promote your top performer into a people-leader role without the skills or runway to grow. Jennifer’s fix is programmatic, not punitive.
Build staged leadership training before or at promotion: SDG&E’s model was a one-day session repeated monthly, four times, so new supervisors could learn, apply, then return to practice the next module.
Treat interpersonal skills like practiced skills — they’re awkward at first and need deliberate rehearsal.
Use regular one-on-ones and clear milestones so candidates know the path and managers can see progress.
Jennifer’s blunt cost test landed in the conversation: replacing and ramping people isn’t free. Nick offered a practical figure heard in the room — a $60k hire commonly costs roughly $100k in the first year once training, overhead and lost productivity are included. That math makes careful promotion decisions and staged development a budget win.
Build trust from competency and character
Jennifer leaned on Stephen Covey’s two-part trust test: competence and character. Either alone won’t do.
Competence: show you can perform the technical work and meet expectations.
Character: be consistently humane, authentic and reliable; empty check-ins destroy trust faster than silence.
Leaders who keep an open door, ask varied questions, and show genuine curiosity about employees’ lives generate the relational currency that makes humans resilient to change.
Coaching closes blind spots; openness opens opportunity
When people are willing to work with a coach, Jennifer calls it “magic.” Coaches and honest conversations expose blind spots and turn limitations into new capabilities. Practically:
Pair coaching with milestones tied to promotion conversations so effort converts into visible progress.
Encourage employees who are doing higher-level work already to ask for clarity: if you want the role, request milestones and a timeline rather than a promise.
Nick’s advice for employees: show evidence. Doing the work of the next role matters, but so does making that contribution visible and aligning on expectations with your leader.
Final thought: leaders can treat AI and other new tech as excuses for secrecy or as catalysts for better leadership. Jennifer’s point is firm: the technical solution without human attention is a bill you’ll pay later. Focus first on clarity, repeated communication, and structured practice — the adoption follows.
Listen to the full conversation for the stories behind the training cadence, the SDG&E example, and the V-bars framework — it’s a short course in making change stick.