You’re disappointed with AI…and it’s not your fault.
A Human-First Approach to AI Could Transform Your Business
Interior design AI strategies fail when firms prioritize the technology over human readiness. Most designers find that generic tools like ChatGPT produce "people-pleasing" responses that don't reflect their unique brand voice or professional expertise. A human-first approach focuses on making AI adapt to your current workflows, such as drafting client emails or processing site visit notes, rather than forcing you to learn complex prompting. By shifting the focus to human ease, you can achieve up to a 2.4x gain in productivity without the typical tech-transition burnout.
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Should AI adapt to us or should we adapt to AI? It's not an easy question. We're going to look at a video from the AI Explored podcast with Michael Stelzner where he dives into this topic of Human First AI adoption. All of these organizations who started investing in AI were saying that, you know, we're not really seeing impact from this AI investment. We're not sure if this is actually worth it. That really struck me. This is not really a technology challenge. It's a human readiness challenge. It won't be perfect, it won't be ready for you to just ship it off to your leadership, but it gets you 70% there.
And that's not just her opinion. There were two studies that came out late last year, one from MIT and one from Wharton and they looked at big large corporations in America and how they were adopting AI and how it was working out for them. The one study looked at bottom line results, profits and things like that and they found businesses were not seeing a large benefit from AI. In the second study instead of looking at things like profit, they looked at productivity and the perception of how AI was helping their companies. In that case both employees and managers found that AI was a huge benefit to the company. They just couldn't quantify it with revenue and profit numbers
I think that so many of us do have meaningless, brainless tasks. And we feel good because we've checked the box in Asana, or project management tool. We feel like we've accomplished something, but we're not actually doing critical thinking. And critical thinking requires your brain to be free to think.
You can actually use AI to think it through with you. You can say, hey, here's a rough idea that I have. Here's what I'm trying to do with it. What am I missing? And so AI can help you get better.
In today's episode of the AI Explored podcast, we'll explore a human first framework to adopting AI. My special guest is an AI strategist who helps business owners and organizations create AI environments that place humans first. She's the product marketing lead for AI adoption and usage at Microsoft. Her consultancy is called Transformation. She's hosted the AI But Human podcast. Kristin Jin, welcome to the show. So, when you get people onboarded properly, we're going to talk about how to do that, but I want to talk about when it's done well, what's the upside? What are the benefits? What are the things that are waiting for those listening who are able to employ maybe what we're going to talk about today.
Yeah, I think there are a lot of benefits at different levels too. If you look at the organizational level, there's actually a lot of research that shows that those companies who are ready to embrace AI and who are doing a good job rolling it out and getting the people to actually use it, they have a competitive advantage. I think it was Accenture. They did a recent study that showed that those organizations who are ready for AI, they see a 2.4 times higher productivity gain than organizations who don't embrace AI. And anyone who participated in a study with, I believe that was McKinsey. The participants said that if they have generative AI at work, their productivity goes up by 80% because they can now focus on more strategic work, they can get things done faster. And so at the organization level, it's really important to start embracing AI to get these competitive advantages, really
At the individual level, it's more about like reimagining how your work gets done. Like, imagine all of these tasks that are just draining your energy because they're tedious. They just take a long time. But those tasks, like if you have a report that you have to write, say at the end of the quarter, it'll take you maybe a day, two, sometimes three, just to get all the information you need for it, start writing it because you start with a blank page, right? But imagine if you can use AI to do the first draft. Think of it almost like you have a assistant or an intern doing this for you. It gets you 70, 80% there. It won't be perfect, it won't be ready for you to just ship it off to your leadership. But it gets you 70% there. And then all you have to do is go in, verify the information, and edit it a little bit, to make it your own. But that can actually help you not only save time, but it also allows you to focus on the more meaningful tasks that can actually help your team and your organization move forward and get more done. So I think it's a combination of time savings, but then also like improving the type of work that you do and the quality of work that you deliver as well.
Okay, so this is obviously easier said than done. We're just into 2026 and right now the most widely used AI tools are chatbots, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and either image or video, image generation pieces of software. The businesses that they are talking about are large companies who bring AI in house and have money to spend to not only train their employees but to integrate AI into their systems. If you are a solo business owner, small business owner, this is not available to you. You are more than likely using the consumer version of ChatGPT, which doesn't do for you what she is talking about
She's 100% with this one. I might push back a little bit and say that are these AIs that she is talking about being trained on a company's financial data, their operations, things like that? Are these internal AI bots or are they public? Kind of a nuanced question. I want to double down on what you're saying here because I have been working with my staff and one of the things that I've been telling them, and I've also been speaking this when I'm at my conference is I think that so many of us do tasks that are meaningless, brainless tasks. And we feel good because we've checked the box in Asana, or project management tool. We feel like we've accomplished something, but we're not actually doing critical thinking. And critical thinking requires your brain to be free to think. It requires more cognitive load
In my business I consult with residential interior designers on a regular basis on their operations. And in the past six months that has morphed into AI consultation as well. Michael is 1000% correct here. The value added that residential designers bring to their clients is that ability to design homes, but also to interact with clients and to do all of those things that are not busy work that are not Asana spreadsheets. If AI can in the next year or so pick up some of that slack, it's going to make a massive difference especially to solo firms which are essentially going to be hiring junior employees at a fraction of the cost that they would be able to do so with an actual human being.
To actually think deeply about things and not just say yes or no and go to your instincts. And I believe from my own experience, and I hope that this applies with your clients as well, that if AI allows us to kind of get started a little bit on critical thinking, right? Maybe coming up with a really rough plan and then allow our brain to like, look at it and say, okay, here's how I would tweak it, here's how I would improve it. Or if AI allows us to move some of the things off of our plate that are not, really things that require critical thinking so that we can allocate actual human time. I feel like these are huge advantages to leaders and huge advantages to people that work for businesses because they become more valuable. I'm just curious what you think about that.
Yeah, absolutely. But I think in addition to that, you can also look at generative AI Like a thought partner. Like, yes, it can get you started and give you a rough framework, for example, that you then react to. You flesh it out, you build it out a little bit more. But if you already have an idea that is just in your mind, for example, and you haven't really had the time to, you know, put it to paper or to really, you know, go through all the different details that are, you know, part of that idea, you can actually use AI to think it through with you. You can say, hey, here's what I'm trying to do with it. What am I missing? What's missing from this plan that I haven't thought of before? And so AI can help you get better. And that kind of goes back to improving the quality of the work that you do. We're all, I mean, we all have biases one way or another, right? Some are smaller, some are larger. But we all look at things through our own lens. And with AI by your side, you can actually start getting a different perspective in a way and say, hey, assume the role of, say, a CFO what would a CFO think when I provide them this business plan? And for example. So I think there's a lot more to AI than just, hey, help me, you know, flash this out or write this out. Like, I think of it as a thought partner and I use it in that way a lot for my business as well.
I agree with her in theory, in practice, I completely disagree. And this is why, if she is using generic AI, ChatGPT, Claude Gemini as a thought partner, she is going to get generic answers. However, if she has built a custom GPT that has been trained on specific Personas, avatars on specific topics. So let's imagine we're doing a marketing project, right? You're thinking about you need to bring in more clients this year in 2026, and you want to improve your social media market. Well, imagine if you had five or six of the top social media marketing experts in the world advising you on what you should do, right? Fantastic. You're going to get much better results. But you can't afford to hire five or six of the world's top marketing experts to do that. Now what if we take those top five or six marketing experts and capture every piece of public produced content that they have ever done. Videos, written work, podcast appearances, whatever. We collect all of that information. We have the AI create individual avatars for those individuals, then we create a roundtable of those AI avatars from where now you can have a discussion not just on broad based, generic, AI information, right? We know that AI is the most people pleasing, people pleaser in the entire world, but if you can create a roundtable of AI experts that are willing to push back hard against your ideas for marketing your business in 2026, then AI becomes something special. She's not talking about that. She's talking about using ChatGPT or Claude as this idea partner, or as, some people are calling it, a second brain.
All right, coming back to what I was just saying, assume the role of a CFO, or assume the role of these five CFOs from these specific companies who you admire and think are just the best CFOs to ever exist, collect every piece of publicly produced content that they have ever done, and build specific avatars. That is the next wave. That's what I'm building. That's what I have built for my business.
Love it. Okay, so we've got a variety of different people listening to this podcast. We've got CEOs like myself, we've got internal thought leaders that work inside of various size businesses who are maybe the ones on the front line doing the research. And maybe they've been tasked with kind of bringing AI to the entire company. So when it comes to getting everyone in the business to adopt AI, where do we begin?
Yeah, I think you really have to start with just a foundation and knowledge that it's not so much about the technology, it's really about helping your people get ready to use AI. And if you start by knowing this, hey, I have to focus on the humans. I cannot look at this as a pure technology rollout. I think that is probably the best thing that you can do for yourself and for your organization as well. Because that will allow you to understand that it's a change management challenge. Because like I mentioned before, you're really giving your people a different way of working. But because we're humans and it's actually human nature for us to avoid change. It's just how we're wired. Like there's fear of the unknown when we don't really know what AI means for us in our work, for our organization, for us as a human being, we tend to be anxious about it and even scared because we just don't know what it means. There's also status quo bias that means that the way we have done things, they just feel better. There's no logical reason for it necessarily. It's just how we're wired. Like our gut just tells us no, the old way is a lot better. And at the same time, because change means something is potentially going away and something new is coming in, there's also loss aversion. And that pretty much means that anything that is new or that we're potentially losing, like the old way, our habits, our routines, We perceive that as more negative than potential gains, like the productivity gains, the higher quality of work for us, it just doesn't Feel as strong as the things that we may lose with it. And I think you have to be able to bring that into your rollout strategy when you start rolling AI out to your people. Just understanding it's human nature to avoid change. So how can I help my people to overcome these challenges and really embrace the new way of working and the change that we're asking them to go through?
AI is unlike any piece of technology that human beings have ever used. It's a meta tool, it's a tool that builds tools. The fact that it can do that is almost too much for any employee to be able to use effectively in their role in any business. We are used to being handed a piece of technology, whether it's an email piece of software or an accounting piece of software. We Learn, do this, do this, do this, and these, and these and these things will happen. With AI, everything is left up almost to our imagination. If you're an employer and you want your employees to use AI, that incredible scope of what AI can do for them is almost paralyzing. It needs to be ruled out in a way that is simple for the employee to understand, but also makes it so that they want to use AI. I think that's what she's getting to here.
So this whole concept of human first AI, is definitely not getting enough talk in the business world and definitely not in the world of AI. We're constantly being fed information on the latest model, being dropped and how amazing it is and what it can do. At the end of the day, it has to work for us. And if it's not working for us, then it's not the tool that it's being promoted as. I'm a massive fan of AI, I have learned, I have spent hours and hours and spent tons of money hiring people to teach me how to train AIs. As a small business owner, you don't have the time to do that. So how are we going to do that? In my next video, I will discuss exactly what I'm doing with building AI tools like a digital roundtable that we discussed and an AI second brain. It is going to change things in crazy, crazy ways.
Key Takeaways:
It’s Not a Tech Problem: AI failure is usually a "human readiness" or change management challenge.
The 70% Rule: AI is an intern that gets you 70% of the way there; your "Human-First" role is the final 30% of critical thinking.
Generic vs. Custom: Generic AI is a "people pleaser"; true power comes from training custom avatars on your specific business data.
Cognitive Freedom: The goal of AI isn't just "speed," it's freeing your brain from "brainless tasks" to allow for deep design work.
Meet Your New Board of Directors: The AI Digital Roundtable
The "human-first" approach to AI means moving away from generic chatbots that don't understand the nuances of luxury interior design. To solve the "human readiness challenge" where designers feel overwhelmed by new tech, I have developed a specialized AI Digital Roundtable. This tool is designed to stop you from adapting to the machine and instead make the machine adapt to your specific business needs.
How the Roundtable Works
My AI Roundtable allows you to hand-pick up to 10 specialized advisors to guide your firm’s strategy. Whether you need a panel of "Organic Social Media Experts" or a broad board of "General Business Strategists," the tool performs a deep-dive search to build highly specific avatars based on rigorous professional criteria. Once your board is set, you engage in a live, multi-perspective conversation where the AI assumes the roles of these different experts simultaneously.
Why This Changes Everything for Your Firm
The power of this tool lies in its ability to protect your cognitive load. Because the advisors have distinct strengths, they won't weigh in on issues outside their expertise, ensuring your "social media marketer" isn't giving you bad human resources advice. You act as the lead director, adding your own research and intuition to the conversation while the Roundtable handles the "brainless" tasks like drafting complex project launches or analyzing site visit data. This moves you from a "people-pleasing" generic AI experience to a custom-built edge that treats AI as a true, high-level thought partner.
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