AI tools are already in your team's hands — the question is whether your organization is managing that well, or just hoping for the best.

In this episode, we sit down with three practitioners who use AI daily in very different corners of L&D and workforce operations to talk about what's actually working, where the tools still fall short, and how to build the governance and critical-thinking skills your organization needs to use AI responsibly. We cover practical, hands-on use cases, from Copilot in Excel and Outlook, to agentic AI piloted on a real-world grant review workflow, along with lessons learned about data cleaning surprises, AI source citations that can't be trusted at face value, and in total, explore when and how it's appropriate to lean on AI and when it isn't.

Joining host Scott Rutherford for this episode are Mateland Mays, who runs an instructional design and workforce development consultancy and has spent the past year deliberately integrating AI into her practice as a trusted working partner; Jamie Storella, a Microsoft Office Master Instructor and owner of Launch, a Boston-area computer training and consulting firm, who teaches Copilot to dozens of classes a year; and Bethany Warburton, a senior IT project manager at Brown University who has spent the past year piloting AI across the university's administrative operations.