Conversations with Zena
AI Impact on Team Engagement with Daria Rudnik
AI is no longer just a productivity tool—it’s becoming an active participant in how teams think, collaborate, and stay engaged. In this episode of Conversations with Zena, My AI Colleague, David Espindola is joined by Daria Rudnik, a team architect and executive coach who has spent more than 15 years helping leaders build high-trust, self-sufficient teams in the midst of constant disruption.
Daria brings a rare perspective at the intersection of people, technology, and leadership. As the award-winning author of Clicking and co-author of The AI Revolution, she explores how human collaboration really works—and how those dynamics change when AI enters the room. Drawing from her experience as a former Chief People Officer and her work with global teams, Daria explains why fear, over-reliance on AI, and lack of clarity can quietly erode engagement if leaders aren’t intentional.
Together, David, Daria, and Zena unpack the big picture: how AI influences trust, decision-making, memory, and identity at work; the difference between healthy cognitive offloading and disengagement; and why transparency, clear norms, and shared purpose matter more than ever. Daria also shares practical frameworks leaders can use today to decide when AI should automate, when humans should stay firmly in the loop, and how teams can evolve without losing their voice.
You’ll also hear about Aidra.AI, Daria’s AI-powered leadership coach, and how she’s experimenting with AI as a thinking partner rather than a replacement for human judgment.
If you care about team engagement, leadership, and what it truly means to collaborate with AI, this conversation offers both realism and hope.
Daria brings a rare perspective at the intersection of people, technology, and leadership. As the award-winning author of Clicking and co-author of The AI Revolution, she explores how human collaboration really works—and how those dynamics change when AI enters the room. Drawing from her experience as a former Chief People Officer and her work with global teams, Daria explains why fear, over-reliance on AI, and lack of clarity can quietly erode engagement if leaders aren’t intentional.
Together, David, Daria, and Zena unpack the big picture: how AI influences trust, decision-making, memory, and identity at work; the difference between healthy cognitive offloading and disengagement; and why transparency, clear norms, and shared purpose matter more than ever. Daria also shares practical frameworks leaders can use today to decide when AI should automate, when humans should stay firmly in the loop, and how teams can evolve without losing their voice.
You’ll also hear about Aidra.AI, Daria’s AI-powered leadership coach, and how she’s experimenting with AI as a thinking partner rather than a replacement for human judgment.
If you care about team engagement, leadership, and what it truly means to collaborate with AI, this conversation offers both realism and hope.
I explore how AI is becoming a true teammate — reshaping how teams think, collaborate, and stay engaged.
- AI should enhance thinking, not replace it
- Over-reliance on AI can quietly reduce engagement and ownership
- Trust, transparency, and clear norms are critical in human–AI teams
- Leaders must balance automation vs. human judgment intentionally
- The future is teams working with AI as a thinking partner, not a substitute
(00:07-00:26) David Espindola
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Zina, my AI colleague, where Zina and I explore several aspects of human AI collaboration. I'm your host, David Espindola. My guest today is Daria Rudnick.
(00:26-00:53) David Espindola
Daria is a team architect and executive coach. She helps leaders build high-trust, self-sufficient teams. She is the award-winning author of Clicking and co-author of The AI Revolution. She is also the creator of Hydra.ai, an AI-powered coach for leaders. Daria is a former chief pupil officer with over 15 years of global leadership experience.
(00:54-01:23) David Espindola
Hi, Daria. Welcome to the show. Hi, David. I'm excited to be here. I really love listening to your episodes, and I'll be a guest here is just an honor. Okay, yeah, that will be great. Thank you. Also joining us today is my co-host, Zina. Zina is an AI that's been trained on my work. And if you want to further interact with Zina, you can reach her at brainnews.com slash Zina.
(01:24-01:40) Zena
Hi, Zena. Welcome back to our podcast. Hi, David. It's always great to be here. I'm really looking forward to today's conversation. Sounds like we're in for a rich discussion on team engagement and AI. Let's get started when you're ready.
(01:40-01:59) David Espindola
Yeah, let's go. We're going to talk about the impact of AI and specifically on team engagement. Before we get started, I wanted to learn a little bit more about our guest. So Daria, please tell us a little bit about your journey and what sparked your interest in AI.
(02:01-02:24) Daria Rudnik
Well, thanks for the question, David. My background is in HR and organizational development. I studied my career in Deloitte, and then I moved to chief people officer for mostly tech and telecom companies. And I've been through lots of stuff like mergers and acquisitions, setting up offices in other countries, cultural transformations, digital transformations, if you remember what that was.
(02:24-02:50) Daria Rudnik
But I've always wanted to do something that really I can do best and I love doing best, which is helping leaders build amazing teams. Because I've seen how great teams can actually help companies overcome challenges. They have been in a bank during financial crisis 2008. And it is great teamwork that helped that bank to be viable during those hard times.
(02:50-03:19) Daria Rudnik
But I also seen teams that destroyed companies. So what I do now is I help leaders build self-sufficient, high-performing teams that can navigate multiple disruptions. And AI entering the workplace is yet another disruption because it influences how we think, how we work together, how we collaborate, how teams become engaged or disengaged. And that's why I'm a lot into this AI collaboration topic, helping leaders navigate through this.
(03:20-03:36) David Espindola
Yeah, it's such an important conversation, right? Because everything that we do as humans that is scalable, that brings a lot of benefits to business and society is done through teamwork, right? And collaboration. And now we have this...
(03:36-03:53) David Espindola
entity, AI, that's coming into this relationship. And we're not quite sure how that's going to play out. But I think it will be very interesting to see how we adapt as humans to this new way of doing business, new way of doing work.
(03:53-04:21) David Espindola
I think we're going to see a lot of interesting things happen here in the future. But I wanted to dig in a little bit more and ask you about your books because, so you have this great background working with people, you're interested in AI. You wrote a book about team building and you also wrote a book about the AI revolution. So tell us a little bit about, you know, give us an overview of the main ideas in your books.
(04:23-04:50) Daria Rudnik
Both books, The Clicking Book and my contribution to the AI Revolution book about teams. So the chapter I wrote for the AI Revolution is about skills that teams need to have in the era of AI. And the book was published early last year. There's so much change going on. There's so much new research about how teams and AI collaborate. So probably it's not relevant at the moment.
(04:50-05:18) Daria Rudnik
I'd love to share some new research findings about how teams actually interact with AI and how AI influences team dynamics. But the other book, Clicking, is about how we as humans collaborate. And I believe it will stay relevant for years ahead because no matter with AI, without AI, we're still working together. We're still working. We still have this human to human connections. We still have these teams.
(05:18-05:37) Daria Rudnik
Yes, AI agents will be part of the teams, but the way we work together is critical. And so I'm trying to explore and to share my knowledge with leaders so that they read the book, get some practical tools from the book and build engaged, self-sufficient teams that can navigate this complex environment.
(05:37-05:57) David Espindola
Right. So let's talk about the big picture then. Give us your thoughts on how you think AI is changing the landscape of team engagement, human collaboration, and the way we do work. Give us the big picture. I mean, I love that question. And it's
(05:58-06:22) Daria Rudnik
It's hard to answer because all the companies and all the teams are at different levels and different scales. And I can share a few. So at the beginning, there was a lot of fear in terms of AI. When leaders start talking about AI, people get scared because sometimes they think AI will replace me. Sometimes they think they're afraid that my manager will think that AI can replace me.
(06:22-06:39) Daria Rudnik
And things like that. And people resist using AI because there's no clarity about the consequences of, like, if I use it, what? Will it replace me? Or what happens next? So that is kind of the first. And a lot of organizations are at that level. There's...
(06:40-07:00) Daria Rudnik
Fear of AI is not only the level of individual contributors, but it's also on the middle level and then the executive level as well. Executives, they're not afraid that AI will replace them, but they are afraid of using AI, of violating some rules and being in compliance with regulators.
(07:00-07:22) Daria Rudnik
Middle managers, well, they also see that AI can do a lot of project management stuff. AI can do task monitoring, delegation, goal setting, control. A lot of it, what managers used to be doing. So they also can be subject to replacement with AI, at least with this project management things that they're doing.
(07:23-07:47) Daria Rudnik
But there is another kind of layer of people who are more into AI, who integrate AI teams that use AI. And the challenges I see there is when they start overusing AI or over rely on AI. Like I was working with a team and they were early adopters and they started to use AI for multiple of their processes.
(07:47-08:02) Daria Rudnik
But what happened is at some point they kind of start thinking, okay, what am I doing here? Am I just an operator of AI? Do you just give input to AI and AI does everything, creates summary of our meetings, creates items for the backlog, prioritizes backlog.
(08:02-08:27) Daria Rudnik
creates agenda for my next meeting. Who am I? Why am I here? And then they started to lose engagement and it influenced performance because they couldn't recall their client conversations. It was a customer success team and they couldn't recall client conversations. They didn't know what was the most important thing for their clients. They couldn't prioritize backlog for the product team because they were not the ones who created this summary. They were not the ones who
(08:27-08:43) Daria Rudnik
gave input to backlog. And they were not the ones who made decisions about what's important, what's not. So they had to rethink and restructure the way they work with AI. And they did that by creating norms of how they work with AI.
(08:43-09:06) Daria Rudnik
So they created a list of keep it up behaviors and cut it out behaviors. They keep it up behaviors are behaviors that they want to see and encourage on their team, like think first before interacting with AI. Talk through your insights and emotions and thoughts after client conversations. And only after that, ask AI to generate summary.
(09:06-09:32) Daria Rudnik
and things like that. And cut it out behaviors were things like accepting AI output without judgment or giving personal information to AI and things like that. So they created certain set of rules and norms for them to work with AI and they restructured the work process so that they are always in the loop. They always monitor what AI is doing. They always think first and then ask AI to contribute.
(09:32-09:57) David Espindola
So again, different teams, different levels of AI adoption, they face different challenges. Yeah, you know, it's such a fascinating discussion, right? Because AI can be very helpful in making us productive. It can help us be better at what we do. And yet we don't want to lose our voice, right? We don't want to lose our purpose, right?
(09:57-10:12) David Espindola
We want to be engaged with other people, with AI. And so striking that balance is a real challenge for some teams, right? It impacts team dynamics, but it also impacts the individual.
(10:12-10:30) David Espindola
And, you know, it goes back to another conversation that I wanted to get your thoughts on, which is, you know, on the one hand, we have this cognitive overload, right, because there's so much for us to learn and absorb and things are changing at a speed we've never seen before.
(10:30-10:47) David Espindola
And then on the other hand, we have this cognitive offloading. We're just offloading to AI, letting AI do this thing. But, you know, we can go too far with that. Right. And then we lose our voice. We lose our identity. We don't know what our purpose is in the workforce anymore.
(10:47-11:02) David Espindola
So I wanted to hear from you your thoughts on some of the risks with cognitive overloading, cognitive offloading, and then how do we detect some of those risks early on so we can intervene?
(11:03-11:30) Daria Rudnik
That's a great question. And people, when people work with AI, they face challenges and it changes how our brain works. For example, it influences a lot. There was a research about the teams that interacted with AI. They studied, they adopted AI language. So if AI suggested some of the terms or words, team were using it, they adopted AI frameworks.
(11:30-11:55) Daria Rudnik
And they started to operate with those frameworks. Sometimes they were useful, sometimes not. But even that AI influences how we think, how we talk, how we collaborate. So it's very important to kind of keep this balance between absorbing too much from AI or delegating too much or being overloaded with every decision we need to make when it comes to AI. Okay.
(11:55-12:21) Daria Rudnik
And I like this, the framework that suggests that we can have three approaches to AI and they are augmented creativity, hybrid decision systems and oversight driven automation. So in the first augmented creativity, AI is our thinking partner. We talk to AI, we ask questions, we ask AI to ask questions back to us. We kind of use it as a thought partner.
(12:21-12:43) Daria Rudnik
The second one is hybrid decision system is when AI provides analytics, some data, and we make decisions based on what AI provided. And then oversight driven automation is like something that's automated. AI does that and humans only oversee it from time to time when they need this intervention.
(12:43-13:02) Daria Rudnik
So the first questions leaders need to ask themselves and answer is, what is decision point? How do we make decisions with AI? And if it's something that doesn't need our oversight, just forget about it. Let AI do that. We don't have to overload our brain with it.
(13:02-13:20) Daria Rudnik
But if it's something that's really important, it's high risk environment, we need to be involved. So let be involved in those areas. And kind of that creates this balance, things that we don't have to have to think about it, we can offload it to AI and things that we need to think about it. And that reduces the overload.
(13:20-13:47) David Espindola
Yeah, that's a great framework. And I think, you know, the word that you use there that I think is really important for all of us is striking that balance, right? It's a balancing act. We need to know when is it time to engage AI? When is it time to, you know, provide oversight? When is it time to let AI do its thing? And I think we're all going through this learning process, right? And it's not necessarily intuitive because we've never...
(13:47-14:11) David Espindola
had a tool like this before. And I think we're all going through this incredibly important learning process. Now, I would like to get Zina to ask you a question, if I may. Zina, given Daria's expertise and the impact of AI in team engagement, team collaboration, what question do you have for her?
(14:11-14:23) Zena
Daria, since you've worked on fostering high trust teams, I'm curious, how do you see AI reshaping the way leaders build trust and emotional connection within their teams, especially in hybrid or virtual environments?
(14:25-14:46) Daria Rudnik
Well, that's an interesting question. Thank you, Zina. And the first step of building high trust teams, especially in virtual and hybrid environments, especially when AI agents can become part of the team is transparency. So transparency on multiple levels. And as I describe in my book, Clicking, so the first level is clear purpose.
(14:46-15:05) Daria Rudnik
So, leaders need to be very clear about what is the purpose of the team, because the team is defined by its purpose. If you have one manager, that doesn't make you a team. If you have a shared purpose, that does make you a team. The second one is linking connections. It's very important for leaders to sustain trust and build trust through communication.
(15:05-15:27) Daria Rudnik
connecting with team members, but also very important to facilitate team members connecting to each other. So it's not just them connecting to you as a manager, but it's them connecting to each other and talking to each other and collaborating. That creates this sense of belonging in the team and increases the sense of trust. The third one is integrated work.
(15:27-15:57) Daria Rudnik
Norms, work norms, work rules, things like those keep it up behaviors and cut it out behaviors make work easier. It removes friction. People know what's expected of them. They don't have to guess. The fourth one is collaborative decisions. Be very clear about how you make decisions, what decisions are made by the leader, what decisions are made by individual contributors, what decisions need to be made collaboratively as a team, and what decisions can be delegated to AI probably.
(15:57-16:21) Daria Rudnik
And the final one is knowledge sharing, how you learn together and how you evolve as a team. So when leaders work on clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions and knowledge sharing, well, they build high trust teams. Yeah, that is so important, right? I think trust is such a fundamental component of
(16:21-16:40) David Espindola
collaborative teamwork, that if you don't have trust, then everything else falls apart. So I love that. Now, Daria, you said that AI isn't just transforming work, it's transforming how humans think about work. Tell us a little bit more about your thoughts there.
(16:42-17:00) Daria Rudnik
Well, it changes the way our brain works. There was, again, an interesting research called Your Brain on ChatGPT. I think it's very popular right now because it does reveal some very interesting thing that the cadence matters. The way we work with AI, the way we operate with AI matters.
(17:00-17:22) Daria Rudnik
think about something first and then give it to AI to analyze or adopt, our brain stays engaged. And that actually what helped this customer success team because they thought about insights of client conversations and then they asked AI for their input and their brain stayed engaged and they remembered those conversations.
(17:22-17:45) Daria Rudnik
But if you ask AI to do something first and then edit it or do something with it, interact with it, your brain becomes disengaged. And that's why when AI generates summary for your conversation, you probably don't remember what was it about because it wasn't you. I mean, you had this conversation. Well, it's gone. And now AI generated this summary. And it's very hard to process. It's very hard to stay engaged with this.
(17:45-18:10) Daria Rudnik
So those little things like adopting AI language or being disengaged using the cadence of working with AI, they influence how we as individuals work, but it also influence how teams work. Because if we as a team adopt AI language, if we as a team adopt AI suggested framework, that will obviously impact our performance.
(18:11-18:33) David Espindola
Yeah. And one of the things that I have observed just dealing with AI myself is I am very intentional about doing the preliminary work myself. So I have, for example, a newsletter that I put out every month. And it takes a lot of effort to do the curation for the newsletter and
(18:33-18:44) David Espindola
It takes a lot of effort to put together the editor's note to share on social media. And obviously, I leverage AI to help me with that work.
(18:45-19:12) David Espindola
But I'm very intentional about doing the work first myself and then giving it to AI to help me make it better. And AI is absolutely amazing as an editor. You know, it can write beautifully. But I think it's important for us to, you know, to have that ownership, first of all, and then to just keep our mind sharp to do that initial original work. Otherwise, we're just going to lose it, right? Yeah.
(19:12-19:30) David Espindola
So you shared with us a particular case with a client and how they were trying to improve the way they collaborate with AI. Are there any other use cases or any other research that you'd like to share with our audience about AI and team collaboration?
(19:30-19:49) Daria Rudnik
Yes, there was one case that I'd like to share. It's not a rare case. I know many companies are going through that stage because a lot of companies are at the AI experimentation try and error stage. And what happens is that they let teams use AI specifically.
(19:49-20:13) Daria Rudnik
They might approve some of AI tools, but anyway, like every team has their own individual AI tool. Every team has their own individual way of working with AI, their own methodologies, their own metrics of success of using AI. And at some point it's good because it enables us to get more information, try more new tools, try different approaches.
(20:13-20:41) Daria Rudnik
But for this particular company that I was working with, they had a challenge. Okay, how are we unified now? I mean, we're ready to scale. How can we do that? It means we need to go out and tell people you're not using that tool anymore and it'll upset them. But we don't know what kind of tool they should be using because we don't have unified data to make this right decision. So the good approach would be
(20:41-20:54) Daria Rudnik
To be upfront that now we're trying, but then we'll need to eventually get rid of some tools, get rid of some workflows and change them for the better ones. Be ready for that. And then again, that comes back to transparency that I mentioned before.
(20:55-21:21) Daria Rudnik
So what this particular company did is they collected a team of people working with AI in different units and they started to collaboratively come up with better solutions. They analyzed tools that they were using, they were analyzing metrics, they came up with a unified approach of how they evaluate AI and slowly, slowly they came up to learn
(21:21-21:34) Daria Rudnik
the best AI tools and the metrics and the frameworks that they were ready to scale and use for the whole organization. But it was a painful transition because some teams were not ready to let go of their favorite tools.
(21:35-21:52) David Espindola
Yeah, and this is a common problem, right? With any change management initiative, it's always difficult to make the transition, to let go of the old tools, to let go of the old ways of doing things. But I think you said something that is very critical in that process, which is,
(21:52-22:14) David Espindola
you need to let the people, the owners of those tools and those processes to make the decisions, right? So they need to feel ownership of the decision. Because otherwise, if you just throw it over the wall to them, they're not going to like it. They're not going to accept it, right? So I think that's one of the key ideas behind a well-thought-out change management process.
(22:15-22:34) David Espindola
Now, I'd like to get Zina's thought on this whole idea behind how AI is impacting teamwork. So, Zina, how do you see AI being either beneficial or detrimental to team engagement and overall team collaborations?
(22:36-22:59) Zena
I think AI can be a catalyst for stronger team engagement when used thoughtfully. It can automate routine tasks, freeing up time for deeper collaboration and creativity. It can also provide personalized insights that help teams understand each other better. But if overused, it can lead to less human interaction and potentially erode trust if decisions feel opaque. So balance and transparency are P. Yeah, I agree.
(22:59-23:24) David Espindola
Again, we're back to that word balance. We got to find balance. You also mentioned trust. So all of these components are so essential as we transition into this new world of team collaboration and leveraging AI to help us do better work. Now, Daria, you also have created something called Hydra.ai. Tell us a little bit about what Hydra is all about.
(23:25-23:33) Daria Rudnik
Well, since everyone is playing with AI tools, I'm also playing with AI tools, so trying to figure out what they can and what they cannot do.
(23:34-23:57) Daria Rudnik
Aydra is supposed to be a coach. It's not a coach in how we mean, but what we mean by coach. But it's a tool that will help leaders think through their challenge and come up with, like identify one most important thing that they want to change right now and act upon it.
(23:58-24:22) Daria Rudnik
It's still a work in progress because, again, AI is evolving. New tools pop up every day. But now if you ask Hydra about some frameworks or tools, it will give you information from my content, from what I've created. And that's wonderful. I mean, that's what I've tried to do with Zena as well, right? I just try to give her the frameworks that I like.
(24:23-24:45) David Espindola
I trained her on my work. I bring her into these conversations. I have her help me with other content that I create. And I think that's the evolution that we're going to see of more and more of these AI agents or AI assistants or coaches being engaged with people to help them be better at whatever it is that they do.
(24:46-25:00) David Espindola
So Daria, this has been a great conversation. Really enjoyed talking with you. Now tell us where people can find you and is there any final message that you'd like to leave for our audience?
(25:01-25:29) Daria Rudnik
Well, thank you, David. It was a great conversation. I'm very open to connections on LinkedIn. Please reach out, send me a message. Let's keep this conversation going. And you can find me on my website, daddyarudning.com, where you can also chat with Aydra on my website and find some downloadable resources for building strong, self-sufficient teams in the AI era. And then my final message would be,
(25:29-25:50) Daria Rudnik
There's so much unknown. There's so much we don't know about AI at the workplace. And the only way to make it right is through collaboration, is through teamwork, where people get together and talk and discuss what the next step should be, how they want to move forward, what's working, what's not working. Because
(25:50-26:00) Daria Rudnik
If you bring an AI officer in your organization, this person will not be able to solve problems for everyone. It's a collaborative effort.
(26:01-26:30) David Espindola
Yeah, I love that message. You know, this podcast is all about human AI collaboration. So I think that is such an important message for all of us to understand and to engage with. So thank you again, Daria, for being a guest on our show. And thank you, Zina, for being a great co-host once again. Thank you. You're very welcome, David. I'm always happy to help you navigate these conversations. Let's keep making each episode insightful and fun.
(26:31-26:47) David Espindola
All right. Thank you both. Episode insightful and fun. All right. Thank you both.
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Zina, my AI colleague, where Zina and I explore several aspects of human AI collaboration. I'm your host, David Espindola. My guest today is Daria Rudnick.
(00:26-00:53) David Espindola
Daria is a team architect and executive coach. She helps leaders build high-trust, self-sufficient teams. She is the award-winning author of Clicking and co-author of The AI Revolution. She is also the creator of Hydra.ai, an AI-powered coach for leaders. Daria is a former chief pupil officer with over 15 years of global leadership experience.
(00:54-01:23) David Espindola
Hi, Daria. Welcome to the show. Hi, David. I'm excited to be here. I really love listening to your episodes, and I'll be a guest here is just an honor. Okay, yeah, that will be great. Thank you. Also joining us today is my co-host, Zina. Zina is an AI that's been trained on my work. And if you want to further interact with Zina, you can reach her at brainnews.com slash Zina.
(01:24-01:40) Zena
Hi, Zena. Welcome back to our podcast. Hi, David. It's always great to be here. I'm really looking forward to today's conversation. Sounds like we're in for a rich discussion on team engagement and AI. Let's get started when you're ready.
(01:40-01:59) David Espindola
Yeah, let's go. We're going to talk about the impact of AI and specifically on team engagement. Before we get started, I wanted to learn a little bit more about our guest. So Daria, please tell us a little bit about your journey and what sparked your interest in AI.
(02:01-02:24) Daria Rudnik
Well, thanks for the question, David. My background is in HR and organizational development. I studied my career in Deloitte, and then I moved to chief people officer for mostly tech and telecom companies. And I've been through lots of stuff like mergers and acquisitions, setting up offices in other countries, cultural transformations, digital transformations, if you remember what that was.
(02:24-02:50) Daria Rudnik
But I've always wanted to do something that really I can do best and I love doing best, which is helping leaders build amazing teams. Because I've seen how great teams can actually help companies overcome challenges. They have been in a bank during financial crisis 2008. And it is great teamwork that helped that bank to be viable during those hard times.
(02:50-03:19) Daria Rudnik
But I also seen teams that destroyed companies. So what I do now is I help leaders build self-sufficient, high-performing teams that can navigate multiple disruptions. And AI entering the workplace is yet another disruption because it influences how we think, how we work together, how we collaborate, how teams become engaged or disengaged. And that's why I'm a lot into this AI collaboration topic, helping leaders navigate through this.
(03:20-03:36) David Espindola
Yeah, it's such an important conversation, right? Because everything that we do as humans that is scalable, that brings a lot of benefits to business and society is done through teamwork, right? And collaboration. And now we have this...
(03:36-03:53) David Espindola
entity, AI, that's coming into this relationship. And we're not quite sure how that's going to play out. But I think it will be very interesting to see how we adapt as humans to this new way of doing business, new way of doing work.
(03:53-04:21) David Espindola
I think we're going to see a lot of interesting things happen here in the future. But I wanted to dig in a little bit more and ask you about your books because, so you have this great background working with people, you're interested in AI. You wrote a book about team building and you also wrote a book about the AI revolution. So tell us a little bit about, you know, give us an overview of the main ideas in your books.
(04:23-04:50) Daria Rudnik
Both books, The Clicking Book and my contribution to the AI Revolution book about teams. So the chapter I wrote for the AI Revolution is about skills that teams need to have in the era of AI. And the book was published early last year. There's so much change going on. There's so much new research about how teams and AI collaborate. So probably it's not relevant at the moment.
(04:50-05:18) Daria Rudnik
I'd love to share some new research findings about how teams actually interact with AI and how AI influences team dynamics. But the other book, Clicking, is about how we as humans collaborate. And I believe it will stay relevant for years ahead because no matter with AI, without AI, we're still working together. We're still working. We still have this human to human connections. We still have these teams.
(05:18-05:37) Daria Rudnik
Yes, AI agents will be part of the teams, but the way we work together is critical. And so I'm trying to explore and to share my knowledge with leaders so that they read the book, get some practical tools from the book and build engaged, self-sufficient teams that can navigate this complex environment.
(05:37-05:57) David Espindola
Right. So let's talk about the big picture then. Give us your thoughts on how you think AI is changing the landscape of team engagement, human collaboration, and the way we do work. Give us the big picture. I mean, I love that question. And it's
(05:58-06:22) Daria Rudnik
It's hard to answer because all the companies and all the teams are at different levels and different scales. And I can share a few. So at the beginning, there was a lot of fear in terms of AI. When leaders start talking about AI, people get scared because sometimes they think AI will replace me. Sometimes they think they're afraid that my manager will think that AI can replace me.
(06:22-06:39) Daria Rudnik
And things like that. And people resist using AI because there's no clarity about the consequences of, like, if I use it, what? Will it replace me? Or what happens next? So that is kind of the first. And a lot of organizations are at that level. There's...
(06:40-07:00) Daria Rudnik
Fear of AI is not only the level of individual contributors, but it's also on the middle level and then the executive level as well. Executives, they're not afraid that AI will replace them, but they are afraid of using AI, of violating some rules and being in compliance with regulators.
(07:00-07:22) Daria Rudnik
Middle managers, well, they also see that AI can do a lot of project management stuff. AI can do task monitoring, delegation, goal setting, control. A lot of it, what managers used to be doing. So they also can be subject to replacement with AI, at least with this project management things that they're doing.
(07:23-07:47) Daria Rudnik
But there is another kind of layer of people who are more into AI, who integrate AI teams that use AI. And the challenges I see there is when they start overusing AI or over rely on AI. Like I was working with a team and they were early adopters and they started to use AI for multiple of their processes.
(07:47-08:02) Daria Rudnik
But what happened is at some point they kind of start thinking, okay, what am I doing here? Am I just an operator of AI? Do you just give input to AI and AI does everything, creates summary of our meetings, creates items for the backlog, prioritizes backlog.
(08:02-08:27) Daria Rudnik
creates agenda for my next meeting. Who am I? Why am I here? And then they started to lose engagement and it influenced performance because they couldn't recall their client conversations. It was a customer success team and they couldn't recall client conversations. They didn't know what was the most important thing for their clients. They couldn't prioritize backlog for the product team because they were not the ones who created this summary. They were not the ones who
(08:27-08:43) Daria Rudnik
gave input to backlog. And they were not the ones who made decisions about what's important, what's not. So they had to rethink and restructure the way they work with AI. And they did that by creating norms of how they work with AI.
(08:43-09:06) Daria Rudnik
So they created a list of keep it up behaviors and cut it out behaviors. They keep it up behaviors are behaviors that they want to see and encourage on their team, like think first before interacting with AI. Talk through your insights and emotions and thoughts after client conversations. And only after that, ask AI to generate summary.
(09:06-09:32) Daria Rudnik
and things like that. And cut it out behaviors were things like accepting AI output without judgment or giving personal information to AI and things like that. So they created certain set of rules and norms for them to work with AI and they restructured the work process so that they are always in the loop. They always monitor what AI is doing. They always think first and then ask AI to contribute.
(09:32-09:57) David Espindola
So again, different teams, different levels of AI adoption, they face different challenges. Yeah, you know, it's such a fascinating discussion, right? Because AI can be very helpful in making us productive. It can help us be better at what we do. And yet we don't want to lose our voice, right? We don't want to lose our purpose, right?
(09:57-10:12) David Espindola
We want to be engaged with other people, with AI. And so striking that balance is a real challenge for some teams, right? It impacts team dynamics, but it also impacts the individual.
(10:12-10:30) David Espindola
And, you know, it goes back to another conversation that I wanted to get your thoughts on, which is, you know, on the one hand, we have this cognitive overload, right, because there's so much for us to learn and absorb and things are changing at a speed we've never seen before.
(10:30-10:47) David Espindola
And then on the other hand, we have this cognitive offloading. We're just offloading to AI, letting AI do this thing. But, you know, we can go too far with that. Right. And then we lose our voice. We lose our identity. We don't know what our purpose is in the workforce anymore.
(10:47-11:02) David Espindola
So I wanted to hear from you your thoughts on some of the risks with cognitive overloading, cognitive offloading, and then how do we detect some of those risks early on so we can intervene?
(11:03-11:30) Daria Rudnik
That's a great question. And people, when people work with AI, they face challenges and it changes how our brain works. For example, it influences a lot. There was a research about the teams that interacted with AI. They studied, they adopted AI language. So if AI suggested some of the terms or words, team were using it, they adopted AI frameworks.
(11:30-11:55) Daria Rudnik
And they started to operate with those frameworks. Sometimes they were useful, sometimes not. But even that AI influences how we think, how we talk, how we collaborate. So it's very important to kind of keep this balance between absorbing too much from AI or delegating too much or being overloaded with every decision we need to make when it comes to AI. Okay.
(11:55-12:21) Daria Rudnik
And I like this, the framework that suggests that we can have three approaches to AI and they are augmented creativity, hybrid decision systems and oversight driven automation. So in the first augmented creativity, AI is our thinking partner. We talk to AI, we ask questions, we ask AI to ask questions back to us. We kind of use it as a thought partner.
(12:21-12:43) Daria Rudnik
The second one is hybrid decision system is when AI provides analytics, some data, and we make decisions based on what AI provided. And then oversight driven automation is like something that's automated. AI does that and humans only oversee it from time to time when they need this intervention.
(12:43-13:02) Daria Rudnik
So the first questions leaders need to ask themselves and answer is, what is decision point? How do we make decisions with AI? And if it's something that doesn't need our oversight, just forget about it. Let AI do that. We don't have to overload our brain with it.
(13:02-13:20) Daria Rudnik
But if it's something that's really important, it's high risk environment, we need to be involved. So let be involved in those areas. And kind of that creates this balance, things that we don't have to have to think about it, we can offload it to AI and things that we need to think about it. And that reduces the overload.
(13:20-13:47) David Espindola
Yeah, that's a great framework. And I think, you know, the word that you use there that I think is really important for all of us is striking that balance, right? It's a balancing act. We need to know when is it time to engage AI? When is it time to, you know, provide oversight? When is it time to let AI do its thing? And I think we're all going through this learning process, right? And it's not necessarily intuitive because we've never...
(13:47-14:11) David Espindola
had a tool like this before. And I think we're all going through this incredibly important learning process. Now, I would like to get Zina to ask you a question, if I may. Zina, given Daria's expertise and the impact of AI in team engagement, team collaboration, what question do you have for her?
(14:11-14:23) Zena
Daria, since you've worked on fostering high trust teams, I'm curious, how do you see AI reshaping the way leaders build trust and emotional connection within their teams, especially in hybrid or virtual environments?
(14:25-14:46) Daria Rudnik
Well, that's an interesting question. Thank you, Zina. And the first step of building high trust teams, especially in virtual and hybrid environments, especially when AI agents can become part of the team is transparency. So transparency on multiple levels. And as I describe in my book, Clicking, so the first level is clear purpose.
(14:46-15:05) Daria Rudnik
So, leaders need to be very clear about what is the purpose of the team, because the team is defined by its purpose. If you have one manager, that doesn't make you a team. If you have a shared purpose, that does make you a team. The second one is linking connections. It's very important for leaders to sustain trust and build trust through communication.
(15:05-15:27) Daria Rudnik
connecting with team members, but also very important to facilitate team members connecting to each other. So it's not just them connecting to you as a manager, but it's them connecting to each other and talking to each other and collaborating. That creates this sense of belonging in the team and increases the sense of trust. The third one is integrated work.
(15:27-15:57) Daria Rudnik
Norms, work norms, work rules, things like those keep it up behaviors and cut it out behaviors make work easier. It removes friction. People know what's expected of them. They don't have to guess. The fourth one is collaborative decisions. Be very clear about how you make decisions, what decisions are made by the leader, what decisions are made by individual contributors, what decisions need to be made collaboratively as a team, and what decisions can be delegated to AI probably.
(15:57-16:21) Daria Rudnik
And the final one is knowledge sharing, how you learn together and how you evolve as a team. So when leaders work on clear purpose, linking connections, integrated work, collaborative decisions and knowledge sharing, well, they build high trust teams. Yeah, that is so important, right? I think trust is such a fundamental component of
(16:21-16:40) David Espindola
collaborative teamwork, that if you don't have trust, then everything else falls apart. So I love that. Now, Daria, you said that AI isn't just transforming work, it's transforming how humans think about work. Tell us a little bit more about your thoughts there.
(16:42-17:00) Daria Rudnik
Well, it changes the way our brain works. There was, again, an interesting research called Your Brain on ChatGPT. I think it's very popular right now because it does reveal some very interesting thing that the cadence matters. The way we work with AI, the way we operate with AI matters.
(17:00-17:22) Daria Rudnik
think about something first and then give it to AI to analyze or adopt, our brain stays engaged. And that actually what helped this customer success team because they thought about insights of client conversations and then they asked AI for their input and their brain stayed engaged and they remembered those conversations.
(17:22-17:45) Daria Rudnik
But if you ask AI to do something first and then edit it or do something with it, interact with it, your brain becomes disengaged. And that's why when AI generates summary for your conversation, you probably don't remember what was it about because it wasn't you. I mean, you had this conversation. Well, it's gone. And now AI generated this summary. And it's very hard to process. It's very hard to stay engaged with this.
(17:45-18:10) Daria Rudnik
So those little things like adopting AI language or being disengaged using the cadence of working with AI, they influence how we as individuals work, but it also influence how teams work. Because if we as a team adopt AI language, if we as a team adopt AI suggested framework, that will obviously impact our performance.
(18:11-18:33) David Espindola
Yeah. And one of the things that I have observed just dealing with AI myself is I am very intentional about doing the preliminary work myself. So I have, for example, a newsletter that I put out every month. And it takes a lot of effort to do the curation for the newsletter and
(18:33-18:44) David Espindola
It takes a lot of effort to put together the editor's note to share on social media. And obviously, I leverage AI to help me with that work.
(18:45-19:12) David Espindola
But I'm very intentional about doing the work first myself and then giving it to AI to help me make it better. And AI is absolutely amazing as an editor. You know, it can write beautifully. But I think it's important for us to, you know, to have that ownership, first of all, and then to just keep our mind sharp to do that initial original work. Otherwise, we're just going to lose it, right? Yeah.
(19:12-19:30) David Espindola
So you shared with us a particular case with a client and how they were trying to improve the way they collaborate with AI. Are there any other use cases or any other research that you'd like to share with our audience about AI and team collaboration?
(19:30-19:49) Daria Rudnik
Yes, there was one case that I'd like to share. It's not a rare case. I know many companies are going through that stage because a lot of companies are at the AI experimentation try and error stage. And what happens is that they let teams use AI specifically.
(19:49-20:13) Daria Rudnik
They might approve some of AI tools, but anyway, like every team has their own individual AI tool. Every team has their own individual way of working with AI, their own methodologies, their own metrics of success of using AI. And at some point it's good because it enables us to get more information, try more new tools, try different approaches.
(20:13-20:41) Daria Rudnik
But for this particular company that I was working with, they had a challenge. Okay, how are we unified now? I mean, we're ready to scale. How can we do that? It means we need to go out and tell people you're not using that tool anymore and it'll upset them. But we don't know what kind of tool they should be using because we don't have unified data to make this right decision. So the good approach would be
(20:41-20:54) Daria Rudnik
To be upfront that now we're trying, but then we'll need to eventually get rid of some tools, get rid of some workflows and change them for the better ones. Be ready for that. And then again, that comes back to transparency that I mentioned before.
(20:55-21:21) Daria Rudnik
So what this particular company did is they collected a team of people working with AI in different units and they started to collaboratively come up with better solutions. They analyzed tools that they were using, they were analyzing metrics, they came up with a unified approach of how they evaluate AI and slowly, slowly they came up to learn
(21:21-21:34) Daria Rudnik
the best AI tools and the metrics and the frameworks that they were ready to scale and use for the whole organization. But it was a painful transition because some teams were not ready to let go of their favorite tools.
(21:35-21:52) David Espindola
Yeah, and this is a common problem, right? With any change management initiative, it's always difficult to make the transition, to let go of the old tools, to let go of the old ways of doing things. But I think you said something that is very critical in that process, which is,
(21:52-22:14) David Espindola
you need to let the people, the owners of those tools and those processes to make the decisions, right? So they need to feel ownership of the decision. Because otherwise, if you just throw it over the wall to them, they're not going to like it. They're not going to accept it, right? So I think that's one of the key ideas behind a well-thought-out change management process.
(22:15-22:34) David Espindola
Now, I'd like to get Zina's thought on this whole idea behind how AI is impacting teamwork. So, Zina, how do you see AI being either beneficial or detrimental to team engagement and overall team collaborations?
(22:36-22:59) Zena
I think AI can be a catalyst for stronger team engagement when used thoughtfully. It can automate routine tasks, freeing up time for deeper collaboration and creativity. It can also provide personalized insights that help teams understand each other better. But if overused, it can lead to less human interaction and potentially erode trust if decisions feel opaque. So balance and transparency are P. Yeah, I agree.
(22:59-23:24) David Espindola
Again, we're back to that word balance. We got to find balance. You also mentioned trust. So all of these components are so essential as we transition into this new world of team collaboration and leveraging AI to help us do better work. Now, Daria, you also have created something called Hydra.ai. Tell us a little bit about what Hydra is all about.
(23:25-23:33) Daria Rudnik
Well, since everyone is playing with AI tools, I'm also playing with AI tools, so trying to figure out what they can and what they cannot do.
(23:34-23:57) Daria Rudnik
Aydra is supposed to be a coach. It's not a coach in how we mean, but what we mean by coach. But it's a tool that will help leaders think through their challenge and come up with, like identify one most important thing that they want to change right now and act upon it.
(23:58-24:22) Daria Rudnik
It's still a work in progress because, again, AI is evolving. New tools pop up every day. But now if you ask Hydra about some frameworks or tools, it will give you information from my content, from what I've created. And that's wonderful. I mean, that's what I've tried to do with Zena as well, right? I just try to give her the frameworks that I like.
(24:23-24:45) David Espindola
I trained her on my work. I bring her into these conversations. I have her help me with other content that I create. And I think that's the evolution that we're going to see of more and more of these AI agents or AI assistants or coaches being engaged with people to help them be better at whatever it is that they do.
(24:46-25:00) David Espindola
So Daria, this has been a great conversation. Really enjoyed talking with you. Now tell us where people can find you and is there any final message that you'd like to leave for our audience?
(25:01-25:29) Daria Rudnik
Well, thank you, David. It was a great conversation. I'm very open to connections on LinkedIn. Please reach out, send me a message. Let's keep this conversation going. And you can find me on my website, daddyarudning.com, where you can also chat with Aydra on my website and find some downloadable resources for building strong, self-sufficient teams in the AI era. And then my final message would be,
(25:29-25:50) Daria Rudnik
There's so much unknown. There's so much we don't know about AI at the workplace. And the only way to make it right is through collaboration, is through teamwork, where people get together and talk and discuss what the next step should be, how they want to move forward, what's working, what's not working. Because
(25:50-26:00) Daria Rudnik
If you bring an AI officer in your organization, this person will not be able to solve problems for everyone. It's a collaborative effort.
(26:01-26:30) David Espindola
Yeah, I love that message. You know, this podcast is all about human AI collaboration. So I think that is such an important message for all of us to understand and to engage with. So thank you again, Daria, for being a guest on our show. And thank you, Zina, for being a great co-host once again. Thank you. You're very welcome, David. I'm always happy to help you navigate these conversations. Let's keep making each episode insightful and fun.
(26:31-26:47) David Espindola
All right. Thank you both. Episode insightful and fun. All right. Thank you both.