People Powered by AI: The Podcast is the companion series to Theresa Fesinstine's book of the same name. The book gave HR leaders the playbook, and this series brings it to life with stories, updated thinking, and the things Theresa has learned since the book went to print, because AI doesn't slow down and neither does the work.

In this opener, Theresa sets the table for the next ten episodes and walks through the foundations that everything else builds on. She shares how she went from 25 years in corporate HR to founding an AI education company, a path that started with a single text message five days after ChatGPT launched. From there, she introduces the "modern library" metaphor she uses to make machine learning, large language models, generative AI, and predictive analytics make sense without requiring anyone to understand code.

Theresa also makes the case for why HR (not IT, not legal) is the right function to lead the AI conversation inside organizations, and gets honest about the gap she keeps seeing between how confident HR professionals feel about AI and how fluent they actually are. To bring it to life, she shares a real story from Spotnana, where CHRO Jessica Bartlett's team built a custom peer reviewer tool in Claude after one workshop, solving a problem their vendor couldn't.

The episode closes with a roadmap of what's ahead across the next nine episodes, from the ten biggest fears about AI to ethics, vendor selection, and what it actually takes to lead a people first, AI forward organization.

Grab a copy of People Powered by AI wherever books are sold, and take the free 5-minute AI Fluency Assessment at assessment.peoplepower.ai to see where you actually stand.