Leading in the Age of AI

How to Think Beyond the Tools and Lead with Curiosity

In this episode, Megan Robinson and Julia Kozlov explore what it truly means to lead strategically in an age when artificial intelligence is transforming how we work, decide, and connect. Julia brings her expertise in technology strategy and leadership development to unpack how leaders can stay curious, adaptable, and human-centered even as the world accelerates around them.

Tease Key Insights

• Empathy is strategy. Understanding the human impact of your decisions creates loyalty and innovation.

• Connection fuels clarity. Engaging your team in the process helps everyone see the bigger picture.

• Technology should serve, not steer. Tools enhance leadership and they shouldn’t replace it.

  
  

Why this Matters?

AI is not just changing what we do. It’s changing how we think. Strategic leaders must balance speed with reflection, innovation with ethics, and automation with authenticity. Julia challenges listeners to develop the muscle of mindful decision-making: being both informed by data and guided by intuition.

When you lead with curiosity, you cultivate a mindset that stays ahead of disruption. You don’t just react to change; you anticipate it.

Listen Now

The future of leadership isn’t about competing with AI. It’s about thinking beyond it. Listen to the full episode and discover how to reframe your strategic approach for the modern era.

Julia Kozlov

Finance Executive

Julia Kozlov is a finance executive, AI strategist, and keynote speaker known for turning big ideas into bottom-line results. For over two decades, Julia has led finance across healthcare, consumer goods, and tech - most recently as a finance executive at Intercare Therapy in Los Angeles. She demystifies AI for non-technical leaders, showing C-suite audiences how to apply emerging tools without the buzzwords or overpriced solutions. Julia’s sessions blend financial acumen with a storyteller’s spark, leaving listeners with actionable frameworks they can put to work the next day. Offstage, she mentors rising finance talent and serves on multiple boards, both in the financial networking space and in the philanthropic world.

Full Episode

Megan:

Hello and welcome to Culture Conversations, the podcast where we explore the people side of work. I'm your host, Megan Robinson. For years, I've found myself deep in discussions about workplace engagement with industry experts. Now I get to share this wisdom with all leaders, new and experienced, on their journeys to build cultures that maximize potential. We spend so much of our lives at work. Let's make it a place where our teams can grow and succeed. Hello and welcome to Culture Conversations. My name is Megan Robinson. I'm going to be your host for this podcast and I'm thrilled to announce my guest Julia Kozloff. Julia and I have had such incredible conversations and dialogues and AI is such a rich and challenging and new Area that is not something that's my expertise, but it is absolutely hers and I'm thrilled to get to learn more about it with you with her and let me go ahead and just introduce Julia. Julia Kozlov is a finance executive, an AI strategist, and keynote speaker known for turning some of those big ideas into bottom line results. For over two decades, Julia has led finance across health care, consumer goods, and technology, and most recently as a finance executive at Intercare Therapy in Los Angeles. She really demystifies AI for non-technical leaders, showing C-suite audiences how to apply emerging tools without the buzzwords or those overpriced solutions. Definitely been there. Julia's sessions really blend that financial acumen with a storyteller spark, leaving those listeners with those actionable frameworks that they can put into work the very next day. Offstage, she's a mentor for a rising finance talent and serves on multiple boards, both in the financial networking space and in the philanthropic world.

Julia:

Welcome, Julia. Thank you so much, Megan. I'm so thrilled to be here. I sound like really amazing with that intro. I'm digging it. I think I'm just going to have you follow me around. I'll put it into AI, and every morning at 9 a.m., I'll have it just repeat to me as I'm starting my workday. I was going to say, did you use AI to help write the intro?

Megan:

Because it's great. I did not. Oh my gosh. It's pretty wonderful. I'm shocked, to be perfectly honest, because it sounds so polished and so impressive. And you are quite the impressive lady when it comes to AI. Before we kind of really jump into how we really bring leadership into the role, leadership roles in the age of AI, how did you get really started with AI?

Julia:

So, almost two years ago, it was October of 2023. I went to a CFO leadership conference, and I was one of those people that's like oh yeah I've read about AI, you know it's can't pass the CPA exam. I'm fine. Like, we don't need to worry about it. And then I heard someone named Glenn Hopper speak and do a presentation on just AI and taking 10 Qs and 10 Ks and throwing it in and getting forecasting. And just every moment he spoke, I was like, Oh my God, like, and then- John just keeps dropping and dropping lower. And you're like, oh my gosh, my jaw's into this relax for a while. And then I started, I spoke to another attendee. We were both, both of our flights were delayed and we sat there and we spoke and she said, you know what? Shout out Melissa Hurrington. And I said, she said to me, you know, I have my team every single day spend a half hour looking at ChatGPT, thinking about AI and thinking about how we can utilize AI. And I said, oh my God, I am so behind the times. So as I'm going from where we were eating to my gate, I called our CTO and was like, oh my God, have you heard about this AI? And here's how we could potentially use it for this. And oh my God, client services. And oh my God. And every day since then, I've just been kind of like on the AI train. And we went from, oh my gosh, I need chat GPT pro because the free version is only up until like 2021 or something like that to now. All of the AI is all up to date, but obviously with the free versions, you don't get as many iterations. But just like every day something's changing. In early 2025, I started doing an AI 101 presentation, like January of 25. And the things that I said AI still couldn't do then, by the time I did my next present AI 101 presentation for the C-suite executives, for like what AI couldn't do in January, it could actually do some of it. So like how many R's are in strawberry? In January, GCPT couldn't answer that question and it was wrong, but by April it was correct. So it's consistently getting better at what it can do. I started trying to use it for financial analysis. I don't know if you know this, but like finance is one of those last bastions of where it's the easy buttons not there. And us as really conservative finance folks, we're like, oh, I tried using it once. It was a C minus, I'm not gonna use it again. I need to be able to count on myself, which is true. Look, governance is a thing and we'll get into it. But we kind of are very conservative in what we use, especially when it comes to like, letting out information.

Megan:

There's a lot of hesitation, skepticism, and it's so much so thrilling to see you be on that cutting edge with it, knowing that it's that uphill battle within the industry.

Julia:

But it's also, okay, three months ago, didn't do what you wanted it to do. Try it again. And I've even seen that with my own analytics. I'm downloading, you know, 10,000 rows of data and trying to homogenize it because I'm not just a speaker about it. I use it every day, which is, I think, one of the things. And, you know, I do have a nine to five. a W2 job. So I am one of those people that's actually using it every day. And I'm able now to homogenize the data. I'm able to create custom GPTs just to like figure out my revenue for the month. These are things that I'm now able to do that I wasn't able to do six months ago. And there are still things that frankly, it's not great at, but who knows what it's going to do in a month. This is what's exciting and scary at the same time.

Megan:

I love that. And from when we record this to when it's posted to when someone digs it out of the archives and listens to it, it's one of those things, this is still a relevant conversation because it's not necessarily just about the capabilities and what AI can or can't do. It's about something way more than that. It's about the mindset, it's about the leadership, it's about how you use these tools, not the capacity of them, which I think is true.

Julia:

And how we think about the tools, truthfully, and how we think about the tools of tomorrow, even when we're coming up with governance for how to utilize AI at a company. you always want to be forward thinking and putting something into your governance document about like what's going to occur and consistently like every quarter reviewing the governance to see, wait a second, where are the potential pitfalls?

Megan:

There's so many different aspects of AI that can really be aligned with that. Tell me, kind of focusing more on leadership in that age of AI. Because you've often said that AI is not just a tech conversation. And we've kind of touched on that a little bit already, I think. Tell me more about how is it a leadership conversation?

Julia:

Unpack that a bit, please. So to me, it's getting everybody aligned on what do we want for the future, and then seeing, hey, how do we utilize AI to solve problems, as opposed to saying we're now going to be an AI company. We are basically trying to go to the different C-suite owners to like CTO, chief, you know, the technical officer, the people officer, the revenue officer, the marketing officer, and saying, okay, what are we trying to achieve with this company? And then what are the problems that we have? So, If we decide if we say hey here are the problems that we have now is this something that we can use AI to help us solve. And also, we cannot be siloed. This is the other reason why it's a leadership conversation. Everybody has our own mindsets and points of view, not just with what we've done on in work. but what we've done in our personal lives. And so I may have a solution for marketing based on something that I saw that my TikTok or Instagram algorithm served up to me. So it's really just discussing consistent discussion. And it's always, this is why I love speaking to you, this is why I love speaking to anyone, like I will speak to the mailman if I catch him, about AI. Because every time we speak about how can we use AI in our personal lives, how can we use AI in work, we're all helping one another. It's kind of the way I say that we're not, in the future, we're not hiring for technical skills, we're hiring for critical thinking skills. And so as leaders, like we have people that are going to do the day-to-day operations, but now we're losing our critical thinking skills to see what is the future hold. And that is a full leadership and C-suite discussion. Does that make sense?

Megan:

100%. I mean, you touched on quite a few pieces there, which I'm like, I want to unpack each one of them because I think it's so critical that we really do look at AI as adoption, to your point, it is not just a tool. It has to be a solution for something. It's not just chasing the shiny object that everyone's talking about. It's how does this really apply to our business? So it's the strategic side that is terrifying. It's, to your point, the alignment. And you can't be as strategic if you are not, if you are siloed. Every organization knows that it's going to take that cooperation, that coordination, that stronger alignment, even the buy-in across departments. And that's where AI has its magic. So if you are a company right now and you are just relying on your chief technical officer or whoever's in the techie kid on your team to lead your AI strategy, they're not capable of building a strategy. They don't know enough about the business and you have to have that dialogue.

Julia:

Or even if they do, but as you said, everyone has to buy in to what the strategy is. And by the way, you can have each person which Now I'm like, oh, wait, we should have each person do this, but you can have each person go and say, this is what I see the company in five years, but the prompts you're going to put in to AI, everyone has their own way of prompting. Right. And as their own prompting biases. So if everyone goes in and says, Hey, I'm going to have a conversation with you, AI, Jane, Bob, call your AI, whatever you want. Chatty McChatterson. And we're going to go and say, here's where I think the business is going in five years. Help me get there. Let's break it down. Let's talk about strategy. Let's talk about the finance strategy. How do we get there holistically? It's like talking to a really interesting mentor.

Megan:

I love in that aspect too, or a great mentor, I'll even say a great coach isn't necessarily giving you the answers. They're meeting you where they're at. And if you don't have the ability to set vision to begin with, it's kind of that you put garbage into it, into AI, you get garbage out. And if you don't have that vision building skill, that strategic perspective, your prompts and the way it's going to support you is going to fall immensely flat. And it's not an AI problem, it's not an AI challenge, it's a leadership challenge.

Julia:

Yeah, like, it's like the bias, like, you're like, I feel like we're going to grow to a $200 million business. And I think this is how we're going to get there. And AI is going to say, you're right, let's get from there to there, as opposed to going, okay, what are other businesses doing that are in a similar space? What's the contrarian corner? What haven't I thought of? And that's why if each person from leadership comes to at it from their own point of view and then brings it all together, you're going to have things that other people haven't thought of. But I think you really, really have to make sure that you're going into AI and saying, what haven't I thought of? Where could this fall flat? Are there other ways of getting there? Because it's kind of the way the analogy I like to say is when you ask your child, if you have a child, have you, did you take a shower? Yes. Did you turn on the water? Yes. Did you get in the shower? Yes. Did you wet your hair? Yes. Did you put shampoo or body wash? Oh, it's kind of, The assumptions that you make and that AI makes. It's one of the reasons I think I'm such a good iterator, because I never ever took what my kids said as gospel. It's like, hmm, I don't know.

Megan:

Trust but verify.

Julia:

And that's the thing, trust but verify with AI. Even when you ask AI something. So finance loans, right? what is the generally accepted accounting principle? What is the, you know, FASB for this? Oh, the FASB for this, well, tell me, show me, cite your source, because things change all the time. So unless you're citing your sources and you're looking at your sources, you're not gonna know if something's true or not.

Megan:

Cost over, a little, make some assumptions, took some creative liberties that it maybe shouldn't have.

Julia:

Or it's two generations back. So you don't know, so you're constantly having to iterate and ask. So.

Megan:

I think that's such a important leadership skill that really can be applied to AI as well as how, cause you're in a way, you're almost coaching that AI to give you the answer that you want. Yeah. And there's a point of coaching your team to get the behaviors that you're looking for. And it's not telling your team what to do. It's giving some of those gentle nudges and those great questions to help them dig a little bit deeper. Right? Just like, okay, you took a shower, but you know, how much soap do we use for that?

Julia:

I love that analogy. So, and it's constant. And we, and you're always asking, well, is there a better soap out there? Or like, hey, is there a better way to tell my child that this is what I want them to do? But always ask the question. It brings me back to someone that says, just go play, like someone that's never used AI. And someone will say, just go play with it. What does that mean? Do you want me to throw a ball at it? I don't understand what play with it means. So when you're in a leadership position, one, you give the guardrails, but you also say, go ask it these three things. Like when I talk to people and I give presentations, I really just go down to, OK, let's go in, open up a session. and let's make sure that we are able to like ask it some simple questions that are just anybody can ask and that will let us know okay now when you go back you have these four or five prompts now what do you want to do with it? So just not be scared. And things that I'll play with is, Hey, I did a transcription on my voice memo. Let's transcribe it, put it into AI and summarize it. Or, Hey, we have an issue. Cause everybody in every company has an issue with like customer service or client services. And it's like, someone comes up to you and they're an irate customer. Here is your, um, here is the company you have, AI, how would you help me answer this? And so once you start doing all of these things, now you're like, okay, wait a second, we're helping the employees, but now operation, now leadership-wide, it's now as a C-suite, what do we do with this? So as you get more comfortable with using this in your own life, now how do we use this to help propel the company forward?

Megan:

100%, you brought up such a funny example of that customer service. Because I'll say from the other side, I actually was just playing with AI. I had a difficult return or exchange that I had to do with a company. And so I had to call the customer service, and I chatted into AI exactly. It was like, OK, well, using Chris Boss's negotiation techniques, how can I get this result that I'm trying to get that I know that they won't Yeah, and it gave me a bunch of prompts and things to do and questions to ask.

Julia:

I love that you're using Chris Voss's negotiation. You gave it that additional prompt. And so now someone that's going to be watching this and is constantly using AI to help with writing emails, it's like, wait a second, I should use Chris Voss's negotiation.

Megan:

That was a fun one. I will say another client of mine, her boss and manager is a I'm a huge fan of, oh my gosh, I can't even think of it. The Simon Sinek, huge fan of Simon Sinek. Oh, start with Y, love. Yeah, start with Y, right, classic. So she had a couple of projects she was working on. She's like, rewrite this to be in the Simon Sinek. How would Simon Sinek say this to like get the best result from what she knew her boss wanted? Amazing.

Julia:

But the start with why goes back to leadership, right? So now you can go to all of your C-suite and say, hey, here's something that we're going to do. Look at start with why, like using Simon Sinek and start with why. What should we be thinking about marketing-wise? What should we be thinking about people operations-wise? And then feed in to it the website of the company that we're in. So it's like, okay, now from each of those points of view. So really it's like dealing with other leaders is really let's come together and let's all talk about what we've come up with and how do we as a group, how do we get buy-in? to move the company to move the project to move anything forward.

Megan:

I love it because it's, I mean, I know we're going down the rabbit hole like, and do this, and we can do this, and we can do this, which is always fun. But I mean, what it really comes down to what you've been addressing is those key skills that leadership, they're truly leadership skills that amplify your AI adoption, efficacy, your strategy. I mean, it is the strategic thinking, it's getting the alignment. I'm even gonna say it's a bit of vulnerability. of being comfortable not having all the answers and opening to your team, letting something else change a process. It's change management, right? I mean, if you don't know how to address that, all of these things are not things that AI is taking from you, that you as a human, as a leader, have to implement and have to have your skillset be at a level that you are able to integrate these AI technologies.

Julia:

And it level sets so you could have someone that's 22 years old that just started their career that has that's been kind of growing up in the talk and instagram and you know the the phone. I think they can come up with a better prompt potentially than I can. Someone asked me the question once, like, is this going to pull apart further the rich from the poor? And to me, I said, absolutely not. It is going to level up the critical thinkers, the people that are the iterators from the people that just Google something, get the answer and put it in. Like it is, this is where we're going. We're going for the critical thinkers and that critical thinker can be 22 or 82. So if you're intelligent, that is going to be the differentiator. And if you are curious, curiosity, critical thinking, those are the differentiators. A 22 year old isn't going to know that they're strategic. They're going to know that they're just trying to get from here to here in like the best way possible. They don't know the word strategy yet, but that is what they're doing. And that is what we need to be hiring for. And that is who was a leadership team. We need to be like, Like going all in for.

Megan:

I'm going to frankly say nurturing it because there's been a critical thinking chasm for quite a while. It's been a complaint, I think, for every industry. The kids these days, they don't critically think, but we haven't necessarily nurtured it. And I always used to joke like having a baby is never a relationship fixer. Like if it was broken before, it's an amplifier. It's just going to add pressure. I think COVID was another example of an amplifier. If your business was broken before, it sure as heck is broken when COVID came. I think to your point, AI is another amplifier. If you were missing critical thinking skills before, AI is just going to exasperate that. And it will show that difference between what's working and not working.

Julia:

The people that really just do data entry, or the people that really just are consistently going from A to B, A to B, A to B. Those people, like AI is going to take that over. Over the weekend, I was in Napa Valley and I sat down for a wine tasting and there was a robot sommelier that poured the wine. Now, what like to me my favorite wine tastings are when you have the person that's pouring tell us about the wine and tell us about the winery and the terroir and the legs and tell us like the story about it. That's my favorite wine tasting experience and it amplifies the wine. But if you have someone that's like, here's your wine, I'm going to go help someone else. Well, the robot can take that over. So if you don't have the storytelling, if you don't have the EQ, well, AI is going to take over the IQ. Like my favorite thing is the AI, the IQ, the intelligence quotient, the EQ, the emotional quotient, the TQ, the technology quotient. And then a friend of mine recently over the last couple of months was like, oh my God, we need to add AQ, the adversity quotient. So the adversity quotient and the way I look at that with AI is you give five prompts and it doesn't just quite get you there and you're like, oh, C minus, I'm not going to do this anymore. Whereas if you've had someone that's dealt with adversity in their lives and has a plan B, plan C, plan Z, Now you're like, okay, wait a second. Maybe I'm not prompting it really well. And so how can I prompt better? Hey, this is the answer I'm trying to get to help me get there. Like they're not going to give up. So these are the people that we need. And I feel like I'm all over the place, but it's going to be the people that have the EQ, that have the drive, that have the will, that have the critical thinking skills. The people that can recite a textbook Well, we've got AI for that now.

Megan:

I think that's the one thing that I wish we spent more time on, Beth, is just that emotional intelligence. But I would say the connection to your point, the story. Yes, you could read a card that tells you the story about the wine. That is not engaging. That is not the experience that you're going to a winery for. And really being able to blend You know, the emotional intelligence is not there. It can spit out an entire, you know, plan, entire strategic plan for a company or show you all the holes, but how you gain those stakeholders, how you get everyone on board, how you adopt that strategy is all leadership skills that AI cannot take away from you.

Julia:

Yes. And then when someone says, I don't know why we're doing this, So it's like, okay, how do we explain why we're doing this? Like all of that. Yeah, the computer, well, AI told me, well, where did AI get that? That's where like cite the sources as well. All of that comes into play, right? But also you need to have the critical thinking skills to say something doesn't sound right. Even if AI told me this, something doesn't sound right. hey, what aren't you telling me? Or give me an alternative point of view. But just saying, hey, like using AI as Google doesn't work. That's where AI is gonna take that over. But the strategic thinking, or you know what, this is what AI told me, but I don't like that. And there must be a better way. What if I did it this way, Chatty McChatterson? How would that come up? Like, is that legal? Does this work? Is this, you know, how is this within the guardrails? Because strategy isn't just Google, right? It hasn't been for a long time and it never will be. No, and it never will be again. And really that's the critical thinking skills and the con what you said is right on the connections. Like it gone are the days where an executive can sit at their desk and just do this. It's, it's almost going back to the days of, you know, the fifties, the sixties, where you are meeting people on a golf course at an event. at a wine tasting and you start talking to people. To bring a company forward, you're going to need outside people that you connect with that are going to be partners, both outside and inside people. So the connections, and you're not going to get those connections with pure IQ.

Megan:

Beautifully put. This has been such a pleasure talking with you. There is so much going on when it comes from how you lead in this age of AI. And I think it's true, at least from my perspective, I really took away. being that amplifier. Those leadership gaps that we saw before are still just going to be broken or even amplified in the age of AI, plus even a stronger need to develop different skills that maybe haven't been prioritized as we continue to shift.

None:

1,000%, 1,000%.

Megan:

That's what I teach my kids. They're very lucky. They're very lucky. Any last parting words, Julia, that you want to share? Any other insights we missed?

Julia:

I think the best thing is don't start reaching for the stars when you start playing with AI. Use a note taker. Use your voice memo. Use things that are very, very cheap and are going to give you the biggest bang for your buck. Between using a Gemini, between using a Claude, between using a chat GPT, use the paid version of one of them, use the free version of some of the other ones, use a note taker so when you are having these one-on-one connection meetings, you can actually look someone in the face as opposed to taking notes and then take that note taker and summarize it. So these are things that really between a paid AI and a note taker, it's $40 a month, that is going to give you the biggest bang for your buck and the biggest return on investment as opposed to trying to solve a problem that you don't know what the problem is and spending thousands of dollars implementing it. that's going to be your first step. Very pragmatic advice. Thank you so much.

Megan:

Well, this has been a lovely conversation. I will say, if you are listening or watching, and you are wondering, oh my gosh, there's so much that I need to do with AI, or we are behind, or there's a lot of opportunities to really enhance what it means for our organization, or we're just getting started with it and we want to have that taste, I do really recommend that you reach out to Julia. She does fabulous workshops, fabulous keynotes that really help make it relevant and actionable and keeps it out of that really heady technology space. and makes it very, very actionable and pragmatic for companies. So please do reach out to her. All of her contact information is in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining me, Julia. Oh my God, this was so much fun. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Culture Conversations. I'm your host, Megan Robinson, founder of eLeader Experience, a professional leadership development company. Today, we shared actionable ideas to navigate the evolving workplace landscape, compete for talent, and build cultures that maximize potential. If you're looking to learn more about how to support your organization's leaders, you can learn more about our work at eLeaderExperience.com. Now get out there and contribute positively to your organization's culture with your own conversations.