Welcome back to the show, My fellow extraordinary Americans. Today’s guest is Tonya Jay Long. 

Tonya is an entrepreneur, speaker, and author who is the leading voice in digital transformation, artificial intelligence, integration, and governance. Tonya drones from a unique range of perspectives, from rural Tennessee’s tobacco farms to corporate America’s boardrooms, from tech innovation hubs to Bangalore’s bustling tailings. 

As a veteran technology transformation, her leadership strength is built on two decades of experience steering multinational teams in various technology verticals and advising private boards in the technology, human capital, and publishing sectors through our efforts. 

She has led teams in 15 countries to restructure delivery models and integrate acquired talented technology. She has also hired and developed executive teams and shaped newer cultures, generated over 1.5 billion in documented bottom-line impact, and launched 400 product releases into the market. 

She established Greenfield operations in China and Ireland, integrating 1,000 employees and associated technologies into new companies via 20 strategic M&A integrations. She has also delivered corporate initiatives and programs serving customers like Walmart, Bank of America, Apple, Barclays, HSBC, Daimler, and Chrysler and converted 2.8. Clean product portfolio from a Prem to SAS / subscription. She also authorizes the best-selling book AI and the new Oz Leadership’s Journey to the Future of Work. 

Tonya is more than just an AI leader. She’s a way-shower who seamlessly connects technology with the human experience. She’s an extraordinary American, and I’m glad and honored to have her on the show. Tonya, are you there?

I sure am. I’m excited to be here. Thank you, though.

Tony, I’m so honored to have you on this show, and I would want to have some of your wisdom, especially regarding artificial intelligence. So, Tonya, can you tell me more about yourself, your background, and how you got started?

I got started on tobacco farms in Tennessee, just like you mentioned. I grew up in the rural South and never said no. I got a Vic 20 computer when I was 12 years old, and I enjoyed technology but pursued political science in my undergraduate and graduate studies. From there, my jobs led me to Tech, where I spent 2025 years in multiple tech verticals—loved People. 

And so, I always kept tech in my brain and people in my heart, I think, how I’ve come to lead. But I managed a lot of functions over the last 2025 years. I became a fixer. And so that naturally led you to mention the. You know, I LED teams in Asia in the countries I opened. That I did a lot of process work, a lot of big integrations, and you mentioned the M&A work that I had done, and you know, I never knew I was going to hit 20 years ago when I started, when I, well, I can’t say that I mapped my career. I wish that I had it kind of happened by accident. Looking back, it all led here because AI is so cross-functional. A technical component, obviously related to artificial intelligence, is just hyper-automatic. But the biggest thing that we need to do now is to. It is to reengineer all the processes on the planet. That’s no small feat, and I think having so many disciplines and different verticals in my line of sight has made me particularly aware of what it will take to work together with the integrated companies and functions we have to deploy AI. 

That’s kind of where I came from. It grabbed me, and I thought I should briefly discuss the book. Just this might be one of your questions. If I’m usurping that, I apologize, but. I started using ChatGPT. That’s where everybody kind of started on generative AI. 

And I realized that my friends and my executive peers weren’t. And so that’s the origin story of the book because I said, wow, we’ve got to all do this. We’ve got to lead this! And so, the book just kind of happened in 90 or 100 days; with help from ChatGPT, we published a book, and we can talk more about that. I’ll find out what you want to know, and that started my journey into being very focused on AI. And here we are today.

Tonya – AI has been taking over, especially in the last few years, especially with Chat GBT. Many of us are still unaware of how impactful and revolutionary it is. But one of the things I wanted to ask you before we get deep into AI is its effect on business and everything else, like your strategic vision and your goal from, like, starting from the time you were in the farms to, like, where you are now, what got you into this field in the first place, and how did your vision and goal regarding your career evolve over the years?

Neither of my parents went to college, so I can’t say I had a strategic vision when I was on the farms. I just wanted out, and I had a Family that I babysat for. That said, you’d make a good attorney because I was good with language. So, what I wanted to do was make an impact. 

At one point, he was very involved in politics, and just Al Gores Farm, his Al Gore senior, a family famous in Tennessee. Al Gore Senior and Al Gore Junior, the vice president of the United States, probably. 20 years ago. He just retired from Apple’s board. Their farms are 20 minutes from where I grew up.

That was where I started. I will say I always followed my passions, and by doing that, I was always. I was always involved in unique and fun things, and I never said no, so it was more about it. Leaders saw my value and asked me to apply my skills to solve problems in business, and because of that, I got to do interesting projects. It was more than me having a vision because the world was a lot. More, how do I say this? The world wasn’t as transparent when I was young as it is now. A kid growing up on a farm didn’t have Internet access. I had the World Book encyclopedias, and so you understand. So, I didn’t have a lot to dream of. 

So I think people my age. And you’ve had some of those people on your podcast. Already, we followed our hearts, but we found in time that our passions led us to interesting lives, and we were lucky that, you know, part, luck, and a lot of hard work. The grace of power is bigger than us. It helped us to reach things where we go and make a difference.

So, Tonya, I wanted to ask you how you think AI is revolutionizing business today. Twenty years ago, there was no Internet, right? 

It was people who were doing business in the 1990s, and they had no calls. They didn’t even have cell phones or iPhones or any of that. They’re doing business a certain way. Then, the Internet came along. 

Now everybody has a web. They have websites, and everybody has marketing online and on social media. It revolutionized the way business was done in 2000 and 2010. But now AI is taking prominence in the twenty 20s, and people do not understand its full impact, similar to how it was in the 99. 

So, can you tell for the sake of the audience? What exactly? How will AI transform the job market in the coming decades?

I think that AI will transform the face of knowledge workers. It will transform the face. Of how we operate and businesses that leverage human capital for people who do knowledge worker-based work, the research reports tend to delineate this when we talk about the exposure that AI creates in jobs that involve manual labor. I think the lowest on the reports are like pole diggers. That’s a gold digger, a job designation, and pole diggers. Zero. They have 0 exposure from AI, so pole diggers are completely safe. 

There will be no changes to the job category of pole digger based on AI, but then they have ranked all of these job classifications for the exposure that AI will bring; jobs just for simplicity tend to be more office jobs, jobs that use a computer, and jobs that involve repetitive tasks. It will be impacted and changed by the availability and opportunity of AI. 

Some will be eliminated, and I’m not going to. I’m not going to. Shy. Apart from saying that, I think it’s an opportunity because we can put aside those mundane things that people are left to do, and we get to elevate what we do to do more interesting things. And I’m going to give you an example. IKEA did this almost two years ago. Now they saw AI coming and imagine being a customer service representative at IKEA, and you get a phone call, and they say, oh, I’ve forgotten. What’s the famous Bookshelf? 

They have it’s got a name, The We’ll; we’ll call it the Cosmo. OK. It’s the Cosmo bookshelf. People call in because they can’t go to the website, and they ask what the size of the small Cosmo bookshelf is. Somebody on the phone looks it up and tells them the exact height and width. Well, those jobs are going away with AI. 

They knew that two years ago and started retraining their entire customer service team to be designers. So now people who used to have jobs where they would look up things on the. That people are on the phone. I wouldn’t look it up. Do you know what colors it comes in? What’s the size? What finishes does it come in now? Those people are trained to say let’s take a picture of your space. Let me make some recommendations about some rug textures you might have. 

It’s a whole different. Mindset and working model for those employees and those employees are providing more value, doing something very different than they hired on to do. It elevates IKEA and the level of service that they provide to the customers who call in. And frankly, it saved those jobs. 

So, I think that we’re going to have an elevation of roles where, you know, data transfer and the type of information will happen in a more automated fashion. And what do people do? I believe I will be more meaningful. 

So, the job market will transform how we search for jobs. An IBM study said 1.4 million jobs will require skill in 18 months. I’ve been asking the question for about six months. Our companies were working on that. Have they started to make that transition with reskilling? The teams there are not getting that information on that in terms of companies not. Yet, I started that work.

So, I don’t think 18 months will hit, but 1.4 million jobs will reach skill very soon because this automation will enable teams to uplift. We’ll be able to optimize what people work on to provide different types of service for customers.

Tonya, this is such a fascinating subject, and it’s something that I’ve also liked taught.

Right. One thing that comes to mind is the Industrial Revolution. 

So, one thing that the audience must realize is that there was an error during the Industrial Revolution where there was a whole new way of doing things, and many jobs were taken away, and many new jobs were brought into place. But it revolutionized the way the world worked forever, right? 

But Tonya, one of the questions, and this is for the audience, right, because it is good, is that there’s going to be a lot of fear when automation comes into play because every time a new era is born.

I would like the error that we’re in, and I’m sure we’re at the beginning of an AI revolution. There’s going to be a large swath of the population, especially in this country, that will be left behind because they will not be able to re-educate or whatever. And then there’s going to be the new. There’s going to be a new set of jobs. How do you think that will play out on a national level and even a global level? 

I think people will need to start thinking about reskilling themselves. We all have to have personal accountability. So, I think learning as much as you can as a consumer is so important right now, so I want to start with that. 

But to bring some relief. I want to use a more modern-day example than the Industrial Revolution because I bet most people who watch your podcast haven’t ridden horses or pulled a plow. I bet they have pulled a plow behind a horse. How about that? I have the Granddaddy’s horse beat me to death when I pulled the Plow. When I was a teenager. But I digress. A modern-day example, but I think everyone can wrap their head around, is 1518 years ago when Quicken hit the market. Quicken the accounting platform, the online accounting platform. When Quicken was released, it was a hit. And Jamie Peebles is a friend of mine. He’s a thought leader in accounting and first wrote about this. 

I Co-opted it, and I wrote about it in my book. And he and I were. But he was right. When Quicken hit the market, everybody said, oh. Don’t be a CPA; there won’t be any CPA jobs. You know. Bookkeepers. Forget it. Nobody will be a bookkeeper anymore because you know now that we have this automation in the cloud for clicking. Nobody will have jobs. What happened was Quicken put the business of the financials of a smaller, medium-sized business in the hands of the business owner of the entrepreneur. 

They could be closer to their data because they managed it more directly. This elevated the tasks of bookkeepers and CPAs, so we still have as many roles as we ever had, if not more. But they stepped up the line; they do forecasting and customized reports. 

Also, quicken, they even have, you know, things where they will configure and install your Quicken services. So that’s kind of funny. It took them out of data entry. Hell, forgive my language. It took them out. It took them out of data entry hell and moved them into roles where they were helping. Guide and advise business owners using that data so it elevates what they can give and provide as a service. 

I think AI across the board will enable us to do the same thing. It will give us a platform so people can step up and provide higher service levels. As advisors, we will be given predictive data to build plans for the future, which requires a different kind of thinking.

No, I mean totally like you have to like rescale. You have to like and think on a different level. And then, uh, obviously, some people stick to the past, and then people are ready to embrace the future. But from your perspective, Tonya, regarding the American economy, how do you think AI will go in the coming ten years? AI is going to revolutionize the way as a continuation of this question. How do you think it will revolutionize how businesses are done? And will the American economy be booming? And will it be productive for everybody?

Many reports talk about the trillions of dollars that will be added, so that’s just a stat. That is as accurate as it can be with the teams that model those. I think the most interesting thing is how it will change things. In my tech circles, we talk about.

The big guys right now are the same companies, like Google and Netflix, that are multi-billion-dollar global companies. We believe the next billion-dollar companies will have less than ten people. We also believe in that change, and I’ll get to the individual entrepreneurial level in a minute. 

But on the company on the corporate side. The ability for people to build businesses that reach the planet isn’t going to require these multi-thousand-person organizations anymore, and it won’t have to be. Super technical people. Those are super technical skill sets that are required to build them. You know this: no code, low code thing. It’s real; it’s drag and drop. It’s using things that exist.

I wrote code long ago, like in the eighth grade. I don’t write a whole lot of code these. Days, but I can figure out how to use Chat GPT. Using these tools, I can piece together things I need to with real, just pattern recognition in my brain. 

From a creative level, we’ll be able to take ideas and take them to lunch much more quickly than in the past with fewer people. We won’t have this heavy network infrastructure that used to be required to make corporations occur. 

So, I think we will escalate timelines in ways we’ve never seen before. We must be careful because just because you can do it fast doesn’t mean you should. This is the old-fashioned part of me talking. We’re going to have to put some guardrails on ourselves. When you start making important, valuable decisions with data, knowing that that data has been properly vetted is so important. 

So that’s an example of a guardrail that we must exercise some discernment with. So I think over time, we’re going to stumble, we’re going to make some mistakes, and we’re going to learn from those mistakes. I’m hopeful. I prefer This and having spent so much time in tech; it isn’t very objective. I hope that. I hope that we become self-governing. I hope that we don’t get in our way by entrenching things in big government law but that we are smart enough to do it ourselves first because we want to, we want to lead good businesses, and we want our products to serve our customers. Without risk, without undue risk. 

We are able to do that. As you know, I’ve launched products that took three years to market. And this was 15 years ago, but now? I see how. It could be done in a few months, so it’s very exciting to see that.

So, Tonya, like AI, is amazing. Whenever you look at it, you realize how it can make life easier for many people and everything. 

Still, many people have deep concerns regarding the moral issue of it; they believe that if AI is combined with blockchain technology, it is put into the hands of, let’s say, an authoritarian government. They can control or utilize your business transactions because most people don’t understand how AI works. 

There is a lot of concern that if it’s put into the wrong hands or there are no spiritual or moral regulations around it, then greedy companies could prize it to control governments. But I don’t know if you have heard of any concerns like that. What is your perspective on that?

The bad guys will always have the tools. And. We can’t delude ourselves into thinking that they won’t. Laws don’t apply to the bad guys, right? Let’s step back to the nuclear age when the nuclear age came. Came around.

I saw the I saw the Oppenheimer movie.

Yeah, right, right. And there was a race to get your hands on those powerful elements. That represented your ability to command power over the destruction you could create. The bad guys had those. And to your point, you know, the moral code is different. We have to live at that risk, and with AI, we will live there. There’s currently with quantum. 

Yes, China has a 15- or 17-billion-dollar investment to beat us to quantum. I don’t believe in living in the fear of them getting there first. I’m not saying China is a bad guy because I think some worse bad guys don’t have a name we can affix. There’s nothing we can do about it other than continue to work on cybersecurity and tighten our controls, and I’m not going to go into the layers of what that means. We’ve not done enough, frankly, on cybersecurity. We’re working on it, but it’s not. It’s scratching the surface. Those risks will always exist. 

But just like when we landed the first nuclear bomb, and people mourned and grieved because there was so much destruction, it was all so good that came out of it. And you have to weigh the. Good with the bad. I’ve got smoke detectors on my ceiling. The technology and smoke detectors came out of the Oppenheimer project. Cancer detection MRI out of MRI’s. MRI nuclear medicine that. Manages the machinery that gives us things like MRIs that detect tumors from the Oppenheimer project so that destruction may have occurred. It did occur. But good came out of it. 

I think the risk of AI of the bad guys potentially doing things, and I know that we’re heading them off the past every day. But the good that will come from it, the good that already is coming from it. On the medical side and the education side. We have to weigh and balance. The opportunities and the potential. What could happen? I think it’s a risk we have to take.

Tonya, it’s almost like I’m talking to one of the people. It’s like one of those Oppenheimer movements, where they created their nuclear bomb. And then, in the coming years, they do. 

They don’t know how it’s going to revolutionize everything. AI, Chad, GBT, and all these new technologies that are coming out will revolutionize the way business is done. It’s going to revolutionize the way politics is done. I mean, there’s going to be, there’s going to be like demagogues out there. They’re going to be like, instead of talking about immigrants, they’re going to talk about AI. 

There’s a common theme that they think immigrants are taking all the jobs, but it’s not true. You know, they. But it’s what Dev blogs across authoritarian nations always to be fear-mongering, and we as an audience have to be aware.

To avoid a fear-based approach in the uncertain world, we must face uncertainty and use it as an opportunity to elevate success.

Right. 100%. I encourage people. To face their fear, and most of my outreach is to leaders. Because I desperately want leaders to pull people forward and advocate for what we can do. And if People have some kind of, I’ll just say moral, which is a very broad Term. But if people have a moral concern about AI, bring it, bring it, and use AI so that you can use AI-enabled tools, generative AI generally, because that’s what’s surging right now. But bring your concern because it’s just a tool, just code. We get to write the code, but that code is not perfect. We are only going to be able to.

We need to address the imperfections when we know where they are or when we have public discourse about how we want things to operate. That means people have to come to the table with their objections, and we have to talk. I’m a big fan of the discourse so that we can work together as a society. We start to have difficult conversations about what we want. People not using it is, for me, not an option. It’s only by using. When we start to retrain it, I think most people on the call probably understand That the more that goes into the large language models, the more it retrains those models. 

But it would be best if you also had an opinion to share with the groups. Build these. We want to know. It’s ours, but it’s just a tool. People act like AI is this big, ubiquitous thing that they’re somehow beholden to or can’t do anything about, and it couldn’t be further from the truth. We can, and we must it. The toothpaste is out of the tube. The Genie is out of the bottle, but we still have an opportunity to build. And I think guardrails is not the right word because I don’t want to say we’re controlling or manipulating data. But how we want these things framed is up to us.

Tony, if you asked the average person, the masses, or anybody else, yeah, the first thing that’ll come to mind is the Terminator and The Matrix, you know? 

Skynet.

They’re not going to think in terms of what’s going on. 

So, we have to have an education. I’m interested in a system that will help us on a massive level to understand this and see how it can be applied to business. How can we use AI to start our business, get money, monetize our skills and passion, and become financially free? That would be helpful to so many people.

Yeah, AI would be used every step of the way. You are ideating your business, understanding your target addressable market, and building your website. I mean, the thing is, AI is not just one big thing. AI is all these little components. 

So. Every part of the journey of an entrepreneur. I would be able to tap into multiple AI-enabled tools. To do it better or more richly, I mentioned predictive data earlier. I am researching whether I can brainstorm with large language models. Claude, GPT all the time. To get a different opinion. I work. At home, a lot more than. I did four years ago—pre-pandemic. And so I don’t have people I can grab and drag into a conference room and whiteboard. I have ChatGPT, and I’ll tell you. You. It’s pretty darn good. It’s pretty darn good for me. You know, Zigzag left, right, end of life, product A versus product B. How would I make that choice? 

And so, entrepreneurs start a business—every element from. Suppose you look at my business and my consultancy. A lot of the copy. A lot of the text. A lot of the landing page Pictures were created in ChatGPT by Dally 3. I mean, there’s so much. In that journey that you can set up, and there’s, there’s a lot of programs out there that will help you, that other people like me that that have an affinity for it will take you through all the ways to automate funnel collection automate. How you contact and get in touch with your customers and how you set up those engagements, I mean, there’s just, I can’t begin to tell you how you can use AI because it’s because it’s at every step of the journey.

Tonya, many people in the audience might still not know about the details of ChatGBT and how it can help them, their clients, and their businesses. 

So, can you explain the basics of chat GBT and how it can help them in business or writing a book? What is ChatGPT? Let’s say somebody has never heard of ChatGBT before. How could you explain that to the audience?

Well, that’s a hard question, yeah. Oh, this is a remarkable disservice, but ChatGPT. It is a chatbot. Technically, ChatGPT at its simplest, and if that word doesn’t mean anything to you, it means it’s an open portal that you, the term is prompting you to ask it a question. It responds, and why has GPT done so well? Was ChatGPT the first big one? Still, it was the first big knowledge of natural language processing, which means that instead of being an engineer and writing code to get an output, you can just type, so I can just say, I’ll give you an example. I’m just going to mouth this, 

But if I want to write a birthday poem for Cosmo here, I can do it. I would just say. I met a guy named Cosmo, and we are in a networking organization together. Cosmo lives on the East Coast and has this great podcast he brought me into. We had a great afternoon. Cosmo turns X age in two weeks, and I want to. Please send him a birthday poem. Cosmo and I would, and I would just keep rattling. And I would say, please make Cosmo a birthday poem. I want it to be upbeat and happy, and I want it to make Cosmo feel like 1,000,000 bucks because he cares deeply about America and wants, and he wants the world to know how great it is to live in the greatest country in the world. And I would just type all that. Just string of consciousness doesn’t matter if there are spelling errors; it doesn’t matter about grammar, and you’re certainly not writing code. And ChatGPT would immediately start typing. And would produce—the funniest, most clever, most interesting poem. You’ve never seen it, and I do it all the time. I do it all the time for people I care about.

And Tonya, what is real, what is authentic, and what is like? How are you going to know? And I gave the poem versus like.

And. Why does it matter? Why does it matter? This is a good conversation. The poem wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t taken the initiative. The poem would be flat if I had just said Cosmo is having a birthday next week. Please write a poem. I never send the poem without. Tweaking words because something will come out? 

That’s like, Nah, it doesn’t feel right because I’m doing it typically for someone I know, so it will. It will use, you know, a word that I’m like. No, that’s not me, you know? So, I never just send it. It’s always you kind of go. In, and you’re like. Change the tone, and I always know if it’s on. A social media post, you know, sticking a little icon because it, you know, you decorate the birthday card. So, there is a raging debate over whether it is authentic. I think that it is. I think that it is because of all the content. You know, if you say what color the sky is, it will say blue. But if you set it up. With all of this, I’m in the middle of the hobby, and you give it lots of context. Oh, you will get the most fascinating answers. 

So, the results are highly dependent on how you address the system.

Can you imagine going into a time travel machine to somebody in the 1700s and then explaining artificial intelligence, the Internet, and social media to them? Do you know how they would burn you in the state? Here we are, you know? Yeah.

Yeah.

The 20th and 21st centuries have produced wonders, and we do not know where this will take us. We feel like we’re literally in a new era.

Yeah, I mean, OK. So, I’ll do this. I’ll freak.

You can see this picture on my mouse pad. OK, so I have an ear stream that’s an Airstream. And when my book is published, that’s my Book. So, a buddy of mine is a mid-journey freak, so the mid-journey is AI-based. The image generation app is very popular. It’s not open AI’s app. Valley three is. So again, this is it’s you, He said, articulated a minute ago for the birthday card. I want an astronaut on Mars with an Airstream holding the book AI and the new Oz. Here’s the link so it can get the book’s cover. Here’s the book. Right. 

And so, he was able to create this image. With five or six sentences, I have the prompt. And he tweaked it. This gives us a level of creativity we wouldn’t otherwise have. And I think frankly, I’m in love with AI because I think I’m in love with people, and I think that AI is going to bring us back together, this, this, this picture is he’s I think he’s 61 years old. He’s an executive coach. I don’t think the man probably could draw stick figures, but with words, he can draw this can, and he can send this to me by e-mail and say congratulations on your book. And that’s a way of connecting with people.

It gives us tools to connect that we wouldn’t have had, like me sending you a birthday card. I think AI is going to save us because it’s going to give us new tools to connect in creative ways. I think that the workplace will force us in a good way. Communicate cross-functionally because AI will pull from every discipline and pull cross-functionally, generationally, and cross-culturally. AI will pull us out of the pandemic caves that we all crawled into and have had trouble coming out of. I’m looking for AI to be the catalyst for that. 

It brings us back into the light, so we are all communicating again, and it makes it easy because of that natural language processing that I was talking about. You don’t have. To worry about, but it’s what makes it’s what makes it so easy. With just your own words, you can say I need to do this. I want to do this. Create a table with a diet plan for five days. That’s keto. That has no dairy, and I want breakfast to be a heavy hot breakfast, and it will present you with that detail.

So, Tonya, I know you wrote this book, AI in the New Oz. Could you tell us a little bit more about it and the premise of how you started writing it?

Yeah, of course. Thank you. On my Airstream, I was at it several places and had some buddies who are executives in large companies, and I was like, hey, AI, and they were like, oh, you know, you’re ruining my beer. 

And I realized, and I started asking, like, I was dragging the party down, but nobody was using it. I started asking more seriously in my professional Circles, and nobody was using it. And. And I realized this because I’ve done business transformation and digital transformation for 15/20 years now. The model changed 15/20 years ago. It’s been like a heavy network, heavy cost people like Tonya are in the back room with the expensive consultants from McKinsey and Bain, you know, making plans for a year, you know, and, and now. And now you know you’re your 11th grader, comes home, and it’s on his phone, and he’s using it to write papers. And you’re like. What’s that? 

So, because it was free, all you needed was a phone. I mean, we had millions of users on it. Within a month of the release, nobody was using it at the executive level because of the executive levels they were so accustomed to. It is a managed service where people like Tonya would come back and give reports, and I was like, oh, no, it’s not going to work this way because everybody’s got it in their back pocket, and you need to. You need to know what you’re doing. You’ll get your hat handed to you at board meetings and the company—all hands. 

Still, nobody was using it, so about March, I got to be in my bonnet, and I said I think I’ll just write a book. And I think I’ll do it. It is with GPT and. I had never planned to write a book, never wanted to write a book, but I saw that I wanted to write the book frankly for the less technical people because I have this, I have this. Deep-rooted need that. People should not be left behind. And I know this is a lot of fear, and it’s worse for people who are not in technical roles or are not in technical companies. 

So, I wrote the book not from my technical perspective but from my leadership perspective. It is aimed at people managing payroll, travel, non-engineering, and non-product teams. 

So, as I looked at how to craft a message around AI to get people involved in leading adoption, I was going to my jewelry box one day. I ran into it—a pin that my mother gave me, and it was the ruby red slippers that Dorothy had worn in The Wizard of Oz. 

And I sat back down at this computer, and I asked ChatGPT if I were to write a book on, and that’s what the way if I would write a book on leadership and AI targeted to less technical leaders. And I would have used the Wizard of Oz as a backdrop. What would the chapters look like?

And I was like, oh My God!

I think I worked for 10 hours straight. Going back and forth and back. And forth and back and forth, and it was beautiful. So that was, you know, that’s all the detail, you know, about the. It’s an origin story, but. Yeah, I took 90 days. I’d probably be able to do it in 30 days. I obsessed, I, you know? But it is beautiful that you can do this and have a writing partner, and you know it took longer because GPT and I often disagreed on the tone of what to say. 

Still, it’s a better book because my brain is this big, and then with ChatGPT, it’s this big. There are so many more examples and things that it could bring to light, and it was a lot of fun. And then, of course, since then, it’s helped give me a platform to work with those teams. You can do this because of courage, wisdom, vision, and heart. You know those, those are the things that matter. Technology is going to change all the time and very fast. Don’t let that bother you. You’re a leader. It would be best to give people a safe place to do those things and use your courage, hard vision, wisdom, and wisdom. And bring them forward.

Tonya, that’s amazing. I recommend my audience look at your book and get a basic understanding of AI, ChatGBT, and this new era we are entering. Tonya, are there any other projects you’re doing now that you want the audience to see?

There is always something fun coming up, and, like I said about technology moving so fast, things are always moving very fast. So, by the time this publishes, I’ll be on to something else. Follow me on LinkedIn. I talk an awful lot about leadership, bringing people forward, and not fearing the unknown. That’s an awful hard thing to ask of people because the unknown is pretty scary. But I don’t think we have a choice. 

And I think taking some ownership and accountability is our path to the unknown, and I’ve framed that, as you know, as the yellow brick road and our way to oz. Suppose we can own that and find other people on that path. Then I think we won’t be alone heading into the unknown and can enroll other people in the journey to make it what we want. Things won’t always be easy and smooth over the next couple of years; figuring out automation and how it will be bumpy will be difficult. The workforce transitions. But we’ve got to be working together to do that. 

So you asked about projects. I don’t know. I don’t know what I will be doing in three months. I don’t follow Tonya Jay Long on LinkedIn. My company name. Is that OK? It’s quantum pro advisory. If I can help anyone, I currently work mostly with boards and executive teams. Their strategy, clarity, and consistent communication with employees, customers, and partners are the most critical things that can happen. 

So that people are working toward the same end goal, so that it’s a sustainable plan for the companies they run, I think we are in for a fun ride. Cyclone is coming for Kansas in the AI and the new Oz vocabulary, but we don’t have to fear It. We can enjoy the ride. And I’m looking forward to it.

That is amazing; Tonya and I agree. A new era is coming upon us, and we must embrace it and not be so afraid of the future. 

Tonya, I’m so glad and grateful you took the time to come to this podcast and share your wisdom about artificial intelligence. It was charging, meeting, and so the audience could understand this. 

Like many of us, this new era already has, but many more can see this and know we are entering a new era. And with that comes with all this power. With this knowledge comes great responsibility, and I hope you take the time to return to the show later.

Anytime. Cosmo, I appreciate you. This has been great. Thank you.

I appreciate it, too. I want to conclude this episode by letting my fellow extraordinary Americans know that, hey, look, there’s an extraordinary within every one of us. We must awaken it and unleash it until next time. Bye for now.