Scroll Top
The Builder Mindset: The Creative Leader’s Advantage in the Age of AI
August 14, 2026 Creative Strategy Design Leadership Event Marketing Experiential Design Leadership ROI
Featuring
Jennifer Kattula, Global CMO, Microsoft Advertising

Jennifer Kattula is GM and global CMO of Microsoft Advertising, where she leads brand and AI transformation. She started her career as a chemical engineer prior to spending nearly 12 years at Meta building marketing functions from the ground up, then moved on to Polygon Labs on her way to Microsoft. She specializes in building and leading diverse global teams, bringing together people and technology to create a human-centered strategy that supports the needs of the business while developing creative individuals.

The Builder Mindset: The Creative Leader’s Advantage in the Age of AI

The creative possibilities are endless with AI, but only if leaders stop treating integration as someone else’s job.

In this episode, Adam Morgan talks with Jennifer Kattula, Global CMO of Microsoft Advertising, to unpack why AI transformation can’t be delegated — and why the builder mindset matters more as tools get more powerful. As AI adoption accelerates across organizations, Jennifer shares how she balances governance with creative chaos, and why human judgment behind the work is becoming the real differentiator.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • Why leaders can’t delegate AI transformation
  • The importance of AI fluency at every level
  • How to mitigate risk without sacrificing experimentation by balancing governance with creative chaos
  • How to set clear priorities that provide a framework for your team’s trial runs

Watch or listen now for expert insight into leading teams through AI transformation while leaving room for experimentation.

View Transcript
mentioned in this show:
adammorgan
Adam Morgan
Creative Leader and RCL Host
stoke-logo
The Stoke Group
Digital Marketing and Full-Service Content Agency
Prev

Leave a comment

REAL CREATIVE LEADERSHIP

Season: 7

Episode: 3

Episode Title: Builder Mindset: The Creative Leader’s Advantage in the Age of AI

Guest Title:
Jennifer Kattula, Global CMO, Microsoft Advertising

++++++

Adam Morgan
Hi, and welcome to Real Creative Leadership.

Today we are gonna continue to dig into this new topic and theme of the human advantage in the age of AI. For many leaders, AI feels like a technology conversation, but Jennifer Kattouf believes it’s really a leadership conversation. As Global CMO of Microsoft Advertising, she’s helping guide AI transformation inside one of the world’s largest technology companies, and she’s convinced that leaders can’t outsource this moment.

That’s a big deal. In this episode, we’re gonna discuss why every leader needs to have a builder mindset, what the marketing team of the future might look like, and which uniquely human skills become more valuable as AI improves. Okay, well welcome Jennifer to the show. Thanks for joining us.

Jennifer Kattula
It is so great to be here, Adam. Thank you. Thank you for having me, and I’m really excited to have this conversation about being a builder

Adam Morgan
What’s so fascinating is even since we first chatted in prep for this, the world has still changed so much already on this topic. So it’ll just be interesting to, yeah, to dig into how we’re all dealing with AI, how this builder mindset can help us. Since then we also launched a big ad campaign for my company all around, you know, this idea of like, don’t fear the future.

They’re like, there’s so much doom and gloom in this world with all the articles of how AI is just gonna crush you, that it’s like, as a builder, you’re the one that can change it. You’re the one that’s gonna build the future. So you just don’t worry about it. Go and build it. Just get out there and do it, and I think that’s just such a nice message today. 

Jennifer Kattula
I love it. I saw your campaign and I saw the rebrand that kicked off from last year, so well done on all of that. It’s really, you know, you can look at it doom and gloom, or you can change your perspective and say, “There’s so much opportunity, and you have these tools at your fingertips now.”

So I know we’ll get into it, but that’s what makes it so exciting right now.

Adam Morgan
Well, let’s start, and let’s talk about your journey and how you got to where you are. You started as a chemical engineer. So did I. I did, like, college for chemical engineering, and now look at us in marketing.

Tell us a little bit about you and your journey into consulting and technology and how you got to Microsoft, all that good stuff.

Jennifer Kattula
Absolutely. So we share this degree of chemical engineering. I can say I actually never did chemical engineering. I studied it. I loved chemistry, and then I realized that the chemical engineering jobs were not in New York City. They were in, like, small towns in the middle of nowhere. And I really wanted to go to the big city.

I’m a kid from a small town in Michigan. and I went into consulting at PWC. I was building websites and databases in sort of that first dot-com era. And I’ve always loved technology. Like, I always have loved the thinking about what it can do for people. 

And so I did that for a few years, and I realized that I also have this love and passion for communications, and I decided to switch careers. I went back to business school, but what really almost immediately went back into technology in a marketing profession. First at Microsoft, then at Meta for about 12 years when it was on this, like, massive growth trajectory.

I spent a couple of years in Web3 and learned all about blockchain, all about crypto, and then found myself back at Microsoft in a very different role. I’m now leading global marketing for our Microsoft advertising division, and one of the things that drew me back to Microsoft was just the focus on AI within the company and the opportunity to be at the center of it.

I am a technologist, I would say, like an engineer brain that really likes to take complex things and make them simple for people.

Adam Morgan
Oh, that’s awesome. Mine was similar in some ways where it was like I also wanted to be a part of technology. I think I tried to do a double major of information systems and chemical engineering ’cause I just wanted to be a part of it. But for me, chemical engineering was like, ugh, the labs and being alone, and I’m an extrovert and I hated being alone.

So I’m like, “Where can I be around a lot of people and invent stuff all the time?” And that’s where advertising was like this aha moment where I could

Jennifer Kattula
That’s the thing about—I think being a marketer or being in advertising, like, we like to make things. We like to create. We like our ideas to see the light of day. when you kind of step back, it makes a lot of sense because engineers also like to make things

Adam Morgan
Jennifer, you’ve described yourself as a builder for most of your career. What does a builder mean to you?

Jennifer Kattula
I think builder really is a mindset. It’s like you feel empowered to take the tools at your disposal and create with them.

It’s a process of going through and learning and feeling really uncomfortable when you’re onboarding into new tools and they’re foreign and you have to learn how all the things work so that you can come out on the other side. And they can often be painful and demoralizing too.

And I will say, when I first started using AI in the very beginning, it was hard. It took me at least six months and, you know, this is—let’s rewind. 

Let’s all rewind, like two or three years when prompting delivered really poor results. And you thought this was gonna be, this magical piece of technology, and it wouldn’t give you back what you wanted, and you’d have to keep going and keep going and keep going.

And I think that’s part of the builder mindset and the builder process, is that you teach yourself and you learn, and you get hands-on. And at the end of that, once you go through it, you’re not going around it, you’re not delegating it,you can come out with like a really strong point of view on how this piece of technology, and it’s not technology for technology’s sake, it’s technology for an application, like to make your world better, to make your customer’s world better.

And so you come out of that with a real point of view on what it means for your daily life, your team, your customers. And that’s what I think a builder is like getting in there, getting your hands dirty so that you have, like, real, visceral, emotional connection to what you’re doing. And that’s where I think, like, work has really changed in the last couple of years because we can do those things on our own, especially as non-technical.

Adam Morgan
Well, what I love about that is like it—when you talk about not being technical, I think in the past people thought, “Oh, a builder is someone who’s technical, is someone who’s got these crazy skills,” and maybe they’re like, “I don’t have that. I don’t know what that is.” But this mindset of a builder, for me, the beauty of it is it’s like everyone can be a builder.

Literally everyone. You have to just admit that there’s something you want to change in the world, like you said, make better for your business, for your customers, whatever. And then today, you don’t have to go get a special degree to go build something. You can just do it, and you can talk through it and just think through it and use AI to get there.

Jennifer Kattula
Exactly. If you can, if you can describe—I mean, look, we’re all human beings. Every single one of us has problems that we’re like, “Why isn’t this solved?” so that’s a good starting point. And if you can describe what the solution looks like, that’s your starting point. And even better if you can describe what good looks like or what done looks like.

And so taking what’s in your head and turning it into words so that you can interact with AI or the technology to do it is—it’s a new skill for a lot of us, because oftentimes that would be an engineer doing it or a product manager doing that kind of work, it kind of brings it back to you and really kind of interrogating what is the problem that you’re really trying to solve.

Adam Morgan
Hmm. I think a lot of times when we think about the world that we’re in today with AI, folks like to go back and say, “Oh, this is just, you know, when the personal computer came out and it changed the world and we’re here,” or, “This is when social media came out and it transformed everything.” But this one’s different.

So what feels different about this moment? You said you’re a technologist at heart. You’ve been through several waves of big technology changes, blockchain to social to whatever, but what’s making this one feel different?

Jennifer Kattula
It feels like the most empowering time to be a human being in the world, honestly, because it’s so democratized. If you can communicate in whatever way you can communicate, the modalities out there are varied and wide. Voice, typing, pictures. And so if you can do that, you can make things.

And I think we’re gonna just see an explosion of creativity where AI will raise both the floor and the ceiling. and what I’m finding in my role at work is that the ability to have, like, super hyper-personal workflows so you can get your work done in exactly the way that works for you.

Like, we’re all very different people, whether maybe you’re a morning person or an evening person. Maybe you have these specific steps you wanna go through to create something. Maybe you prefer things formatted with bold versus emojis. Everyone’s different. So if you can create personalized workflows that help  you do what you wanna do and take the load off of things that annoy you so that you can spend more time doing the thinking, like, that’s magic

Adam Morgan
Wow, that’s interesting. It’s almost like it makes me think of, you know, they always talk about writers who are either pantsers or outliners. You know, it’s like you just—

Jennifer Kattula
Yeah.

Adam Morgan
—go by the seat of your pants and just, you know, get in the flow and you can work any style you want and still get to the right destination.

Jennifer Kattula: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm

Adam Morgan
But there’s something about today, you talk about creating clarity and chaos and if it is this like the most amazing moment where everyone can do their own personalized stuff, but there’s still a lot of chaos. People are still like, they haven’t figured out that personal style of what they’re doing.

 

Jennifer Kattula
Right.

Adam Morgan
So how do you help other leaders find more clarity? ‘Cause right now it feels like everyone’s just running in 1,000 directions.

Jennifer Kattula
It totally does. And I’ve been at this now for about a year and a half, sort of leading this AI transformation at work and learned a lot. You know, we started with a directive, like, everybody use AI, great. And we have an employee base that is very tech-forward and everyone’s really excited about it.

And we saw adoption almost out of the gate, like 100% adoption out of the gate. And then we saw this group of super users who were building some really exciting things. And, so we had this explosion of agents and skills and workflows and this and that. And what we learned in our working group is that the role of the leader is to create that environment of growth, right?

You have a bunch of seeds and you wanna water them all. And create governance around it. And the governance piece is really important for the leader out of the gate because AI allows accessibility to lots of different information in your enterprise. It can give you information about your products, it can give you information about your customers, and without the right governance, you may be creating things, especially as a non-technical person, that could have downstream effects that you can’t, actually see because you don’t know the inner workings of it.

And it’s also important that that governance is built into the product, with permissions and security and things like that, and that the employees understand what the guardrails are of what they should and should not do. What is the right thing to do?

And as a marketer, and what I tell marketers all the time is the role of AI in our work is lots of prototyping, lots of brainstorming, but human in the loop every time if it’s touching a customer. If we’re building a customer experience, we wanna make sure that there’s a human in the loop there.

And that may change over time when we have more trust in the systems and they’re much more battle tested. So governance is a big—it’s a big piece of it. And creating a culture of knowledge sharing internally, ’cause people will build some magical workflows and magical things, and they will create centers of gravity that everyone will wanna use.

And then everyone will have their personal workflows as well. So we do a lot of that knowledge sharing. And then there’s a little bit of let’s be comfortable with a little bit of chaos because the creativity is part of the chaos. If you try to hold it all down, you’re not gonna have as much of that creativity.

So it truly is a balance, and so this is maybe a new muscle for marketers to think about because that has always been delegated to like the IT team or the security team or the engineering team. And for us to have to think about it is new. And I think it’s a great area for growth too, because that means we are thinking more end-to-end about our customers’ experience, and we’re thinking more end-to-end even about our roles as marketers.

And you and I both know this, that marketing has gotten, like marketing roles over the last, I don’t know, 20 years or so, have gotten smaller and smaller and smaller, like very niche—

Adam Morgan
Very. Specialists.

Jennifer Kattula
—very specialized. And what I’m seeing is that there’s almost a move back to like a generalist, and not for every single role.

Like, I still think there’s a huge need for creative directors and data scientists. But, you know, a lot of the marketing roles that once were very niche can now be more generalist. And so that means you need to be thinking left to right across the business in a different way, and be aware that everything is connected to the system, especially with AI.

It’s no longer like I’m in my own little silo and I finish my work and I hand it off. It’s a new way of thinking about how your work is connected and what’s required to do even better work because of these connections, and the opportunities that exist now because of these connections. So I can make this a little bit more concrete.

When you think about doing any sort of marketing, the best marketing is grounded in customer insights. It’s grounded in data. It’s grounded in your product truth and your brand and your voice. So if all of that information is really accessible to your marketers and it has high fidelity, it’s clean, it’s current, you can build on top of that in so many interesting ways with, you know, shortening the briefing process, shortening the pre-production ideation. Our creative team is doing that now, like, just shortening these timeframes.

Adam Morgan
Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Kattula
And then pushing the boundaries of what the creative direction could be, because we’re able to iterate so much faster. The data underneath is another really important part, that it has to be accessible, it has to be clean and you have to also have the guardrails around it.

Like, don’t write to your customer database and like change all the data while you’re, while you’re building some of these experiences.

Adam Morgan
That was a lot of good stuff. I love this idea of building the environment, like, your job as the leader is to build this environment where both your people and AI can thrive. 

I think a lot of people are struggling right now where governance is slowing them down too much, right? Where they’re like, “Oh, the safety and security, and we’re being told we can’t use this tool and we can’t get access to that one,” or, “We don’t have a single sign-on for this one and so therefore blah, blah, blah.”

I’m sensing a lot of people want to run and they’re running off and getting their own computer and they’re just doing a personal account with a new LLM and just experimenting with stuff. So how are you balancing that, where you’re giving guardrails and what kind of guardrails are you giving versus the freedom?

‘Cause I think you’re right, it’s a balance, but I think so many people are struggling with too much governance.

Jennifer Kattula
I think it comes back to the business problems that you are solving and taking a step back on how access to particular data sources can go awry. So, for example, a lot of technology today is becoming, like—you can basically log into your CRM. You can write an agent on your own to log into your CRM and pull a bunch of insights out, and then do something with it and send your customers an email. It’s awesome. You can build these personalized workflows there. The governance that is required is to make sure that the access through the headless experience is no different than when you’re logging in through the UI.

And you can’t… You wanna make sure you’re avoiding situations where you’re mass updating things, mass deleting things, or mass exposing things. and this is why I kinda keep going back to this, the marketer has never historically had any access 

Adam Morgan
No. You go to the data scientist or you go to

Jennifer Kattula
You go to the engineering team and you go to the data scientists and you say, “Can you do these things for me?”

And so there’s a real conversation that needs to happen across functions. So marketing talking to engineering and say, “Put these programmatic controls in place so nobody can do mass deletes on X database.” Or working with your legal department and saying, “Here’s our guidelines around, creative, for example, that we want in our marketing.”

And the legal team really understands your need and your use cases.

‘Cause at the end of the day, AI is a tool, and we can’t forget that we’re marketers, like, we’re talking to customers. So I think that those things are really important when it comes to governance. 

And then also encourage the creativity, encourage the sharing, create the champions groups, create the learning days, like create all of these things that generate energy for the teams. And when people see other use cases, that generates ideas and that generates energy. 

Adam Morgan
Yeah, tell us more about this because when you said sharing out, I’m like, “How are people sharing?” Tell us.

Jennifer Kattula
Oh, yeah. Once a month, the whole organization, we have a learning day. And people, we get together in different kinds of meetings and share out new use cases that people have invented or made, new tools that have been launched. I think the tools are changing every single day, it seems like.

Microsoft just launched something called Scout, and so how to train people on how to use these things. Somebody has gone into the GitHub repository and is teaching people how to pull things down from GitHub. This is a new skill for marketers and non-technical people. Did you think a year ago we were gonna be talking about GitHub repos on a creative leadership podcast?

Adam Morgan
Or that we even know what that is.

Jennifer Kattula
Exactly. We have a group of kind of super users who are a little bit more technical, and they’re finding all of these things, and then we get together on a Teams call, share it out, and then we have our Teams chats where people are sharing agents that they’re building and, ideas that they’re solving.

And then the final thing that I’ll say is we’re hiring differently. So we started to hire a role that we’re calling an AI builder role, and this is someone who is a functional expert in, say, marketing or sales and technical. And they’re almost sitting at the intersection of engineering and the business, where they understand the needs of the user so well that—and they’re so technical that they can build some of these workflows that are more for a full organization, not for a personal workflow, somebody just doing it for their small team, but really for an organization.

Like things that would take days to do historically are now happening like that. And these AI builders that we’ve hired are the ones that are architecting that because they’re both technical and understand the real pain points of what it means to be a salesperson or a marketer or what have you.

And every company is so different too. You know, we’re all working with our different tech stacks. We have different policies. So it’s hard to take something off the shelf. You really have to understand what does it take for a bill to become a law in today’s world, and what do we want the bill to become a law in, in the future.

Adam Morgan
So how are you dealing with this, these new AI builders and the intersection with them and like the traditional IT or tech department? ‘Cause we’re having a struggle with who owns what and who gets to override who and all of that.

Jennifer Kattula
Absolutely. I have to say it has to be a collaboration, that our engineering and our IT teams are sort of the arbiters of how our technology is used. So there’s no one going around the system. It’s more of when you think about building enterprise tools, a lot of times you build the widest use cases first—

Adam Morgan
Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Kattula
—that will touch everyone, and then you think about it, like then you go narrower, narrower, narrower.

I need a use case for my integrated marketing team to do campaigns for a specific audience. And you get so narrow that the engineering or the IT teams, it’s just too narrow for them. So this—these AI builders can really kind of think about a more narrow use cases that are specific but highly impactful to a smaller group of people.

And so they kind of sit in the middle and it’s super collaborative, but we have been very clear on decision rights of who is deciding on responsible AI. We have a fully responsible AI model internally and that we follow for everything that we launch. And then the arbiters of access to a lot of the technology and the tools would sit with IT and engineering.

Adam Morgan
Well, I want to dig in another aspect of building this environment that when we talked before, um, you talked about how you can’t delegate AI transformation. So as part of this, it’s more than just having share cases and having these new roles. What about leadership? What is your stance on this? How—You can’t delegate AI transformation, so as leaders, do we need to get our hands dirty?

Jennifer Kattula
You cannot delegate this. You can’t delegate it in your organization. With a lot of technology, say you’re gonna do a MarTech implementation—a lot of times the marketing leader is not running the lifecycle marketing campaigns. So you’re not in the tool every day.

You really want the people that are doing the work to have a say in what that technology system is, how it gets set up. With AI, my point of view is I can’t even have a point of view on what is possible and where it could go wildly wrong if I’m not in the tools making things myself. And the other piece of this is I can’t expect my team to take this transformation seriously if their leader isn’t talking about it and doesn’t have real visceral, like, connected use cases to my daily life.

So I think it’s two things. It’s a role model and it’s, um, having a very deep and informed point of view on how the technology can affect and strengthen the work that you’re doing and transform the work that you’re doing. I don’t think it’s possible to have that kind of point of view from the outside.

And the way I tackled it truly is I put 30 minutes on my day, on my calendar every day, and early it started with me like prompting. And this is where the pain was that I was talking about earlier, like so painful. Oh my God, I’m doing this prompt and it’s, like, really hard and it’s giving me terrible output.

Um, and then I shifted a little bit. I would do some training and then I shifted to, “How can I try to get a specific task done using AI instead of another tool, whether it’s email or writing a report or doing research?” And so that’s how I kind of added use cases and examples to my repertoire. And my big “aha” moment was 18 months ago.

I got a hold of like 250 trend reports. You know those trend reports that come out from, like, every single company? It’s like 20, 25 trends. It was 2025. And I had like 250 of them, and collectively it was probably like thousands and thousands of pages of really interesting information. And I built an agent to—it was basically a trend report explorer, so that I could explore the trend reports and then have really good insights when we were developing marketing.

And it was like magic. I could not believe it. We think about this use case today, 18 months later, and you’re like, “Obviously, it was such a magical moment for me that I—it kept me going, and I kept, like, imagining new things that I could do.

So I do say you really cannot delegate it. And I have put that sort of onus on myself to keep building and keep learning, and you can go in every single direction, and there’s so many things to learn, you will never learn everything. I do my best to do is try to be an expert in the tools that we have and just, you know, keep my skills fresh.

Because if you step out of it for a few months, you’re gonna be—like, a lot happens in a few months.

Adam Morgan
Yeah. I did a similar—I did it at the end of my day, I added a 40-minute block. And that’s not like every day I get to it. Like there’s always chaos. I think that it’s hard as a leader when you’re like in 16 meetings a day and you’re just, like, burning it out at both ends. So I get it, but I think it’s still very sage advice that you’ve gotta get in there and you’ve gotta experiment and try, or your team is never gonna trust that, that you’re serious about making this a big, important step. So I love that.

Jennifer Kattula
Absolutely.

Adam Morgan
Okay. You also talked about creative chaos. Let’s talk about this. Like, how can you give advice to leaders who like having more organized worlds? How much chaos, and what is the right amount of chaos that you’re allowing people to just create different things? Because like, I felt it. I was at an offsite last week, and we put together this kind of a hackathon, and it went off the rails, like, in a completely different direction than I was expecting. And I just had to smile and be like, “All right. I guess we’re exploring that now,” you know? So what’s the advice you have for allowing some of that chaos?

Jennifer Kattula
Yeah, definitely. We’ve had hackathons too, and they’re so fun, aren’t they? But yes, they do. They can go in like so many, so many different directions. I think what I’ve learned in the last year or so is going back to a lot of the basics Here’s what I mean. People respond to three things. Like, what are your three priorities? Inside each priority, what are the three goals? And I know I’m backing up to, like, a business concept. It’s, like, making sure you are so crystal clear on your North Star and what you’re actually trying to do so that the chaos has a framework to live within.

Adam Morgan
A direction. Yeah,

Jennifer Kattula
Yeah. I think maybe prior to that it was easier to be, I don’t know, loose around the edges with those priorities because you didn’t have tools that could create infinite possibilities for you.

Adam Morgan
Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Kattula
You have tools that are creating infinite possibilities, you have to be extremely precise about what those goals are and what great looks like and have the people on your team that are constantly pushing the upper limit of what’s possible.

So I think that’s another piece too, is that we’re not just like taking the outputs at face value. We’re saying, “Is this good? Is it making the thinking better? Is the customer experience gonna be even better? Is this incremental or is this step change?” So that judgment layer is absolutely critical, um, and making sure you’re solving the problem that is the right problem to solve, which is a human thing too.

Adam Morgan
You just brought up a couple of really interesting things, which is the human factor and kind of back to basics. So earlier we talked about generalists and specialists and we—and then you said, “Okay, but we still need some of the specialists with creatives.” And I know in our talk earlier we talked when AI is so good and you said like you can get high glossy experiences, is there a trend where we’re pushing back of like, maybe we don’t want it to be perfect?

Jennifer Kattula
I do think there is  a little bit of a trend around making sure that humanity is coming through in the work that we’re doing and the work we’re putting out into the world. And there’s always this, like, final edit, judgment, taste on, on the final product so that it feels like it came from one human to the other.

When we’re talking about marketing to the human, making sure that there’s humanity coming through. I feel like I’m seeing this across social media right now as well, where people are trying to be intentionally not polished in how they show up and how they look.

One of the ways we’re doing this, which is not AI at all, is we have an employee advocacy program called the Voice Program, and essentially we have like probably a group of like 50, 50, 60 people in our organization that are putting themselves out there on social media, and they are advocates for our brand, and they’re telling the brand story in their own voice.

They’re focusing on things that they’re interested in or are important to them, and kind of taking, you know, products, narratives, using their own, like, angle on things.

Adam Morgan
Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Kattula
And building their personal brand very authentically. Like, they have their own community, they are very authentic, and it’s such a win-win-win because they’re building their personal brand, it’s helping the company, and we’re reaching more people too, because the networks are all a big Venn diagram.

And I think going back to like the human element, that’s a way to tell a brand story through a human lens, where it’s a real human being connecting with another real human being who’s in their network or maybe not in their network, but has a point of view on something that is not like the approved marketing message.

Adam Morgan
Interesting. So to summarize, we’re not anti-AI. There’s a lot of great uses for it, but there is a component where you need that humanity. We like to call it, like, AI-resistant content cause people are pushing back a little bit. Like, they want all the things, but they wanna know, yeah, you’re speaking human to human and the imperfections, the wabi-sabi, like the, the personal brands, I think all of those elements truly add to that.

And I love that you’ve got this program. That’s really fascinating. I think it’s like even on the social—like, you go to LinkedIn and they’ll say, “Yeah, if someone’s personally posting, that’s better than a brand posting.” 

This has been a lovely conversation. We’re getting near the end of our time here. So first, if there’s one thing you could tell tomorrow’s leaders and encourage them how to be more creative or experiment more, like what would be your bit of advice for leaders today?

Jennifer Kattula: I wanna say two things. One is go through a little bit of the pain to onboard to new tools, whether it is tools that your company has or like a Claude code or something like that to learn something new. It’s a little bit scary, but it’s worth it. And so I think there’s a scary aspect, but once you’re over that hump, it’s really worth it.

And commit to the time to make something really interesting for yourself personally. Like, solve one of your personal problems and see what the technology can do for you, and I think that will really open up your eyes to what is possible for all parts of your life. And where you might end up wasting time, ’cause it’s actually really fun.

I can’t tell you how many things I’ve built that I’ve just thrown away, like thrown away ’cause I’m like, “This is cool, but I’m not gonna use it.” I don’t know if you’ve done that before.

Adam Morgan
Oh, I have a lot of garbage. Sometimes I’m afraid that my job is just making garbage. Like, that’s what I do. Well, Jennifer, that is super inspiring. I know I’ve actually got a writing group tonight, and I am gonna work on a project that I haven’t touched in a while. You’ve inspired me to go back and do that tonight, so

Jennifer Kattula
I love that you have a writing group.

Adam Morgan
Well, we just meet like—

Jennifer Kattula
An outlet.

Adam Morgan
—a month. It’s just to—

Jennifer Kattula
Yeah.

Adam Morgan
You know what it is. It’s like sometimes—And maybe that’s another point, is like, sometimes to motivate yourself is really hard. Like, going and working out in the mornings alone is really hard, but if you get a workout buddy, somehow it’s a little bit easier. So maybe there’s something of this idea of go out and get an AI building

Jennifer Kattula
I totally agree. I have to say some of my most fun conversations are when I get on a call with someone and say, “What are you building?” And then we’re just, like, vibing back and forth like, “Oh, I built this,” or, “I built that. How’d you do that?” It’s so fun in small group, in a small group format where it’s, you know, I’m not like raising my hand with a bunch of engineers.

Adam Morgan
Safe zone. Safe zone for— 

Jennifer Kattula
—safe space. Exactly.

Adam Morgan
I hope everyone listening is getting as much out of it as I have. Like, everything from all the topic of how you create an environment and how we, you know, encourage people, how you have to do it yourself and experiment and try and, and now we’re even, like, trying an AI experiment buddy. Like, there’s just so many great things. So thank you, thank you for all your great insight. It’s been amazing

Jennifer Kattula
This is awesome. Thank you so much for having me.

Adam Morgan
All right. Well, thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.