Chief AI Architect: How to Make AI Your Strategic Partner in 40 Minutes | Conor Grennan

Look, even if the technology doesn't change from today, it can still wipe out twenty-five percent of entry-level white-collar workforce. [upbeat music]

Conor Grennan is the Chief AI Architect and founder of AI Mindset, a training organization helping people to adopt AI into their daily life.

Reinventing a process gets noticed way more than you just doing more work.

New tools drop daily. You're using it a few times in a week and wondering, "Am I already behind? How do you even keep up? And if I don't figure this out, my job is gonna disappear?"

So first of all, don't stress, right? Everybody's going crazy with, "Oh, I just made this into this." Don't worry about that. To me, like a power user is using it across everything from home to work and back again, and also are having long conversations because this is not Google, this is a companion.

In this conversation, Conor reveals why we naturally misunderstand AI, how to transform AI from a search tool into your most powerful companion, how to navigate the changing job market, and what skills actually matter when nobody knows where the technology is headed. Conor, thank you so much for doing this. I'm so excited to be talking to you. You're teaching thousands of future business leaders AI. You're talking to huge companies, teaching their leadership. Can you introduce yourself in sixty seconds and tell me why people should be listening to you when it comes to AI?

Thank you so much for having me. It's really an honor to be on your, uh, show here. Yeah, so I'm Conor Grennan. I am Chief AI Architect over at NYU Stern School of Business here in, uh, New York City, and a lot of what I do is I run AI Mindset, which is a training consulting organization. We train big organizations and kind of like everybody, but on a completely new way of thinking about AI. It's a behavioral framework rather than just, "Hey, here's a few features a- and a tool that everybody should use," and the idea is when you're actually sitting with people in the room, a lot of them are just using it, you know, a couple of times a week or a few times a month-

Yeah

- or just for a couple of different things.

And for queries.

And for queries!

Just, just asking questions, really basic.

So, so that's, that's exactly, exactly... We can end the podcast right now. That was it, right?

[laughing]

Like, the idea is that when they are using it, um... Well, two things are sort of going wrong with the statistics, I think. First of all, imagine if you were in a big room, and you said, "Hey, who here is using Excel?" Every hand goes up, right? But if you say, "Who's using, uh, it and knows at least forty formulas and has done one half-million-dollar deal?" Like, three investment banker hands go up. So everybody's, quote, unquote, "using it," but who's actually really using it to change how they work and how they do everything? To me, like a power user is using it across everything from home to work and back again, and also using it, like, thirty times a day, and also are having long conversations because, as you said, this is not Google. It's not Google Search.