#538 AI and Learning: No Adult Left Behind - George Pillari interviewed by Niels Brabandt | Artikel von Niels Brabandt
AI and Learning: No Adult Left Behind - George Pillari interviewed by Niels Brabandt
Article by Niels Brabandt
Artificial intelligence is no longer a specialist topic reserved for technology departments, innovation labs, or research teams. It has entered ordinary professional life. It assists with presentations, job applications, research, industry analysis, healthcare documentation, aviation, autonomous mobility, and everyday problem-solving. The decisive question for business leaders is therefore no longer whether AI will matter. It is whether adults in the workforce will learn quickly enough to use it with confidence, judgement, and responsibility.
In this interview, Niels Brabandt speaks with George Pillari about Pillari's book No Adult Left Behind and the wider challenge of AI learning for professionals, organisations, and society. The conversation is not a technical lecture about algorithms. It is a practical, business-focused discussion about adoption, productivity, career resilience, skills erosion, fear, and the responsibility of leaders to ensure that people are not left behind while technology accelerates.
George Pillari argues that AI is comparable to earlier transformational technologies such as Excel, the internet, radio, television, and the telephone, but with an adoption curve that is faster and more pervasive. Niels Brabandt frames the leadership challenge clearly: AI is here, it came to stay, and the real issue is how people learn to use it well.
The interview question: AI is learning. Are you?
Niels Brabandt opens the interview by positioning the central leadership question: AI is here, but how do people learn AI and stay up to date? He introduces George Pillari as an expert on the matter and immediately connects the discussion to Pillari's book, No Adult Left Behind.
Pillari explains that the motivation for the book came from two striking experiences in the same week. In one situation, a successful and intelligent friend could not work out how to connect a new stereo system. Pillari took a picture of the back panel, sent it to AI, and quickly received the answer. The friend, by contrast, had no idea what had just happened. For Pillari, that moment illustrated the risk that capable adults, including accomplished professionals, may struggle if they do not understand how the world is shifting.
In another situation, Pillari observed someone who considered himself highly experienced with AI conversing with Grok as though it were an individual, using phrases such as please and thank you in a research dialogue. The two experiences revealed a significant gap: some adults do not know where to begin, while others may use AI frequently but still misunderstand what it is and how it should be approached.
Fear of AI may be the greater career risk
Niels Brabandt asks Pillari about people who avoid AI because they fear it will replace them. Pillari's answer is direct: those are probably the people who will be hurt most. His comparison is drawn from sport. Athletes who play too carefully and think too much are often the ones who get injured. In the context of work, fear-driven avoidance is not protection. It is exposure.
Pillari compares AI to Excel and the internet: technologies that became embedded in work and changed expectations. Yet he argues that AI is moving even faster. For decision-makers, the implication is clear. AI avoidance will not preserve capability. It may erode relevance.
The interview therefore reframes AI learning as professional risk management. Employees, managers, executives, consultants, trainers, advisers, and business owners do not need to become computer scientists. They do, however, need enough practical fluency to understand what AI can do, where it helps, where it fails, and how it changes the performance standard in their field.
No Adult Left Behind: the case for practical accessibility
One of the strengths of the interview is its emphasis on accessibility. Pillari stresses that his book is not intended as an academic or highly technical work. He says reviewers have highlighted the conversational style and the ease with which the book can be read. His point is important for organisational learning: most adults do not want technical jargon. They want to understand what matters, what to do next, and how AI can help them in real life.
This is a crucial insight for leadership development. Many AI initiatives fail not because the technology is unavailable, but because the learning experience is intimidating, abstract, or disconnected from daily work. Employees do not need another vague declaration that AI will transform everything. They need credible, practical use cases that help them solve actual problems.
Pillari's title, No Adult Left Behind, therefore functions as both a warning and a leadership principle. Adults who built successful careers before this technology became mainstream must not be dismissed, patronised, or abandoned. They need a path into AI that respects their experience while helping them acquire new competence.
Productivity: from PowerPoint agony to AI-supported drafting
Niels Brabandt asks what readers can expect from the book, particularly in relation to productivity. Pillari highlights one of the most familiar pain points in business: creating presentations. Many professionals have the knowledge, data, spreadsheet material, interview insights, and strategic understanding in their heads, yet struggle to turn it into a concise slide deck.
Pillari's view is pragmatic. AI can take the raw material, create a draft structure, propose ten slides, adjust the focus, and even change the colour scheme. He is careful not to present the output as finished work. He notes that the draft still needs to be pushed around for an hour or two. Yet the value is clear: AI removes much of the initial agony and allows the professional to spend more time refining substance rather than wrestling with formatting.
For business leaders, this matters because productivity is not only about speed. It is also about reducing friction in knowledge work. AI can help people move from scattered information to structured output more quickly. The competitive advantage does not come from copying AI output. It comes from combining human expertise with AI-supported drafting and then applying judgement.
Career resilience and the battle of the bots
The interview also moves into careers, CVs, and job hunting. Niels Brabandt gives the example of a friend whose CV contained several typos despite evident effort. Pillari responds that typos are only part of the problem. The larger issue is that employers increasingly use AI to sort through candidates before a human sees an application.
Pillari calls this the battle of the bots. If employers use AI in selection processes, applicants who refuse to use AI are effectively competing with one arm tied behind their back. His recommendation is practical: place the CV and the job description into AI and ask it to tailor the CV to the role, while explicitly instructing it not to invent anything.
This point is particularly relevant for HR, talent acquisition, leadership teams, and career development professionals. AI is changing both sides of the labour market. Organisations use it to filter, rank, and manage applications. Candidates use it to refine their materials. The ethical and practical challenge is to preserve accuracy, fairness, and authenticity while recognising that AI-assisted application processes are already part of the employment landscape.
The everyday use case: never pick up a manual again
When Niels Brabandt asks Pillari for concrete daily-life examples, Pillari offers a memorable one: he would never pick up a user manual again. His advice is to take a picture of a device or appliance, explain the problem to AI, and use the response as a practical guide.
This example is valuable because it demystifies AI. It shows that AI adoption does not have to begin with a strategic transformation programme, a large software implementation, or a complex data science project. It can begin with a small, concrete problem that gives people a sense of control.
For organisations, this is a powerful training principle. Adoption improves when people experience usefulness quickly. Once employees see AI solving a real problem, the conversation changes. It moves away from fear and abstraction towards curiosity and capability.
Industries are already changing: medicine, aviation, military systems, and autonomous cars
Pillari also explains that adults need to understand how AI is shaping different industries, even if they do not understand the underlying technology in technical detail. He discusses autonomous cars, where systems are programmed to respond rapidly to crisis situations, such as a dog running in front of the vehicle. The point is not that every person must become an autonomous vehicle engineer. The point is that professionals should understand how decision-making systems are entering the physical world.
He also discusses military contexts, where full autonomy is still constrained and humans remain involved in decisions to act. This distinction matters because it highlights a broader governance question: where should automation support human judgement, and where must humans retain control?
Medicine provides another practical example. Pillari notes that many doctor's offices now use AI recording to summarise consultations, extracting the meaningful information so the doctor does not spend hours writing notes after a short appointment. In aviation, he points to a long history of automation and AI-heavy systems, including autopilot. These examples show that AI is not a future abstraction. It is already embedded in high-stakes sectors.
Skills erosion: the hidden cost of automation
One of the most important leadership themes in the interview is skills erosion. Pillari discusses aviation as an example: if pilots fly manually for only a few minutes per flight and rely heavily on autopilot for the rest, a crisis can create an inverse problem. When the automated system fails, the human may not have enough recent practice to respond effectively.
This is a serious lesson for every organisation implementing AI. Automation can increase efficiency, but it can also reduce human practice. If professionals become dependent on AI for analysis, writing, diagnosis, decision support, communication, coding, or strategy, their own skills may weaken unless organisations deliberately preserve practice, review, and accountability.
The business implication is not to reject AI. It is to design AI adoption intelligently. Leaders should ask: Which skills must remain strong in humans? Where can AI take over repetitive friction? Where do we still need manual competence, ethical judgement, contextual awareness, and professional scepticism? Skills erosion should be part of every serious AI governance discussion.
The leadership responsibility: adults need pathways, not slogans
The interview between George Pillari and Niels Brabandt makes one point unmistakably clear: AI learning cannot be left to chance. Business leaders should not assume that adults will simply figure it out. Nor should they shame experienced professionals for not being instantly fluent in a technology that has accelerated at extraordinary speed.
The responsible approach is to create practical learning pathways. These should include everyday use cases, role-specific applications, ethical boundaries, data protection awareness, quality control, and clear standards for what AI may and may not do. Training must be accessible without being superficial. It must respect the existing experience of adults while helping them build new competence.
No Adult Left Behind is therefore more than a book title. It is a challenge to leadership. Organisations that want productivity, resilience, and innovation must invest in adult AI literacy. Not as a fashionable initiative, but as a core capability for the future of work.
Conclusion: AI literacy is now business literacy
This interview matters because it refuses to treat AI as either magic or menace. George Pillari presents AI as a practical tool that can help adults solve everyday problems, improve productivity, navigate careers, understand industries, and adapt to a changing world. Niels Brabandt frames the discussion for leaders who must now decide how their organisations will learn.
The message for decision-makers is clear. AI literacy is becoming business literacy. The adults most at risk are not those who ask simple questions. They are those who refuse to engage. The organisations most at risk are not those still learning. They are those that confuse avoidance with prudence.
AI is learning. The decisive question, as Niels Brabandt puts it in the interview, is whether we are learning too.
Niels Brabandt
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More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.
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Podcast and Videocast Transcript
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
AI is here and it came to stay. The question is, how do we all learn AI and how do we actually stay up to date? And we have an expert on the matter with us here today. Hello and welcome, George Pillari.
George Pillari
Thank you. Good to be here.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Thank you very much for taking the time. You just wrote the book about AI and it has a very special title, No Adult Left Behind. I think that's, that's addressing a very important point here. AI is learning. Are you?
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
First question, of course, what was your motivation to write a book about AI at this point in time where so many people are writing something about AI, sometimes even by using AI? What was your core motivation here?
George Pillari
Well, I had true motivation, like a bolt of lightning hit me, honestly, where in the same week, I worked with a friend who was trying to install a new stereo system in his house. And he was flabbergasted, couldn't figure out where the cables plug in or whatever else. I took up my phone, I took a picture of the back of the panel, sent it up to the AI, and in, you know, a minute we had the whole thing figured out. He had no idea what happened.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Okay.
George Pillari
No. And this is a smart guy, successful. This is why I sort of say no adult left behind, because you have a whole generation of people that have done well, but without, without any of these technologies. So how are they gonna do now as the world starts shifting?
George Pillari
In the same week, I had another person who just kind of is an expert on AI. All right? And he sent me a dialogue he had with Grok on a research topic. And I looked in it and he was writing, yes, please, thank you. He was conversing with it as if it was an individual. So I had those two experiences in the same week. And I said, wow, there's quite a gap here.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Excellent. So you know that there are quite a number of people who know that AI is there, but they are rather scared. And they say, I'm not engaging with it because as soon as I bring this to work or anywhere else, I think it's going to replace me. So what is your take on people saying, I'd rather stay out of this because my fear is it's going to take away my job?
George Pillari
Those are probably the people that are gonna get hurt the most. You know, there's a saying in sports, right? If you're an athlete, if you try to play carefully and all that, that's when you get hurt, okay? When you think too much.
George Pillari
This is just like Excel. This is like the internet. These are technologies that are very, this one very quickly getting embedded. Okay, go all the way back to the invention of radio. And then television, telephone, each of these technologies had an adoption cycle that was many, many times faster than the previous technology. And AI is gonna swamp 'em all.
George Pillari
Okay. Look at the numbers. There's, you know, 800 million users and all this kind of stuff. So I think these people are, they're just, they're naive and, and they're just a little uneducated.
George Pillari
So the book is supposed to nudge them cuz I have a lot of friends that fit in that category. Yeah. All right. And I feel bad for them. So the book is supposed to say, get around, get down on your computer or your phone, play with it, ask it some questions. Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to spend $20 a month for— you can have all of the world's knowledge in the palm of your hand for $20 a month.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Absolutely. Very good point here. And your book especially talks about productivity or careers or also certain industries. What can people expect when they buy your book now? Because, you know, there are a lot of books out there where many people say, I see the title. I just need to know what's actually in there for me. Let's talk about productivity. Anything in there?
George Pillari
Yes, absolutely. The hardest part of any job, I think, for most people, especially for me, is creating presentations, all right? Where you might have a lot of really good information in your head. You might have a lot of good spreadsheets, interview data, and then you got to put it into a PowerPoint. It's horrible.
George Pillari
I mean, there's many, many new technologies that have popped up to make this less painful, new systems that are better than PowerPoint. But why bother? I just feed it all up into the AI and I say, I need 10 slides, here's the focus I want. And once you get back, it's a pretty good draft. You still have to push it around for an hour or two, but oh my goodness, all that agony. You
George Pillari
can just say, hey, change the color scheme. You don't have to go into the settings and the master and all the— oh, That's all horrible stuff. It's all gone. So most of us have the knowledge and the information and we know what we want to say, but nailing it in a concise slide presentation is where it breaks down. That's a big one. And the other is on resumes and job hunting.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Lots of work there. I just had a friend who gave me his resume and I said, look, I see that you put work in there. However, I found 6 typos in there. That probably is not going to make a great look.
George Pillari
Yeah, typos are the least of the issues, but that's a big one.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Okay.
George Pillari
People are still sloppy. And what's going on is you have employers are using AI to sort through candidates. All right. You never, you never hit a human, right? At, at any kind of any company of any size. So, you know, you have to fight back, right? And use the AI to your advantage. Say, you know, put your resume in, put in the job description from the company and say, hey, tailor my resume to match this job description and put a little footnote in, don't make anything up. Okay? And now you have a puncher's chance. Okay? You're submitting something that lines up with what the AI's looking to see. I call it the battle of the bots, right? If you're gonna have one arm tied behind your back, you're not gonna win. So fight back, use the AI to polish up anything that you're submitting for a job.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Absolutely brilliant here. And of course, I have to ask, when people now say, look, I see— maybe they look you up and they find you on LinkedIn, and then they see you have a pretty good— I mean, former partner, et cetera. So massive career here.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And some people might think, I'm not that much of an academic actually, so maybe this read is too complicated for me. What kind of read can people expect when they open the book and just start with it?
George Pillari
Okay, I'll tell you not what I think, okay? But I got about 50 reviews on Amazon so far, right? The book's only been out a few weeks. And almost all of them mention something about the conversational style that is my voice.
George Pillari
You know, I write a weekly blog, right, called The Cautionary. And so I'm used to getting the message across. Concisely without a lot of extra language. And people don't want the technical jargon, okay? They want to just know, you know, what time it is. They don't want to know how the watch works.
George Pillari
So I think from a readability standpoint, I'm getting really good reviews from people, friends, and even people I don't know who post reviews on Amazon telling me, I like the style, it's really easy to get through.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Excellent. So when people now think, okay, can you give me a taste there? When I say, okay, maybe 1, 2, 3 points which will definitely help me in my daily life.
George Pillari
Okay, that's, that's easy. I would never, I never pick up a user manual again. Okay, ever. When you buy any kind of electronics or any kind of appliance, never touch the manual. Take a picture of the device, feed it up to the AI, tell it your problem, and you'll get an answer. That's number one.
George Pillari
Number two you got to understand what's, what's shaping different industries. You don't have to understand the technologies. Like, for example my favorite chapter is— my favorite chapter in the book is about the autonomous cars and how, you know, everything is programmed in to the brains of the car so that when the car hits a crisis situation, a dog runs in front of the car or something, it already knows what to do. It doesn't have to think. And it just has to, you know, run the program in a millisecond and stop the car. Whereas a human would have to process what's going on, make a decision, and it just takes way too long.
George Pillari
So I think there's some really interesting knowledge there because we're all afraid of autonomous cars to a degree. We hear the horror stories. I think if you understand that and you look at some of the stuff in the military chapter about how, you know, you still have things that are not fully autonomous, you still have humans making decisions to push the button. Very important.
George Pillari
And then, of course, in medicine and in aviation, the technologies are pervasive. AI technologies. I mean, you go to the doctor's office now, almost all of them have an AI recording going on. All right, and what the AI recording does is it, it synthesizes the conversation down to the meaningful stuff so the doctor doesn't have to spend 2 hours after a 20-minute appointment writing up notes.
George Pillari
And aviation's been AI heavy for a long time, and I think it's interesting to just learn the pieces of how AI is fitting in there and where it doesn't fit, because there's a whole discussion of something called skills erosion, whereas if you're used to having something automated, like on autopilot for airlines. You know, they only fly the plane 3 or 5 minutes per flight manually. The rest is all autopilot.
George Pillari
So when you hit a crisis and the autopilot fails, you have a reverse problem, an inverse problem here where the human doesn't know what to do because they haven't had enough flying time without the AI guiding anything. So there's some interesting real-world stuff in there that make you look at things a little differently.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Excellent. I think these are the perfect final words. You saw, this is the book that's going to help you on AI. So at the end of this podcast and videocast, there's only one thing left for me to say. George Pillari, thank you very much for your time.
George Pillari
Thank you. Appreciate it.