Last Updated on August 20, 2026 by Fly High Coaching
AI skills have quickly become one of the most talked about topics in every industry, but most professionals are only scratching the surface of what AI can actually do for their careers. Many executives use it for email or content creation and stop there, missing the deeper ways it can change how they think, decide, and solve problems. Do you know how to use AI as a real thinking partner, or are you still treating it like a search engine?
In this episode, you will learn more about the AI skills that can actually move your career forward. Our host Porschia, alongside guest Dr. Steven Kirch, will share their insight on why learning to use AI is no longer optional for professionals who want to stay competitive, and what happens to the people who wait.
They will also discuss 3 commonly overlooked ways to use AI as a thinking partner, including asking for expert perspectives, surfacing second-order consequences of decisions, and requesting options instead of answers. The conversation covers soft skills that AI cannot replace, like empathy, clear communication, and human connection, and why those matter more now than they did before AI entered the workplace.
Dr. Steven Kirch is a former high-tech executive with a PhD in physics who now helps small and mid-sized businesses grow through his Profit Minds Growth System. He also serves on the board of directors for the Gratitude Network, empowering nonprofit leaders with strategy and global community.
What you’ll learn:
- What AI skills professionals need right now and why most people are only using a fraction of what is available
- How to use AI as a thinking partner rather than just a tool for doing things faster
- 3 approaches to AI that help you make better decisions, not just quicker ones
- Why the soft skills of empathy, communication, and human connection matter more in an AI-driven workplace
- How to check AI output properly so speed does not come at the cost of accuracy
Resources:
- Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Today, we are talking about AI skills to enhance your career with Dr. Steven Kirsh. After a career as a successful executive in high tech, Dr. Steven Kirsh brings his passion for building people and organizations to his small and mid-sized business clients. His Profit Minds Growth System leverages the power of generative AI to transform business with a unique blend of enhancing profit, accelerating productivity, and building scale, [00:01:00] putting more money in his clients’ pockets while giving them freedom to live the life they’ve dreamed of when they started their business.
Porschia : Beyond his business acumen, Dr. Kirsh is deeply committed to social impact, serving on the board of directors for the Gratitude Network, which empowers nonprofit leaders and their teams with the strategy, guidance, and global community they need. Hi, Steve. How are you today?
Dr. Steven: Doing well, Portia. Thanks for having me here.
Porschia : I’m excited. You are so interesting. There’s so many things we could talk about, but today we are talking about AI skills to enhance your career. But before we get into that, we wanna know a little more about you. So tell me about seven-year-old Steve.
Dr. Steven: Yeah, seven-year-old Steve. Boy that’s a while ago.
I think the- Probably the most important things to know about me I was always inquisitive. I always… I loved sports. I loved [00:02:00] baseball more than anything else when I was seven. In fact, an interesting story about me, it’s a little bit earlier than that. I saw Pete Rose play his very first professional baseball game in Cincinnati.
I was four.
Porschia : Wow.
Dr. Steven: But I remember it because my mom was impacted. It’s one of my earliest memories. My mom really didn’t like this kid from across town. A- because he replaced a really popular player on the Reds, and- … and then he walked his first at-bat. And I don’t know if you know anything about baseball, but Pete, Charlie Hustle, he r- ran down the first baseline after he got a walk, and my mom decided he was probably gonna be okay.
Yes. But so but the other thing, music was a very important part of my life always. It still is today. And at seven I was already in organized musical ensembles. I sang at church. I sang in elementary school in the choir. My dad was a singer and And I was… I studied the piano because my [00:03:00] grandmother, my mom’s mom, taught piano.
And I was playing the piano. So those were the things that were important to me at that time. School was always important. Always learning new things. I just love doing that, and still do t- today.
Porschia : Yeah, so it sounds like you’re very well-rounded, Steve, is what I’m hearing. So tell us about some highlights or pivotal moments in your career before you started your own business
Dr. Steven: So I’ll point to a number of things.
So my dad was an engineer went to the University of Cincinnati, which is where I grew up. And he was a co-op student. This is a work-study program. I don’t know how many people are familiar with it, but you go to school for a term, and then you work for a term, and you go to school for a term, and you– and that.
It’s typically a five-year that, So my dad convinced me that this was the way I needed to go to school, even though I wasn’t gonna be an engineer. I really wanted, I, you [00:04:00] know– I wanted to be an engineer, but I didn’t know what kind of engineer, so I went into physics, right? And my co-op job, I went to Georgia Tech.
My co-op job was in suburban Maryland outside of DC, working for the Communication Satellite Corporation, COMSAT interestingly enough, measuring solar cells at that point in time. These things went little tiny squares that went on satellites. But what I discovered was that in order to do the kind of work that I wanted, really wanted to do, I had to get a PhD.
So off to graduate school, then I got a job with IBM and then Intel lured me to California, where I was at Intel for just shy of 22 years. The really pivotal thing in my career at Intel I was a little more than 10 years into my career and I was chief of staff to the factory in Santa Clara, California, where I was working when the announcement was made that we were gonna shut down the factory.
This was a big deal. There were 800 people. I was chief of staff to the folks that [00:05:00] were running the or- the factory. And we made the announcement that we were going to shut down the factory, but we had 18 months of work that we had to do, so we needed to keep people around. And what we did when we made that announcement, we committed to the organization that we would help every employee find a successful new beginning What was really interesting about that was our turnover is typical for Silicon Valley.
Our turnover was typically in the high teens, somewhere between 15% and 20% annually. We made that announcement, and our turnover dropped to 5% because it was clear we cared about the people and that really shifted for me as a manager, as a leader in Intel, to understand the importance of caring about people.
And I [00:06:00] also discovered, while I was at Intel, a love of teaching, and both of those things together led me to develop the kind of business that I developed once I left Intel in 2016.
Porschia : Wow. Yeah. That’s a very powerful story. And I can also hear just in your voice how important that commitment was to help people find their next opportunity.
So you have a very interesting background. What motivated you to start your own business?
Dr. Steven: I was offered the opportunity to retire from Intel. It was earlier than I really wanted to. But they made it financially, So th- they made… Th- there was an enticement in that, right?
And so I said, “Okay.” But I also knew that I didn’t want to just completely disconnect from business. I, I like to… I consider myself permanently semi-retired in the sense that as long as my [00:07:00] mind and body allow me to do this, I will continue to provide value to give back to society. I’ve been incredibly blessed throughout my life.
And so I have an opportunity to take what I have learned and to pass it on to other people. And so I hung out a shingle. I’ve been now a certified facilitator of the Covey Seven Habits for prob- about 30 years now. So it was 20 years at that point. And really enjoyed teaching that and I thought I could really help small businesses incorporate productivity improvements and that kind of thing in, in, so that’s what I started with. That was the inspiration was an opportunity to give back and an opportunity to to have a little fun.
Porschia : Great. So how did you decide to focus on skill development with AI as one of your areas of expertise now?
Dr. Steven: Yeah, [00:08:00] so- again, always learning new things.
I, my seven-year-old self, right? I loved learning new things. Same thing, my, my dad worked at Procter & Gamble and d-didn’t talk about this. My seven-year-old self, I had a chemistry lab. My dad provided me all the glassware ’cause he worked in a lab, and they would throw out the glassware, and he said I’ll take it home to my son.
He’ll play with it.” I was always doing stuff like that. So I continue throughout my, my entrepreneurial journey of learning new things. How to grow profits, how to scale a business. And when I came across this opportunity to do the AI thing it was relatively early in the post-GPT announcement, post-OpenAI thing there were two pieces of it that said, “Steve, this is what you need to do.”
One is it’s such a productivity improvement, and the course that we offer the [00:09:00] training, the, the way we help people learn to use AI in their job, in their life, it’s so groundbreaking. Even today the work that we do, I haven’t seen any other program that’s like it. But in addition to that, my daughter, Susie spent…
She has a master’s in mathematics and spent several years working at an AI startup, essentially ran their patent and research team, and has two patents plus four more pending in AI. And so the combination of the newness, the novelty, the opportunity to learn about AI and the value that I saw that it could bring to my clients, and the fact that I could then hire my daughter and work with her she’s amazing.
And so those things gi-gives me a leg up, I think, on most other organizations that are trying to help people figure [00:10:00] out how to get a handle on AI. That was more than two years ago and we’ve been having a great time working together and made a great deal of difference in a number of companies
Porschia : Absolutely.
And yes, I think Susie is great. We’ve discussed aspects of career development on the podcast before. Back in episode 83, we talked about taking ownership of your career through career development. How do you think learning new skills supports career development?
Dr. Steven: I think, that, that’s an interesting question for me because I am a lifetime learner, and I can’t imagine not wanting to learn new skills.
But I think the, the critical piece today is AI’s not gonna take your job, but somebody who has learned to use AI in your role may very well, or at the [00:11:00] very least they could leapfrog you and take that promotion away from you. If a company’s doing layoffs because of AI is enabling them to do it with fewer people, they’re not gonna get rid of the people who know how to use AI because that’s what they want to leverage,
so there’s a whole bunch of things specifically around why you would want to do career development for AI. I think anybody that sits in their job and does not learn and grow, their value doesn’t increase for the company. So it’s critical. Even if you don’t wanna learn AI, and I get that, some people don’t that’s fine.
We can talk about the pros and cons of that later. But you need to take responsibility for your own development in order to increase the value that you provide to your employer
Porschia : Agreed. And to your point, [00:12:00] if you’re not doing that, your employer is either looking for someone else who can or, another system or another tool.
It’s important to think ahead there. Over the years as a coach and organizational consultant, I’ve seen many clients have issues with change management and adopting new technology. What do you think are some clues that someone might see at work that they need to improve on their own skills with AI?
Dr. Steven: I think the press has, has helped a lot in, in this regard, that there, there’s an awful lot of hype out there, an awful lot of, everybody’s using AI. The truth is, not everybody’s using AI. I think the latest statistics are something on the order of maybe 10% of people are really using AI.
Yeah, there are people, lots of people dabbling in it, but lots of people saying, “Oh, yeah, I use it for email, I use it for con- for content creation.” Yeah, but that’s scratching the [00:13:00] surface. So I think the, the most important thing is to make sure that you stay up with the times. And like it or not,
aI is here to stay. . And the other thing is that the AI that we have today is the worst that it will ever be, and it’s improving at a phenomenal rate. And so our thesis is, and what we’ve seen, is that people who learn AI today and start using it and have that sort of mindset of, “How can AI help me do…
How can I partner with AI to do whatever it is that I need to do?” Those people, as the AI improves, they also are able to improve alongside it. But the people who don’t are the people that get passed by
Porschia : Yes. So what do you think are some of the top skills that people need to embrace with AI to enhance their [00:14:00] career?
Dr. Steven: Y- we talk about this a lot when we do the workshops or we do, as we start to introduce our program. First is you need to treat the AI as a patient, tireless intern And what I mean by that is you can ask the AI to do the same menial task over and over again 17 times, and it will never complain.
In fact, it will be cheerful. “Thanks for asking me to do this again. Oh, I see I could do it better.” All of this kind of stuff, right? But you need to check the output, so having a good handle on how to check, how to double-check the output, because it will sound very authoritative even when it’s wrong.
So that’s one. The other is if you don’t know [00:15:00] how AI can help, ask it. That’s not something that I do. I don’t go around saying, “Hey, Steve, how can you help me solve this problem?” But you can ask the AI, and it will tell you. In fact, it will generally give you half a dozen different ways it can help,
[00:16:00] and the other one is don’t ask AI for the answer Ask it for several options. Give me three choices of how I could solve this problem, or three different ways I could approach what I’m trying to [00:17:00] do. What I have found is that it will almost always give me two or even three ways that I would never have thought of.
And then I can use my critical thinking skills to decide, oh, I like this one, I don’t like this one so much. This one’s really good. How about if we combine one and three together? Can we do that? So the opportunity there. So I think … And the other important thing is don’t be afraid Don’t be afraid of what it can do.
Think of it as a thinking partner. We can talk about this a little bit later, right? What, how do you utilize AI in, in, in the best way?
Porschia : Yeah, I love that. I’d love for you to tell us now what would you say are some tips to utilize AI as a thinking partner? So obviously you gave us one already, asking it for three different approaches [00:18:00] to-
…
Porschia : A solution. But what are some other ways that someone might go about doing that?
Dr. Steven: Yeah. So another, another great way is to ask for, what would world experts… You don’t even have to know who they are. Just give me four or five world-class experts on this topic that maybe they’ve written books or they’ve given TED Talks or, but experts, what would they recommend and why?
And why are they qualified to do that? And again if there’s somebody that you know about that you wanna make sure is included, you can say that. Or if there’s somebody that you don’t want to include, you can say, I don’t like the, this person does, so don’t include that,
you can always filter it that way. And then ask it… In fact, when we get to the end here I’ll be offering folks a free gift, which will incorporate all of these things into a single prompt, a single workflow. So s- another thing you can do is if you’re trying to make a decision [00:19:00] Ask for, ask it for what are the things that I’m overlooking as I’m trying to make this decision?
Here are the things I’m f- the factors I’m considering. What’s a factor that I haven’t thought about? What are the first-order consequences of this decision? What are the second-order consequences of this decision, the, the, those first-order consequences have consequences, those are the second-order consequences,
what are the risk factors? W- how can I mitigate, right? If I’m gonna go this direction, I’m not going this direction, so what’s the risk of doing this versus this? And what are the mitigation strategies I could… so really asking it to help you think through all the different ways of looking at a problem, that to me is the biggest advantage that AI has.
Most people try to use AI to do stuff faster, and they focus on, what can I do quickly? That’s why [00:20:00] email and content generation are the things that people are focusing on. But if you really learn to leverage AI, you learn to figure out how to do things better. It may not take you less time, but you can more thoroughly think through a problem.
You can make sure you’re not missing something. And because AI has this much broader view, it will come up, again, with directions and ideas that you would never have thought of. And it can allow you to more thoroughly consider all the options, all the alternatives, all the risks. So that’s, … To me, those are the kinds of things that I mean by, by using it like a thinking partner
Porschia : So from your perspective, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve seen professionals and executives have with [00:21:00] improving their skills with AI?
Dr. Steven: I touched on one of them, and that is that they focus on doing things faster. And you have to take time to, to verify the quality of the result and to make sure that the result that it’s giving you, make sure you check its references, have it tell you where it found things online and and then check those websites.
Make sure they’re real websites, and make sure that they actually say what the AI told you it was gonna… the conclusion that it came to or the, the output that it’s given you. So you need to take the time to check, and that slows things down, and people are really impatient.
They say, “AI should do this and not get it wrong.” If you gave it to a human, they could get it wrong too. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that the human probably gets it wrong more often than the AI. But the AI, if you just [00:22:00] throw it out there without checking it, are you gonna get the same result as if you had a human do it who didn’t really know what was going on?
Because remember, AI doesn’t actually understand anything. All it’s doing is predicting the next most likely word in a sentence in the context in which it finds itself. So if it gets a word that’s slightly inappropriate, slightly not the most common, but the next most common, right? And then the next word is a little bit further off, and the next word’s a little bit further off, that’s how you go off the rails.
That’s what we call it hallucinating, right? That’s what happens. But you’ve gotta check. So those are the big things. They’re being impatient. They don’t check it themselves. And the other piece of it is to make sure it has the context that it needs. And another pro tip, [00:23:00] you can ask the AI to say, “If there’s any additional context that you need to help me, ask me for it before you go to the answer, before you give me the result that I’m looking for.”
Porschia : Great. I think those are very helpful. So with technology and AI changing so fast, many people feel overwhelmed by all of the technical skills they could be learning. In your opinion, what are some of the soft skills or non-technical skills that will be needed in the future?
Dr. Steven: That’s a great question.
I get that a lot because we’re developing a career institute, AI career institute, to help people build the AI skills that they need for that future growth, for that future career. The things that you really need to make sure you handle, that you are good at, things like empathy. AI [00:24:00] can simulate it, but it’s not real, and you can tell.
If somebody’s having a conversation with you, if you’re having a conversation with an AI bot and it tries to be empathetic, you can tell it’s not real, right? So work on your human connection skills. Communication, really important skill. How do you talk to people in a way that makes them feel like they’re important?
Because they are and, so I would say those, th- those soft skills, that, that may seem funny coming from a PhD in physics but, that’s one of those things that I learned in my career at Intel was how important all those soft skills are. I was pulled into organizations because they were falling apart, and I was asked to lead and hold them together because I understood the importance of caring for the people.
So [00:25:00] empathy, clear communication. That doesn’t mean you have to be soft. You can be a good communicator and not be a mamby-pamby kind of, milk toast sort of person, right? You can still… you can stick up for yourself. But those… Making that human connection, really important, a- and it’s hard to do over Zoom.
It’s hard to do so get out there, talk to people. I know there are companies that are requiring workers to come back to the office and some people are grumbling about it, saying, “Hey, I can be just as efficient as when I’m working at home. In fact, I can be more efficient because I don’t have to spend an hour in the car each way,” right?
I get that, right? ‘Cause I was one of those people that commuted. I rode the train so that I could work while I was… instead of having to drive. But going to the office certainly a couple of days a week to make those human [00:26:00] connections, to have those water cooler conversations that it’s impossible to do that over Zoom.
We can have a great business conversation, but the relationship that we develop as humans in connection, I like you, Portia, but it’s not the same.
Porschia : Yeah. Yeah. I get it. I get it. Tell us a bit more about your business. Yeah.
Dr. Steven: So Profit Minds, our goal is to help small to mid-size businesses grow and scale by leveraging the power of AI, and we do that by infusing AI at every level of the company, not just in IT, not just for coders but for HR, for the executive assistant, for the C-suite, for engineers, everybody.
Every knowledge worker can do [00:27:00] everything that they do faster, easier, and often better by leveraging AI. And this is more than just a slogan for us. We actually measure the ROI, the return on the investment, and we guarantee a positive return. Now, how do we do that? Our 10-week black belt program, the AI Transformation Method program each week is a belt.
It’s more and more sophisticated ways of working with AI. It starts at the very beginning, what is it that you need to do? And then how do you interact with AI? And then, how do you use it, starting to use it as a thinking partner, starting to create expanded roles for yourself, things like that, and you get all the way to the black belt, right?
But the trick is we give [00:28:00] you your time back. So it takes about an hour a week in the course and your homework is to use what you’ve learned on things that you already need to do. So you’re gonna get that time back. In fact, we had one cohort that went through that, that projected an average savings per employee in the cohort of 80 hours saved after the first hour of training And how do we do that?
We ask you, “What did you do?” This is in order to get your belt, you have to tell us, what did you do? How long did it used to take you before you had AI? How as long does it take you now ’cause you’re using AI? And how often do you do it? If you give us those numbers, we can tell you exactly how much time you’re going to save, right?
And so that enables us to guarantee that ROI [00:29:00] for the, the, for the company. The other thing that we’re doing is, and I alluded to it earlier, is we’re working with professionals who are worried about what AI is gonna do to their careers we call it the AI Career Institute, and we set people up with all of the AI prompts that they need to do their job.
We get those out of the O*NET database. This is a database, government database, that lists 56,000 different kinds of jobs, and they tell you, “These are the skills you need. These are the tasks you’re gonna be asked to do.” All right? You give us that O*NET code, we will provide you with all of the prompts that you need to do all of the tasks involved in that job.
All you have to do is cut and paste. You don’t have to learn how to use AI. Instantly, that … You have a [00:30:00] portfolio now of all of the things that you need to do in your job to get your job done faster, better, by using AI. And we’re partnering with career coaches to, … so you don’t walk through this alone.
We don’t want people to go through this with just AI as a companion. Again, the human-to-human interaction is really important. But what we’re trying to do is produce AI-enhanced humans, and this AI-human partnership, where you’re using the AI as a thinking partner. There’ve been lots of studies that have shown that, when two people work together they do better.
When a person works with an AI, they do better.
Porschia : Yeah, I definitely believe it. So we’ll be providing a link to your website and social channels in our show notes so people can find you online, but I know that you have a free gift for our [00:31:00] listeners. Tell us more about that, Steve.
Dr. Steven: Yeah. It … I alluded to it earlier and it is a, a custom workflow.
No matter what platform you’re on it’s, what are you working on? It’s designed, you type in what the problem is that you’re trying to solve, and AI will come back. It will ask you for context. It will suggest experts that might have solutions to help you, and then help you develop an appropriate plan.
So it takes you from problem to an implementation plan. Now, of course, you still have to implement the plan but it will g- will help you develop a plan, if you wanna do it over a course of a week, over a course of three months, whatever it is that’s appropriate, or maybe you just need a checklist, right?
We call it What Are You Working On? And the website is ainisnothard.com
Porschia : Love that. Love that. And we’ll include that in our show notes as [00:32:00] well. And so now, Steve, I want to ask you our final question that we ask all of our guests. How do you think executives or professionals can get a positive edge in their career?
Dr. Steven: It should be obvious. Learn to use AI. Learn to think differently, to approach it differently. One of the things that we’ve realized recently is that the limits to what AI can do to help us, it’s primarily limited by our imagination. AI is incredibly capable, and the AI we have today is gonna be replaced by an AI tomorrow or next week or next month, a better one.
But if you learn now your skills and you use it daily, your skills will continue to evolve, and you will get better as the AI gets better. So the answer is, [00:33:00] and again, I’ve been talking about this now for a half hour or so, learn to leverage AI. Don’t be afraid. It’s not coming after your job.
It can help
Porschia : Well, Steve, you have shared a lot of wisdom with us today, and I’m sure our listeners can use it to be more confident in their careers. We appreciate you being with us.
Dr. Steven: Thanks so much, Portia. Really loved the conversation [00:34:00]
