Episode 4 with Todd Schmiedeler: AI, Intrapreneurs, and Getting More Human at Work

Welcome back to the Energy Exchange with host Alane Paulley. This episode is a conversation Alane has wanted to have for a while, with the person who helped guide her own journey into AI, her friend and fellow entrepreneur Todd Schmiedeler.Todd spent 15 years in healthcare, first as a senior executive in acute care, then as Chief Innovations and Engagement Officer for a large long-term care company, before launching his own businesses about five years ago. In the last two and a half years, AI has been at the center of almost everything he builds. He travels nationally and internationally speaking about it, and his thesis is one that most people don't expect: AI doesn't make us less human. Used right, it makes us more human to each other.The conversation covers a lot of ground. Todd breaks down the difference between using AI as a glorified search engine versus using it as a genuine thought partner, and why that shift changes everything about how a leader operates. He shares how he built Todd.ai, a version of himself trained on three years of his emails, meetings, and writing, so his teams could get answers without always having to wait for him. After running a two-week time study, he found that 70% of the questions people brought to him were ones they already knew the answer to. They just wanted assurance. Now his AI gives them that, and 95% of the time it responds exactly as he would, sometimes better.Todd also walks through his AI dossier system, a tool he built to research everyone he meets with before they sit down together, then shares that dossier with the person it's about. He talks about what it was like to navigate dyslexia as a business leader before AI existed, how he uses NotebookLM to convert research into audio so he can actually absorb it, and why he believes AI has created a new class of people inside companies he calls intrapreneurs.Alane brings her own experience into the conversation too, including how she used Todd's advice to get started, what happened when she let AI interview her one question at a time to learn who she was, and how she has used it to free up her customer support team from reactive one-off chats and move them into looking at the full customer journey instead.They also get into data privacy, AI guardrails, why the people most afraid of AI already have an Alexa in their kitchen, and whether AI might eventually do to social media what social media did to the evening news.