The AI Skills You Need Now to Stay Ahead with Joshua Wöhle

0:00Heather Monahan:Write your own money story with Monarch. Use code CONFIDENCE at Monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just$50. That's 50 % off your first year at Monarch.com with code CONFIDENCE. If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free. Just head to granola.ai slash confidence. That's granola.ai slash confidence to get your time back. Try it for free at granola.ai slash confidence. For the first time ever, you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenue is at least in the seven figures, go to netsuite.ai slash Monaghan. Built for every industry, ready for every boardroom.

0:47Heather Monahan:netsuite.ai slash Monaghan. For a limited time, my listeners get a free month of Primal Queen plus four free gifts at primalqueen.com slash confidence. That's primalqueen.com slash confidence. When you check out, tell them Creating Confidence sent you. I know you hear this a lot. AI is taking our jobs. Really, the only thing you can do is to lean in, is to just start now. And the good thing, as I said before, is that you're actually not behind. It's still okay not to be using this technology. In three years from now, it's not going to be. It's going to be very similar to trying to have a job and saying, sorry, I don't use email.

1:23I know that the longer you wait, the gap is increasing, not decreasing. And so the leverage you get out of starting early is really the thing that changes the game.

1:34Heather Monahan:I'm on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close-up. Hi, and welcome back. I'm so glad you're back with me this week. This week, you get to meet someone who I now call a friend. He's brilliant. We've got Joshua Bola on the show today. He's a six-time founder, AI adoption expert, and CEO of Mindstone, the AI adoption platform for non-technical, that's your girl, Heather, professionals, and home to one of the world's largest practical AI communities. Previously, Joshua co-founded Super Awesome, the world's largest kid safety technology platform as chief product and technology officer.

2:16Heather Monahan:He scaled the business to more than$100 million in revenue. This guy knows what he's doing. With technology protecting the digital experiences of more than 500 million children each month across brands, including Fortnite. Oh my gosh, that thing needs protection. Nintendo, Lego, and Warner Brothers in 2020. Super Awesome was acquired by Epic Games and a nine-figure exit. Today, Joshua is best known for helping leaders and organizations like me move beyond AI hype, and build practical AI capability at scale. At Mindstone, Joshua is closing the gap between AI's promise and what workforces actually experience.

2:48Heather Monahan:Named one of Time Magazine's world top ed tech companies in 2025, Mindstone has trained tens of thousands of professionals, including me, and including Delta Airlines, Home Depot, Hyatt, so many companies. The company's core belief is that most AI adoption fails. It has little to do with the technology and everything to do with the people, the habits and the organizational behavior. Joshua has backed more than 40 startups as an angel investor and is a venture partner at Emerge Education. He regularly speaks at FTSE, 100 Companies and Global Innovation Events, and was a feature speaker at London Tech Week 2025.

3:22Heather Monahan:I mean, I can go on and on about this man, but he's incredible and he's here. Josh, thanks for being here with us today. Wow, thank you very much for having me. Oh my gosh, quite the resume. Okay, take us back. First of all, everyone's freaking out because they're saying this guy's a tech genius. take us back to your childhood and did you know you were heading down this path did your parents know about this no not at all um I think it's so I was I always wanted to be a lawyer actually and when I was uh smaller and yeah I don't know don't don't know what went wrong there um or what went right very right actually oh right uh the it was really when I there was a class when I was 12 it was an extracurricular activity at school where they taught people how to use javascript html and javascript to create websites it was like a one hour week like on on the side and it just since then there's something about the feedback loop of creating something and instantly seeing it the result of what you're creating on a screen and then being able to iterate on it that was that has just forever kind of hooked me since.

4:32But I've always been more of a builder than I am. I have a computer science degree, but I wouldn't say I'm not a computer scientist to a degree. I'm a builder and I use the tools that I need to build the things that I want to build. I've never been the best software engineer. But yeah, so I grew up in the Netherlands, did about 13 years there, 10 years in Switzerland, and now 16 years in London, and built a few companies along the way. and it looks like everything is accelerating now. So not stopping yet.

5:01Heather Monahan:One of the great things about you is that you are a real speak normal person. When I had the opportunity to learn from you and get to know you, you make understanding AI normal and simple. And no one had done that for me. And I know first, a lot of people listening, Josh, they're very intimidated by AI. I know you hear about it all the time. Where do you get people to start, to start embracing this? Because a lot of people are hiding and hoping it's going away someday. Yeah, so it's very unfortunate that we are on the back of a few kind of, I'd say tech waves that have just not actually had the effect that anyone said was going to have.

5:43So like we had blockchain, NFTs, we had the metaverse and everyone always said, it's like, it's going to change everything. And the people that said no at that point were clearly proven right. And so now that it's the fourth time in a row that the techies are kind of saying, this is going to change everything. Everyone's looking at it. It's like, yeah, we've heard this before. Seems complicated. I'm not really sure I want to go through that. So that's one thing that's seriously hurting what is happening here. Now, in terms of the fear, the good thing that I can say is that actually the basics are fairly easy.

6:23I mean, we spend, what, three and a half days together, right? And I think after day one, you already get a lot of the benefit of what the technology can do. It's not actually technology that's complicated. It's a bit uncomfortable. And actually, like any real learning is uncomfortable. Even, I mean, for anyone that is interested in learning, you actually have a concept called desirable difficulties in learning science. This is a weird thing, which is basically your neurons reconfigure themselves. and that's the part of where you are actually learning but that is difficult in itself if it is not difficult you're actually not learning and so that getting past that the good thing is is it's not that much of an effort like it is one day and we actually we do a a four-week program which is 10 hours in total in 10 hours in total people get back five and a half hours a week.

7:19So the good news is, even if you haven't started yet, you are still way if you started tomorrow, you're still way ahead of the curve. And it's not it's not going to take you months to get to the other side, might take you months to get to maybe where I would be today. But like, it snowballs from the first steps that you get through and the first steps are easy.

7:41Heather Monahan:So guys, if I didn't explain this, I've been talking about it on LinkedIn, I did a three day training with Mindstone, with Josh in person, on site in Santa Cruz. It was incredible. And not only did I, you're put in the room with unbelievable people from all over the world, very different backgrounds. Remember our guy, Dave, he has, what kind of business does he have? HVAC. An HVAC business, which he has completely restructured, redone, and his company's blown up since he started working with Mindstone. He's re-imagined that industry and the technology he's brought forward and he guys he he is a regular guy i do not see him as a tech guy right but he's embraced the technology so much so much so he's taken the three-day training i believe two or three times yeah it was the third time and he took his son son along he brought his son this time right and so and they've completely reimagined the business such that when you have an hvac problem you hold your phone up and what can you explain how how he's doing it now yeah so he was building this system where his staff who are already professionals when they don't quite know what the problem is they they use ai to help troubleshoot you hold your phone up to it figure out what the problem is and get to the next step as well as his customers ahead of time with like it takes quite a bit of money for a professional to come out and do the thing if that professional can know ahead of time what is the likely problem and they can have all the material ahead of time with them before they even get to your home it means they come once not twice and that it's a 50 % saving for everyone so it uh yeah it's he's been doing more and more and he's now playing around with like the idea of having these uh the the ray-ban glasses and having this real time for all of his employees and stuff which is mental so he's just this regular guy i would say he's less tech savvy than i am and i am not tech savvy person he's just such a regular guy but he's completely reimagined his business guys as a result of going to the Mindstone weekend and in-person training.

9:41Heather Monahan:Here's what I'll say for me. And I know everybody learns differently. And I know, gosh, I mean, you can teach so much about this. This is what you do. When you have somebody hands-on standing with you versus in sub stack, you can read about prompts and this, and you know, it, for me, that was the game changer. Cause Josh, I knew how to use AI. I had all these different, you know, assistant AI is here and Zoom AI recap this, but none of them merged together. I had Claude co-worker, as you know, and I was using that. I hadn't set up skills. I hadn't set up any automations, right? So I wasn't, I was still having to be everywhere to do everything.

10:16Heather Monahan:And AI was helping me, which was great, but I didn't understand what you were just explaining to me, how you have 25 agents right now running on Rebel while we're here talking, doing, Can you talk a little bit about so people can understand the difference between basic AI use versus what you teach? Yeah. Okay. So, well, there's what, and it changes a lot. So even what we teach now will be different in two months from now. So the basics of AI, we kind of think about it in different levels. So level one, you're using it just like an answer engine. You ask a question here and there. If you get familiar with it, people start talking about how they use it a lot.

10:56It's replaced their search engine. And that's, and often people top out there because it feels like, well, I'm using it all the time. Surely this is what it is. And that's also where the underwhelm really comes from. Because you know what, Google was a decent search engine. If all you're getting out of like a chat GPT is that it's a slightly better search, then you're getting some value, but it's not revolutionizing. The kind of third level becomes using AI as a thought partner. and that's the thing where we started most of the the weekend with which is okay well what if you stopped asking it questions and instead you ask ai to ask you questions about the problems you have so that it helps you think which also removes a lot of the the negative aspects some people are saying like it's it's removing your thinking it's making us dumb well actually if you get the ai to ask you questions it makes you think more and if you do ai well i can tell you from experience like Like days where I get to 11 a.m.

11:56and my brain is fried. Why? Because I've been using it way too much. And the only thing I'm doing is thinking. So once you get to past Thought Partner, you then get to what you would call the agentic AI layer. There we talk about AI as a teammate. So this is now not only is it asking you questions, it's second guessing, it's giving you extra details, but it's actually also able to act on what you're asking it to do. So now it can't just help you build a proposal. It builds the proposal for you. It sends it to the right person at the right time after having done all the research on them. It communicates with the other members of your team, trying to gather the information they need maybe in order to do their job or to get a daily update back together so that everyone in the company understands what everybody else is doing in the company.

12:45And it's able to hook up to all your systems, whether that's your CRM, your Gong, your Zoom, your email, your WhatsApps, everything that you kind of use in order to be that teammate. And then there's a last level where I would say, or I'd say last level, no, it's kind of the currently edge of where you can play, which is AI as an operating system. and this is where you no longer just have agents you have teams of agents and those teams are all orchestrating with each other maybe with an orchestrator even on top and that is what i'm what is happening right now so like on the second screen at the moment i've got 25 different agents that are actually 24 agents and an orchestrator the the orchestrator basically gives feedback to the other 24 in order to ship product for us 24-7.

13:38And so it's literally going through bug reports that users all over the world are real-time emitting based on their own usage. It just picks them up, squashes them, redeploys a new version, and everything is done. And I won't even have known about it, let alone whatever, maybe 20 of them are big features that we just wanted to add to the product, and four of them are bug squashes at the moment, kind of coming through and the same is happening now at a non-technology level so we were talking just before but the i've always not just felt at this point i would say the pattern has been so awful like software engineering kind of lifts the future a little bit it's just the the window of the future is getting smaller and like the distance between software engineering and everything else is getting smaller but before the end of this year you'll have this same concept it's called in software engineering people talk about the software factory and there's kind of a saying the same thing is going to happen with every other profession or most other professions anyway so you'll have a legal factory a customer success factory a sales factory and these will be teams of agents that are just proactively doing the work surfacing it to humans when humans need to be involved and otherwise just doing it completely autonomously okay so some people

14:53Heather Monahan:just listen to you and i i know you i trust you and i've learned from you other people haven't So they're getting defensive right now. I can just tell that was intimidating. To that end, can you explain how anyone can make it such that it doesn't have to be autonomous? I can set it up so it checks in with me and how you have all the permissions that you determine. 100 % no this is this is absolutely a journey and also like I didn't get to the point where the agents would run autonomously until I'd spent months basically telling it or going through the permission system where I would have to tell it yes all the time so the your assistants tend to not do anything without asking you very specifically actually the default even in co-work the default until a week and a half ago was that it would ask you for everything think since a week and a half ago they flipped the default to um uh always accept or or uh auto accept sorry the which means that the the ai itself decides when an action is important enough to surface to you in order to ask for permission so for example if it's about reading your email it'll say that's fine but before sending an email it's like oh if i do this it's a non-reversible thing someone is going to get this message i might ask the user first and at a genetic level that's the i think the right way to do it you might think that just getting switching on manual approval would be the better way where it asks you for everything the reality is if you get it to ask you for everything you're going to ask it gets so many requests that the only thing you do is say yes yes yes yes yes yes and actually you will click yes on the one thing you should have said no to but because you just did 50 yeses you're less getting in auto mode because going through so it's much better to just get it to only flag the ones that are actually somewhat sensitive so that you still really take the time to think about it but all of this is fully configurable so the and when i say that by default if you use something like a rebel or you use something like a co-work all of this out of the box anything that's sensitive at this point will get flagged to the user so it's very rare that that any of these products would do something you didn't ask it to do, which is very different from like an open claw that you might have heard of or an Hermes or which it's more on the edge, but all of the kind of disaster scenarios often come from those environments where specifically software engineers being a little bit on the edge decided to just go all in and suddenly it deleted a thing it was not supposed to delete and stuff.

17:29That doesn't really happen.

17:31Heather Monahan:So for people who don't understand this, and I'm super interested to hear what you think, two things. How do we know what to use? Rebel, Claude Cowork, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini. There's so many different things to use. So how do we know what to set up and what to prioritize? And then once we know that, how do we know what level? Because I keep getting notices now. Fable 5.1 is on. How do those two things confuse a lot of people? Yeah. So for most people, you can tune out almost everything. I would even argue start with ChatGPT or Claude. I mean, those are the two best starting products. Get familiar with getting it to ask you questions.

18:12That tends to be a real unlock already for people. Use voice. So talk to it. Don't write to it. And when I say use voice, use the actual voice mode, not just the kind of the voice to text feature, but actually go into voice so you have a real conversation with it. Start there. Go deeper there and give it things that you think it is impossible to get right. And you'll be surprised how much it gets, it actually gets right.

18:47Heather Monahan:Between board meetings, executive coaching calls, and meetings with my upcoming keynote client, I'm in back-to-back meetings all day, nodding along, staying present, while part of my brain is scrambling, trying to remember what was just said and what's next. Meetings are a mess. Granola fixes that. Granola is an AI-powered notepad built for how people actually meet. You take rough notes like normal. In the background, Granola transcribes everything, then turns it into a clean, structured note that the moment the meeting ends, it runs through your device's audio, so it plugs right into whatever video tool you're already using.

19:22Heather Monahan:No setup. No bot on your call. Just your normal meeting with superpowers. I used to spend the 10 minutes after every call rewriting my notes so that they made sense to me and I wouldn't forget. Granola just does that for me now. If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free. Just head to granola.ai slash confidence. That's granola.ai slash confidence to get your time back. Try it for free at granola.ai slash confidence. Growing up, money in my house was scarce. And the conversations around it were a little stressful, to say the least. That shaped how I handled money for years.

20:04Heather Monahan:Monarch didn't just change that. It gave me the chance to rewrite that part of my story and start a new story. Here's the thing about lifestyle creep. It's silent. You don't even notice it happening. My savings rate had quietly slipped 20 % and I never noticed until Monarch put it right in front of me. Now it's like having a financial advisor in my pocket. The AI Weekly Recap catches spending spikes and net worth shifts before they become a real problem. And when I want a straight answer like how much did I spend on travel last summer, I just ask Monarch's AI assistant. Write your own money story with Monarch.

20:43Heather Monahan:Use code CONFIDENCE at Monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just$50. That's 50 % off your first year at Monarch.com with code CONFIDENCE. I ask you to try to find your passion. Oh my gosh. So you were teaching us a couple of things that I want to highlight. text is the lifeblood of AI. And I didn't understand that until you taught me that in our time together that weekend. And that changed everything for me. Every client I deal with now, I record everything. You actually wore this pin the entire weekend, even if we were having dinner at night, anything that was going on and you would record all the conversations so that we didn't miss anything so that we had summary notes so that we had action items.

21:30Heather Monahan:So when we came up with great ideas after dinner, we actually had a game plan the next day. It was unbelievable. And so I've taken that really important piece that you taught me. I, even if I'm doing a potential, I'm going to potentially work with someone. I tell them I'm recording this conversation, not to share with anyone other than you, if you'd like it, I'm using it to make sure I don't miss anything. I can't tell you, Josh, how many times that I will bring that information back into cloud cowork after I create a file on the person, right? I store everything in Google drive, just like you taught us how to do.

22:01Heather Monahan:And everything's got a folder to stay organized. I'm done with this meeting. This is a$60 billion client. He's a COO. I have this great call, obviously huge client for me. And I need to get him, by the way, to the three-day weekend. So we need to discuss that when we hang up because he's got to come. We've got to do this. He's going to love it. It's going to be incredible. And so here's the thing. It said to me, Heather, you missed something very important at moment 2233. And I thought, you know, I'm a great salesperson. What are you talking about? And so I go and actually, and of course I have the zoom recording and I go to watch what I missed.

22:35Heather Monahan:And he was right. I missed, he populated something. I was so, and this is embarrassing to say probably, but I'm just going to tell the truth. I was so jumping to the point that I, he had surfaced something. And I was, I w I was thinking instead of listening in a moment. And I missed in one moment, a huge important piece. And I would have forgotten it because I wasn't truly listening. I was speaking over him and Claude Cobart caught it. I was able to send an email after and apologize for speaking over that and not highlighting it and circle back on our next call. And that's when I actually closed the business with him.

23:09That is awesome. Indeed. And you're totally right. I mean, transcripts are such a dramatic boost on AI, especially when you have a system or you could do it manually where you're well organized. so the if you can point the AI to the point where you say okay hey here are all the transcripts with this customer now help me figure out how we can put the best possible proposal together it is so much better than at least I have ever been why because I it's impossible for me to keep more than even one good conversation fully in my head so that I don't miss details the AI doesn't miss the details. And it does this across five, six, seven conversations.

23:51So when you have to do really kind of big reasoning, whether that's for a big strategic proposal, or it's internally, because you have a big project that you're working on with five or six different people, and it's taken six meetings to get together, like trying to condense that into something the whole group can agree on is so dramatically easier when you have the transcript and working with AI than if you tried to do that yourself.

24:16Heather Monahan:One of the other cool things that you taught us, and then I'll stop being this dead force around the text portion, we can move on from it. But so when you taught us that we have, the text is a light button. Once we have that, everyone learns differently. And so sometimes there are different settings for different ways to consume information. And a cool example you took us through is you did a recap of our prior day in like a podcast format because you fed that same chat thread or the same text thread that was the actual transcript from our day, the day before into, I don't remember. It's Notebook LM.

24:50Heather Monahan:Notebook LM. Thank you. And so you fed it into Notebook LM and then you pick podcast and you made a podcast, like a 10 minute podcast out of our previous day. And it was so cool. Everyone was so highly engaged. And so you start thinking, wait a minute, if I could do that, how could I make learning entertaining or recapping meetings entertaining for my team, for my employees, from my clients, everyone learns differently. And now we have the ability to literally take that same information and make it anything we want. Yeah. Yeah. The multimodality piece is, is, is completely under, underused, I think.

25:24And I include, I must say, I'm include myself in this and probably already, I'm using it more than, than most. We're about to go and do something really interesting. So the, I won't divulge too much, but we were working with an author and we're going to be using a lot of this enhancement technology to enhance a book, which is a really interesting way. So now you'll have a book and the book has like an accompanying AI, basically, that holds you to account as you read through the book. So like, think about what this is going to do to like the self-help type category, which is anything where you are trying to improve yourself, any of the books that teach you something, It'll know where you are, how you go through the book, and how you should apply what you're doing as you go through your day.

26:13It'll literally just be able to tell you, by the way, the thing you read yesterday, today you've got this thing coming up, and you should really be applying that.

26:21Heather Monahan:That's incredible. And please share more as you develop this, because as you know, you are sitting here with an author who's working on our third book right now. So I definitely, I need more information on that one. We should work on that. We need to work on that. So for everyone that's listening, and I know you hear this a lot, AI is taking our jobs. I know that you say someone who understands AI and uses AI more than you do could take your job. What can people do now to start setting themselves up for success for tomorrow and for six months from now? Really, the only thing you can do is to lean in, is to just start now.

27:00And the good thing, as I said before, is that you're actually not behind. so um just start put your toe in the water use an ai system use it personally get it to ask you questions throw problems at it that you don't think it could help with and then try and second guess yourself a little bit it's like try it it's like what what if i tried and then maybe get some if you can more and more companies are now getting support if you're if you're in one of the companies that is properly training, make sure you take advantage of the training that is being given to you there. Because what I can say is right now, there are still quite a few, not by far actually the majority of companies, it's still okay not to be using this technology.

27:47In three years from now, it's not going to be. It's going to be very similar to trying to have a job and saying, sorry, I don't use email. You can try, but very few employers will be okay with that. And I know that the longer you wait, the gap is increasing, not decreasing. The difference between the people that really knew how to use this technology three years ago and the people that didn't was much smaller then than it is today. And so the leverage you get out of starting early is really the thing that changes the game.

28:17Heather Monahan:So for somebody that wants to go through what I did, the in-person three-day that they're saying, you know, I need that hands-on someone standing over me and actually helping me because there were times I couldn't find something. And, you know, Jeremy had to come over and reset my computer and restart things that I just didn't know to do. And it was, I can't even say how helpful it was for me. Allow me to break through. For someone who wants to learn like that, who are the people that should attend your three-day that you have coming up in October? So I'd say there are two types of people. There are the CEOs or the C-suite of some of the bigger organizations who are thinking, okay, I need to understand how much of this is true, how much of this is not, how much of this is hype, how much of this is actually possible, so that I can then go back and know what to even demand slash ask from my team to begin with, right?