Keep Moving Forward

AI Literacy: Why Confidence ≠ Capability in Skill Assessment

Most organizations think self-assessment tells them what their people are capable of. It doesn’t. It tells them how confident their people are. Those aren’t the same thing — and the gap between them is quietly distorting how teams get staffed, developed, and led. Dustin Clinard, CEO of Ignis AI, has spent close to two decades watching this play out. In this episode of the Keep Moving Forward podcast, I sit down with Dustin to dig into why self-assessment is so unreliable when it comes to skills, why L&D investment has been nearly impossible to measure, and why the most important shift an engineering leader can make is treating skill as a live variable, not a fixed input.

Dan Bladen on Why Hybrid Work Goes Wrong

Many companies are having the wrong conversation about hybrid work — and it could be costing them their best engineers. Dan Bladen, CEO of Kadence, has spent years helping organizations design smarter, more intentional ways of working. His take: the word "hybrid" has stopped being useful, return-to-office mandates are usually a leadership problem in disguise, and the distributed teams that built strong documentation habits for remote work are sitting on a structural AI advantage most of them haven't fully recognized yet. In this episode of Keep Moving Forward, Gemma Versace sits down with Dan to cover: - The two patterns that break trust in every return-to-office push - His heads-up/heads-down framework for engineering leaders - Why attendance is the wrong metric — and what to measure instead

Kevin Andrews: When Experimentation Can't Outrun Accountability

For most tech leaders, a bad call means a missed milestone. For Kevin Andrews, it means someone doesn't get paid. Kevin is President of PrismHR and CTO of Vensure Employer Solutions, two companies handling payroll and HR for more than 160,000 small businesses and processing nearly $160 billion in payroll annually. In this episode, host Gemma Versace talks with Kevin about what responsible AI adoption looks like when the stakes are this concrete. They get into the governance-first framework Kevin applies across his 400-person AI-enabled developer team, why no one actually has 20 years of AI experience and what to look for instead, the real gap in vibe coding at enterprise scale, and the leadership mistake he keeps watching tech leaders make heading into integration work. Kevin also shares what he's learned from Vensure's 100-plus acquisitions, why he's currently pursuing a doctorate focused on AI and machine learning, and why the leaders who come through the current AI transition well won't be the fastest — they'll be the ones who know exactly what can't break.

Esha Joshi: How to Make Communication Skills Training Actually Stick

Your team completed the workshop. They did the role play. They said it was amazing. Then they went back to their desks and kept doing exactly what they were doing before. Esha Joshi, co-founder and Chief Customer Officer at Yoodli, has spent years watching this pattern repeat inside some of the world's largest companies. She says the problem with most communication skills training isn't the content. It's that behavior change never gets built into the workflow — and when it doesn't, nothing sticks. In this episode, Esha explains what actually drives adoption of AI-powered communication tools, why being available isn't the same as being effective, and how she learned that being a bottleneck is a systems failure, not a leadership trait. If you lead a customer-facing team and wonder why training never seems to transfer to real work, this episode is for you.

Victoria Pelletier on Building Belief, Not Just Strategy, to Drive Real Transformation

Your transformation roadmap is set. The strategy looks solid. Leadership is aligned. So why does nothing seem to actually change? Victoria Pelletier, global vice president at Kyndryl and keynote speaker, has led change through more than 40 mergers and acquisitions in some of the world's most complex technology environments. She argues that the biggest blocker to transformation is not technology. The obstacle is whether people believe in the change and whether the right leaders are in the right roles to carry it out. In this episode, Victoria explains how organizations mistake busy delivery for real progress, why adoption fails when human-centered design is skipped, and how a 10-20-70 framework reframes where AI's value actually comes from. If you are leading a technology transformation while still expected to deliver every day, this conversation will change how you think about momentum and belief-building.