Workshop: The AI Amplification Problem
Most AI workshops teach you to use the tools. This one teaches you to use yourself — and that's a radically different proposition.
Here's a number that should terrify every people leader: one-third of feedback interventions backfire. Not "fail to help." Backfire. Make things worse. We've known this from behavioral research for decades, and we keep doing it anyway because it's what we know how to do.
Now layer AI on top of that and ask yourself what you're actually amplifying.
This is the uncomfortable thesis at the center of Dr. Michelle Riconscente's work. A former USC professor, founder of Valutare AI, and author of The AI Amplification Effect, Riconscente has spent 40-plus years studying how people actually learn, adapt, and perform — not how HR decks say they do. Her core finding is deceptively simple: AI doesn't change who you are. It makes you more of who you are. The methodical person becomes exponentially more thorough. The decisive person achieves unprecedented speed. The collaborative person enables broader inclusion.
The corollary, which gets far less airtime in the breathless coverage of enterprise AI adoption, is that without strategic awareness, the same AI tools that multiply your strengths can also magnify your challenges — creating stress patterns that push you outside your zone of strength.
Translation: if you're an anxious micromanager, AI gives you a turbocharger for that too.
On June 24, Surf City Founders and Valutare are hosting a 90-minute workshop at Nextspace that takes this research off the page and into the room. The session is built around four work styles — Analytical, Driver, Amiable, and Expressive — and what each style actually looks like in AI-enabled workplaces. Not in theory. In your Slack threads and your one-on-ones and your sprint reviews.
Most AI training is software training disguised as strategy. This isn't that. It's behavioral science applied to the adoption problem every people leader is quietly losing sleep over: not whether AI is capable, but whether your team is.
The leaders who win the next five years won't be the ones who adopted AI fastest. They'll be the ones who understood themselves well enough to know what they were amplifying.
Join Dr Michelle Riconscente, author of The AI Amplification Effect, CEO of Valutare AI and former USC professor— for an intensive, 90-minute interactive workshop that will equip you with practical strategies for navigating AI adoption at your organization.
Come find out which one you are.
The AI Amplification Lab takes place June 24 at Nextspace, Santa Cruz. Co-hosted by Surf City Founders and Valutare AI.
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