by VP of Communications and professional Author, Araminta S. Matthews, MFA, GCDF, DC, SrID, Consultant, Owner-Operator of HIVE-Wise,
Araminta is a professional author and lead author of the recent article, Pay Attention to the Chatbot Behind the Curtain when AI 'Is No Place Like Home': A Framework and Toolkit for Integrating Critical Thinking & Information Literacy in Educational & Professional Studies (freely available in the peer-reviewed journal, Advances in Online Education with a free subscription with Henry Stewart Publications, here).
Generative AI has been around for a long time, but it seems like it's only become a subject of conversation in recent months. Suddenly, everyone is talking about Large Language Model chatbots and their impact on the world. Most of these dialogues seem to focus on fear of AI taking over our work, or people getting lazy and using AI to cheat or do work for them when their own sweat and rigor is well-warranted (like in a classroom or drafting a screenplay with powerful human emotions at the epicenter of the storyline).
Whether AI concerns you is frankly, irrelevant, because the bottom line is that AI is (and has been) in every person's pocket, located in many living rooms ready to operate with a voice-ordered command, or just the first thing a person sees when asking a question of a search engine. AI is unavoidable, so why not embrace the many ways AI can make our lives easier? This list, adapted from the work in the article and toolkit listed above, is designed to help Maine professionals use AI to improve efficiency, streamline workflows, and foster innovation. By harnessing the power of AI, employees across various sectors can elevate their productivity and achieve more in less time--as long as we remember a few basic rules of the game.
AI is based on an algorithm designed to deliver what is statistically likely to be true (not what is actually true), meaning that you can ask AI to generate an answer to the question "Are 2 pounds of feathers heavier than 1 pound of lead?" and AI can get it wrong for months because it is statistically more likely to be asked about the density or mass of those two objects (a feather or lead) than the irrefutable weight of 2 pounds to a single pound.
AI does not yet provide accurate or credible sources for the content it curates into the answers to the questions we ask of it. This means we cannot yet reliably determine that the data it gives us is true, factual, or real. What's more, because AI is a bit dodgy about its source material, we likewise cannot tell if what AI generates for us is perhaps unintended copyright infringement. As they say, buyer beware--or in this case, AI-generator, be careful not to plagiarize.
And lastly, just as with any other media you might reference in work you produce, AI-generated material must also be cited. Given how you can't be sure your AI-generated content is someone else's potential Intellectual Property as indicated above, it's also just in your best interest to clearly indicate when you've used AI to create text, design an outline, or generate an image you plan to use in your work.
Below are 15 practical ways generative AI can enhance productivity for Maine's workforce.
1. Create and Triage a Good To-Do List:
One thing AI is very good at is ordering and sequencing content based on frequency (and just popularity) of content it has analyzed. If you are faced with a long to-do list at work, consider feeding everything you have into a tool like Gemini or ChatGPT and ask it to organize and triage your task list. Be sure to read it and adjust it with your own judgment before implementing, of course!
2. Personalized Customer Support:
One thing AI is particularly good at is analyzing the "patterns" of people's behavior. As such, AI-powered chatbots can be used as entry-level virtual assistants to manage basic customer inquiries, providing instant responses 24/7. This reduces the workload on customer service teams while maintaining a high level of client satisfaction. Just remember--there is no replacement for human interaction.
3. Summarizing Meeting Notes:
Instead of manually writing meeting minutes, AI tools can transcribe and summarize meetings in real-time, capturing key points and action items efficiently. With a few quick touch-ups, a meeting can be succinctly turned into a set of clear action-items for attendees along with a list of events that occurred during the session.
4. Improve Your Decision Making:
Generative AI is programmed to work with enormous data sets, so data-modeling is perhaps one of its strongest capabilities. Improve your decision-making and feasibility-analysis by using AI to help generate data-driven scenarios, simulations, or predictive models regarding your potential outcomes, risks, or results. Just feed the AI tool the information you have and ask it what is the most statistically viable solution to your problem.
5. Help Interpret the Language of Something a Little Wordy:
Generative AI is pretty good at simplifying language. Ever read an email or article and think, "Wow, this is really complicated, and I'm not clear on what I just read?" Why not ask AI to simplify things for you. Write a prompt akin to "Simplify the following article or email into language appropriate for a fourth grade reading level to help ensure clear understanding of nuances" and then paste in the complicated material you are seeking to understand. Just remember to cross-reference with the original material to make sure it's close to accurate.
6. Enhanced Creativity:
As long as the creative person is planning to produce the final product on her own, AI can be very helpful in that classic of all problems--breaking writer's block! Creative professionals can use generative AI for brainstorming and ideation. AI-generated suggestions for ad campaigns, product names, or marketing strategies can spark new and innovative ideas. Logos or tag lines can emerge from AI-support, and outlines or creative ideas to solve problems can be quickly generated--just be sure you analyze them yourself before implementing any.
7. Translation and Localization:
In Maine's increasingly diverse work environment, AI tools like Google Translate can instantly translate documents, emails, or web content, allowing for smoother communication with global partners. It is very important to remember that AI doesn't understand nuanced human language, so be careful in translations to check for the "untranslatable" concepts of another language (like the French concept of "ennui" or the German idea of "schadenfreude").
8. Writing Code and Debugging:
Ever develop a website using CSS or HTML? Ever have to create a database with MySQL or write a Python script? Any language used to make a computer perform a task or look a certain way is not only for a computer, but perhaps even best done by a computer. Generative AI tools like GitHub Copilot or even the Stacks generated by ChatGPT can assist developers by writing code snippets, detecting errors, and suggesting improvements, which can dramatically reduce time spent in the coding and developing process. In 2025, most web and app developers start with a preset and build from there--few code/script from scratch anymore.
Incorporating generative AI into daily operations is no longer a luxury but a necessity in today’s fast-paced work environment. Maine's employees can benefit significantly from the enhanced efficiency, creativity, and accuracy that these AI tools bring to the table. By adopting these technologies, businesses as well as professional individuals of every variety can not only improve productivity but also stay competitive in an ever-evolving marketplace. Just remember to use AI within its appropriate context and succeed, exceed, and proceed swimmingly!
(original content by Araminta S. Matthews, 27 March, 2025, 6:33PM EST. Copyright to author. All rights reserved. Permission to use and reuse within all Maine-ATD publications and resources).
Meet the Board
This month’s featured board member is our talented and dedicated VP of Finance. Suzanne Joined the ATD board 4 years ago. Suzanne would attend the ATD trainings that intrigued her and sit and talk with other chapter members. Having a background in finance, she originally offered to audit the books, and as they say, the rest is history.
What Suzanne enjoys most about ATD, is getting to meet and work with like-minded people toward a particular goal.
Suzanne currently works as the Senior VP of Mission Delivery for Girl Scouts of Maine where she oversees six departments, one of which is the adult learning department. She ran the adult learning team for several years before moving into the Senior VP role and says she still enjoys finding opportunities to develop and facilitate training.
For anyone who has had the pleasure of working with Suzanne when she’s wearing her facilitator hat, it is evident that she embodies the role. She is inquisitive and really listens to participants.
When talking about her experience transitioning from the learning team to her VP role, Suzanne emphasizes that it’s important to think about what you might miss and look for new opportunities. Any time you’re facing a big transition like that, she says it must be something you believe in, and you must be willing to put the effort into it. “It has to give you joy or it’s not worth doing.”
When Suzanne isn’t working, she enjoys spending her time reading and she loves to be outside. It’s no surprise that she loves to sit on the rocks at Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park and read.
If you would like to connect with Suzanne, find her at an upcoming in-person ATD Maine meeting, or reach out to her at finance@tdmaine.org.
Written by Jill Tabbutt-Henry
Any of us who have been involved with any kind of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) work are all too aware of the resistance that our efforts encounter—from token gestures of one-time staff trainings, to hiring a DEI coordinator and then not providing the support needed for that person to be effective, to the Supreme Court decision against Affirmative Action in college admissions undermining DEI in education.
What is behind this resistance? Is it a fear of change? Something deeper? Should we even dare to ask these questions, or should we focus on program strategies and organizational issues?
A recent event in Maine brings these questions even more to the forefront of our thoughts. In December, the DEI coordinator for the South Portland School Department, an Iraqi immigrant, received a threatening email from a man in New Hampshire. His superintendent described the email as “the most vile email message I have seen in my 35 years in education.” The ultimate result of this incident was that the employee resigned from his position and left the state of Maine with his family.
Last year, the Harvard Business Review (March 1, 2023) published an article—”To Overcome Resistance to DEI, Understand What’s Driving It,” by Eric Shuman, Eric Knowles, and Amit Goldenberg. In this article, the authors describe three types of psychological threats that some people experience in response to DEI initiatives and three types of resistance that they engage in, depending on the type of threat.
• Status threat—when people perceive that if anyone from a minority group gains status in an organization, someone from the majority group will have to give up their status.
• Merit threat—when people worry that, if their value to their organization is assessed purely in terms of merit, there may well be people from minority groups who are better qualified or will perform better in their position.
• Moral threat—in the authors’ words, “the sense that if you acknowledge your privilege, you tarnish your moral image by linking yourself to an unfair system.”
• Defending—justifying the status quo to prevent changes that are perceived as harmful to the existing staff (driven by status threat)
• Denying—rejecting DEI initiatives as unnecessary because there’s no bias, or very little (driven by status and merit threat)
• Distancing—acknowledging that some discrimination may exist in the system, but arguing that they themselves never benefited from it (driven by merit and moral threat)
The authors provide some simple and concrete approaches to addressing these forms of resistance. One strategy is to emphasize the “win-win” aspects of DEI initiatives, to reduce status threat and counter the “zero-sum” scenario about power within the organization.
Another approach is to use self-affirmation to identify positive aspects of the organization and its employees prior to addressing problem areas.
The moral threat can be minimized by “highlighting how DEI efforts present an opportunity for majority-group members to demonstrate their commitment to universal moral principles [e.g. fairness and equality], and in doing so ensure that they are not automatically associated with discrimination and privilege.”
These strategies require an assessment of what kinds of threats people are experiencing and what forms of resistance they are demonstrating. Considering these different kinds of threats and different types of resistance before initiating DEI efforts may give us tools for introducing and sustaining DEI efforts.
What do you think? Join the discussion in the comments below and join our chapter’s next DEI SIG meeting on April 4th, 10-11:30.
This month’s featured board member is our talented and dedicated VP of Technology. Jae describes herself as someone who has always “been a club person” so it’s no surprise she’s found a place she belongs here at ATD Maine.
Jae joined the board in 2020, just as the world transitioned to virtual everything and she has been doing all things technology since. Something she appreciates most about being a part of ATD is having a community of people who all speak her language and who offer advice and shared experiences.
Jae has worked in the corporate world, as part of HR, in K12 and Higher Education. Much of the focus of her work over the years has been technical training and instructional design. She enjoys the dynamic environment of L&D and being able to do all sorts of roles. She currently works for the University of Maine Augusta.
Jae enjoys taking big, complex topics and breaking them down into digestible chunks. She takes trainings and makes them better to expand the audience they reach. Over the years, she has spent a lot of time focused on e-learning and teaching instructors how and why to integrate technology and use LMS.
When Jae isn’t working on L&D projects or volunteering with ATD, you might find her working on something for her sorority board or working at Sephora or snowboarding. She dosen’t like to sit still.
Whether it’s through making the learning experience better for students and employees or helping a customer find a new lipstick, Jae has the same goal: to make people feel good about themselves.
If you would like to connect with Jae, find her at an upcoming in-person ATD Maine meeting, or reach out to her at technology@tdmaine.org
Next week is Employee Learning Week 2023.
Employee Learning Week is celebrate each year during the first full week of December and is a time to highlight dedication to talent development.
Is your company doing anything to celebrate Employee learning?
It's a great time to remind employees about all of the resources available to them for learning and development.
If your company does something to celebrate, they can be recognized as a champion of learning! visit this link to see how.
This month’s featured board member is also our newest board member. Dan Cox told me the running joke is he’s worked in every industry- and that’s not much of an exaggeration. Dan is a problem solver and a lifelong learner. We’re excited to have him as our VP of Membership.
Dan currently works as a trainer for Gant Travel, which seems fitting given one of his favorite things to do is travel. He’s been to 43 of the 50 United States.
As a corporate travel trainer, Dan trains travel agents. He brings years of training experience and a robust understanding of instructional design and training technologies to his team.
Dan is the only member of his work team who wasn’t first a travel agent. Instead, Dan traversed a circuitous route to the corporate world. He told me he comes from a family of teachers, and as he moved through roles in the military, healthcare, and education he always found himself in informal instructional roles. When he eventually found himself in the corporate world, talent development was a natural fit, and he took the opportunity to earn a master's degree in Instructional design.
Dan has a vision and goal to increase the role of ATD in the state of Maine. He loves to have conversations and learn about what members want and need. He believes in being part of the solution.
When Dan joins meetings, you might catch a glimpse of his Zoom background image of Horseshoe Bend, just one of the many iconic locations he has visited. He has stood on both rims of the Grand Canyon, and recently, he got to take advantage of a work trip and traveled to Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks.
When Dan talks about travel, you can hear the excitement in his voice. There’s no doubt his work aligns with his passions. Dan brings his appetite for exploration and his dedication to the Talent Development community of Maine to his new VP position, and we have no doubt that he will work to make our chapter even better.
If you’d like to connect with Dan, you can find him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-cox-8343a978.
Program Recap Alert!
Did you join us for our panel discussion last week?
We kicked off our learning season with a panel discussion about Future-Proofing Talent
Our panel of experts discussed Artificial Intelligence in the workplace, cross-generational approach to technology, telling stories with data, and supporting our teams in this time of seemingly constant change.
Dan Cox kicked off the day with a demonstration of Chat GPT and discussed its use in creating written material in the workplace, ranging from resumes to training materials.
Our moderator posed the thought-provoking question of how can Chat GPT make us more efficient in our work and what are the impacts on our business initiatives or for our customers?”
We also dipped our toes into the waters of the regulatory discussion, acknowledging that with new technology new regulations are arising, and these changes come with potential training needs.
As technology often does, the discussion was prompted around cross-generational trends in technology use, comfort, and adoption.
One of the big takeaways of the discussion was that showing the benefits and capabilities of technology is a great place to start. The analogy was made of leading the horse to the water and then letting them drink.
When it comes to digital literacy, the consensus was that we need to make it meaningful.
As our use of technology increases, we have so much more access to data.
Molly Lindberg discussed the need for employees who are able to to speak to both sides- they can walk the walk and talk the talk on the technical side, and they can translate that into meaningful information for the business leaders. This is so important as we advocate for training needs and technology tools.
Richard Parent expanded on this to emphasize that we need to be focused on teaching people how to consume data and think critically about that data. He emphasized the need to skill-up storytellers and skill-up story readers.
All of our panelists chimed into the discussion about supporting people in this climate of rapid change. We briefly discussed the trend of employees retiring rather than adapting as well as the obstacle of younger employees intentionally resisting technology.
While we didn’t find all of the solutions in our training session, we had an interesting discussion about setting internal standards and policies, managing risk, and building psychological safety in the workplace.
This was the first training of the season, and it was our way of opening the door to our training year theme of Future Proofing Talent: Navigating the Skills Revolution. We hope to see you at our future trainings!
Some highlights from ATD National
Are you a Power Member?
This new monthly blog series is here to highlight some of our Maine chapter members’ top picks for articles, podcast episodes, and upcoming trainings highlighted on the National ATD site.
Let’s start this series with a quick reminder that you have access to the national ATD site as well as the Maine chapter site if you are a power member! If you are already a member of ATD Maine, you can get a $30 discount on your national membership.
The ATD National site offers a wide range of resources.
And for those of us driving the long, winding roads of Maine, one of the coolest offerings is its podcast series!
When you arrive at the ATD National home page, you can click on explore and scroll down to find Podcasts.
They currently host three different podcasts: The Accidental Trainer, DE&I Podcast, and Talent Development Leader Podcast.
You can listen right from the site or find them on your podcast platform of choice.
There is great content in all of the podcasts. The Accidental Trainer podcast covers a wide variety of topics with actionable items discussed with industry experts.
DE&I podcast is a monthly podcast and covers all things DE&I as related to talent development.
Talent Development Leader Podcast features conversations with industry influencers about, you guessed it, all things leadership in talent development.
If you come across a topic that piques your interest, let us know! We might have a SIG where you can explore it more, or we can add it to our list of topics of interest for future learning sessions.
Happy listening!
“Yes, AND…”
The Other Magic Word
What if I told you there is a magic word you can say to increase trust and engagement in your learning spaces? Too good to be true, right?
I will concede my first claim is an exaggeration, but the words we choose do have power, and a simple shift in word choice can significantly influence the culture of learning .
The use of “yes, and” phrasing or thinking is not a new concept and many professionals employ this tool in their daily communication. The concept comes from the world of improv.
“Yes, and” works in improv because the actors trust that whatever choice they make will be met with acceptance and validation. This is the same reason why using this phrasing in learning spaces can be so influential when working to encourage engagement and influence a culture of trust.
So how and when can you incorporate this phrase into the language you use? A simple place to start is to think about any time you would say, “yes, but” and start substituting “yes, and.”
This simple exchange of three letters can change the entire tone of a conversation.
“yes, but” says I waited for you to stop talking. You’re wrong. This is what I think and I’m right. Likely your intention behind the “but” is not any of those things, at least consciously, and yet that’s the experience the person has.
“yes, and” says I hear you. You’re right. I value what you say. Let me join you in this discussion.
Imagine if you took the risk to shared your thoughts and were met with this experience of feeling heard and valued. Likely you would feel more comfortable, more confident, and would be more willing to speak up in the future.
This phrasing is a way to demonstrate active listening. By using “yes, and” we keep the conversation moving.
When people feel heard, they feel respected and important. By fostering these experiences in our interactions, we begin to create a feeling of trust in our learning spaces which can lead to an increase in psychological safety. When people feel safe in their work environment, they are more willing to take the risk of failing, and this is the space where the deepest learning takes place.
While uttering the phrase “yes, and” is how we verbally engage with other people, the real weight of the words is the experience that comes with them.
We are acknowledging that we value that person and what they have to say. We’re partnering with them. We’re creating spaces where people can show up with the knowledge they have and learn new skills that will carry them forward in their careers.
“Yes, and” allows two seemingly diametric things to exist at the same time. Employees may complain training messes up their work schedule and they already know how to do x, y, and z, and training is important to ensure all employees are prepared for their roles because the way we do things evolves.
I encourage you to give this phrasing a try and see what shifts you notice in your training spaces and other interactions.
Do you have an interesting topic to explore or perspective to share? If you’d like to share your thoughts with our community, reach out to Communications@tdmaine.org.
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