Every organization has a policy on AI. Most of them are unwritten, unspoken, and enforced by silence. Priyanka Dave — behavioral scientist, dual PhD, and the person responsible for teaching an entire university system how to work with these tools — explains what actually happens inside a company that refuses to say the word out loud.
PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli
Every organization has a policy on AI. Most of them are unwritten, unspoken, and enforced by silence. Priyanka Dave — behavioral scientist, dual PhD, and the person responsible for teaching an entire university system how to work with these tools — explains what actually happens inside a company that refuses to say the word out loud.
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This conversation sat in my queue for months.
I recorded it back when the show still went by another name, filed it under soon, and then buried it under travel, deadlines, and the small avalanche of everything else. So: my apologies to Priyanka Dave, who deserved better timing. What I did before publishing was listen to the whole thing again, half expecting it to have gone stale — AI conversations have the shelf life of fresh milk — and it hadn't. Not one line. That is either a compliment to her or an indictment of the rest of us. Possibly both.
Here is what has held up.
Priyanka Dave is a behavioral scientist with two doctorates and the unglamorous job of teaching a large public institution how to actually use these tools. Her diagnosis is not about the technology. It is about what happens when nobody in charge will say anything about it. An organization that stays quiet on AI does not prevent its people from using AI. It only stops hearing about it. Employees keep working the way they were already working — with a chatbot open in the next tab — and they simply stop mentioning it. The tool doesn't go away. The conversation does.
I cover cybersecurity for a living, so I recognized this immediately. It's shadow IT with a better vocabulary. And shadow IT was never a technology failure — it was a communication failure that grew teeth. The same thing is happening now, except the data walking out the door isn't on a USB stick. It's being pasted into a text box by someone who was never told where the line is, because nobody in the building was willing to draw one.
The schools got there first, and got it wrong first. Ban it, some of them announced, and the students used it anyway — badly, secretly, without a shred of judgment about when the machine is confidently wrong. Prohibition didn't produce abstinence. It produced amateurs. It always does.
So Priyanka's answer is education, and here I pushed, because education has a recursion problem. If the leader is supposed to model good AI use, who taught the leader? I asked her: who educates the educator? Her answer was refreshingly unromantic. Nobody, mostly. Budgets get cut, leadership development is the first line item to go, and the executives left standing are quietly teaching themselves at night so they don't look foolish in the morning. The people expected to be the role models are improvising just like everyone else — they're only better dressed while doing it.
And this is where the real cost lands. She cited the research: people leave organizations that offer them nowhere to grow. Nobody wants to miss the train. If your company won't teach you the thing that everyone agrees is coming, you will go somewhere that will — and you will take your best years with you. The company that avoided the awkward conversation about AI doesn't just end up with a hidden problem. It ends up with a smaller team.
Her three tips for leaders are almost embarrassingly simple, which is how you know they're good. Ask your people what excites them about AI. Then ask what scares them. Then use the thing yourself, out loud, where everyone can see you double-check its work.
Which brings me to the word I've been chewing on since we hung up: sensemaking. Priyanka listed it among the capabilities leaders need. I called it common sense, and she let me get away with it. It means not pressing the easy button. It means remembering that the thing on the other side of the screen has no context, no stake, and no idea what it is saying — even when it sounds like it does.
It is not your friend. It is not your enemy. It is something else, and we haven't named it yet.
So the fear was never really about the machine, was it?
It was about being the last person in the room who wasn't told how to use it.
Priyanka's work and writing are linked below. Subscribe to the newsletter at marcociappelli.com.
Let's keep thinking.
— Marco
Co-Founder ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Creative Director | Branding & Marketing Advisor | Personal Branding Coach | Journalist | Writer | Podcast: An Analog Brain In A Digital Age ⚠️ Beware: Pigs May Fly | 🌎 LAX🛸FLR 🌍
Marco Ciappelli is Co-Founder & CMO of ITSPmagazine, Co-Founder & Creative Director of Studio C60, Branding & Marketing Advisor, Personal Branding Coach, Journalist, Writer, and Host of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age podcast. Born in Florence, Italy, and based in Los Angeles, he explores the intersection of technology, society, storytelling, and creativity — with an analog brain, in a digital age.
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Priyanka Dave, MBA, PhD leads enterprise-wide workforce transformation, building future-ready capability through strategic upskilling, inclusive learning, and organizational change. She currently serves as Upskilling Lead at Oregon State University, where her work on the university's Administrative Modernization Program earned the Outstanding Applied OBM Intervention Award from the Organizational Behavior Management Network at the Association for Behavior Analysis International annual convention.
Her career spans more than a decade across IT, aerospace, pharmaceutical, and higher education, in both the United States and India, with measurable results in Learning & Development, Change Management, and Organizational Development. She began in human resources in India, earning a master's degree and her first doctorate there, before moving to the United States to complete a second PhD in Industrial/Organizational Behavior Management at Western Michigan University. She also holds an MBA.
Dave partners with executives and cross-functional teams to design enterprise upskilling programs that close critical skill gaps, lead leadership development and performance improvement initiatives, and embed scalable learning strategies that sustain workforce readiness. She is a published contributor to the academic literature on performance feedback in organizations, and writes on AI adoption, digital transformation, and workforce capability for outlets including CIO and HR Executive.
EPISODE SUMMARY
Marco Ciappelli sits down with Priyanka Dave, MBA, PhD — a behavioral scientist with dual doctorates who leads workforce upskilling at Oregon State University — for a conversation about what actually happens inside organizations that refuse to talk about AI. Her argument, drawn from research and from teaching an entire university how to work with these tools, is that silence from leadership does not reduce AI use. It only drives it underground, where nobody double-checks the output and nobody admits what they pasted into the box. Marco brings the cybersecurity parallel: this is shadow IT with a better vocabulary, and shadow IT was never a technology failure. From there the two work through the recursion problem at the heart of every AI training initiative — if leaders are supposed to model good use, who trains the leaders? — the skills gap that widens into a societal one, the retention cost of being the company that won't teach anyone anything, and the three unglamorous moves any leader can make tomorrow. It ends on the word Priyanka calls sensemaking and Marco calls common sense: don't press the easy button, and remember that the thing answering you has no context, no stake, and no idea what it is saying.
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3 QUOTES — PRIYANKA DAVE
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> **On why silence is the real risk:**
> "If an organization is not openly accepting the use of AI, people are going to use it anyway. It's just that they will not share what they are doing — and that's where the problem starts."
> **On leaders as role models:**
> "Employees look up to their leaders when they are trying to use new tools. If organizations are not making any effort to upskill their leaders, they can't expect the rest of the organization to figure it out."
> **On the retention cost:**
> "People don't want to miss the train. If organizations don't move with the trend, they will lose their top talent — because employees will go find the learning somewhere else."
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3 QUOTES — MARCO CIAPPELLI
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> **On the education problem:**
> "So who is educating the educator?"
> **On the widening gap:**
> "Technology is going to augment the gap between the people who already understand the tools and the people who never had a chance to jump on the train — and that train has left the station."
> **On what AI actually is:**
> "It's not your friend, it's not your enemy, it's just something else. You've got to figure it out."