In this episode, Laurence Gill breaks down the two core failure patterns behind most enterprise AI deployments that don’t deliver: ROT data — the redundant, obsolete, and trivial information making up 30 to 50% of most organizational data environments — and the Demo-to-Reality Gap, the structural disconnect between flawless pilot performance and real-world failure. He closes with three diagnostic questions every leader can bring to their next meeting, before the next contract is signed.

No technical background required. Just the framework you need to make a better decision.

About the Host

Laurence Gill is a federal IT leader with over 20 years managing technology programs across the U.S. government. He is a doctoral candidate in cybersecurity and a published author on federal IT and cybersecurity topics. He also holds BS from UNC Chapel Hill and an MS from Carnegie Mellon University.

AI Literacy for Leaders is an extension of the workforce development work he has done for years — training youth and adults in financial literacy, cybersecurity, and emerging technology through community programs in Washington, D.C. The mission is the same: make complex, high-stakes knowledge accessible to the people who need it most.

You’ve been using AI tools for months. So why do you have less time than before?

The answer is 150 years old. In 1865, an economist named William Stanley Jevons discovered something deeply counterintuitive: when a technology becomes more efficient, total consumption of the resource it saves tends to go up — not down. More efficient coal engines didn’t reduce coal use. They made coal cheaper to run, so demand exploded.

The same mechanism is running on your calendar right now. Researchers call it workload creep — and it follows a predictable pattern. The faster AI lets you produce, the more output gets expected of you. That efficiency gain doesn’t go to you. It gets absorbed into the new baseline before you ever had a chance to keep it.

In this episode, we break down the Jevons Paradox and what it actually means for leaders deploying AI tools across their organizations. We look at why 95% of large enterprise AI investments are generating zero measurable return — while 90% of workers are successfully using AI on their own outside company systems. We examine the jagged frontier: where AI performs brilliantly and where it silently fails. And we get to the one architectural shift that actually breaks the cycle — the difference between automating a task and automating a workflow.

About the host

Laurence Gill is an IT leader with more than two decades of experience overseeing technology implementation across the U.S. government.. He is a doctoral candidate in cybersecurity with a dissertation focused on federal IT spending, and has spent years training youth and adults in workforce development skills including financial literacy, cybersecurity, entrepreneurship, and AI. That training mission is the reason this podcast exists: making complex, high-stakes knowledge accessible to the people who need it most, without requiring a technical background to benefit from it.

Ransomware attacks on hospitals are not a technology problem — they are a patient safety crisis. In Episode 4, Laurence Gill draws on his background as a doctoral candidate in cybersecurity and two decades of federal IT leadership to break down why healthcare is the number one ransomware target in the country, how these attacks produce documented patient harm, and why the ransom decision is a clinical emergency, not a policy debate. Anchored by the ransomware storyline in The Pitt Season 2 Episode 7 — which aired the same morning the University of Mississippi Medical Center was hit by a real attack — this episode delivers the governance framework every healthcare leader needs before the next crisis lands: how to build resilience before an attack, how to execute during one, and the accountability questions that belong on every leadership agenda right now.