When most leaders talk about AI and the future of work, the conversation quietly drifts toward a single question:

"How many people can we cut?"

In this episode of AI with Bry, I sit down with Christine Santacroce, a people-first leader, founder of Virago Search, and co-creator of SkillzForge, who is on a mission to flip that script.

Instead of treating AI as a shortcut to layoffs, Christine shows how it can unlock creativity, rebuild the middle class, and make work actually work for people again. This isn't theoretical. She's using AI every day in recruiting, skilled labor matching, and business operations and she's doing it without sacrificing humanity.

From Terminator 2 Fear to Trusted Tool

Christine admits she started where a lot of us did, somewhere between curiosity and "oh no, this is how the movie starts." But as she leaned in, one lesson became crystal clear:

*AI is human-driven.*What you put in is what you get out just multiplied.

Instead of seeing AI as an enemy of jobs, she reframed it as:

A way to remove manual, soul-draining busywork
A way to help small businesses compete with bigger players
A way to make room for meaningful, human work, conversations, strategy, creativity, relationships

The fear didn't disappear, it got replaced with responsibility.

The Quiet Crisis: We Optimized the Soul Out of Work

Over 20+ years in the market, Christine has watched something subtle but dangerous happen:

We've optimized the same systems over and over
Speed and profit became the default goals
Innovation and creativity quietly shrank
People became less and less happy in their careers

For many employees, work now looks like this:

Spend Saturday recovering from the week
Spend Sunday dreading Monday
Spend years wondering if this is just… it

Christine believes AI can disrupt that, but not by automating people out of the picture. Instead, it can unwind broken systems in:

Healthcare
Education
Supply chains and food systems
Talent and recruiting

AI becomes the tool that lets us ask: "If we were designing this from scratch, human-first, how would we build it?"

How a Small Recruiting Firm Uses AI to Punch Above Its Weight

Christine runs a small, tech- and AI-enabled recruiting firm. A few years ago, competing with large firms was nearly impossible:

No massive marketing budget
No huge sourcing teams
No in-house creative departments

Today, she's using AI to change that equation:

1. Marketing & Brand Presence

Using tools like ChatGPT to self-learn marketing fundamentals. Building professional-looking campaigns, visuals, and copies. Generating site content, social posts, and outreach that would've required a full marketing team.

2. Recruiting Workflows

Recruiting has always been manual-heavy. It requires, endless sourcing and web scraping and repetitive candidate screening. Now, Christine and her team use model context protocols (MCP) and AI workflows to automate 50-60% of manual tasks. It frees up time to focus on what actually matters like having deep conversations with clients, understanding what's broken in their hiring, and matching people to the right role not just any role.

3. SkillzForge: Rebuilding the Middle Class with Better Matching

Through SkillzForge, Christine is working on one of the hardest problems in the labor market. The gap between talent + skill and real opportunity. There is, no consistent bridge for skilled workers or no simple, trusted system to match the right person to the right job, fast. AI becomes the bridge that maps skills to roles more intelligently, helps people land in jobs where they can thrive, not just survive, and puts more middle-class Americans back on a realistic path to stability (yes, including "I might actually be able to buy a house someday").

The Real Question Leaders Should Be Asking

Most leaders still open the AI conversation with:

"How much of my staff can I cut?"

Christine flips that completely:

"How much can you increase profitability with the same staff?"

AI should:

Amplify your people, not erase them
Turn overwhelmed teams into high-leverage teams
Help you get through the to-do list instead of cutting the people holding it

Think about what's currently stuck in backlog at your company:

Social media and content that never gets posted
Marketing campaigns that never launch
Hiring pipelines that always feel behind
Books that never close on time
Prospect research that sales "never has time" to do

AI gives you the chance to:

Automate the drudge work
Let your teams breathe, think, and create
Replace constant burnout with room for innovation

Governance, Ethics, and Saying "No" to Shady Use Cases

Christine is clear: just because AI can do something doesn't mean you should let it. Her companies, Virago Search and Skillsforge, use guiding principles to decide what's in bounds:

Would this help people thrive at work, or trap them?
Does this respect candidates and clients, or manipulate them?
Does this align with our goal: match the right people to the right opportunities?

Some ideas could drive revenue but feel off, like using sentiment analysis on live conversations to subtly manipulate prospects. Her answer?

"Somebody else might build that. We're not going to."

Ethical AI isn't a slogan for Christine; it's an operating constraint.

Leadership in the Age of AI: Train People, Don't Terrify Them

Christine sees the same pattern over and over with companies adopting AI:

They assume employees fear change
They quietly frame AI as a path to layoffs
Employees react with anxiety and resistance (of course they do)

Instead, Christine advises leaders to:

Acknowledge reality: Your employees are probably already using AI, often in risky ways you can't see.
Shift the narrative: From: "We're adopting AI, some of you may go."To: "We're adopting AI, and we're going to train you to become more valuable with it."
Invest in training, not just tools and teach people: How to prompt safelyHow to use AI in their specific roleWhere the guardrails are (privacy, security, compliance)
Invite ideas from the front lines and real innovation doesn't always come from the boardroom. It often comes from:The claims adjuster who knows a broken workflow is costing 25% efficiencyThe recruiter buried in tools that don't talk to each otherThe coordinator who knows exactly where the bottlenecks are

When people feel safe, trained, and invited, they stop bracing for layoffs and start designing the future with you.

From Layoffs to Long-Term Value

For decades, the default strategy has been:

Miss a number
Announce layoffs
Please the market
Rehire later
Repeat

With AI, we finally have an alternative:

Fix broken workflows
Automate time-consuming nonsense
Keep your best people
Give them tools to maximize their strengths
Use AI to build, not just trim

Christine's challenge to leaders is simple and profound:

What if you got better at what you do, without sacrificing your people to do it?

Listen to the Full Conversation

If this resonated with you, you'll want to hear the full episode:

🎙 Podcast Episode: Beyond Headcount Cuts: Scale with AI, and Keep Your People

📺 Watch / Listen: AI with Bry, visit ai.bry.net

Connect with Christine Santacroce

Want to see how AI-enabled recruiting and people-first leadership actually look in the real world?

💼 Virago Search - People-first recruiting, powered by AI

🌐 Website: Virago Search (search for "Virago Search" online)

📧 Email: [email protected]

🚀 Skillsforge - AI-powered matching for skilled labor and middle-class careers

And of course, you can find Christine on LinkedIn by searching for "Christine Santacroce Virago Search".

Follow AI with Bry

For more conversations at the intersection of AI, leadership, and human potential:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61575757332333

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aiwithbry

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@aiwithbry.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiwithbry

X (Twitter): https://x.com/aiwithbry

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phingers

Know a colleague who needs to hear this? Share the AI with Bry podcast and join the movement of leaders transforming their businesses with AI, one actionable step at a time.

Episode's Transcript

**[00:00.000] Christine Santacroce:**Their home life is crappy because they're miserable at their job, right? They're spending all of Saturday recovering from Friday, and they're spending Sunday dreading Monday.

**[00:07.880] Bryan Dennstedt:**I think you can build the systems and the workflow that AI can help you. Like, you can be ahead of social media. You can be ahead of marketing. Like, every department can be affected if you put the right AI system in place. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to AI with Bry, the show where we dive deep into how to learn, leverage, and lead with AI. I'm your host, Bryan Dennstedt, technologist, strategist, and someone who's endlessly curious about how AI is reshaping our work, our relationships, and what it means to be human. Each week, I'm joined by someone who's not just talking about AI, but actually living in it, experimenting, leading, and helping others adapt. And today, I'm thrilled to welcome Christine Santacroce, a people-first leader and transformation expert who's passionate about helping organizations integrate AI in a way that enhances both productivity and, in my opinion, humanity. Christine has spent her career guiding leaders through change, and now she's at the forefront of helping people understand what it means to lead in the age of AI. From rethinking talent strategy to balancing empathy and automation, her insights are the kind that stick with you. Welcome to the show, Christine.

**[01:23.600] Christine Santacroce:**Thanks for having me, Bryan. That was a really good intro.

**[01:26.000] Bryan Dennstedt:**Thank you. Awesome. I try. I aim to please here. But our first little segment is the learn segment. And so I'm curious, like, what's something you've learned recently about AI that's really shifted the way you think about leadership or transformation? Like, how are you learning in this age of AI?

**[01:45.420] Christine Santacroce:**That's a good one. That's a good question. And it's a pertinent one. So I'm one of the people that probably looked at AI initially and was a little dread going, oh, no, it's going to change everything. I'm the age of Terminator 2, not to age myself. So, you know. But as we sort of dove into AI, I think one of the things that we started to realize was it's human-driven, right? You need that human in the loop, and what you're putting into it is what you're going to get out of it, right? And spades. So if you're putting garbage in, you're going to get a whole lot more garbage out. So one of the things we've been focusing on is learning that and getting tighter and tighter with what we're feeding into our systems, the guidelines we're presenting it, and sort of the direction we wanted to go. So that was a learning curve. And I'll be honest, less afraid now, less freaked out now, because there is a path forward to use this as this really amazing tool that really can push us forward, and it really can make people's lives better.

**[02:42.720] Bryan Dennstedt:**Yeah, absolutely. And, like, how I was just reading in the Neuron this morning, I think, it said that, yes, there's all this buzz that AI is replacing jobs, but realistically, it's probably only replaced 1% or 2%. At this point, you still need a human to do so much. And I know you're in this, like, talent, recruiting, identifying space in a big, big way. Like, how are you seeing AI change the way people work, not just the tools they use, but, like, the mindset that they're bringing, like you were just discussing?

**[03:15.760] Christine Santacroce:**So that's going to be - there's two layers to that. I'm going to give you the deeper layer first, which I probably shouldn't, but I'm going to.

**[03:23.380] Bryan Dennstedt:**Please.

**[03:24.460] Christine Santacroce:**Sitting in the market for the last 20-plus years, to age myself, again, every answer, I'm going to do that. But essentially, one of the things I have realized over time, we've watched innovation and creativity dwindle over the last several decades, where we're sort of working within the same system over and over and optimizing it all the time, either for speed or for profit. And that's really sort of changed the way we function in our jobs. And you can see people are progressively less and less happy in their careers and the way it's impacting their life, right? They don't see the meaning or the purpose. I think with the advent of AI, a lot of those systems are going to be upset because a lot of those pieces are things that the system can take care of. And now we're going to be moving into this age of how do we do this better, right? How can we look at this in a more humanistic way? We're more effective. We're doing this better. And I would point to health care. I would point to education. I would point to supply and demand, our food systems, food shortages, the things we're putting in food. All of those are things that sort of grew on their own within these systems. And now we have an opportunity to rethink those and come up with better solutions. So that's the way I'm seeing it change work. That's my hope, that I'm going to see this change in the way humans are really utilized and what our strengths and our skills really are. And then at the easier point, you know, in my world, we're looking at trying to drive efficiency all the time and trying to spend our time on more meaningful tasks where we really need our skills, working with people, having conversations, having that one-to-one connection, particularly in hiring, we can get rid of a lot of the manual tasks that eat our time and make us less effective at what we do. So that's my two layers. It's a little different. But I do think on the deeper side, what makes humans special is something that's going to continue to rise more and more to the surface as we have tools that can get rid of some of the rope pieces or some of the automation.

**[05:14.160] Bryan Dennstedt:**Absolutely. I think that's well said. But I am the firm believer that this AI thing is not a bubble. It's not going to burst. It's here to stay. And we've got to embrace it and figure out how do we incorporate it in our lives with the right security, caution, privacy, all those things. But it's still that question of it brings it back to the people side of this in a big, big way, right? It's going to usher this new era of creativity and entrepreneurship, I think. Like, are you seeing that now or, like, what are the tools? And my other question is really, like, what are some of the tools that you've learned about in the past couple weeks or months that you're leveraging AI day-to-day with some of the tools that if you don't mind sharing any tips and tricks with those listeners?

**[06:01.200] Christine Santacroce:**I don't. So just to give you context, so I own a small recruiting firm, a small business, where tech and AI enabled lets us do things a little bit faster, a lot bit faster, more effectively and better. I would say even just a few years ago, it was so difficult to compete on the market because if you're a smaller business, you don't have the marketing budgets, you don't have the reach and capability that some of those larger firms have. And all of a sudden, my day-to-day, I'm creating real professional, smooth, impressive-looking marketing materials, right? We've been able to put that out there and drive people to our website. And very frankly, I don't know anything about marketing. I had to go to ChatGPT and say, hey, walk me through these courses on how to actually market a small business and how to do this effectively. And it's been this sort of guided self-learning. And then we're turning to tools like Grok Imagine to create these really beautiful images and videos that look like they were professionally done. And we're able to fit them into a real marketing plan and process that's been built out to help us in our day-to-day. Now, aside from that, if anybody knows anything about recruiting, a lot of what we do is highly, highly manual, right? We're using Boolean strings, we're scraping the web all the time, and you're doing that if you're really quite good. You've been doing this for a while. We now have tools that we can lean into. And I think you know we built tools and we built processes and model context protocols and ChatGPT that freed up about 50%, 60% of our time to be able to sit down with people and our clients and candidates and really build better relationships, the better understanding of what's broken. And so I think we're touching AI in every single aspect of what we do to run the business, whether it's our financials, our marketing, our sourcing. And it's taking a lot of the time-consuming manual kind of crap work out of it so we can actually really double down on what we're exceptional at and what we're very good at and what makes us different. So it's in there every single day with everything we do, and we're kind of using all the tools. It's a little grok over here, a little ChatGPT over here, perplexity over here, right, depending on what their strengths are. And it's phenomenal, right? Even our marketing software, our email software is AI-driven, and we're optimizing that outreach, right, to get past some of those filters. But, I mean, it's day-to-day. It's literally there every single day. It has optimized what we're doing. And, again, this is somebody who is looking at it from the Terminator 2 framework. I'm going, oh, dear God, what are we doing? And then I'm, like, utilizing it, leveraging it to build my business. And just to go off on a tangent, one of the other things we're doing in the skilled labor side of things, and that's another company, Skillsforge, that we're building, we're really trying to leverage AI to put people to work in the right job faster because the disconnect between skill and talent and opportunity is so broad. Like, there's no bridge there right now. There's no system there. We're trying to build a system that's going to bridge that so we can put more of the middle-class Americans to work, rebuild that American dream, maybe make it possible for somebody to actually go, hey, I think I can buy a house in a couple of years. Because we're trying to put that back on the table, and we're using AI to be able to do it. So, yeah.

**[09:11.200] Bryan Dennstedt:**Phenomenal. I love all that. I think it's interesting to see. I guess my question is, if you were to talk to your average recruiter out there, do they even know what MCP means?

**[09:26.660] Christine Santacroce:**No. But I will say this. Once we show them what these tools can actually do on a day-to-day, they intuit immediately, right? They get it immediately, and then they start asking questions and say, well, can it do this too? And it really does drive some of our design and some of our work where we go, yeah, yeah, I can do that, right? We had one, there was a staffing company. We were talking to the recruiters, and they said, we can't pull anybody from these companies, though. And I was like, that's super easy. We need to pull those out immediately. There's so much that they intuit, and they get immediately, and they understand the way this can actually impact. They don't know the terms, but they now understand that the tools can provide that. And there's a ton of stuff on the market that is just built by technologists who are fantastic, but they don't necessarily come out of our industry. And we see this a lot with different tools, right? There's such a disconnect between how we work and what the tool is trying to do. So we tried to finally build something that actually connected our business to what we needed it to do for us, what we needed it to do for our clients, and what we needed it to do for our candidates so that everybody has a really good, positive experience. And they land and work, and things work well and smoothly. So, yeah, yeah, the terminology might not be able to get it.

**[10:37.700] Bryan Dennstedt:**And it's interesting, because I know you and I have had the chance to speak about this before briefly. But as we move into this leverage section, and I think you've touched on many aspects of it already here, but I really want to understand how the leaders that we get to work with are figuring out how to use AI in real-world ways. But one of the things that I think you touched on is the fact that we've all been just using Outlook or using Gmail, and then some other tool comes along, and we try it out. But we've been stuck with whatever workflows the whole general mass use, like Salesforce or HubSpot or any of these tools. And we try to fit our business to match that tool. And I think what you've been able to do with what you've described with your platform is to strip that all out. Like you're building the perfect workflow for exactly the use case and the model for how your teams work to source and get candidates quickly. And I think that's the beautiful thing about AI in this age, is anybody now with half a dangerous computer programming class in their background can come in and do so much cool stuff all on their own. I know I'm doing it, but I'm full-on computer geek. But you are, too, in that sense of just really driving it forward. I just love to hear you talk about how AI is helping you in that way, and tell us a little bit more about how you're leveraging the tools that you've built with your teams.

**[12:12.240] Christine Santacroce:**So that's - it's funny. Being in recruitment, I guess we see a lot. We see a lot. We see sort of the right ways to attack problems. We see the wrong ways to attack problems. One of the things that's been so impressive is we could really do this rapidly, right? Now, building something in ChatGPT and model context protocols, that gets a little bit heavy, and it did get heavy, and they needed help. But I spent earlier, before we built that out, saying, I'm going to do some vibe coding, right? I'm going to talk to the system and actually tell it what I want it to be able to do. How do I build it? Can I build it? How can I build it for cheap? But still have it be effective in, you know, providing that input into a system, because you get crazy answers, by the way. You will get crazy answers. You get mad at the system. You've got to go back and look and go, no, my question was not good. I reformat what I was putting in here, and I can get something out. So it was phenomenal to see that we could sit down and actually build something out that just pushed our business that much further ahead of where it needed to be. And it overcame these problems that we've been struggling with for 20 years, whether it was my company or previous ones, right? To build a company, you have to scale. You have to hire more. Gosh, you're going to lose 30% of your candidates. It's the cyclical thing that you can't break out of. And all of a sudden, we can build tools rapidly. We don't have to scale that way anymore. And suddenly, we can just scale without all of the inherent cost and keeping that inherent cost down. So that's been really, really cool. One of the things, and I'm going to bring this up because I think it's important, that we have seen companies do poorly. And I've seen other companies do it really well. I saw them do it with cloud, too. They're like, let's go cloud. Why? Because our competitor is doing it. Yeah. It's not a good business case, right? But we've seen other companies that with the AI adoptions being pushed from their parent companies and their holding companies, they're doing it so well. They're training their internal employees that understand their business. They understand the problems that they run into. They're training them on AI. And all of a sudden, it's become a part of their business model. And it's very, very functional and optimized, customized for that business. Very similar to what we did, right? We customized what we built for our type of business in our industry. And we were using it until we realized that other companies might also want to use this. And we went, oh, that's a good idea. We should sort of push this out there. And that's the space we're in right now, creating something that solves an actual true business problem that we know is there, as opposed to just adopting to adopt, right? There's a lot of companies that will go, we're AI first. We're tech-enabled. The systems they're using don't fit together the right way. They're using myriad different systems, and there's sort of this hodgepodge of, I'm now asking my recruiters and my staff to touch all of these systems. It's not actually adding anything to the bottom line of their success or making them better at what they do, right?

**[14:50.240] Bryan Dennstedt:**Yeah. Absolutely. Well said. Well said. And I think that light bulb has not gone off for a majority of companies yet, which gives us first-mover advantage. But at the same time, it is the future, for sure, like being able to just come up with the workflow and drive it forward. So kudos for you to being on this bleeding edge of it. I guess I'm curious how you're balancing the excitement of all this cool innovation that you get to do with the responsibility that you're using it ethically and thoughtfully and those angles, too. Do you have some thoughts, or has that been conversations with your team?

**[15:28.440] Christine Santacroce:**Um, yes, and I think that one's, that's actually, that's easier. Um, when I started my first company, Virago Search, when I started Skillsforge, it was really coming from a deep place of wanting my work to actually matter. Um, I've got three sons. I'm a mom. I am a coach. I coach a girls' varsity basketball team. And you get this insight on these things that are actually broken in our society, and you go, I want to actually fix this. I don't want to be in a business that it's just business for the sake of, if I'm going to be out on my own and I'm going to build something, then it should have meaning behind it. So we created at both companies, there's guiding principles that really guide what we do, how we service our candidates, our clients, um, how we take anything to market. And I think everybody sort of has to start there, because it's really easy to go, I'm so excited about what I could do with this technology. Oh, my God. Like, we have ways that we can use a sentiment analysis engine to read the person we're talking to and to give us insights and go, hey, if you want to really bag a sale, say it this way. That's very borderline unethical, right? So we don't use it because it just doesn't, it doesn't feel right. And it doesn't vibe with what we're doing. So those guiding principles, when you move forward into any new territory, you have to have them. Because when you come to those crossroads and you really don't know what to do, you get to fall back and go, okay, does this fit with the paradigm that we stipulated at the onset? And for us, with both Virago Search and Skillsforge, this is about matching the right people to the right opportunity. We don't want to keep putting people in jobs that they don't thrive. They're not happy. Their home life is crappy because they're miserable at their job, right? They're spending all of Saturday recovering from Friday, and they're spending Sunday dreading Monday. That's the exact opposite of what we're trying to accomplish. We want people to thrive at work, and it should be the thing that drives their home life, their family life, their personal life, whatever that might be, instead of work being this drudgery of day in and day out. I'm going to do this for the next 40 years, and then hopefully in my 70s, I'll have a little time. So for us, we have guiding principles that have driven everything we do and every decision we make. And as I said, there are some tools that we looked at, and we can see the potential, and we go, that doesn't fit. Somebody else will probably do it, but we're not going to do it, and that's where we can draw a line.

**[17:45.560] Bryan Dennstedt:**Well, kudos to you for taking that time to really think through that because I think it's like any tool that we're given in this technology age. You can decide how you want to use it, and I have the belief that society as a whole will do the right thing with these tools, but time will tell if Terminator comes in terms. I certainly hope Terminator does not happen. But let's flip the narrative over to leadership. AI is transforming every industry, including yours. Leaders are under pressure to guide people through this massive change. How are you providing that leadership to your team or other people that you're speaking with in the recruiting space to help them go through this massive change?

**[18:33.180] Christine Santacroce:**So one of the things that we end up, we find ourselves a lot is talking to companies that are trying to struggle with this change and who's using what. And we ended up having to show a number of clients that your employees are already using these tools, and they're using them in dangerous ways. They're using them without your knowledge, right? In banks, we see it in insurance companies and underwriting. So when we talk to our clients, it's often about these hiring paradigms and this making the shift in what it looks like. And I'll be very honest, you know, how much of my staff can I cut? And we come at it from this very different perspective of how much can you increase your profitability with the same staff? That's the equation. So getting to be in that seat and have that conversation with them and sort of flip that presumption of, oh, if I cut 20% of my workforce, gosh, look at my profitability goes up. And we say, what if we use these tools instead to optimize and drive these efficiencies and to build, right? Keep the staff, profit will soar. We try to guide conversations in that way, right? Look at your staff as people that can be trained, that can be open to change. And we hear lots of people go, well, my staff, they're very afraid of change. Of course they are. You're talking about cutting them. Let's flip it and talk about training them and how this might actually make them that much more effective at what they do. Now, internally with our teams, that's the conversation. And with our clients on the recruitment side, that's been the conversation as well. Let's look at how we can actually optimize and make everybody X percent more profitable for you. Let's see how we can make them better at what they do and build your business that way. And when we get clients that buy into that, the change is phenomenal, right? The culture shifts positively. Their productivity shifts positively. And they have these tools that actually apply to their businesses. And I think that's the game, right? That's what we're playing for. It doesn't have to be the old paradigm of firing everybody or doing layoffs to hit your numbers, right? It could actually be, let's innovate. Let's do something new. Let's see what some of our people can actually come up with when they feel safe and they have the ability, right? Ideas are generated like crazy. And so often, they're ground level up, right? They don't come this way. They come this way. But these people have to feel safe and they have to feel like they're part of the equation moving forward. And I think if we are going to drive AI forward, if we're going to drive this technology and these businesses forward, we have to have our hand on the scale. And we've got to drive it ethically and we have to drive it the right way. And that's a lot of, that's a paradigm shift, right? We've spent decades hitting layoffs, the hit numbers, shareholder value, then going into the cyclical rehiring and then doing the same thing over. What if we just got that much better at what we did?

**[21:10.780] Bryan Dennstedt:**Yeah. And I commend you. And that's what I see. I mean, I think it's important to note that the governance piece of AI is a key thing. You've got to have a governance schedule. But just like when the internet came out or we had to train people on how to use Microsoft Word or we had to train people on how to buy stuff from Amazon, even like all those things had to go through those training curves. And this is no different. I just think it's a more intense training session that you have to take your employees through to give them this new skill set. But at the same time, when I go in and look at companies as a CTO, what I see is that they've got a bazillion things on their to-do list that they aren't doing because they continue to trim so much fat and they optimize for shareholder value, all those things that you mentioned. And so that their to-do list is never done. So their employees are always stressed out and that leads to that cycle that you're talking about. But with this age of AI, I think you can build the systems and the workflow that AI can help you and you can actually get everything done on your to-do list. Like it's just amazing. Like you can be ahead of social media. You can be ahead of marketing. You can be ahead of your books closing on time. You can be ahead of prospecting research. Like every department can be affected if you put the right AI system in place to help the employee nail it. And then from there, you're giving that water cooler time, that ability to sit there and think like, what could we do next? What's the cool thing we could unlock? And you're spot on. Like, I just love that. And the companies that embrace that, I think are going to be the ones that fly ahead.

**[22:53.200] Christine Santacroce:**Yeah, for sure. They're going to win. And it's so ironic that, and I'm not going to knock these companies or name them, but some of these big indicators of our market on the tech side that have these cool cultures and stuff, look, they're the ones hitting these layoffs, layoffs, layoffs, layoffs. And you're going, you guys are the ones who are supposed to iterate and develop and innovate. And as much of a bummer that is, and we go, no, it's opening the door for other players and where AI, right, AI is not inherently going to democratize anything. But if we use it the right way, small Virago Search and Skillsforge can actually have a big footprint to make a change enough that other companies follow that direction. And the trick is finding the right leaders to put them in place because the leaders that can balance strategic with tactical and they can sort of keep this mission of what we're trying to accomplish, they're going to lean towards strategic change and optimization and creation. When you bring in tactical leaders, and we've done that for decades, right, you see it a lot in finance. They're like, boom, boom, boom, boom. I cut heads, we hit our numbers. But the next year rolls around and you're facing the same problems again, right? We're never solving it. Now we have an opportunity to go, hey, I can actually solve this problem and do something new and better, right? That's the change. And I think that's how we have to start talking to and educating those leaders, those shareholders, those board members, that these tools aren't just to automate and cut employees. That's like the lowest level use. It's a terrible usage. Let's go the other way and actually create and build and innovate and see if we can create the world that we actually want to live in.

**[24:30.840] Bryan Dennstedt:**I love it. I love it. I think that's so inspiring. I mean, the way you're describing leadership, it's less about controlling the outcomes and more about creating trust and experimentation at your companies. And I think that you hit the nail on the head. That's exactly what we need in this new era for sure.

**[24:49.640] Christine Santacroce:**Awesome. We need people that are going to usher in this creation and this innovation and make it, again, you have so many people sitting in your companies that have good ideas. They know what's broken. And they know how impactful a tiny change can be, but that message is never getting anywhere, right? It's stopping here because it's not your role, right? Imagine the leaders that actually breed that safety and that creativity so that that person sitting there, that claims adjuster, can go, that system's broken. It's costing 25% all the time, right? Screen to screen to screen to screen. We could probably do this internally. We don't need that off-the-shelf software that's a billion dollars to actually implement it. Oh, God, we want to make a change. We have to go back to the vendor for another billion dollars and wait six months. So many companies are addicted to this sunk cost fallacy and so many levels.

**[25:43.900] Bryan Dennstedt:**Yeah, yeah. I love it. I mean, Christine, you've nailed it. This was an amazing conversation that we had today. I appreciate you so much in joining us for the AI with Bry podcast here. How do people get in touch if they want to learn more about the recruiting system? You've teased out a little bit here. They can get in touch with you and learn about how you're really leveraging AI, and you can increase the speed at which you hire amazing talent.

**[26:09.420] Christine Santacroce:**We are such nerds. We like to actually show everybody what we do and talk about it, because even if they're not working with us, they get this insight into how to work with these systems. But I'm on LinkedIn. You can hit me at my company. It's Christine at Virago Search. It's Christine with a C-H, and Virago Search is V-I-R-A-G-O, search.com. But we're all over. We're posting all the time, so you'll find us.

**[26:30.380] Bryan Dennstedt:**Very cool. I will make sure those links are in the show notes, so you can check out more and get in touch with Christine. I think she does have a really unique model for hiring, and it is definitely AI forward. So please reach out to her. I really enjoyed hearing your perspective on how we can learn, leverage, and lead with AI, Christine. Thanks again for being here.

**[26:49.920] Christine Santacroce:**Thank you for inviting me. This was awesome.

**[26:51.780] Bryan Dennstedt:**Thank you. If you're listening and enjoying this episode, make sure you're following AI with Bry. Leave a review, please, or share it with someone who's curious about AI and leadership. You can learn more about Christine and her work at Virago Search. Again, I'll make sure that's in the show notes. Again, I'm Bryan Dennstedt. We'll see you next week. And remember, the future doesn't wait. Learn, leverage, and lead. This episode of AI with Bry was hosted and produced by me, Bryan Dennstedt. Produced with help from Nancy Velasquez and Kelly Lopez. Video by Leo Moralina. Sound, AI generated. Find us on all platforms at AI with Bry, and visit ai.bry.net for more. Learn, leverage, lead.