Preparing the Workforce for AI (Rebroadcast)

We're taking a short break from new episodes while we plan some exciting upcoming interviews. In the meantime, we're revisiting one of our favorites from the archive on a topic that's even more relevant now than it was when we released it in 2025.

As enterprises move from AI pilots to full deployment, the upskilling question has gone from 'nice to have' to urgent. In this episode, Tom Stoneman sits down with Ricardo Costa, Chief Technology Officer at Purolator, to explore the big idea of preparing the workforce for AI.

With nearly two decades leading technology and security teams, Ricardo has helped organizations through multiple waves of change. Now, his focus is on giving people the skills and confidence to use AI well. Tom and Ricardo dig into the gap between AI expectations and reality, why upskilling can’t be a side project, and how strong teams and partnerships make change possible.

We also hear how Ricardo uses music and specifically makes AI-generated music as his own “outside the enterprise” ritual to reset and find headspace for better decisions.

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Tom Stoneman: Hi, I'm Tom Stoneman and this is The Intelligent Enterprise, a brand new podcast where every episode we take a break from the chaos of all the notifications rollout. And updates and enterprise life and get inside a big idea by stepping outside of it. It could be over a coffee on a walk, or even listening to some music, because sometimes the best way to get a new perspective on something is to step away from it.
I can't think of a better guest to kick off our first episode than Ricardo Costa, chief Technology Officer at Purolator, the largest courier network in Canada. Ricardo has spent nearly two decades leading technology and security teams at major enterprises. From the likes of Deloitte and Rogers to Weston Foods, his career has been built on preparing organizations and their people for the next wave of innovation, making him the perfect guide for today's conversation.
Our topic today is preparing the workforce for AI and the tensions that come with that.
Ricardo Costa: The biggest tension that I see right now is I call expectations versus reality. The expectation on AI is being a lot higher than the outcomes of ai.
Tom Stoneman: We talk about how leaders today face the challenge of having to balance the promise of AI with the realities of.
We also get to understand Ricardo's approach to future proofing his team and when he is looking for a little outside perspective, how he makes music using ai.
Ricardo Costa: Some people will do gardening, some people will go running. I might spend a couple hours trying to create an okay AI song.
Tom Stoneman: I hope you enjoy the conversation.
Ricardo, thanks for joining us. We know you've got a busy day. We appreciate your being here.
Ricardo Costa: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Really nice to have this conversation with you.
Tom Stoneman: First and foremost, I'd like to ask you what your break time activity is when you're deep in a problem.
Ricardo Costa: I like playing the guitar.
It's something I've done a good chunk of my life. I am a very bad player, but I, I usually use headphones when I'm doing it. I kind of like isolate myself and it's a good decompression. Like you don't think about anything. Doesn't matter if I'm playing good or not, it's my time and I get you kind of doze off a little bit and not thinking about day-to-day stuff.
So that's kind of my. Scape area or zone for the busy day to day and all the discussions we have every day.
Tom Stoneman: Do you ever do it at work? Do you keep a guitar there?
Ricardo Costa: No, no, no. This is something that not even my kids get to hear me playing most of the time. As I said, I'm not a great player, but I do like playing.
I know a little bit of music theory because. At the end of the day, it's math. And for somebody in the technology area, it seems to be easier. But, uh, I usually play for myself. I don't play in band or anything. It's, and I like keeping it that way. It's my moment, right? It's. Kind of selfish, but it's mine.
Tom Stoneman: I know we talked before this, we both have music backgrounds.
We could go on and on. We will come back and talk about this a little bit later. So our topic today, preparing the workforce for AI and your role as Chief Technology Officer. I know in past interviews you've talked about that role as being a translator for technology to business, basically helping people to understand what's what, how technology translates into the business part of the work.
Can you elaborate a little more on that, of how you translate that into the workforce?
Ricardo Costa: I think the role of the technologist and the technology leader has been changing for a long time, right? Like before it was like, just make sure email gets in every mailbox every day. And now we're the translators.
We're the ones connecting the dots between strategy business. So I do see that my role is to use technology with vision, empathy, inclusivity, to try to inspire, change, and strengthen the business, the people, and the communities. So I think that's the role of technology is connecting the dots, especially between people and the technology and the business outcomes.
Tom Stoneman: So just to kind of dive into this a little bit more, I think we all see that. The future of work is now being significantly impacted by ai. It puts leadership, I believe, in a precarious position of having to balance the promise of AI efficiency with uncertainty and lack of understanding of ai. So in your role.
And I know you've seen a lot of of this especially recently, and the sudden onset of AI and enterprise operations. What changes or tensions do you see coming for the workforce or do you see already there?
Ricardo Costa: There's a couple of layers there. I think that the biggest tension. That I see right now is I call expectations versus reality.
The expectation on AI is being a lot higher than the outcomes of ai, and it's kind of weird when you say that, given that everybody's now using Cha g PT to plan their vacations or using a different tool to create. A bunch of different things. AI is changing the world. It's gonna change the world. I'm not saying that we're not gonna have any of that, but when you're talking at executive levels that don't have a lot of experience on technology, the question that always comes back is, when are we actually gonna replace all our people with ai?
You hear that a lot in the media, et cetera, and you hear like even today, Amazon saying, Hey, we're gonna drop X number of thousand jobs because of ai. What people don't talk about is they're actually creating a lot of jobs because of ai. So at the same time that they actually lack go X number of people, they're hiring a huge number of people because of ai.
So there is a shift in the skillset right now, but the tension that I see most right now is the expectation that. The savings are there today, and the cost of AI doesn't translate into that today. It will get there eventually, and there's tons of studies from different groups, and Gartner recently let out a, a research saying that 74% of the investments on AI.
Do not translate into the expected return on investment, which is fair. It's part of the learning curve. It's part of like it, we're gonna get there, but the expectation in reality is very different, which translates into the second problem that I see, and I think it's the one that I like to tackle the most at this moment, is how do we get the workforce ready for ai?
And if you look at a bunch of different numbers that are coming from like World Economic Forum has numbers on this. Like there's tons of studies that talk about this, that AI is going to get rid of a lot of jobs, but it's gonna create similar or greater than. What it's gonna eliminate, which is hard to understand when you start seeing the whole thing.
But the comparison I make is with the PCs, when in the eighties people started talking about PCs and, oh, PCs are gonna take all the accountants out, or PCs gonna change the world, et cetera, et cetera. And it did. We didn't get less jobs because of it, like it replaced quite fairly. But it took a good generation.
To actually go through that transformation where people had time to, my dad had time to learn how to use a computer and be very proficient on his work using a computer. I think the challenge we have right now, we're going through the same kind of changing timelines in in humanity right now. Like you have this AI that's transformational for humanity.
But it's gonna happen extremely fast, and I would say like five years is gonna be a completely different landscape. I usually say that I have three young kids, my oldest one's 15, and my youngest one is nine. They are more AI literate than anybody that's gonna be managing them in 10 years. So you gotta think about that because what's gonna happen, my assumption is that in the very near future we're gonna have jobs being removed because AI is taking over some of the jobs, new jobs being created, but we, we won't have enough people to transition from one to the other if we don't upskill folks.
So we might get into a high rate of unemployment. In countries and at the same time with not having a lot of people to actually do the actual work. To me, that's the challenge right now and how it's, how do we bring that workforce that are gonna be managing my kids in five years or 10 years. How do I prepare them to manage them?
'cause my kids are growing up AI literate.
Tom Stoneman: We've seen this kind of shift before new technologies come in and old jobs evolve or disappear, but new jobs get created too. What's different this time is the speed at which this is all happening. AI is moving faster than any transformation in recent memory. And large enterprises, which can already be slow to move, have to keep up or risk falling behind.
The danger here though, isn't just about missing the next innovation. It's missing the chance to equip people with the skills they'll need before the gap gets too wide. So how do you actually prepare your workforce to not only use AI today, but to be able to adapt as it evolves?
Ricardo Costa: The way we're approaching is is a little bit. I wouldn't say a little bit different, but it's not a one person job, it's not a director's job. We're looking at it as an organizational component. So we actually partner with HR very tightly, the whole learning and development group. And we actually, uh, we have like groups that every week they get trained on ai.
So we're, by the end of the year, we're hoping we're gonna get about a thousand employees all trained on ai. And it could be as simple as using copilot, whatever it is. We just wanna make sure that people have the experience that they can actually understand and it becomes a full-blown program. We have different levels, of course we have for people that have like ideas that are really transformative.
We have a little path that we can take them and we couple them with more data scientists and specialists for people that just wanna play with copilot, create their own agents, whatever it is. We have a little program that they start the program in one day. By the end of the week, their first agent is done, but more important, I couldn't care less about the agent they're creating at this moment.
I'm more interested in once they finish that agent. What can they do with the tools? It's tooling them and giving them the tools that they can actually go back to their business and say, Hey, I can actually solve this problem using ai. I can actually take some of the work that I don't like doing with AI and actually focus on the stuff that is actually more valuable.
So it's getting people to actually become those agents of change, and we're seeing that should be actually really nice. Like it's working really well at this point.
Tom Stoneman: That's awesome. Yeah. I've found, you know, the, uh, old dog new tricks doesn't really apply anymore because these are really cool tricks, so I don't mind learning them.
Ricardo Costa: And the tricks change by the hour too.
Tom Stoneman: That's right. Yeah.
And when the tricks change by the hour, you've gotta find ways to reset your brain. For Ricardo, we know it's playing his guitar. But it doesn't stop there. Fittingly for someone so immersed in ai. He also uses it to create backing tracks like this.
So Ricardo, tell us a little bit about this clip.
Ricardo Costa: So, as I said before, I like playing guitar, but playing guitar without other instruments is. More difficult, it's more complicated. So actually that clip was created, uh, through ai. So I actually used AI to create a back, we call backtrack. So I think you used a, a term before Tom, uh, band minus one,
Tom Stoneman: music minus one,
Ricardo Costa: music minus one.
Exactly. So it's actually a fake band, an AI band that I can play with. So I don't need people to play with me. I can actually make mistakes and be lousy. I won't be embarrassed.
Tom Stoneman: So how do you create those? Is it sample based or does it actually go in and, and create the sounds itself through synthesis.
Ricardo Costa: So it's a gen AI tool.
Uh, and there is a couple of things that you could do. You could just say, Hey, I'm looking for a song like this, this, this, and this. You can have lyrics or not. I choose not to 'cause I just wanna play over it. And you just describe what you want. It does help to know a little bit of musical theory, 'cause then you can talk a little bit about the chord progression, the harmonies you want and the instruments you wanna lay over.
But you can do it completely through just typing what you want. And I put it in and whatever spits out I'll, I'll play with it a little bit.
Tom Stoneman: And how does that help you? I mean, do you do it when you're like in a problem and you need a break, or is it just something that you have a certain time, like when you're, at the end of the day, everybody's getting ready to go to sleep, and you go off and do it on your own?
Ricardo Costa: Yeah, it's kind of the second I like, I like some people will do gardening, some people will go running. And for me as, as soon as my kids go to bed and the house kind of quiets down, I go down to my basement and I play, and that's why I use headphones. 'cause then nobody hears anything and it's very quiet.
And I can stay there for like, sometimes it's just 10 minutes, sometimes it's a couple hours. But it's almost like bookend the day and and saying, okay, so now I can actually relax and go to sleep or whatever. But it's a hobby. It's just like some people might spend a couple hours gardening. I might spend a couple hours.
Trying to create a OK AI song.
Tom Stoneman: That's awesome.
Ricardo Costa: That we'll never see the light of the day that I'm the only one playing. That's the first one that actually seen the light of the day. So
Tom Stoneman: it's gonna now, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Just a couple more questions, Ricardo. Uh, and it's still revolving around the workforce. So I'm on the marketing side, so I, you know, I'm working with, uh, business in a little bit of a different way, but we all have the same goals a lot of times in, um, a lot of meetings or presentations on these new tools.
It's mind blowing what can happen. One thing that I. Keep bringing up is, this is great, but the fundamentals of marketing and business are still the same. Right. I'm wondering if there's anything you've learned, uh, either about technology or people in general that you think enterprise leaders should understand along that line.
Things that, you know, some thoughts that you have.
Ricardo Costa: The one thing I learned in my career is technology. At the end of the day, it's about people and how they use the technology. Yes, there will be automation. Yes, there will be stuff that we do that AI will take over, but there will be new things that will come up that.
We're gonna have to do, and I dunno what they are, that's a, a current discussion that my wife and I have about our kids is like, what are they gonna be when they grow up? I'm like, the job they might have might not even exist yet. And to me that's a learning for me. And technology is not the end goal. It's an enabler for the end goal.
And regardless of what we're gonna do in the future, people are gonna be using technology. Technology is gonna be servicing people at the end of the day. That's what. We are people we're not, at least for now, we're not humanoids. So to me, that's the biggest thing. I'm a technologist heart. I'm a geek at heart.
I will do my music with ai. I will play video games, and I'm always looking for what's the new trend on technology so I can test it and use it. I love that. But at the end of the day, it's about people. It's how are we gonna impact people's lives? How people are gonna use that to actually achieve those growth goals and et cetera, et cetera.
I think that to me is the gist of it, is as soon as we make technology about technology, we lose sight of the benefits.
Tom Stoneman: So as someone, I mean, you're right at the forefront. Of the revolution you I'm sure every day. I'm curious if there's any part of your life where you'd prefer that human touch over ai or if there's any part of your life you think should be AI free.
We shouldn't be using ai.
Ricardo Costa: That's an interesting one. I don't think it's about keeping things AI free. I don't think there's any component that should, could or will be AI free, but it's about balance. It's AI will augment us, absolutely will makes more efficient, will help understand things that we might miss, but it's not gonna replace human contact and deep relationships.
At least not in my foreseeable future. I don't see that changing. That to me is a huge part of being a leader, is it is about people at the end of the day. So empathy, intuition, ability to connect with people. What motivates someone? How do we motivate people? AI won't. Replace that. Like understanding what someone fears or what's gonna help them grow.
Those things come from human experience. It doesn't come from data. Data can help you. Data can give you insights. Data AI might actually support you on a bunch of different things, but at the end of the day, it's still a a human job. I can see AI creating a lot of empathy or true empathy. It might mimic empathy in the near future.
And I think in leadership, for example, that's key. So I think it will support us, but I don't think it will replace those connections in a meaningful way, and I hope it doesn't.
Tom Stoneman: Yeah, me too. Along those lines, and this is. A kind of question that's maybe asking you to invent the iPhone in two seconds, but do you think there's anything AI can or will be able to do that's never been done before?
Ricardo Costa: I think we're seeing some of that now and that's why I keep saying like, I don't know what jobs my kids will have 'cause they may not exist yet. 'cause AI will start enabling things that we didn't even think about. Like even the little things like having chat GPT, helping my daughter study for her math exam.
Those are things that I never thought AI could do. But when you think about what's happening, even in the health industry right now, and I could be wrong on this data, but I believe the chemistry, uh, noble for 2024 was actually given to an AI engineer or an AI inventor because what they were able to do was actually.
Find a way to break the protein molecules or something like that. I don't remember the story correctly, but when you start seeing ai, actually finding stuff that would take 18 years or 10 years for scientists to actually solve it, and AI is actually helping those scientists to solve that in five days.
That to me is game changing. Right? And that's where I think a high right now is the expectations are not as high. Like we're seeing, it's not like in the office. So I'm gonna use copilot and, and I'm gonna reduce my accounting team by X. No. Like we're seeing actually, like here's for diseases and things actually popping up right now.
So that to me is where I get excited. I love seeing it because it's. I think a lot of the transformations coming there. I'm not sure I, I hit your question on reinventing the iPhone, but it's really, to me, that's where I see we're gonna see a lot of new things and changing things that we didn't even think about that was not even in the radar.
Tom Stoneman: I agree. I think the world is gonna change in ways we can't even imagine. Probably
once upon a time, music was my vocation. So inspired by Ricardo, I pulled out my guitar to reflect on what we just heard.
The big takeaway for me. Is that it's easy to get dazzled by AI's promise of efficiency and automation, but the real long-term advantage doesn't come from replacing people. It's preparing them meaningfully and at scale. The smartest leaders like Ricardo aren't asking What can AI do? They're asking What can my people do with AI and how do I help them get there?
So if you're wrestling with that question, you might wanna try taking a break like Ricardo did. Maybe pick up an instrument, maybe listen to some music that you like, whatever gives you that head space. I know that breakthroughs almost never happen for me when I'm in front of a computer screen. Thanks for listening to the Intelligent Enterprise where we get inside big ideas by getting outside of them.
I'm Tom Stoneman, and make sure you follow the show and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.