Navigating Change, Together: Reflections on Learning, AI, and the Future of Work
Reflections from the 2025 Seattle Women in Tech Regatta on staying human, curious, and connected in an AI-powered world.
At the 9th Annual Women in Tech Regatta, I had the honor of speaking on a panel discussing how we stay curious, resilient, and connected in an AI-powered world.
As a way to give back and to share with everyone who couldn’t be there, I’m publishing the answers I prepared for the panel. These reflections come from my research, journey of learning, experimenting, and reimagining what work and growth can look like.
I hope these ideas spark something in you as well. Because the future of work isn’t something we automate, it’s something we co-create, together.
1. Introduce yourself and share with us - what does future-proofing mean to you?
Hi, I’m Klara Hermesz. I serve on the board of the Open Talent Society, a nonprofit that builds learning communities for talent professionals, where I lead our community learning strategy.
For the past 8 years, I’ve built cohort-based and community-driven learning programs globally at scale, like mentorship and coaching, mostly at Facebook. One global program I led and built at my last company was a mentorship initiative with over 50,000 people in mind.
That work made one thing clear: traditional learning can’t keep up with the pace of change, especially in an AI-driven world.
That’s what led me to start RedRebel Learning: a consulting practice focused on helping leaders and founders build better spaces for people to come together and design relevant, practical, and more engaging learning experiences.
When I think about future-proofing, I don’t see it as predicting the future. The world’s moving too fast for that. To me, it’s about what you can control: your self-awareness, adaptability, and curiosity, asking better questions, reflecting often, and learning together, even when you don’t have all the answers.
2. Let’s talk about the elephant in the room - how has AI changed your career and the path you’re taking?
Let’s be real for a hot second: AI has brought uncertainty, overwhelm, and pressure to stay relevant. I felt that too. But instead of trying to master every tool, I gave myself permission to play. Try one thing. Solve one problem. That’s where it started for me. It’s not about knowing it all, it’s about staying curious.
AI made me pause and ask: What makes us truly human in a world where machines can write, generate, and automate?
And the answer I kept coming back to was curiosity and connection.
I use AI for tasks I don’t enjoy, such as drafting, organizing, and outlining, but I reserve the parts I care most about: listening, designing, and co-creating.
I aim to utilize AI to enhance the human experience.
In a time of constant change and rising anxiety, I believe that learning together is how we reclaim connection. I’ve always built programs rooted in community and shared growth, but now, it feels urgent. So it made me leave my corporate career to help more companies build more intentional, connected learning experiences that are both future-ready and human-first.
3. What should you do to embrace AI rather than fear it? How do we create an environment where people are excited about learning?
I'm currently part of the Perplexity AI Business Fellowship, and one of the things that stuck with me from a fireside with their CEO, was this:
"Speed is your moat. Don’t wait for the next AI influencer to tell you what tool to use. Build your own intuition. Try things. Learn fast. Iterate quickly."
That mindset shifted something for me. I stopped worrying about being ‘ready’ for AI and just started experimenting. My first CustomGPT was honestly kind of silly; it was a Movie Night Recommender. You’d tell it your mood or genre, and it would give you three film suggestions with IMDB links and streaming info.
It wasn’t perfect, but it solved my problem, and it taught me how to prompt, build, and learn by doing.
To me, embracing AI isn’t about becoming an expert. It’s about being willing to experiment. The more we treat learning as play, not performance, the faster we grow with these tools.
What I care about most is building better learning spaces, where people don’t just consume content but actually connect, reflect, and grow together. That’s what we need to focus on.
4. Beyond automating tasks, how might AI fundamentally alter our relationship with work?
I think AI is forcing us to redefine what work even means. For so long, our identity has been wrapped up in what we do, what we produce. But now that machines can generate, automate, and optimize… we’re kind of facing a low-key existential crisis. (And I say that jokingly...but not really.)
It’s not just our tasks that are changing. We must rethink how we build trust, culture, and meaning in the workplace. That’s not something AI can automate. Only people can create that through how we show up for each other.
Personally, I hope this shift will lead to less burnout and more space for creativity, collaboration, and reflection. I hope we finally start treating learning, growth, and connection as central to how we work and not nice-to-haves.
Robots might write the code. But we create the culture. And that’s where the magic still lives.
5. What are you most afraid of not being prepared for in your own career?
Honestly? I’m afraid that the work I care about, learning, mentoring, and building connections, becomes irrelevant. That we automate so much, we lose the why behind what we do. In our rush for efficiency, we end up more isolated, stuck in our own AI bubbles, forgetting what it means to be human.
I’m also afraid of doing meaningless work that doesn’t add value or make an impact.
What helps me is staying close to the tools, using them, understanding them, and questioning them. I’m not afraid of AI itself. I’m afraid of what happens when we remove the human from the loop, when we forget that we bring the context, the care, and the ethical lens.
That’s why we need more people in these conversations, especially those who care about impact. Not just how fast we can go, but where we’re going. We need people using AI to solve real problems, in education, healthcare, climate, and inclusion. We need people asking, Is this useful? Is this good? Who does this serve?
Because AI might reshape the landscape, but we still choose what gets built, who it’s for, and what kind of future we want to create.
6. What is a skill worth developing regardless of the impact of AI?
If I had to choose just one, it would be self-awareness, because it’s the skill that powers everything else. When you know how you think, what patterns you fall into, and how you handle change or conflict, that’s when you can actually grow, adapt, and lead in uncertainty.
I think of metacognition: thinking about your thinking. It’s what helps you pause and ask: Is this useful? Am I reacting or responding? Is this thought even mine?
From self-awareness flows curiosity, adaptability, critical thinking, and clear communication, skills that are becoming more essential, not less, in the age of AI.
Even prompting, which seems so technical, is really about how well you communicate with clarity and intention. The tool is only as good as the person using it.
The tools will continue to change, but who are you in the process? That’s your real skill.
7. How do you personally decide what to learn next or invest in when it feels like everything is changing all the time?
There’s a lot of pressure to keep up right now, to chase every trend, every tool. But I’ve learned that when everything changes, the most important thing is to get clear on what matters to you. Follow your own curiosity and interest.
I ask myself: Does this spark my curiosity? Is it something I want to explore or something I “should” do?
Sometimes I follow a spark. Sometimes, I follow a problem that I care about solving. Sometimes I play with a tool until it surprises me.
I don’t learn in isolation; I talk to people, share my thoughts, test things, and write about it. That’s part of my process: co-creating meaning with others.
So when everything feels like it’s changing, I don’t chase everything; I go deeper into what feels relevant, energizing, and connected to my values. That’s what keeps learning sustainable for me.
8. How do you think about balancing becoming an expert in something you’ve been developing over time versus learning something new?
Expert is such a loaded word. Who even defines that anymore? To me, expertise comes from experience and mastery, not just knowledge, but actually doing the thing, over time, and seeing impact.
But I also ask myself: Is this skill or experience still relevant? Is it still needed? If the answer is yes, I keep deepening it. Sometimes that means taking what I know and applying it in a new industry or domain.
If the answer is no, or if I’ve outgrown it, it’s time to learn something new.
There are things I’ve done for years and will keep refining, like building learning programs and supporting community growth. But I’ve also learned that holding too tightly to what we know can close us off from what we might need next. So I stay open. I stretch into new spaces - AI, communication, systems - not to abandon what I know, but to expand it.
And honestly? The more you learn new things, the better you get at learning. Once you embrace failure, iteration, and reflection, you stop seeing learning as starting over and start seeing it as expansion.
For me, it’s not a choice between depth or exploration; it’s a practice of staying grounded in what I know and open to what I don’t.
I will also add my mantra for this panel:
I’m not here to impress. I’m here to connect.
I’m not here to have all the answers. I’m here to ask better ones.
I would be curious to hear what you think.
Any question that speaks to you? What would you add?