What changes, and what doesn’t, when AI enters the room. A conversation series on the human side of AI adoption. Hosted by Douglas Ferguson.
For thirty years, the friction in knowledge work was the stuff facilitators are built for. Alignment. Decision making. Getting the right people in the room and getting them to agree on what’s next.
AI is quietly changing what the friction even is.
When anyone on the team can generate a plausible answer in seconds, the bottleneck moves. It moves to judgment. To trust. To knowing which answer to act on, who’s accountable when it’s wrong, and how to keep the team actually thinking instead of outsourcing the thinking to a model that sounds confident.
That’s the New Friction. It’s not less work for facilitators. It’s different work. And it’s the work that decides whether AI adoption actually lands or stalls out in a pile of abandoned pilots.
This series is where we explore it. One conversation at a time.
One hub, three formats, one thesis.
In this episode of the New Friction podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Bryon Jacob, a technology advisor and AI strategist who previously co-founded data.world as CTO and spent a decade at HomeAway. Jacob argues
In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Yvette Cronje, Head of UX Design for HP’s unified consumer app experience, about how design leadership is shifting as AI compresses production
In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Alyssa Coughlin, Director and Chief of Staff for Autodesk’s Data, AI, and ML Platform organization, about what it actually takes to move
In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Jeff Chow, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Miro, about where friction is showing up inside product teams as AI reshapes how
In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Joe McLean, Group Product Manager for the AI Stream at Miro, who led the overhaul of Miro’s Sidekicks and Flows AI surfaces
In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Taran Lent, Chief Technology Officer at Illumia, about how his organization moved from individual AI experimentation to enterprise-wide capability. Lent describes building
Writing on what changes, and what doesn’t, when AI enters the room. Field notes from real engagements and the patterns showing up across leadership teams making AI stick.
We run AI transformation engagements for leadership teams navigating adoption inside real organizations. Facilitation-led, pragmatic, and built for the messy middle.
New episodes, essays, and field notes on the human side of AI adoption. Sent when there’s something worth sending.
Copyright © 2026 Voltage Control. All Rights Reserved. | Privacy Policy
