In this episode of the Beyond Technology Podcast, Shawn Freeman sits down with Christa Hill, CEO of Tacit Edge, to talk about what happens when everyday people start building with AI instead of just talking about it. From sales teams in Alberta's industrial companies to chamber of commerce leaders, Christa is watching non-technical people build real automations every week, and she has strong opinions about what keeps everyone else on the sidelines.

Christa shares the story of a student who built a system that scrapes competitor pricing overnight and delivers a punchy voice memo to the whole sales team every morning. She breaks down the most chronic mistake she sees in startups: spending $150,000 to learn what $15,000 could have taught you. And she explains why AI adoption has to start with leadership literacy, why safety right now is a moral compass and not a policy, and why our relationship to time has to change when a 20-day quote becomes a 20-second one.

As Christa puts it: your idea brought you into the arena, but your customers grow the arena for you. And it is way more fun to be rich than it is to be right.

What You'll Learn:

- Why "the try is the skill," and the skill-before-the-skill myth keeping people out of the game

- The overbuilding trap: why fear of looking unprepared craters more capital than anything else

- How to test whether a problem is a "jugular gusher" or a paper cut before you spend a dollar

- Why non-technical people can build real AI automations after a two-week vocabulary on-ramp

- How technical language has been used to gatekeep, and why that power is slipping away

- Why leaders need to become builders before they can set AI expectations for their teams

- Why AI safety today lives in your moral compass, not in policy or frameworks

- The daily tool stack Christa runs a global education company with as one person

In This Episode:

00:00 Welcome and what Tacit Edge does

01:05 Building a lifestyle, not an empire

02:09 The sales team that wakes up to AI voice memos

05:15 The $150K mistake: overbuilding before the market speaks

07:30 "I'd rather be rich than right"

08:11 Jugular gusher or paper cut: testing problems for free

11:48 The RV office, voice tools, and leaning into your gifts

15:23 The skill before the skill is a myth

16:58 How technical language gatekeeps the business

18:40 Why a chat beats fancy UX

20:09 From 20-day quotes to 20 seconds

21:58 Breaking up with our relationship to time

24:13 Why AI adoption starts with leadership literacy

26:50 Safety is a moral compass, not a policy

28:18 Is leadership getting harder?

29:24 Christa's daily tool stack

32:37 Transformation is not a point in time

35:03 Where to find Christa

About Christa Hill:

Christa Hill is the CEO of Tacit Edge, where she drives AI literacy across Canada by authoring curriculum and creating courses for every Canadian, whether they are in elementary school, the trades, professional roles, or organizations. Her work sits at the intersection of technology, people, and process, teaching leaders and teams to become builders, not just users, so they can reduce risk, build stronger guardrails, and lean into the human gifts that technology amplifies.

Connect with Christa:

Website: https://tacit-edge.com

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

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christa.hill.ai/

In this episode of The Learn-It-All™ Podcast, Damon Lembi sits down with Christa Hill, Co-Founder of Tacit Edge and Learnit's Chief AI Learning Officer, to unpack why so many leaders, teams, and organizations are still using artificial intelligence at what Christa calls "brochure-level." Playing around with ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, or Gemini might feel like progress, but real AI literacy starts when you stop treating AI like a shortcut and start using it to rethink strategy, decision-making, team workflows, and business value.

Christa explains why most people are still operating at a grade three or four level of AI literacy, why productivity wins eventually cap out, and why leaders cannot keep approving AI tools they do not understand. She also breaks down one of the biggest mistakes companies are making right now: banning AI and accidentally pushing employees into risky "shadow AI" behavior. As Christa puts it, organizations do not have AI problems. They have very human problems surrounding the technology.

Because AI may have more IQ points than us, but it does not have our judgment, empathy, lived experience, or what Christa calls "your proprietary data set."

What You'll Learn:
What "brochure-level" AI use is, and why surface-level productivity hacks are not enough
Why Christa calls ChatGPT "Captain Confidence," and the final 30% only you can add
How to avoid wasting money on AI adoption by solving one or two business problems first
Why productivity wins cap out without connection to team goals and business strategy
How meeting transcripts and AI can surface trends, risks, and new opportunities
Why banning AI tools may be one of the riskiest moves a company can make
The true human advantage: your judgment, empathy, context, and proprietary data set

In This Episode:
00:00 Episode preview and introduction
01:22 Why Copilot doesn't make you AI literate
03:03 The mistake self-taught AI users keep making
08:16 The "Captain Confidence" problem with ChatGPT
10:30 Why most people are still at a grade three AI level
14:12 Productivity wins are not an AI strategy
16:52 How one team bought back time with AI literacy
19:09 Why your team needs "game one days"
23:15 Why AI literacy makes people less afraid of being replaced
24:25 Technical debt explained for non-technical leaders
27:01 Why every meeting should become usable data
28:52 The "yes, and" exercise that kills bad brainstorming
31:45 Why people don't have their best ideas on command
33:41 How leaders can capture ideas before they disappear
38:21 AI is a mirror, so what is it exposing?
39:37 Why Christa doesn't buy the AI replacement panic
42:18 The question every leader should ask AI but probably won't
45:13 Why banning AI might be your riskiest move
54:09 The executive AI questions leaders are afraid to ask
57:18 Smash or pass: the AI tools Christa actually recommends
01:01:41 The human advantage AI can't copy
01:03:21 How to know when you need real AI education

About Christa Hill: Christa Hill is the Co-Founder of Tacit Edge and Chief AI Learning Officer at Learnit. With more than 20 years in technology, product management, and business transformation.

Connect: Christa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christajhill/
Tacit Edge: https://tacit-edge.com/
Learnit: https://www.learnit.com
Follow Learnit on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/learn-it/

What if the biggest bug in AI isn't in the algorithm? What if it's in us?

In this episode, I sit down with Christian Ortiz, Afro-Indigenous decolonial social scientist, technologist, and creator of Justice A.I. GPT, the first AI system built on a decolonial framework. We go deep on what decolonization actually means (explained like you're five), why AI is essentially a mirror of our inherited biases, and how tools like Justice AI are turning that mirror into a feedback loop that helps us do better.

Christian's story is wild. From growing up in LA and New Jersey, to walking out of a corporate discrimination case, to beta testing ChatGPT in 2022 and immediately spotting the bias problem, to building his own AI that doesn't just flag what's wrong but walks you through how to fix it with empathy and emotional intelligence.

We talk about what bias is actually costing organizations (hint: it's millions), why HR teams need tools like this more than ever, and why "ethical AI" and "decolonized AI" might just be the same conversation.

Plus, we play Smash or Pass with AI tools. Christian has opinions. Strong ones.

This one is heavy, hopeful, and deeply human. If your last episode was "We Built This Mess," this one is about what we do about it.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction to Christian Ortiz
• 16:52 Decolonization and Its Impact
• 28:00 The Role of Bias in AI
• 33:30 Ethical AI and Its Impact
• 49:35 AI Tools and Their Impact
• 54:50 Accessing and Working with AI

LINKS:

Justice AI Website: justiceaigpt.ca

Christian Ortiz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/modatlasmedia/

Mod Atlas Media: https://justiceaigpt.ca/modatlasmedia

ABOUT YOUR HOST:

Christa Hill is the founder of Tacit Edge Inc. and creator of Product for Humans. She teaches product management as a leadership discipline and helps organizations adopt AI with confidence, not fear. Learn more at tacit-edge.com.

CONNECT:

Website: tacit-edge.com

Email: info@tacit-edge.ca

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/christahill

AI is changing everything, but the real crisis is trust, and leaders are not measuring the human cost.

In this 2026 episode of Product for Humans, Christa Hill goes deep with Katrina German, one of Canada’s clearest voices on ethical digital leadership.

They start with what sparked Katrina’s recent media coverage: AI-enabled harassment and the rise of synthetic sexualized imagery used to silence women online. From there, the conversation zooms out to a bigger question: how did we go from early internet guardrails to today’s “terms of service as consent” reality, and what does that mean for Canadians trying to lead through platform power, misinformation, and fragile digital infrastructure?

Then they shift to the human side. Katrina names the thing many leaders feel but cannot articulate: technostress. They talk boundaries, organizational clarity, and why leaders in 2026 have one job above all else: rebuilding trust.

They wrap with a fast, fun “Smash or Pass” round on AI self-regulation, unenforced principles, and the myth that we are “too early” to govern.

• Why AI-generated sexualized imagery is being used to silence women online, and why platforms cannot shrug it off as “user responsibility”
• The media problem: whose voices get airtime, and what it costs when expert women get clipped to one sentence
• A practical solution for journalists and experts: Informed Perspectives, a network that helps match media with expert women
• Regulation memory loss: what Canadians already regulated well (and why we stopped pushing for the same accountability in social platforms)
• Platform power vs public interest: why commercial incentives are not the same as societal stewardship
• Canada’s opportunity moment: and why “building our own” is back on the table
• The human cost of constant change: technostress, burnout signals, and what leaders are asking people to carry
• What leaders must prioritize in 2026: trust as a strategic pillar, not a brand value
• Smash or Pass lightning round: self-regulation, terms of service, “responsible AI” without enforcement, and leadership literacy

Katrina German is the Founder and CEO of Ethical Digital. Her work focuses on ethical digital leadership, trust, and helping organizations build human-centered digital strategy with real accountability.

https://www.katrinagerman.com/

https://www.ethicaldigital.ca/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/katrinagerman/

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Context of the Conversation

07:27 The Mess We Built: Regulation and Technology

26:00 The Human Cost of Not Measuring

26:58 Navigating Emotional Responses in a Digital World

28:29 The Importance of Self-Care in Tech

30:19 Understanding Techno Stress and Burnout

32:35 Strategies for Managing Tech Overload

36:49 The Future of AI: Integration or Opt-Out?

39:13 Building Trust in the Age of Technology

44:14 The Role of Ethics in AI Development

Send us a text

Frances became a household name in 2021 when she blew the whistle on Facebook for the prioritization of profits over user safety.

And guess what... she is a PRODUCT MANAGER!

We got to ask her about her pathway into Product Management, what it was like working at Facebook when these practices were happening, and how she got the courage to speak up for what is right.

We also got to talk about the future of AI and how we can be at the forefront of it.

This is a MUST WATCH for anyone who is interested in the future of technology and how it can be created ethically.

Want a discount on AI Product Management Education? Join our Info Session! https://courses.tacitedge.ca/ai-product-management-apply-now-page

Hosted by: Renee Matsalla & Christa Hill

Tacit Edge:

• Website: tacit-edge.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/tacitedge
• Instagram: instagram.com/tacit.edge
• YouTube: youtube.com/@TacitEdge

Find Christa Hill on social:

• Instagram: instagram.com/christa.hill.ai/
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/christajhill/

Send us a text

Tired of your job and want to pivot?

Well, it isn’t as hard as you might think! Don’t just take our word for it—hear from recent Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) grad Jillian Hale, who transitioned from marketing to become a Group Product Manager at Travel Alberta.

Join Christa Hill and Renee Matsalla tomorrow to learn how Jill made her successful pivot into Product Management and how you can too!

Hosted by: Renee Matsalla & Christa Hill

Tacit Edge:

• Website: tacit-edge.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/tacitedge
• Instagram: instagram.com/tacit.edge
• YouTube: youtube.com/@TacitEdge

Find Christa Hill on social:

• Instagram: instagram.com/christa.hill.ai/
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/christajhill/

Send us a text

Did you know you can work at Microsoft with a background in interior design!?

That’s exactly what Kelly did!

After a career in Interior Design and the furniture industry, Kelly did the seemingly impossible: She started working for an up-and-coming tech startup.

Then she landed at Microsoft!!

How did she do it?

How does she use her unique background to lead teams?

Hosted by: Renee Matsalla & Christa Hill

Tacit Edge:

• Website: tacit-edge.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/tacitedge
• Instagram: instagram.com/tacit.edge
• YouTube: youtube.com/@TacitEdge

Find Christa Hill on social:

• Instagram: instagram.com/christa.hill.ai/
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/christajhill/

Send us a text

Sometimes you meet people who were born to be Product Managers.
Temi Oyewole is this type of person.

Originally from Nigeria, Temi did her Masters in the UK, became a Strategy and Finance Consultant in Lagos, then made her way to Canada in 2018.

Soon she realized that she wanted to become a Product Manager.

And she did just that, landing a job with the rapidly growing Virtual Gurus.

Now she is a Product Manager at ATB and has never looked back.

Hosted by: Renee Matsalla & Christa Hill

Tacit Edge:

• Website: tacit-edge.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/tacitedge
• Instagram: instagram.com/tacit.edge
• YouTube: youtube.com/@TacitEdge

Find Christa Hill on social:

• Instagram: instagram.com/christa.hill.ai/
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/christajhill/