How David Fisher blends human coaching and AI at Kingfisher Communications
David Fisher is founder of Kingfisher Communications and the speaker-coach behind A Culture of Us™, a leadership programme that combines storytelling, improv and experiential learning. He uses AI pragmatically to organise the business and gather research while keeping a human assistant and live interaction for judgement and empathy.
Use AI to gather and organise information and to handle admin, but always verify its outputs and keep humans in roles requiring judgement and relationship skills. Also make your website copy and FAQs easy for AI to index so discovery improves.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
While I was pursing an acting career, I was in sales and leadership. Moving back to Canada, the job offered to me feel through and I as on the verge of being homeless. From rock bottom, I began to climb out of the hole and discovered what I was really passionate about, which is speaking and coaching others. Drawing my my own speaking experience which started at the age of 13, my education in communication, and my experience in leadership, I started what is now called A Culture of Us™. My personal story, acting ability, improv training, and my experiential learning philosophy is unique to speaking. I combine story, science, and interaction so clients are left feeling inspired and motivated, but have also integrated new habits and ideas they can take with them long after the feelings of the event are over.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Most is a combination of referrals, responding to requests on speaking platforms, and my website. Some work comes through agencies. I have started to build out my YouTube channel so more business from that and LinkedIn could help me reach a broader audience. And of course more results from AI.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
Great question. I started using AI to integrate into the organization of my business – contracts, calendar, and such. However, I’ve hired an assistant to actually help with that as the human touch is vitally important and will provide insight and reminders that AI might miss. I have used AI more in pure research, gathering data about employee engagement, retention, communication insights, etc. However, I’ve learned to not only ask AI to provide documented research with sources, I ask again, once the data is gathered, to check it a second time as it will pull from outdated or incomplete research. Once I narrow that down, I double check it myself (or have my assistant do it). AI is a great tool to gather information and brainstorm, but I’ve learned not to rely on it as the conclusion, just part of the process.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
As far as I know, no, but I just tweaked my website by adding a FAQ page and a Testimonials page so it’s easier for AI to find me. AI loves words and content, so I feel like we are going back to the "old" internet where copy was really important.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
I have a keynote called Human and AI, which is more about when to use AI. when to partner with it, and when to leave it well enough alone. Technology is changing so fast our nervous systems can’t keep up, so although I’m learning more about integrating AI, the constant lesson we all must keep top of mind is when we can rely on it, when we can use it to help us, and when real human to human communication is needed, as messy as that may be. That’s an ongoing conversation and the science of it is fascinating. What we need to realize is that AI, with all it can do, is still just a data center somewhere. It can’t experience love, anxiety, a walk in the woods, or hear they cry of a newborn. Shared human experience is what has kept us alive and that will never change.
Thank you to David Fisher and the team at Kingfisher Communications for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
Want to share your playbook?
Leaders Perception publishes founder and operator interviews every week. A few questions, about five minutes, no calls. It is free and everyone we accept gets published.