Technical skills are being commoditized faster than ever. As AI takes on more of the work that used to define a junior knowledge worker, the things that once made someone valuable are becoming table stakes. What compounds in this environment is reputation — what colleagues, clients, and decision-makers think about you when your name comes up.
That puts new pressure on visibility. People doing great work in silence are increasingly the ones getting passed over for promotions and external opportunities. So how do you build a reputation without becoming an influencer? What does AI-era credibility actually look like? And how do you start small?
Dorie Clark teaches Executive Education at Columbia Business School and is the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author of The Long Game, Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You, and Stand Out. She has been named four times as one of the Top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50, recognized as the #1 Communication Coach in the world by the Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Awards, and is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review.
In the episode, Richie and Dorie explore why AI fluency is the new Excel skill, tinkering with AI's jagged frontier, the security risks of agentic AI, what personal branding really means in an AI-disrupted job market, the recognized expert formula, the ladder strategy for credibility, networking with "no asks for a year," running better meetings, and much more.
Links Mentioned in the Show:
• The Jagged Frontier (HBS Working Paper)
• Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats (Anthropic)
• AI-powered coding tool wiped out a software company's database (Fortune)
• Reinventing You by Dorie Clark
• The Long Game by Dorie Clark
• Connect with Dorie on LinkedIn
• AI-Native Course: Intro to AI for Work
• Related Episode: #341 Our Data Trends & Predictions for 2026
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