Agentic AI Is Turning Knowledge Workers Into Managers, Ready or Not

Hey, this is Jason, excited to bring you episode five of AI and the Humans in a Loop, where I'm having conversations with people who may not have traditional software or developer backgrounds, but are leveraging AI tools like Clawed Code, Codex, and coming at it with a pure beginner's mind and doing some amazing things. This new workforce of people who lie in that space between technical and project manager and designer. And today I'll be talking to Chrissy Coger, who's my coworker. at Chakra AI Solutions. Chrissy has a long history of leadership in the tech industry, somewhere between the C-suite and the developers. She's going to share, if I would have asked her five years ago if vibe coders would be bringing software to life, What would she have thought back then? I'm going to ask her a little bit about what we should be teaching kids today to prepare them for tomorrow, what it's like to work for an AI-native company, how we get more women in tech, and small shifts like HTML and Markdown, kind of replacing PDFs and PowerPoint and Word docs. It's going to be an exciting conversation, so glad you joined us. Chrissy Koger, new friend, new coworker, our COO at Chakra AI Solutions. Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

You're welcome. In the intro, I mentioned that you spent over a decade in leadership roles, kind of in that fun space between the C-suite and the developers. Tell us a little bit of your history and give us kind of a frame of where you're at today.

Yeah, well, thank you for having me and for that introduction. My history goes back quite a while. First time, if I give you a little hint of how old I am. So the first time I sat down in front of a computer, I was probably seven years old and started off on an Apple Macintosh 2. So back in the day, my way into DOS and I've always found computers very fascinating. I seem to understand them better than humans. And more importantly, systems. So being able to use systems, no matter what kind they are, to help solve human problems, really, in many different ways. avenues and different, um, industries. I, I've really been blessed to have a lot of opportunities to see how many different industries work and function across my years. Um, and just being able to provide clarity on, you know, process improvement and efficiencies and get things done. And so I've been in IT my entire career, but I've, um, You know, I've done everything from getting up on a ladder and installing network cabling to actually, you know, doing a little bit of programming enough to know I don't want to be a

programmer.

So since I'm not a programmer, I've really found myself driving towards tools where I didn't necessarily have to know languages. Right. So, yeah. so that I could do things on my own. I'm very much a go-getter, self-star. So if I can figure things out on my own, those are the types of systems that I want to use. And so with that, I've always found myself, you know, like you said, being in the seats between the developers and not only the C-levels, but also the end users, honestly, more importantly. I had the benefit of working in a grocery store company locally here in Indiana and working in the IT