Your host
Fair question. There are a lot of people talking about AI right now. Most of them have never had to make it work inside a real organization — with real budgets, real lawyers, and real fear in the room.
I have.
I spent nearly twenty years as a lawyer and executive inside a global law firm and a Fortune 30 company. In my last role I was Global Head of Legal Innovation and Emerging Solutions at Verizon: 45+ lawyers and engineers across the US, Europe and Asia, a multimillion-dollar technology budget, and one of the first enterprise-scale generative AI deployments inside a 1,000+ person legal organization. Before that I was Market General Counsel for a multi-billion-dollar consumer business. Before that I ran antitrust and competition policy across three continents.
None of that is why this podcast exists.
It exists because in every one of those rooms, the thing that actually moved people was never a mandate, a dashboard or a deadline. It was curiosity. It was permission to be brave instead of perfect. It was joy, deliberately built into consequential work.
That is what Technically Joyful is about. And I have tested it at scale.
Gabrielle Kohlmeier
Host, Technically Joyful · Founder & CEO, GK Strategic Advisory
Built and led Verizon Legal’s first multi-year technology roadmap — from business case to capital investment to deployment. Launched “Generative January”: 51 teams, 21 hours of hackathons. Then the unglamorous part that actually matters — dashboards, KPIs, a prompt library, a GenAI champions program. Ignition is easy. Conversion is the work.
Scaled an international legal team 6x in six months across the US, Europe and India. Led 45+ lawyers and engineers on three continents. Directed transformation strategy for a 1,000+ person legal organization and its C-suite, on a multimillion-dollar budget that outperformed its expected return.
As Market General Counsel for Verizon Consumer Group I led legal for sales, marketing, HR and operations. I designed risk and review processes tied directly to revenue-generating work — and drove a 150% increase in participation and integrity metrics across 30,000 employees.
Associate General Counsel for Antitrust and Head of FTC and Global Competition Policy. Shepherded platform, digital advertising and big data investigations across the US, Europe and Austral-Asia. Built a pioneering behavioral-economics-based compliance program — which won Best Business Paper at the 2020 Antitrust Writing Awards.
Eight years at Latham & Watkins: four in complex antitrust litigation, four in multi-billion-dollar M&A. First-chaired a 16-day trial with 22 witnesses and experts, and served on firm management committees.
Graduate Fellow at Kissinger McLarty Associates, analyzing political, economic and industry risk for multinational clients. Dual US and EU citizen, native German speaker, Bundestag Praktikum. Change across borders is not a thought experiment for me.
Grit and growth mindset research — Duckworth, Dweck, and the work around them — is the reason I could keep going when the first hackathon flopped, the second budget got cut, and the third rollout landed in a team that did not want it.
It is also the reason I stopped treating mindset as something you hope people have, and started treating it as something you can train.
So I trained it.
A 21-day challenge that turns the research into daily practice: one small, deliberate rep a day, built to make perseverance and a growth orientation a habit rather than a personality trait you either have or don’t. Bar associations and professional groups around the country picked it up and ran it with their own members. It is still spreading.
Then I pointed the same method at the thing making smart, accomplished people freeze: AI. Twenty-one days of low-stakes, curiosity-first experiments designed to replace “I’m behind” with “I’m learning.” Same result — adopted by associations and organizations across the country, and now the backbone of how I teach AI fluency.
Two programs, one thesis: You don’t need to catch up on AI. You need the muscle to keep learning it.
That is the Transformation Gym™ idea. You don’t get fit by going once. And the best signal that change is taking hold isn’t an adoption metric — it’s when the idea of change stops shutting people down. That shift is what I’m chasing in every episode.
When I’m not recording, I’m running, hiking, in a ballet class or hanging from aerial silks. I read several books at once. And I’m a parent of three, which remains the best leadership training I have ever had.
