Using AI to Facilitate Human Transformation and Lasting Change
In an ever-changing and unpredictable world, delivering impactful change can feel like an insurmountable challenge. This is particularly true when working with jobseekers experiencing homelessness—a population with dynamic needs and often significant barriers to employment. We spoke with Howard Perlstein, Founder and CEO of Make Your Change Count™, whose mission is to empower people through education to rebuild their financial lives after experiencing homelessness, substance abuse, or generational poverty. Howard shared an inside look at how Make Your Change Count™ leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to create positive and lasting change.
Understanding the Challenge
Make Your Change Count™ imparts timely, relevant, and actionable knowledge around financial goal setting, managing money, credit, and banking in a way that preserves dignity, conveys respect, and instills personal agency. For Howard and his team, the challenge isn’t just about designing programs or templates. It’s about ensuring that messaging, materials, and methods can be adopted by, and resonate deeply with, a diverse audience, often with changing needs—a challenge familiar to many change management practitioners.
Lessons Learned
Recently, Make Your Change Count™ needed to improve a survey to accurately measure the effectiveness of their program and make changes and updates to their communications and training materials to accommodate language and cultural differences of their learners. As an early adopter of AI, Howard frequently utilizes Generative AI (Large Language Models which use huge amounts of data to help humans solve problems in a conversational, engaging way.) His experience has revealed several key insights into how to use AI to enhance learning and development and transformation efforts:
1. Recognize the limits of AI. AI can save you time and streamline tasks, but it cannot replace human judgment, empathy, or the ability to interpret nuance. Expecting AI to think, read between the lines, or understand context would be a mistake. Instead, view it as a tool to augment human capabilities, rather than replace them.
2. Input quality matters. The effectiveness of AI is directly tied to the quality of the input that it receives. Well-crafted prompts yield better results, highlighting the importance of clarity, precision, and having an idea of what you want before you start when interacting with AI tools. Privacy considerations are also critical; don’t share any information that you don’t want someone else to see.
3. Use AI as a brainstorming partner. AI can serve as an excellent collaborator, sparking new ideas and offering alternative perspectives. For Howard, AI-generated concepts often lead to deeper, more refined discussions with humans. By catalyzing creative thinking, AI becomes a stepping-stone to more effective solutions.
4. Experiment with different AI tools. Howard has explored a variety of AI tools, each with unique strengths:
ChatGPT for translation, summarization, and brainstorming.
Perplexity (perplexity.ai) for research on cultural differences, complete with source citations and thought-provoking questions.
Claude (claude.ai) for translation, summarization, writing, and expanding ideas.
These tools provide valuable support, but their limitations—such as an inability to handle abstract or creative tasks—remain clear.
5. Master the art of questioning. Effectively engaging with AI requires learning to ask the right questions. Howard often asks AI how to improve his prompts, creating a feedback loop that enhances output quality over time.
The Role of Human Judgment
While AI plays a supporting role, human empathy and thoughtfulness remain central to the success of Make Your Change Count™. Technology is only as effective as its algorithms, and it lacks the empathy and contextual understanding necessary to address the complexities of human experience. As Howard eloquently puts it, “AI is big ‘A’ for Artificial, and little ‘i’ for its inability to understand the ways humans communicate and appreciate context, nuance, and innuendo—at least for now. AI should never be relied on to understand the unique needs of a target audience; that’s uniquely a human’s job.
Although AI is developing rapidly, it’s not a substitute for the empathy, creativity, and judgment that’s required to drive meaningful change. When used thoughtfully, AI can help amplify a change management consultant’s effort, enabling us to think better, do more, and do better for our organizations, clients, and constituents. Impactful change can happen when artificial intelligence and emotional intelligence work together. Make Your Change Count™ exemplifies this by blending AI with human wisdom. By fostering adaptability and empathy, Make Your Change Count™ proves that lasting impact comes from a thoughtful balance of innovation, humanity, and technology. In a rapidly changing world, the ability to adapt, learn, and connect remains a change management expert’s most powerful tool. As Howard’s experience shows, when we embrace this mindset, we can make change count.
Contact Howard Perlstein to learn more about Make Your Change Count™, or explore ways to use AI and technology to make your change count.
Contact ChangeStaffing to learn more about how to leverage AI for human transformation!
Thank you to Howard Perlstein for his thought leadership and for collaborating with us on this blog.
Written by Kylette Harrison