Dec 1, 2025
Over the past year, I dedicated time to mentorship while navigating my own transition into deeper work in enterprise AI, service design, and organizational transformation. What I learned is simple but powerful:
Role transitions are not just about acquiring new skills. They’re identity shifts.
And nobody should navigate them alone.Working with different mentors through MentorCruise gave me clarity, perspective, and structure at a moment when my role was expanding — from UX designer to strategic partner operating across systems, data, and AI intelligence.
Concrete examples from my mentorship journey:
1. One mentor helped me map my impact across organizational layers, showing me how to connect frontstage (customer experience) and backstage (operations and AI workflows). This insight directly influenced how I designed the Agentic Enterprise blueprint.
2. Another mentor guided me through difficult stakeholder conversations, helping me gain confidence in presenting AI-driven strategies to senior leaders — skills that proved invaluable for shaping cross-functional alignment in real projects.
This experience directly shaped my case study:
“The Agentic Enterprise: Connecting Frontstage & Backstage with Agentforce 360.”
Inside the case study, every persona — from Industrial Buyers to Sales Reps to Product Teams — is going through their own transformation. Their journey mirrors what many of us experience in real life when AI enters our workflows:
Moving from reactive to proactive
Moving from task execution to decision-making
Moving from siloed processes to integrated intelligence
Moving from static roles to evolving capabilities
Just like me, these people need guidance, support, and space to grow into who the future requires them to be.
Why Mentorship Becomes Essential During AI-Driven Change
Mentorship helps individuals:
Make sense of new expectations
Build confidence during ambiguity
Expand perspective across the whole system
Develop the capabilities needed for new ways of working
In other words, AI transformation isn’t only about technology — it’s about people becoming more agentic.
My mentors helped me step into that agency — seeing beyond tools and into the human systems change required. And that’s the mindset behind the Agentic Enterprise: technology becomes meaningful when people are supported in evolving alongside it.
If you’re navigating role transitions — or helping teams do the same — mentorship isn’t optional. It’s an accelerant for growth in an era where everything is changing fast.
Explore how to visualize and align transformation journeys with my case study:
“Storyboarding for Change – Visualizing Transformation for Better Alignment and Buy-In”
References
Mentorship & Role Transitions
Allen, T. D., & Eby, L. T. (2010). The Blackwell Handbook of Mentoring: A Multiple Perspectives Approach. Wiley-Blackwell.
Kram, K. E. (1985). Mentoring at Work: Developmental Relationships in Organizational Life. Scott Foresman.
Ragins, B. R., & Kram, K. E. (2007). The Handbook of Mentoring at Work: Theory, Research, and Practice. Sage Publications.
AI, Human-Centered Design & Organizational Transformation
Russell, S., & Norvig, P. (2020). Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (4th ed.). Pearson.
Norman, D. (2023). “Design, Ethics, and the Future of Human–AI Interaction.” Nielsen Norman Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles
Stickdorn, M., Hormess, M., Lawrence, A., & Schneider, J. (2018). This is Service Design Doing. O’Reilly.
Agentic Enterprise & Case Study Context
Kalbach, J. (2020). The Jobs To Be Done Playbook.
Bitner, M. J., Ostrom, A. L., & Morgan, F. N. (2008). “Service Blueprinting: A Practical Technique for Service Innovation.” California Management Review.
Salesforce Customer Stories. “Siemens, GE Healthcare, Rockwell Automation: Driving Transformation with AI and Integrated Systems.” https://www.salesforce.com