Episode
Episode 62: From Art to AI: Toni Vanwinkle on Designing the Future of Work at Adobe
- Podcast
- 909Exec
- Published
- Jun 9, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2588
- Processing state
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Summary
In this episode of 909 Exec, host Den Jones sits down with longtime friend and mentor Toni Vanwinkle, Adobe’s leader for Digital Employee Experience and co-chair of AI, to explore how technology, disruption, and human-centered leadership are reshaping the future of work. Toni shares her nonlinear “career lattice” journey from aspiring artist to finance professional, then into consulting and large-scale enterprise transformations at Cisco, before spending 16 years at Adobe in multiple roles. Along the way she discovered a passion for technology as a powerful way to solve business problems, implementing early automations and ERP systems, and learning how organizational change management is essential to bringing people along in any transformation. She opens up about pivotal personal decisions—like leaving a high-stress role to pursue consulting so she could prioritize starting a family—and how she and her husband redesigned their careers to create a sustainable “container” for work and parenting. Toni explains why you can have it all, just not all at the same time, and how aligning career moves with life needs and values has guided her path. Den and Toni dive into the trap of “work, work, work” in your 20s, and why so many professionals are blind to the need to prioritize their physical, financial, and spiritual health, as well as their broader sense of purpose. Toni encourages people to see themselves as multidimensional, drawing on her own artistic background to show how creativity can fuel even highly technical roles. The conversation then turns to the future of work and the transformative impact of AI. Toni outlines three key questions she uses to reimagine work: Do we still need to do this work? How can technology augment us as a thought partner? And what can we safe…