Sara Riedel
Sara Riedel is a leadership strategist, AI training consultant, and founder of KALA Leadership Collective, where she helps organizations bridge the gap between AI tools and real-world AI adoption. With a background in education and more than two decades of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, Sara combines leadership development with practical AI implementation to help professionals modernize how they work and lead. Her signature BUILD Method — focused on leadership fundamentals, AI upskilling, integration, applied learning, and measurable outcomes — has supported leaders across more than 15 organizations, from individual contributors to executive-level teams. Through workshops, consulting, and her growing online community, she emphasizes that AI is not simply a technology shift, but a transformation in how organizations build capability and scale performance.
Before launching her business, Sara spent over 20 years in the pharmaceutical industry, including leadership and learning-development roles with Takeda and earlier sales and training positions with AstraZeneca. During her tenure at Takeda, she helped create a mentoring program through the company’s Women’s Employee Resource Group, an initiative that was later featured in the organization’s global oncology newsletter. Although being laid off in late 2023 marked a major turning point in her career, Sara transformed the experience into an opportunity to combine her lifelong passion for teaching with her self-taught expertise in artificial intelligence. Drawing on her educational background and postgraduate studies in curriculum and planning, she developed hands-on leadership programs designed around how adults learn best: through dialogue, real-time practice, collaboration, and application.
Today, Sara leads a remote team that develops monthly leadership courses and facilitates weekly live sessions through an interactive online community platform. Known for her thoughtful and human-centered perspective on leadership, she writes extensively about career growth, organizational culture, AI adoption, and navigating change in the modern workplace. A graduate of Michigan State University with a degree in education and Spanish, Sara believes the future of leadership will depend not only on technology, but on stronger relationships, trust, and community. Her work reflects a commitment to helping leaders adapt confidently to rapid change while maintaining the human connection at the center of meaningful leadership.
• Everything DiSC® Certification
• Certified Mentor
• Michigan State University- B.A.
• Honored Listee-
Marquis Who's Who
• Millennium Cup Winner 2008
• Millennium Cup Winner 2011
• Takeda Oncology Cup Winner 2020
• CATHOLIC YOUTH SPORTS
• Girl Scouts of Citrus Council
What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to rejection. Being rejected for many roles, both internally at my organization and externally, really forced me to look inward and see how I was showing up and what I could learn from it. Obviously it makes you call yourself into question and your confidence, but that repeated rejection gave me the courage I needed to start my own company and bet on myself. At the end of the day, I was going to bet on myself. And this fear of starting out on your own after you've been in the corporate world for many, many years, and being the single breadwinner of my household at the time, it's terrifying. But the rejection gave me the courage to start the journey.
What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think the biggest opportunity is that AI is so new and people are figuring it out, and there's not a lot of step-by-step how-to guidance, which is where I excel. Because of the hands-on nature of my courses, I can walk you through how to do it in real time, and I'm not doing it, you're doing it. There's a great need right now for people to learn, and there's a desire to learn how to use AI. The biggest challenge in the market is that people don't know what they don't know. Even just a basic level prompt, which probably may not get you a great result, feels amazing because it's such a jump. So newer AI users who are experimenting at a beginner level just don't realize how much better it could be. I think that's true in organizations as well. About 92% of Fortune 500s have rolled out AI tools, but only 35% have a reskilling strategy. They think if they teach you how to prompt with a basic prompt, you're trained, but there's so much more to it than that. It's a skill level that has to be developed over time. The opportunity and challenge is having companies recognize that it's a combination of individual users learning to use it, but also providing the support and structure to make them successful.
What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
For me, it's respect. I care more if you respect me than if you like me, and that's always held true for me. My second value is fairness. I think we all want a fair shot, we all want to be treated fairly, we all want to be given a fair chance. Fair does not mean equal, but respect and fairness are what matter most to me.