Anyone else feeling a bit untethered lately? Maybe it’s the season, and I am just shedding the leaves for the year. Still, it feels like the ground is constantly shifting, and building a business on top of it is a total balancing act.
If you’ve been here a while, you know I love AI. Can’t overstate how much it has improved my ability to start and run a solo biz. Most days, I am on an AI high, my friends, but then I’ll read something about where AI could be headed and think: holy s*** are we on the edge of WALL-E? Blade Runner? Something that explodes? Okay, maybe my imagination has a flair for the dramatic, but the underlying question is real: what happens when technology moves faster than our ability to understand or govern it?
I don’t think stopping scientific progress is simple, or even the right answer. I can see how much good AI could do. I’m excited by what it might make possible for my 3-year-old daughter. I also catch myself wondering whether she’ll have a career, and you know, who the heck gets to decide what these systems are allowed to touch.
I think that uncertainty is what makes me feel untethered lately. I don’t trust that the people making decisions at the top always know what they’re doing, or that they’re thinking first about what’s best for people. When the stakes feel that big, “just stay curious” doesn’t quite settle me.
I do know what uncertainty looks like in a startup. I seem to crave that world (15 yrs and I can’t quit you.): the risk, the figuring it out as you go, the constant change. It also means I know how much it helps to build some structure around the uncertainty. Clear ownership. Systems people can follow. Boundaries around what gets automated and when. Those things don’t give you control over everything. They do give you a better chance of seeing what’s happening and responding before the chaos gets wild.
I think about AI in business the same way. I want to be an empathetic leader first. People are what keep a company running, and they should know how valuable they are. At the same time, I believe people need to learn how to use AI in their work. It’s becoming part of how companies operate, and teams that refuse to adapt will fall behind.
Those ideas can sit beside each other. People can learn the tools and still be essential because they bring context, judgment, oversight, and an understanding of what a customer actually needs. The human role can change without becoming disposable.
There’s one line I keep coming back to: we should only automate workflows we trust and are proud of. Automating a broken process can make the confusion happen faster and at a much larger scale. Some customer issues may eventually be handled well by AI. I still firmly believe customers should still be able to reach a person quickly when they need one. That matters to me.
I don’t have a reassuring prediction about where AI is going. I’m not giving up the ways it helps me, and I’m still uneasy about the people deciding how it gets used in government, the military, and everywhere else. I also wonder whether we’re sitting with what this current generation of tools can do before rushing to make the next one smarter.
Maybe the thing I can hold onto is smaller than a prediction. In the company I help build, I can keep asking who benefits, what happens when the system gets it wrong, and whether a person can still get help from another person.
I can’t give my daughter certainty about the world she’ll work in. I can keep insisting that the businesses we build remember there are people inside them, and people on the other side of every system. Those people matter.
That’s not an answer to all of this. It’s something I can stand behind while I figure out what I think.
As you build or lead out there, what are you choosing to keep human?