Last January, I was running a nonprofit marketing team that could have benefited enormously from AI. I had budget, smart people, and the authority to experiment. But I didn't even try.
Not because I didn't understand the promise of the technology, but because culturally, organizationally, logistically — it just felt too hard to thread the needle between folks who were excited to explore and those who were skeptical.
The thing is, both the critics and the champions have genuinely good points: AI as an industry IS often legitimately awful (guzzles energy, enriches billionaires, addicted to hype) while AI as a tool IS often legitimately transformative.
It's been tricky, but I'm learning to hold both truths at once. That's enabled me to start figuring out how to use AI to improve my day-to-day life and advance the causes I care about — and it's gotten me more excited about technology than I've been since I interrupted a vacation in Peru to go to an internet cafe and watch Steve Jobs unveil the iPhone.
Which brings me to something that would have seemed unlikely a year ago: I'm starting a company called Alongside with my friend Rachel Marcuse, who knows everything about org design, operational excellence, and change management, to help teams navigate the human side of AI adoption. We'll be sitting with folks one-on-one to overcome initial obstacles, listening to problems and building time-saving tools in real time, and creating experimentation cultures where it's just as acceptable to call BS on something as it is to be excited about a cool little breakthrough.
Before we get started in earnest, Rachel and I want to spend the next month talking to people about how AI adoption is actually playing out in their teams so far — the good parts, the awful parts, the confusing parts. What's working? What's flopping? Where are you stuck? What surprised you?
If you'd be game for a 30-minute conversation about your team's reality, please get in touch. We'd be genuinely grateful for your insights. And I (not my bot) will send you a calendar link.