A personal reflection on the first time I used AI, the question it sparked, and why it matters for leadership, decision-making and the future.
There is a question that has accompanied me for much of my life.
Long before artificial intelligence entered the public conversation, I was drawn to the mysteries of human behaviour and decision-making. Through years of work in leadership, negotiation, governance and international development, I kept returning to variations of the same puzzle. Why do people make the choices they do? What allows some individuals and communities to flourish despite adversity, while others struggle? What enables us to collaborate across our differences?
Beneath all of those questions, I realise now, was another one, quieter and harder to name.
The Question That Changed Everything
I remember the first time this question surfaced with a completely different intensity. I was sitting by Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, at the end of several days immersed in a programme on positive leadership. We had spent our time exploring purpose, trust, resilience and the conditions that allow people and communities to thrive. The conversations had been rich, and the setting, surrounded by volcanoes and by the vast stillness of the lake, seemed to invite exactly the kind of reflection that is hard to access in ordinary life.
It was there that I opened ChatGPT for the first time. I began simply, out of curiosity. I asked questions, tested ideas and pushed back a little. What I expected was an interesting piece of technology. What I did not expect was the feeling that crept in as the conversation unfolded, a strange mixture of fascination and unease that I could not quite shake.
The machine was doing things I had spent years developing, teaching and valuing. It was making sense of information, connecting ideas, structuring complex arguments and engaging in a dialogue that was far more sophisticated than I had expected. It was remarkable, but what stayed with me was not the technology itself. It was the quiet sense that I was witnessing the beginning of something that would change not only how we work, but also how we understand intelligence, creativity and perhaps ourselves.
I put my phone down and sent a message to a friend.
“I’ve just tried AI for the first time.”
A few moments later, I sent another.
“If this is what AI can do today, what will remain uniquely human?”
The Answers I Found That Afternoon
My first instinct, sitting there by the lake, was that what would endure was our capacity for empathy. Machines could reason and generate ideas, but surely they could not truly understand what it feels like to care for another person, to love, to grieve, to belong, or to sense the subtle emotional texture of human relationships.
Then my thoughts moved to the body. AI had no physical presence. It could not feel the warmth of the sun, the subtle unease that precedes an important decision, or the calm that sometimes settles after a long silence. So much of human judgment felt inseparable from embodiment, from intuition, attention, presence and the signals we receive before we are even consciously aware of them.
And beneath both of those lay something harder still to define: consciousness, our capacity to reflect on who we are, to search for meaning, to take responsibility, to hold values and to wrestle with questions that have no clean answers.
At the time, these distinctions felt almost obvious. What I did not anticipate was how quickly they would begin to blur.
The more AI advances, the more those seemingly clear boundaries shift. Systems now recognise emotions, simulate empathy, inhabit physical forms through robotics and engage with questions we once considered distinctly human territory. The boundaries I thought I could rely on have become less stable than I imagined.
And yet the question has not disappeared. If anything, it feels more urgent now than it did that afternoon by the lake.
Not because I am worried about technology. Quite the opposite. I find its potential genuinely exciting. What fascinates me even more is the way technological progress acts as a mirror. Every major leap forces us to examine assumptions we did not realise we held, and to ask, more carefully, what we actually value.
Over time, I have come to believe that this is not only a question about technology. It is a question about how we live, how we learn, how we relate to one another and how we make decisions. It begins at the most personal level, with the capacities each of us chooses to cultivate. But it does not stay there. Those capacities shape the quality of our conversations, the intelligence of our groups, the culture of our organisations and, eventually, the governance of the systems we build.
That question by the lake never really left me. In many ways, it became a kind of seed for the conversations I now want to host through AIRIS: spaces where we can think together, not in order to find quick answers, but to explore what it means to lead, decide and govern well in a world changing faster than our frameworks for understanding it.
I still do not have a definitive answer to what makes us human. But I am increasingly convinced that the question matters, and that keeping it alive may be one of the responsibilities of our time.
The future will not be shaped only by the intelligence we build into our machines. It will also be shaped by the human capacities we choose to cultivate, first in ourselves, then with others, and ultimately in the institutions and systems through which we create the world.