If you’ve sat through an AI presentation in the last two years, you’ve probably experienced one of two things: breathless excitement about the coming transformation, or grave warnings about everything that could go wrong.
Both have their place. Neither, on its own, is particularly useful.
The conversation most organizations actually need is more grounded, more specific, and frankly more interesting. It starts not with what AI can do, but with what you are trying to do — and whether AI is actually the right tool for it.
The question before the question
Before any conversation about AI adoption, there’s a prior question worth sitting with: What problem are we actually solving?
Not “how do we use AI?” but “what are we trying to achieve, and is AI the best path to get there?”
This sounds obvious. It rarely happens in practice. The pressure to be seen as “doing AI” is real — from boards, from investors, from peers. That pressure pushes organizations toward adoption as a goal in itself, disconnected from actual purpose.
Speaking plainly
When I speak on AI — to boards, to community organizations, to leadership teams — I try to do one thing above all else: speak plainly. Not dumb it down. Not oversimplify. But use language that connects to what people actually experience, value, and fear.
Because AI is not ultimately a technology story. It is a human story. And humans respond to human language.
The technical details matter. But they matter in service of the human questions: What does this mean for my people? For my community? For the way we make decisions? For what we stand for?
That’s the conversation worth having. And it’s the one I love most.