How is AI Showing Up in My Work?

Last month, in the middle of an interaction with Claude, who was helping me write a proposal, a WhatsApp arrived from my brother-in-law.

Every year we holiday in Scotland, visiting family in a place that matters to people I love. The message was news of a bid to build a huge data centre on the moor near where we stay. We know it well. We know where the Short-eared owls hunt and where the Lapwing breed. We cycle the roads that may become access routes for construction traffic. We swim in the rivers that may be used for cooling hot machines.

I sat for a moment with the two things, the proposal on my screen, my love for the moor.

The honest truth is that I don’t know what to do with that dissonance. For now, I am defaulting to hypocrisy. Opposing the data centre and asking Claude to sense-check my proposals.

Claude and I. We’re getting on well. Frankly, I’m delighted with the help I get and it’s starting to feel like a partnership. Although I wonder if I’m becoming a lazy-brain. “Claude, I really can’t be bothered to do these sums.”

My clients sit at very different points on the AI spectrum and I mean that in more ways than one.

Some are deep inside commercial organisations: the Chief Revenue Officer looking for AI-driven growth, the Chief Risk Officer trying to work out how to make that safe. Inside those organisations, the prevailing message is simple and stark: AI or die. Others are working at a bigger scale entirely, thinking about societal risk, planetary systems and what AI might mean. Their message is considerably more cautionary.

I find it useful to hold both perspectives. Not because I have answers, but because I think the commercial frame alone is too narrow a place from which to think about what AI is and how we choose to respond. My work has always tried to bring a wider lens, to sit with the whole person in the context of a career and a life. To sit with the small, close-in dilemmas as they are nested in bigger and bigger systems.

Within commercial organisations in the march of AI transformation, I am starting to see AI enter the dilemmas people are bringing to me as a coach:

• It doesn’t feel great to be making colleagues redundant and replacing them with chatbots.
• How do I manage customer risk when no one can tell me what the risk actually is?
• I love the young, AI-savvy transformation team but how can I make sure they don’t break important things?

My work is fundamentally about the quality of human relationships. I don’t feel any threat to that work yet. But I am noticing that relationships with AIs are becoming significant to many people in ways that should not be underestimated.

One client makes a place for AI in their Executive Team Meeting. Colleague Co-pilot gets a say before a decision is made. I can see how helpful that is.

Even in my work as a counsellor with members of the public, I see this. While I was away on holiday recently, a client used AI as a proxy counsellor. They showed me the transcript afterwards. The reflective listening, the measured responses were admirably sound. I noticed something shift in me as he showed me his phone. Not quite threat. Not quite admiration. Like the feeling of standing at the edge of a beautiful, dark lake, unable to see the bottom.

As I write this, I notice a voice in my head:

You are exposing yourself. There’ll be much better-informed writing about AI out there, Lucy. What do you actually know? You’re going to make yourself look silly trying to address this topic.

I think that’s not just about me. I think it’s systemic. AI brings us directly into contact with what we don’t understand, can’t understand, possibly can’t control, and may come to regret. It is deeply convenient and yet makes us profoundly uncomfortable. Abstract and unembodied, yet humming away on the moor.

What I am trying to do for myself is open up the conversation between the conflicting parts of me that AI stirs up. The individual performer and the worried spouse. The delighted consumer and the outraged citizen. The part that sees opportunity and the part that senses threat.

Can I hold all of those parts and bear the stuckness? If I can, might something become possible beyond the dissonance? Not an answer, exactly. More like a place to stand from which the next best step becomes visible.

With thanks to Louise, whose question this morning got me thinking.