A technologist recalls building solutions for their son without asking what he actually needed, learning that technology fails when you skip listening to users first. At the AI Leadership Institute, this became a core rule: never build for someone without them.
Chapters
So that was no big deal. But the other thing was that I, you know, I'm a technologist. I grew up, the first time I got into tech was Y2K. Mm-hmm. Everything was gonna change. The world was done. That's right. I always say like it was the first time the world was gonna end. Yeah. Right? Like we were all like, oh my gosh. But it taught me a lot about what you could do. I mean, we did amazing things in the middle of the night to protect the world from, you know, what we thought would be a catastrophic outcome. So I was really inspired by technology and that was Y2K. I, I, I realized like I can use tech as a tool to solve any problem. Yeah. So, when I had my son, I was kinda like, I got this, I can fix this. And I think most technologists come at solutions that way, but it, and we'll talk about this throughout the session, but I think it's very interesting the evolution of that because as a technologist, especially with AI, we actually can't fix anything. Right. Like, I can't fix problems for my son unless my son tells me what he wants fixed. And I think that became a cornerstone for what we do at the AI Leadership Institute is we never build for someone without them.
