By Penny Power – Business Author & Human-Centred Speaker
This week I am pondering my deep belief that AL is giving back time to us all to be more emotionally connected.
28 years ago Thomas and I built the first ‘social business networks for business’. We believed, with our whole hearts, that connecting business owners across kitchens and cities and countries would help us understand one another better. Our belief was ‘friendship first- commerce second’ as how else can we build the trust in others to trade unless they knew one another personally and with emotion.
I stood on stages and promised rooms full of strangers that technology would bring us closer. I meant every word.
I was half right.
We are more connected than ever. My phone knows more about my week than some of my dearest friends do, and I can reach a thousand people before my coffee has gone cold. Yet I have sat across from brilliant, successful, deeply loved people who told me quietly that they have never felt more alone. Somewhere in the last twenty years since iphones and social media, we learned how to broadcast, and we quietly forgot how to belong.
I think often about my mother and the chair she kept beside the telephone in the hall. When someone called, she gave them the whole of herself. Nothing competed for her attention. No second screen, no buzz pulling at her sleeve. She was simply, completely there. I did not understand what a gift that was until it became rare.
We told ourselves the phones were saving us time. In truth they filled every gap we had. The queue, the walk, the pause before sleep, the small silences where a thought might once have wandered toward another person. We disconnected as far as human beings are willing to go, and then we called it progress.
And now, into that tired and overstretched world, comes artificial intelligence. Many people meet it with fear. I understand the fear. But I have come to see something else in it, something hopeful, and I want to share it with you.
AI is very good at the work that is quietly stealing our humanity. The drafting, the sorting, the endless admin, the second and third pass of tasks that never loved us back. For the first time in twenty years we are being handed something precious in return. Time. Not time to do more, but time to be more.
In BIP100, the community Thomas and I build together, I watch this happening in real life. I see members hand the heavy lifting to their tools and then turn, with the hours they have won back, toward each other. They ask a better question. They stay on the call after the business is done. They notice when someone has gone quiet. They remember a birthday, a worry, a small win from a fortnight ago. I am watching people rediscover interdependence, and it is the most human thing I have seen in years.
This is the fight back. Not against the machines, but against the disconnection we allowed ourselves to drift into. It is the determination to take every hour AI gives us and spend it on the people in front of us.
I keep returning to a simple journey I have come to trust. It begins with curiosity, the willingness to ask about someone and truly want the answer. It grows into compassion, feeling something for what we hear. It becomes a contribution, doing something with that feeling, however small. And it ends in commitment, the moment another person knows, without any doubt, that they have been seen and you seek to sustain that relationship. That is significance. It is the deepest need we carry, and no algorithm can meet it for us. Only we can.
The last twenty years taught us to be recognised. The next twenty can teach us to be known, deeply. The tools are finally ready to carry the load we were never meant to carry alone. The only question left is what we choose to do with the time they hand back.
So here is my challenge to you this week.
Take one hour that a machine has saved you and give it away. Not to your inbox. Not to your feed. Give it to a person. Call the friend whose voice you have not heard in months. Sit with someone and put the phone in another room. Ask the question, wait for the real answer, and let them feel, in that moment, that they matter.
That is how we stay human. And it may be the most important work any of us ever do.
With love,
Penny x
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