My Son Doesn't Know a World Without AI. Here's What That's Teaching Me.

My three boys live in a world I didn't grow up in.

They don't experience AI as a new technology. They don't have a reference point for a world before it. For them, the idea of asking a device a question and receiving a thoughtful, contextual, synthesised answer is as unremarkable as turning on a tap and having water come out.

As someone who has built a professional identity around understanding how digital-native generations think differently, and what that means for the organisations they'll eventually lead, you'd think I'd be well prepared for this. I wasn't.

What I noticed with my eldest

My eldest son has a mild intellectual disability. He's bright, determined, and creative, and he has always worked harder than most people recognise to achieve things that others do without thinking.

Watching him interact with AI tools has been one of the more genuinely moving experiences of this whole experiment. He uses AI to help him structure his thoughts before he writes. To turn the tangled idea in his head into something he can then edit and shape into his own words. To check whether what he's trying to say is landing clearly before he commits to it.

And it works. Not because AI is doing his thinking for him. But because AI is giving him a scaffold, he can climb. The thinking is his. The ideas are his. The voice, once it's on the page, is entirely his.

This is a different model of capability than the one I was educated in. I was taught that demonstrating intelligence meant producing the output independently. My son is learning that intelligence includes knowing which tools help you think better.

The assumption I had to update

I had, without fully articulating it, a residual belief that using AI was a form of shortcut. That the real work was the unassisted version. That AI-as-a-cognitive-scaffold was somehow less than doing it on your own.

Watching my son disabused me of this entirely. The scaffold isn't the achievement. What you build on it is.

I now bring this lens to the leadership work I do. When I hear executives say they're worried their teams are "just using AI" instead of thinking, I ask them to examine that assumption. What exactly are they worried will be lost? And is that loss real, or is it the discomfort of watching capability expressed differently than they were taught to express it?

For over a decade, I've told the story of Isaac, a boy born the same day as the iPhone. A digital native. And we explored how he would enter the world as a citizen, a consumer, and a member of the workforce. I've been forced to rethink that notion and dive deeper into my research to explore the world of the AI native.

Practical AI: Test how AI explains differently

This one is simple and genuinely interesting. Pick any concept related to your work, something you understand deeply. Then ask your AI to explain it twice:

• Once for a senior executive who wants strategic context but no jargon

• Once for a curious 10-year-old who wants to understand why it matters

  
  

Read both. Notice which one is clearer. Notice whether the simpler version taught you something about your own explanation. Often, the 10-year-old version is more precise than the executive one, because it can't hide behind sophistication.

If you want to really amaze yourself, turn on the deep research setting on your chosen AI tool and re-run the above scenario. Ask follow-up questions and see where it takes you.