What a Year of Living With AI Actually Taught Me, And the Question I Now Ask Every Leader

I started this series with a confession. I was standing on stages telling leaders to transform how they use AI, and I wasn't doing it myself. Well, not to the extent I was preaching.

Nine posts later, here's what I've actually learned.

What changed

My finances are clearer than they've been in years, not because AI manages them, but because AI helped me see the behavioural patterns underneath the numbers that I'd been successfully avoiding.

My health approach is more honest. I arrived at my last medical appointment with questions instead of just answers, and the quality of the conversation was completely different.

My decision-making is more transparent to me. I caught a pattern, the one where I research the object of desire while underanalyzing the desire itself, that I'd been running for years. I can't unsee it now.

My keynotes are sharper because they're coming from experience now, not just observation.

And my relationship with my sons, watching them use AI as a cognitive scaffold, shifted something fundamental in how I think about capability and intelligence. That's the one I didn't expect.

What didn't change

I still make the same kinds of mistakes. I still have blind spots. I still bring my biases to every prompt and sometimes get confirmation of what I want to believe rather than what I need to hear.

AI didn't fix me. It gave me better mirrors. What I do with the reflection is still entirely on me.

The question I now ask every leader

In the keynotes and advisory work I do, I used to ask leaders: "How is your organisation using AI?"

I've replaced that with a different question: "What has AI shown you about yourself that you couldn't see before?"

It's a much harder question to answer. Most people pause. Some look uncomfortable. A few light up, because they've clearly been sitting with exactly this.

The leaders who can answer it, specifically, honestly, with an example, are almost always the ones who are genuinely ahead. Not because they have better tools. Because they're using the tools to think better, not just to produce faster.

That's the shift. That's what this whole series has been about.

Practical AI: Write your AI charter

For this final Practical AI task, I want to invite you to write something that no one is asking you to write. A personal AI charter.

One page. Four sections:

• What I will use AI for (specifically, not vaguely)

• What I will not delegate to AI (the things that require my full humanity)

• Where I still need to develop my AI practice (honest gaps)

• What AI has shown me about myself that I didn't see before

Read it back in six months. See what's changed.

That's the experiment. And it's one worth running.