What I Felt During That AI Demo
The Setup
Last week I watched my firm’s AI team demo a suite of tools to about 250 people. Context tracking across accounts. Automated client communication summaries. Workstream dashboards. Deliverable assembly. I watched it in chunks… on 1.8x speed. Between meetings, after dinner cleanup, during my kids’ screen time. That’s what transformation looks like for this mid-career professional. Not in some focused strategic offsite I hear about from others. But in stolen 23-minute windows while the Daniel Tiger is on. A few weeks prior, I spent a full Saturday following my own curiosity about what happens to professionals when AI disrupts their identity, not just their tasks. I wasn’t doing formal research. I was asking questions, pulling threads with AI, drawing parallels across fields I had no business connecting, and trying to make sense of what I was seeing around me. What came out of that day was a framework I’ve been calling the Identity Layer: the idea that most AI transformation programs teach you the tools and explain the business case, but skip the part where you have to figure out who you are now. I thought I understood it. Then I watched that recorded demo meeting and became a data point in my own framework. Cue dramatic spotlight in a dark room.
My Approach + AI Role
The Identity Layer idea was built with AI. Not over months of careful study (I was a terrible student), over a day of relentless curiosity. I’d ask AI a question, get an answer that sparked another question, chase a parallel into retirement psychology, sports performance, and healthcare payment systems, and suddenly I was looking at the same pattern from five different angles. The AI didn’t do the thinking. It let me think faster and wider than I could have alone, which meant I could follow the curiosity instead of running out of energy before the insight arrived. That’s the part I’m really excited about. The combination of human curiosity and AI capability isn’t replacing my judgment. It’s letting me go places with it that I couldn’t reach before. Every new tool or methodology being introduced is only going to compound that, not undo it.
What Actually Happened
So there I am, watching the demo, and I notice four things happening simultaneously: Ego. I’ve been building AI systems and frameworks for months without a title, a team, or a mandate. Now a funded team with proper titles is building in overlapping territory. My first reaction was not… my best self. I wanted someone to notice. I caught that impulse, but only after, not before. Protection. Some of these tools directly automate what many PM peers built their careers on. Being the person who holds the context, who knows what’s happening, who keeps the trains running. I could see their professional identity about to be restructured into a hub and some buttons. That wasn’t ego. That was real concern for my fellow peer professionals. Defense. A gut-level “you don’t understand how we actually work” response toward the builders. Partially legitimate… I think. People who learned the business from the outside do encode incomplete assumptions. Partially a defense mechanism I needed to check. And then the meta-awareness. Wait a minute, this feels familiar. The slow realization that I was cycling through the exact stages my own framework describes. Resisting. Mourning a little. Conserving my sense of value. The observation of myself experiencing the thing I’d written about… that was the Identity Layer idea unraveling in real time. Here’s what the first draft post have missed upon reflection: I was also excited. Watching those tools, I could see how they’d make the work I’m already doing more powerful, not less. How might I inject the knowledge base my AI knowledge systems I’ve been building into the scaling effect of their tools to become ultra-relevant for my teams? My approach may not be elegant. It may not be pretty. But it works. And when better infrastructure arrives, it’s only going to work better. It’s not getting replaced. Both things were true at the same time. The discomfort and the energy. I think that’s actually the more honest observation than just the poor-me story.
The Real Insight
You don’t transcend your own framework just because you built it. Knowing the map doesn’t mean you get to skip from point A to B without the journey in-between. But here’s the part I didn’t expect: the journey isn’t just loss. It’s also possibility. The professionals I’m most worried about aren’t the ones feeling the discomfort… they’re the ones who aren’t feeling anything yet. The discomfort means you’re paying attention. It means you see what’s changing and you care enough about your craft to have a reaction to it. The question isn’t whether the feelings are real. They are. It’s whether you let them drive your strategy or let them inform it. Those are very different things.
Try This If…
If you’ve been watching AI tools arrive at your organization and feeling something you can’t quite name, it might not be resistance. It might be your professional identity recognizing that the ground is shifting. Next time it happens, try this: pause and ask which layer is talking. Is it ego wanting recognition? Real concern for people you care about? Defensiveness dressed up as critique? Or is it something quieter underneath… the part of you that’s already seeing what comes next and isn’t sure how to get there yet? You don’t have to resolve it. Just name it. Naming is how the processing starts. Side note: I am deeply wondering if my ability to “name my feeling” is thanks to years of Daniel Tiger and learning about the powers of simply naming the feeling. Go donate to PBS, they’re doing great programming for the sake of our future emotionally stable society. And if you find yourself also feeling excited - hold on to that too! The both-and is the honest position. Not everything about this AI transformation journey is loss.
Systems Lens
The gap between knowing something intellectually and living it emotionally is exactly the gap most AI transformation programs are reproducing at scale. They teach the tools. They explain the business case. But they skip the part where a person sits with the fact that what they were proud of being great at is evolving into something they haven’t mastered yet. I don’t think that’s a training problem. I think that’s where the real transformation work lives. In the uncomfortable, energizing space between “I understand why this is happening” and “I’m figuring out who I’m becoming.” And I think the people doing the most interesting work right now are the ones who don’t have the fancy title or the funded team… the ones getting creative with constraints, building things that work because they have to, not because they were told to. When the better tools arrive, those people won’t start over. They’ll compound. That’s not a comfortable realization. But it’s an honest one. And I’d rather be honest about what this feels like than pretend I have it figured out.