Every planner I talk to right now is somewhere in the AI conversation. Some are all in. Some are quietly hoping it settles down. Most are using it every day and still not sure how they feel about that.
MPI published a piece with Cherry Rose Tan this week, ahead of her keynote at theEVENT in Vancouver, and she did the thing I have watched her do in a room. She took the argument everyone is having and turned it into a question you can actually use.
The line MPI ran as the headline is the one that stuck with me. AI is an amplifier.
She borrows the idea from Lynne Twist’s The Soul of Money. Twist spent a career working with both the poorest people in the world and the richest, and found that money did not change who people were. It amplified what they were already building and what they already stood for. Cherry says AI works the same way.
For our industry that should land as good news. We are a business built on human beings and what happens to them in a room. If AI amplifies what you already are, and what you already are is an industry obsessed with the room, then the question stops being whether to adopt it and starts being what you are amplifying.
Stewardship, not ethics
The part I want every planner to read is where she refuses the good-or-evil framing. “That framing isn’t useful for people who have to make everyday decisions about AI,” she told MPI.
Instead she calls it stewardship. Being an active, intentional user, and asking two plain questions every time. What does success actually look like here? Who is affected by this, and what conversation do we need to have with them?
That is a far better question than whether AI is good. It is one you can answer on a Tuesday afternoon with a real decision sitting in front of you.
Start with one thing
Her advice on adoption is refreshingly unglamorous. Start with the low-hanging fruit. One tool. One task you already do in your day.
She makes the point that the pressure to adopt everything at once is exactly what makes it overwhelming, and that matches what I hear from planners constantly. Nobody is behind because they have not built an AI strategy. They are stuck because they think they need one before they are allowed to start.
Know where your people sit
This was the part I had not heard put quite this way. People sit in different places on the risk spectrum. Some want to go all in, attend everything, try every new tool, because that is how they are wired. Others find that pace intimidating.
If you are leading a team, knowing where each person sits is the difference between adoption that actually works and adoption that quietly stalls in month two.
Catch her at theEVENT
Cherry keynotes Human First: Stewardship in the Age of Artificial Intelligence at MPI’s theEVENT in Vancouver, September 14 to 16. If you are going, that is the one worth the early start.
And if you are not going, read the article. It is ten minutes and you will come out of it with better questions than you went in with.
This is the topic clients are asking us for right now, and Cherry is the reason I stopped worrying about how we would answer it. She does not hand a room the answers. She hands them a way to think, and then makes them responsible for it.
Want Cherry Rose Tan on your stage? Get in touch and we will make it easy.
