A few weeks ago I spoke at the Arizona Association for Lifelong Learning Conference about responsible AI adoption in adult education, and I started my session with a message I wanted every attendee to remember: I believe we are out of what I call the AI “honeymoon phase”.
People are still curious, and brands are experimenting to figure out where the technology fits, but the energy has shifted. The questions aren’t: “What cool thing can this tool do?”
The questions are (or IMO they should be):
- Can we trust this?
- How do we use this responsibly?
- What happens to learner trust?
- What are the privacy risks?
- Who’s overseeing this?
- What’s appropriate and what isn’t?
It was important that I start the session with caution because I think some organizations are moving so fast, trying to “keep up” with AI that they’re introducing tools into environments that don’t have rules yet. Everybody’s making their own decisions, creating their own boundaries and deciding for themselves what “good use” looks like. And that’s where things start getting messy.
One of the things I said during the session was that what’s missing in a lot of organizations right now isn’t effort…it’s structure. People are under pressure to deliver, so they’re doing their own research, and teams across departments are trying different tools. Leadership often hasn’t defined what responsible use actually looks like.
So in the pursuit of efficiency organizations are accidentally creating fragmentation. That’s the part I think we should pay more attention to.
AI changes more than workflows, it also changes how organizations are experienced.
And in education, if communication becomes inconsistent, oversight weakens, and trust starts eroding (because nobody established guardrails first) people notice. My skepticism about all of this definitely comes from my military background. I was trained to think about compartmentalization, need-to-know access, data protection and operational risk. So when I hear about people uploading sensitive information into free AI tools without understanding how these systems work behind the scenes my inner alarm bells go OFF.
I don’t think AI is dangerous; I believe that powerful systems require thoughtful leadership. That’s why I keep saying AI supports the work, and human beings are still responsible for the outcome.
And I think organizations that understand are going to navigate this era very differently than the ones treating AI adoption like its a race.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this conversation at the Arizona Association for Lifelong Learning Conference, and I think these are exactly the kinds of conversations more organizations need to be having right now.
Let’s ask more than: “How do we use AI?” and start pondering how we use it without creating problems we didn’t have before.