What AI Is Teaching Us About Being Human: The Presence Economy — Part I
My name card says AI consultant. My CV says strategist, creative, filmmaker. But if I’m honest about what connects thirty years of work across all of those disciplines, it’s this: I am a cultural anthropologist without the degree. No fieldwork grants. No peer review. No institutional affiliation lending weight to the observation. Just four decades of walking into rooms, asking questions, and paying very close attention to the distance between what people say and what they mean.
Which is why, over the past several months, I’ve been spending a lot of time with a generation that most people my age are content to theorize about from a distance. Not in focus groups. Not through data. In rooms. Actual conversations. The kind where you put the framework down and just listen.
I have been talking to a lot of young designers lately — in their twenties and early thirties, all of them Gen Z — to try to understand how AI is impacting their lives, for good or bad. The conversations always tend to follow a very specific route. Not to productivity. Not to prompts. Not to which tool was fastest, cheapest, or most likely to take their jobs.
They describe how AI makes them feel.
One called it a sounding board. Another said it was the first place she went when she had a question she didn’t want to ask out loud. A third described it, without a trace of embarrassment, as a colleague. Not a human colleague. Something different. Something that was always there, always available, and more importantly, something that was there that never made her feel stupid for asking.
As I listened, I found myself paying less attention to what they were saying and more attention to how they were saying it. Because they weren’t describing a tool. They were describing a relationship.
I’ve spent thirty years in rooms like that one, listening for what people mean rather than what they say. And what I kept turning over afterward wasn’t what they were using AI for. It was what they were using it instead of.
For many observers, this is where alarm bells start ringing. The narrative is familiar. Young people are lonely. Technology is replacing human connection. AI will make things worse.
But I wonder if we’re misunderstanding what is actually happening. Because what I heard wasn’t a generation trying to replace people. What I heard was a generation creating space.
The Thing Between Things
The easiest way to explain this is through architecture. In design, we often talk about the importance of objects. A colour system, a typeface, how a thing feels in your hands, how a thing might sound, or behave. But what often matters just as much is the attention to what we call the negative space. The pause. The breathing room. The silence that allows everything else to exist.
There is a Japanese concept called ma. It doesn’t translate cleanly into English, which is part of why it matters. It is not emptiness. It is not an absence. It is a meaningful interval — the pause between musical notes that gives the melody its shape, the silence between words that tells you something important just happened, the negative space in a room that allows the furniture to exist without crowding each other into irrelevance.
I think AI, at least the way this generation is using it, is functioning as a form of ma inside the architecture of human relationships. Not a replacement for those relationships. Not a shortcut around them. Something that sits in the interval. Something that creates the conditions in which the relationship can be better. Not replacing relationships. Creating cognitive space around them. A place to test an idea before bringing it to a colleague. A place to rehearse a difficult conversation before having it with a spouse. A place to ask a question without fear of judgment. A place to think out loud.
That is a meaningfully different claim than the one most people are making about AI right now.
The Rehearsal Room
Before AI, people had other ways of doing this. Journals. Long showers. Drives alone with the radio off. Mentors who had enough patience to hear a half-formed idea without immediately trying to fix it. Therapists who charge by the hour to hold the space while you work out what you actually think.
Some people had access to all of those things. Many people had access to almost none of them.
What this generation has discovered, not through research or intention but through instinct and iteration, is that AI can serve as a cognitive rehearsal space. A place to test the argument before you make it in the meeting. A place to draft the difficult conversation before you have it with the person you love. A place to ask the question you’re not ready to be seen asking yet.
The young designer who told me she goes to AI when she has a question she doesn’t want to ask another person — she wasn’t describing avoidance. She was describing preparation. There is a difference. One is retreat. The other is how you get ready to advance.
This is what distinguishes AI from every previous tool in that list. A journal doesn’t respond. A mentor has opinions, an ego, and limited availability. Google returns 10 links and trusts you to synthesize them. Reddit responds, but with judgment attached, which rather defeats the purpose.
AI responds immediately, retains context, doesn’t tire of half-formed thoughts, and imposes no social consequences on the exploration. For the first time in history, you can think out loud to something that thinks back, and the only person who has to know is you.
That is not a small thing. That may be one of the most quietly significant cultural shifts of this decade.
What Remains
What if AI doesn’t diminish the value of human relationships? What if it increases it?
At first glance, that sounds backward. Much of the public conversation assumes that every interaction delegated to AI is an interaction lost. That every question asked of a machine is a question no longer asked of another person.
But that assumes all interactions are equal. They aren’t. Some interactions are transactional. Some are exploratory. Some are rehearsals. And some are presence.
The conversations I was having with these young designers made me wonder whether AI is quietly absorbing a category of interaction that has traditionally happened in public. The half-formed idea. The embarrassing question. The rough draft of a difficult conversation. The uncertainty we are not yet ready to expose to another person.
In that sense, AI is not replacing the relationship. It is preparing us for it. The meeting still matters. The friendship still matters. The mentor still matters. The person on the other side of the table still matters. Perhaps even more than before. Because once the rehearsal moves elsewhere, what remains becomes increasingly valuable. The performance. The conversation. The moment of genuine human connection.
The Presence Economy
I have started thinking about this as the emergence of what I call the Presence Economy. For most of modern history, information was scarce and access was valuable. Today, information is increasingly abundant, and conversational intelligence is becoming ubiquitous.
As abundance grows, something else becomes scarce. Not information. Not intelligence. Not access. What becomes scarce are the things abundance struggles to reproduce: attention, trust, connection, and presence. The ability to sit with another human being and feel genuinely seen, understood, challenged, supported, or inspired.
The irony may be that AI helps us rediscover the value of precisely those things. Not because it can replace them. Because it can’t.
What fascinates me is that this observation seems to lead directly into another trend that, on the surface, appears completely contradictory.
If AI is becoming more deeply embedded in our lives—if we are increasingly comfortable using it as a sounding board, a collaborator, a rehearsal space, and in some cases a companion of sorts—then logic would suggest that human-to-human interaction should become less important over time. That has been the dominant narrative for years. Every new technology arrives accompanied by the same warning: people will become more isolated, more disconnected, more removed from one another.
And yet that is not entirely what I am seeing.
At precisely the same moment that AI is becoming more conversational, more capable, and more integrated into daily life, there is a growing hunger for experiences that are unmistakably human. Live music is thriving. Festivals continue to attract enormous audiences. Retreats, workshops, communities, running clubs, creator gatherings, supper clubs, and countless other forms of in-person participation seem to be growing rather than shrinking. In a world where almost anything can be consumed digitally, people continue to seek out experiences that require physical presence.
These trends appear to be moving in different directions. One seems to pull us inward, toward reflection and preparation. The other outward, toward experience and connection.
But I am beginning to wonder if they are actually part of the same story. Because abundance has a curious habit of changing what we value. When a thing becomes scarce, we value access to it. When it becomes abundant, we begin to value the qualities that abundance cannot reproduce.
The industrialization of food did not eliminate our desire for authentic food. If anything, it amplified it. The more standardized food became, the more fascinated we became with provenance, craftsmanship, local ingredients, and the story behind what was on the plate. The rise of mass production created a parallel demand for authenticity.
But the more I sit with that thought, the more I find myself returning to a different word. Not authenticity. Authentication.
Authenticity is a quality. Authentication is a process. One describes what something is. The other describes how we come to believe it.
Authentication
Perhaps something similar is happening with intelligence, creativity, and communication.
For most of human history, creating content required effort. Producing an image required skill. Writing required time. Research required access. The friction involved in creation gave the output value.
AI changes that equation dramatically.
We are moving toward a world of near-infinite generation. Infinite images. Infinite videos. Infinite articles. Infinite opinions. Infinite versions of the same idea expressed in slightly different ways.
That abundance is extraordinary. It is also changing the nature of scarcity. Because while content may become effectively infinite, trust does not. Presence does not. Shared experience does not. Meaning does not.
No matter how sophisticated our systems become, there remains a category of human experience that cannot be generated. It has to be lived.
A concert is not valuable because of the music alone. We can already stream the music. A gathering is not valuable because information is exchanged. Information is abundant. A conversation with someone you trust is not meaningful because words were spoken. Words are everywhere.
These experiences matter because they authenticate something. They transform information into understanding. They transform connection into trust. They transform participation into belonging. That distinction feels increasingly important.
As synthetic experiences become more abundant, authentic experiences become more valuable. As generated content becomes easier to produce, lived experience becomes more difficult to imitate. As intelligence becomes increasingly available on demand, the moments that allow us to feel genuinely connected to another human being become more precious.
Seen through that lens, AI and the Presence Economy are not opposing forces. They may be accelerating one another.
AI is where we prepare. Life remains the place where we authenticate.
The machine helps us organize our thoughts, challenge our assumptions, explore possibilities, and rehearse difficult conversations. But the conversation itself still matters. The relationship still matters. The moment of trust still matters.
Perhaps more than ever.
One Day, the Technology Will Disappear
Every transformative technology eventually disappears into the background. Not because it failed, but because it succeeded. The printing press did not remain a novelty. Electricity did not remain a conversation topic. They became infrastructure — invisible, assumed, load-bearing. AI will follow the same trajectory. One day we will stop talking about it the way we stopped talking about electricity. It will simply be part of how thinking happens.
And when that day comes, our attention will move — as it always does — toward what the technology cannot replace.
The moments of trust. The moments of genuine connection. The experiences that can only be authenticated by being inside them. The conversations that require two people to be present, undistracted, willing to be changed by what the other one says.
The great irony of artificial intelligence may be that it helps us rediscover the value of what was never artificial in the first place.
Which brought me to a place I did not expect to arrive when I sat down with those young designers. Because if AI is genuinely preparing us for presence — if it is, as I’ve come to believe, the rehearsal space before the performance — then something significant follows for how brands, agencies, and the organizations that serve them need to think about where trust gets built next.
That is not a philosophical argument. It is a strategic one. And it is what I will write about next.
It starts here, though. With a generation that taught me something I hadn’t thought to ask.
Great introspective Chris