🎙️ In this episode, I sit down with Paul Slater, author of “The AI-Ready Human” and AI enablement advisor, for a wide-ranging and refreshingly honest conversation about what it takes to stay human, capable, and grounded as work is transformed by AI.

Paul shares how his career, from delivering early IT training on the first office computers to a decade at Microsoft translating AI research into real world use cases, led him to write “The AI-Ready Human.” He now serves as Principal AI Technologist at Adobe, and his work centers on the human capabilities we need to protect as the pace of technological change accelerates.

At its core, this conversation is about reclaiming agency over who we become, recognizing that AI does not just change how we work, it amplifies who we already are, and asking what it takes to consciously build the guardrails that used to exist for us automatically.

We explore:

🧠 How AI amplifies whatever tendencies we already have, for better or worse

🌪️ Navigating a BANI world: brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible

🤖 The shift from linear AI conversations toward agentic, parallel workflows

♿ What accessibility and neurodiversity mean for how people interact with AI

🛡️ Why the structural guardrails that used to protect human connection are gone

⚖️ Building the next wave of AI ethics frameworks around human impact, not just capability

Follow and explore more of Paul’s work:

📲 LinkedIn: Paul Slater

🌐 Website: paulslater.ai

📝 Substack: Humanity Working

🎙️ Podcast: Humanity Working

If there’s one takeaway from this conversation, it’s this: the guardrails are gone, so building them back, on purpose, is now our job.

🎧 Podcast produced by Riti Suresh.