AI reminds me of HR.

Ask any HR business partner what the job actually feels like day to day and they'll tell you the same thing. It's supposed to be planning and strategy. What it was for me was more like being the retail version of Olivia Pope. Fixer. Go-between. The person who handled what was in the email and what got left out of it.

I did that job for almost two decades, moving between the office and the field, learning how to get things done with limited resources and hardly any budget. I also learned how to play the game. And if you've ever been Black in a corporate space, you know the ecosystem I'm talking about. The silent expectations nobody names out loud. Micro-aggressions you let slide. Favoritism you watch happen for somebody else. Decisions you nod along with because your paycheck is attached to it. I got good at all of it. I had to. It's how I fed four kids and kept the lights on.

But my body started keeping its own records.

The better I got at the job, the more they gave me. Bigger territory, fuller plate, same single mother behind all of it. At 40, I had my first panic attack. Ever. Eventually, I was on three psychiatric medications just to stay functional and the job I'd spent my whole career chasing still had my name on it while I felt myself coming apart at the seams.

What actually happened? I had the title. I did not have the impact. My work wasn't touching the people I actually cared about, and I couldn't keep doing something that looked like success and felt like nothing.

So I bought a course on digital marketing in 2023. As it turns out, not all courses are a scam. I saw where technology was headed, and because of the seventeen years I'd already put in watching how organizations work, I saw exactly where AI was going to land, and who was going to get left holding nothing when it did.

Here's my position: If you decide AI's not for you, that's your business. Not knowing how to use it is the problem. Too many of US are hearing about the harms and turning that into staying away from AI entirely, and that's the wrong move. We could be using this thing to fight some of what it's doing to us, but you can't fight with a tool you never learned to wield.

I built my consultancy on one belief: entrepreneurship as a liberation exercise for Black people. Labor has always been the priciest line on the P&L, and funding has never been in abundance for us. Let an AI agent handle the functions that it can. That frees up the person to do the part of the job that they love (which is likely the part that also brings in revenue). AI can handle the parts of business that are crucial but don't always need us to be the one doing it.

We've never lacked the creativity for this moment and we have always been innovators. What we've lacked is somebody putting the tools in front of us and showing us how to use them. I partnered with an organization doing exactly that, so the entry point stays free or close to it.

Teach the ones who want to learn it. Build for the ones who'd rather I just do it. Either way, I'm in it with my people.

Oh, and I've been off the meds for three years now.