Part 1. The Empty Chair Is No Longer Alone
There’s a legend regarding Amazon. At the company, every meeting includes an empty white chair to represent the customer. It’s a visual, symbolic commitment: even if the customer isn’t physically there, their needs, expectations, and voice should shape every decision. That’s exactly what you’d expect from a customer-centric company. And to be fair, they’re pretty damn good at it.
Yesterday, while speaking with students in my AI for Business course, I shared a simple thought: what if we added another chair?
An “AI Chair.”
Not just as a symbol, but as a provocation. “What could AI contribute here?”
It wouldn’t magically fix our tension points, meet our deadlines, or balance our budgets. But it would remind us that we’re no longer alone in the room. We now have a partner with remarkable capacity for synthesis, memory, simulation, prediction, and yes, even creativity.
And yet, just like the customer, it is voiceless unless we speak for it.
The AI Chair won’t offer anything unless we actively bring it into the conversation. If we ignore it, or assume it has nothing to contribute to legal, design, management, or ethical decisions, then we’ve already missed the point. Its value lies in the questions we dare to ask, and in the mental space we give it.
Part 2. The Biggest Revolution Since the Industrial One
I still remember my first experiments with GPTs. It was during a workshop I attended in November 2022, while I was a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School.
My first reaction?
“This feels exactly like that moment when the world shifted from AltaVista to Google.”
I was in middle school, but I remember the shift vividly.
A part of me thought that GPTs were just smarter chatbots. But over the following days, something deeper began to take shape.
We’re not witnessing the birth of a new tool.
We are living inside a revolution.
And the weeks and months that followed (you know, new models, versions, agents, etc.) only amplified that feeling.
Generative AI doesn’t just help us find things. It helps us create, test, redesign, forecast, summarise, speak, think, write, simulate. And that’s just the beginning. Furthermore, it doesn’t move at the speed of thought: it accelerates it.
If I had to find a more fitting comparison, I’d say this moment is closer to the Industrial Revolution, but compressed. Changes that once took decades are now unfolding in years. And these new capabilities are rippling across every domain: law, logistics, design, education.
This isn’t a wave we ride.
It’s a new ocean.
Part 3. Scared. Excited. Overwhelmed.
These are the three feelings I carry with me every day when I think about AI, whether I’m working with clients, playing with platforms, or teaching students.
They aren’t sequential, and they don’t cancel each other out.
I’m scared because the pace is relentless, and the ethical questions are enormous. What happens to trust, to expertise, to employment, to regulation? What happens when models hallucinate, manipulate, or carry our biases into decision-making at scale? And what if we really do reach AGI?
I’m excited because the potential is extraordinary. I’ve seen teams generate insights, simplify dense documents, map user journeys, and imagine entirely new services in minutes instead of weeks. The augmentation is real. The leverage is immediate.
And yes, I’m often overwhelmed. Not just by the flood of tools, platforms, prompts, and plugins, but by the sheer depth of the transformation. It’s easy to feel like we’re all playing catch-up in a game with no fixed rules and no finish line.
These three emotions – scared, excited, overwhelmed – don’t show up on a schedule. Some days, it’s just one. Other days, they all arrive together, jostling for space in the same conversation.
But something shifts when I talk openly about them with clients, colleagues, or students. People nod. The dialogue deepens. And most of the times they share the same vibes. That’s when we stop trying to “master” AI and begin thinking about how to integrate it. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But thoughtfully. Mindfully. Boldly.
We should remember we’re all new at this. Even the experts. Our grades, degrees, and backgrounds still matter, of course. But the more we cling to traditional identities (“I’ve been a lawyer for 20 years,” “I am a manager, therefore I am the one directing” I’m a specialist, not a tech person”), the harder it gets to reskill and move forward.
This is a beginning.
And like any beginning, it’s better when we walk into it together.
