Episode 10: I Think We’ve Been Thinking About AI Like Interns…When We Should Be Thinking About Kids.

This thought hit me in the most random place.

I was watching a dad at the airport trying to teach his son how to use the moving walkway.

The little boy couldn’t have been more than four years old.

At first, he was terrified of stepping on it. Then, after watching his dad do it a couple of times, he jumped on, smiled, and spent the next few minutes explaining to everyone around him that he was “an expert.”

Kids are funny that way.

They don’t just listen to what we tell them.

They watch what we do.

Sometimes they even pick up the habits we wish they hadn’t.

It made me think about AI.

We’ve been talking for months about training models, prompting better, and deploying agents.

But that’s not really how organizations teach AI.

They teach it by existing.

Every meeting.

Every customer call.

Every pricing decision.

Every workaround.

Every shortcut.

Every disagreement.

Every time someone says, “Yeah…that’s just how we do it here.”

AI is paying attention.

It doesn’t know whether a process is brilliant or broken.

It doesn’t know whether an approval chain exists because it’s necessary or because nobody’s had time to fix it since 2017.

It just learns.

That’s why I think companies are asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking,

“How do we train our AI?”

Maybe they should ask,

“What is our AI learning from us today?”

Those are very different conversations.

One is about technology.

The other is about culture.

And culture has always been one of those things that’s hard to describe but easy to recognize.

Walk into almost any company and you’ll feel it within the first hour.

Some organizations move quickly.

Some don’t.

Some share information freely.

Some protect it.

Some reward curiosity.

Some reward avoiding mistakes.

Now imagine AI sitting quietly in every one of those meetings for the next five years.

Which organization ends up with the smarter AI?

Probably the one that was already becoming a smarter organization.

That’s why I don’t think building a Company Brain starts with choosing the right platform.

It starts with asking whether your company is worth learning from.

Because AI isn’t just inheriting your knowledge.

It’s inheriting your habits.

The good ones.

And the bad ones.