Recently, I was moderating a panel at an AI conference and I asked a question: What is one thing you could do five years ago that you cannot do today? And the immediate lighthearted answer was running a tech conference for ten minutes without mentioning AI. But as the laughter settled, a sharper truth emerged:
What we have really lost over the last few years is our capacity for friction.
By friction I mean the uncomfortable parts of being human. The awkward pauses, the second guesses, the internal conflicts and the difficult conversations. These all add up to enrich and inform the human experience.
We often hear that technology is killing human empathy. But I don’t think so. What we’ve lost is patience for the drama of being human. We are becoming more focused on outcomes and less people-oriented. As we try to keep pace with the rapidly accelerating developments in AI, how do we hold on to that friction and stay human?
The Hidden Cost of AI
The AI revolution and upgrade to technology isn’t happening in a vacuum. Beyond the software lies a massive physical cost: energy, water, and compute power. But perhaps the biggest cost of AI is our decreasing attention span, reduced cognitive function and increasing impatience with that which makes us human.
AI gives us clean, instant, polite answers and makes us feel good. Humans, on the other hand, are messy. We bring emotions, hesitation, context, and history to the table. Algorithms have trained our attention spans to expect zero delay. We’ve started treating human interactions like an inefficient process that needs to be streamlined. We aren’t becoming heartless; we’re becoming impatient.
What’s more, as a society, we are struggling to maintain emotional connections in an increasingly digital landscape. Coming from a hospitality and executive coaching background, where emotional connection is everything, I worry that this impatience is spreading like wildfire in all spheres of our lives.
Speed Makes it Harder
In the age of AI it feels like everything is happening at breakneck speed, where learning, unlearning, and keeping track happen simultaneously every single day. This velocity breeds anxiety, amplified by recent news of industry leaders sounding warning bells about the unregulated growth of AI.
As countries struggle to implement rules and standards around AI deployment, the problem isn’t just bureaucratic inefficiency. It’s the challenge of trying to build guardrails for a train that’s already moving at full speed. The technological advances in the past gave us time to think, adapt and realign. During the Industrial Revolution, and subsequently the Internet era, humans found a way to collaborate and reinvent the way we work along with machines.
The real threat isn’t whether machines will replace us. The risk is losing our ethical compass because we fail to upskill, adapt, and set clear boundaries. When every answer is instantaneous, there is no incentive to pause and think. Just because we can do something, should we? Many of us want our governments to regulate the industry and organizations to set boundaries. However, are we drawing clear lines in our personal lives about where and how we will use AI, and where we will not?
Four Circles of Responsibility
In coaching I often talk about the ripple effect our actions and choices can have. I adapted Stephen Covey’s Framework of Circles of Influence to AI and visualized four circles of responsibility.
Self: Micro-habits & Personal Agency (Circle of Control)
WHAT/HOW will I choose to slow down this week?
Start with immediate everyday choices. Setting personal boundaries with technology means stepping away from screens. Engage face-to-face with the humans in your lives. Support physical community spaces and events. Choose an analog activity to stimulate your brain. Staying in the space of curiosity can be challenging and tiring. So practice curiosity and make it a deliberate choice. Ask the difficult questions and look at things from different perspectives. Don’t automatically reach for the answers.
Before we try to govern an algorithm, we must learn to govern our own attention and habits. And we do so by cultivating our curiosity. Bring the art of consciousness to the forefront.
Interpersonal: Experiential & Emotional Integrity (Circle of Influence)
WHERE/HOW do we keep the inefficiency, the intentional pause, the awkward silence?
We live in a strange paradox: we rely heavily on platforms like Amazon and Temu for ultimate online convenience, yet we continue to build and visit bustling shopping malls. Why? Because we inherently crave community and connection. The same applies to our relationships, with individuals and teams.
Empathy, vulnerability, and presence cannot be algorithmic, especially in coaching, hospitality, caregiving, and mentorship. Organizations should make empathy and behavioral training core to their culture, and we do this by making space for real emotional connection.
Systemic: Human-in-the-Loop Governance (Circle of Influence)
WHAT decisions/processes need a human to slow things down?
Human oversight is friction by design. Machines can calculate, but humans must decide. While AI suggests and accelerates, humans must retain ultimate moral responsibility and ethical authority. We must build and implement a clear accountability thermometer: a framework that defines the stakes and predetermines who leads, AI or a human. You decide what counts as high stakes in your field of work. Whatever you place there, human judgment is non-negotiable.
A word of caution: If everything is classified as HIGH stakes, then nothing is. A simple way to check is to determine what happens when things go wrong. What’s the cost? Who pays? And is it reversible?
Planetary: Resource & Environmental Stewardship (Circle of Concern)
WHO decides the cost of AI is worth it?
Every AI model trained and query run consumes precious resources. This circle of concern demands resource transparency and ecological accountability. For most of us this is beyond our control or influence. At times it can feel overwhelming, and pointless. That is why we start with the Self circle. The choices we make in our individual circles of control can have outsized ripple effects.
But it takes immense courage to question technological growth and walk the fine line between standing up for ethics and challenging systemic waste. This is where our human values of curiosity, connection and judgment must be applied with imagination to ensure that technological progress does not come at the expense of the planet.
Nurturing Independent Thought
We are entering the era of self-improving AI systems that learn, relearn, and optimize their outputs faster than any human organization can adapt. As technology learns to improve itself without us, our role isn’t to out-calculate the computer. Our job is to deepen the human qualities an algorithm can never replicate.
A system that improves itself will not wait for us to catch up. The group most affected by this will be the younger people who are starting their careers, or are still in school. This brings me to the next question:
What kind of a world are we creating for our next generation?
My hope is a world with responsible AI, but also a world where we can give them the understanding and the ability to think independently. We are raising young professionals and children in a world where an AI agent can write their essays, structure their thoughts, and answer every query before they can experience the discomfort of not knowing. If we hand them a world where machines do all the thinking, we risk raising a generation that relies on external algorithms for their internal identity.
How can we teach them to stay independent? Can we show them that it’s important to sit with a tough problem? How can we make them handle difficult conversations with compassion and sensitivity? How do we demonstrate that making a hard ethical call isn’t friction that needs to be automated? It is the very essence of living.
As parents we fear that AI is taking away the ability to think critically from our kids. Perhaps it is. However, it cannot take away our willingness to encourage their creativity and curiosity. It cannot prevent us from showing them the difference between AI-generated and human-origin achievements. It should not stop us from urging our kids to resist quick & easy solutions, build on their work ethic, and to stay human.
AI will keep getting faster, smarter, and self-improving by the day. Algorithms don’t have courage. They don’t feel vulnerable. And they will never carry moral responsibility. Humans will.
Building Guardrails Together
AI can analyze data, optimize processes, and even generate coaching scripts. But it cannot truly understand the weight of the human experience. The level of control we hand over to technology is ultimately up to us.
Start with the circle closest to you. Think about rules, ethics, and habits you would adopt that ensure that technology serves humanity, and not the other way around. A conversation you won’t hand to a tool. A decision a person must own. A meeting where the screens stay closed.
Then tell us two things. First, the friction you chose to keep for yourself. Second, one decision or process in your team or organization where a human has to stay in the loop. Let us know in the comments or by message. With permission, I will publish the strongest ones in a follow-up so we can build these guardrails together.
Hi, I’m Anjani. I am a Leadership & Executive coach and the Founder of The Bento Coach. I believe that coaching works, and I am on a mission to make coaching accessible to everyone. If you would like to explore workshops and coaching sessions on Authority, Culture, Diversity, Leadership and more, connect with me on LinkedIn.