Erik Foley

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Erik Foley

One AI Sees Your Problem. The Other Sees You.

One AI Sees Your Problem. The Other Sees You.

I want to tell you about an experiment I didn’t plan to run. But now I will never see AI the same again. It started with a provocation: asking AI to imagine what AI would look like if it had been built by a team of women and trained

Data and Sources for "One AI Sees Your Problem. The Other Sees You"

Data and Sources for "One AI Sees Your Problem. The Other Sees You"

Male AI vs. Female AI — Eight Prompts, Two Responses Each The following are the complete, unedited responses generated during the experiment described in my essay "One AI Solves Your Problem. The Other Sees You." Each prompt was given to two AI orientations — one built on the defaults of

The Unedited Workplace: A Call for Human Intervention in AI "Productivity"

The Unedited Workplace: A Call for Human Intervention in AI "Productivity"

I want to tell you something I’ve been watching happen in slow motion, and I think you’ve been watching it too. Artificial intelligence produces volume without friction: this is its greatest strength and the fatal flaw for humans wired to seek efficiency. It is fast, tireless, eager — always

The 7 Stages of the Client Journey

The 7 Stages of the Client Journey

In consulting, we often treat "the sale" as an event—a binary switch that flips from No to Yes. But if you’ve been in the trenches of sustainability consulting or high-stakes corporate advisory for long, you know that’s a delusion. When I asked my wife to

Dumber by the Hour: How Back-to-Back Meetings are Killing Your Company (and what to do about it)

Dumber by the Hour: How Back-to-Back Meetings are Killing Your Company (and what to do about it)

Like you, I recently survived a Tuesday that was less a workday and more a high-stakes clinical test of cognitive overload. What are we doing to ourselves? My calendar was a solid, unyielding block of 10 meetings. Time management? You would think I'd never heard of it. David

Adaptive Sustainability

Adaptive Sustainability

It's been thirty years since I first stepped into the ring as a student activist in the Pacific Northwest. Back then, it was the Endangered Species Act-protected spotted owl versus the logging industry that fed my family. Now, in 2026, I see a familiar tremor in the hands

AI as Catalyst not Crutch: Three Principles to Live By

AI as Catalyst not Crutch: Three Principles to Live By

Artificial Intelligence (AI) challenges us to consider that some things are worth thinking about, while others are not. I want to suggest that if we choose to use AI to replace the necessary effort of human learning, it will make us dumber and co-dependent. And if we allow it to