Last week at Ideas Fest (festival for entrepreneurs, also known at the Glastonbury of business!) our Mission Director Anwen Cooper spoke alongside Natalia Komis (CEO & Co-founder of award-winning AI coachiing platform Aidx) about how AI can support us to build more meaningful human connection.
The conversation explored:
✨ How we can use AI to deepen our self-awareness and reflection
✨ Using AI to add value for leaders and teams
✨ The real risks we must guard against
✨ Why empathy, embodiment, and ethics must lead the way
Women Leading the Conversation
To kick off, Anwen noted how the festival programme featured a number of speakers on the hot topic of AI in business, yet she and Natalia seemed to be the only women sharing their expertise on the subject to lead the conversation.
As mothers in business, she observed, they were also bringing this unique perspective to the work that they do. Natalia’s baby boy was even in the audience (and made a brief stage appearance at the end), grounding the conversation in the lived reality of combining business with caregiving and bringing the human side of what we do into sharper focus.
The “Godfather of AI” on Motherhood
Anwen then quoted from that weekend's Financial Times’ Lunch with the FT column, featuring the Nobel-prize-winning academic Geoffrey Hinton - known as the 'Godfather of AI' thanks to his pioneering work with neural networks.
He suggested:
“The only hope for humanity is engineering AI to become mothers to us. The mother is very concerned about preserving the life of the baby and its development. That’s the kind of relationship we should be aiming for.”
This emphasis on care and concern for human life is central to our work at Thrivall. For us, technology is not the purpose of our business - it’s simply a tool, to enable us to deliver on our mission to get everyone thriving at work and beyond and to add more value to our Client Partners and their people.
Where AI Can Add Real Value for You and Your People
At Thrivall, we’re excited about how AI can do this in many different ways, including:
Humans First: What Machines Can’t Replicate
Natalia and I discussed the fact that affective empathy is part of what is core to what makes us truly human. Our ability to layer lived experience, emotional intelligence, and embodied wisdom cannot be replicated by machines whose more cognitive “intelligence” is limited to the data they’re trained on. Meanwhile, we are wired for connection to our fellow humans for the ongoing survival and flourishing of our species.
Of course, our physical needs are also part of what also makes us different from robots - we need to eat well, rest, move️, hydrate, and breathe to thrive. AI can support us in developing our awareness to look after ourselves but it cannot replace the rich, complex intelligence of being in a human body.
The Risks We Must Acknowledge
We also discussed the dangers:
And we emphasised that this is why ethical frameworks, safeguarding, and escalation to human professionals are absolutely essential.
AI as a Force for Good
Despite the risks, we are optimistic. If harnessed responsibly, AI has huge potential to:
At Thrivall, this vision underpins our pioneering, blended, people-first, AI-enabled approach.
If you’d like to explore how AI together with real human support can develop and sustain you and your people to become better leaders, build high-performing teams, and grow a thriving business - we’d love to talk.
Email hello@thrivall.co.uk to find out more about our pioneering new approach for forward-thinking organisation
