Thank You, Friends

It all started in a Starbucks in Riyadh, with voices a little too loud for a coffee shop. We were debating one question: where are the limits of AI? Nobody gave way. Somewhere between the second coffee and the third argument, one of us said: “Enough. Let’s sit down and do this properly.”

Yesterday we did. In a friend’s office on Tahlia, thirteen friends and I gathered around the table: Wael, Elie, Imad, Issam, Nicolas, Spiro, Michel, Sakhr, Doraid, Sleiman, Georges, Georges and Miled. Shorts, flip-flops, and sweets from Tim Hortons. Every trainer knows this is the hardest room there is. When friends are comfortable, the subject has to earn their attention.

It did. I kept the session free of technicalities, only ideas. And then something happened that I had not planned: the questions took over. Around that table, successful people who run real businesses and carry real responsibilities leaned in, challenged, and asked.

One question came back to me in a hundred different forms, from every corner of the table: what happens to my data? I understood then that privacy is not a technical detail for them. It is the fear underneath all the other fears. Fast Company, reporting on an Indeed survey, found that workers now worry about AI more than burnout. I saw it live, in people I respect.

Then I said something that surprised even me. Claude is not the best tool for every person in every situation. Some of them only need NotebookLM. Others are better served by Gemini, because of its link to Google’s search engine. Choosing the right tool means knowing the person first.

And all along, I was learning from them. Every idea I offered met an answer shaped by years in their own industry, the kind of knowledge no manual contains. Zoho’s writing on tacit knowledge puts it well: intuition, judgment and craft are the hardest things for AI to absorb. I know a little about many businesses. They know their own business deeply. That gap is exactly why AI needs people like them.

I have to admit it: I benefited more than anyone in that room, and I am grateful.

Thank you, friends. You reminded me that AI is learned best the way everything important is learned: together, around a table, with good questions.