Speaker Gayemarie Brown and Current Club President
Show me the WAI: AI as a tool for abundance
Largely because of my work over the last six or seven years, AI is the topic I get asked about more than any other — at the office and at our luncheons — and the questions are almost always some version of "should I be worried?" I've spent my career helping organizations answer that honestly, and several of you, along with friends across Rotary, have asked me to bring that answer to our club. So here it is.
Last week, a researcher resigned from a leading AI lab warning that the industry is "gambling with our lives." Ninety million people read it in a day. Congress scrambled. And somewhere between the headlines and the hype, the real story got lost.
Here's the question this talk answers: if AI is so dangerous, why are the people closest to it the least afraid — and what do they see that the rest of us don't?
Why Me? My day gig, as the founder of Wintam Place Advisory, Consulting & Coaching, I guide corporate ventures, newco's, and 0-to-1 launches through AI and growth strategy. As an early adopter my work led Forbes to name me one of its Top 50 Female Futurists. I speak regularly on demystifying AI for business and civic audiences, and I promised many of you a version of this talk for our club.
In thirty minutes, we'll separate the fear from the facts: why the "Terminator" story keeps getting told and who profits from telling it, how the cost of intelligence collapsed a thousand-fold in three years, and what that means for organizations that run on mission and volunteers from food programs reaching more families, crisis lines answering more calls, caseworkers getting more people the help they've already earned. Real organizations, doing more, not less.
And I'll close with something that I am passionate about as a member of the International AI working group for Rotary: Rotary International writing a playbook for our members. The Four-Way Test, it turns out, was AI ethics all along.