Why I stopped calling myself an AI expert

For a while, my speaking page said I was an AI expert. Or something close to it. The language was carefully hedged — “navigating AI,” “harnessing the future,” that kind of thing — but the positioning was clear: hire me if you need someone to talk to your team about artificial intelligence.

I was not wrong, exactly. But I wasn’t entirely right either.

Here’s the honest version: I work in a tech-heavy organization. I have been navigating technology change, and the human response to it, for my entire career. I got genuinely excited about AI early, started using it, started talking about it, started incorporating it into my work. I could hold a room’s attention on the subject and leave people feeling less terrified than when they walked in.

What I couldn’t do — what became increasingly clear as the pace of change became genuinely staggering — was keep up with it as an expert. The technology was moving faster than any honest generalist could track. And I am, at my core, a generalist. A communicator. An organizational person. Someone who has spent her career at the intersection of people and change, not at the intersection of people and large language models.

So I stopped calling myself an AI expert. It felt like a loss for about ten minutes. Then it felt like relief.

What I actually am

What I’m good at — what I’ve always been good at, long before AI entered the conversation — is helping people move through fear into function. Helping organizations have the right conversations before the resistance starts. Helping leaders understand that the problem usually isn’t the technology. It’s the timing of the communication around it.

Which, it turns out, is exactly what most organizations need right now.

Because here’s what I keep seeing: companies are rolling out AI tools the same way they’ve always rolled out technology — deciding first, announcing second, and then wondering why adoption is so low and anxiety is so high. They’re treating it as an implementation problem when it’s actually a communication problem. A timing problem.

The question isn’t “how do we explain AI to our team.” The question is “when did we start that conversation, and was it early enough for people to feel like participants rather than recipients?”

That’s shift-left communication. And AI might be its most urgent application right now.

What this means practically

I’m not the person who will explain how a transformer model works or which AI platform your organization should adopt. There are excellent people for that, and you should hire them.

I’m the person who will help your leadership team have the conversation about AI adoption before the rollout meeting. Before the resistance. Before someone in your organization has already decided what this change means for them and dug in.

I help people get less uncomfortable with AI — not by making it seem simpler than it is, but by making the path through it feel more navigable. Less surprising. More human.

That, I can do. And I’ve stopped apologizing for the fact that it’s not the same thing as expertise.

Corrie works with organizations navigating technology change, communication challenges, and the particular friction that happens when good ideas meet unprepared rooms. If your team is heading into an AI rollout and you want to get the communication right, let’s talk.