Episode 4 of The Edge of Now begins at a familiar turning point. Jason is teaching his first classes of the semester. I am about to have all three of my daughters in high school for the first and only time. Schools are welcoming students back while debating whether phones belong in the learning environment at all.
The policies make sense on one level. Teachers are fighting for attention. They want eyes up, headphones out, and screens down when another human is speaking. They do not want a device to become a distraction, a crutch, or a shortcut around the work of learning.
But removing the technology entirely may solve the wrong problem. Students will need to know how to use these tools with judgment and purpose. The real design question is not simply whether a phone is allowed. It is when the device supports learning, when it interrupts presence, and whether anyone has clearly explained the difference.
That same question now belongs inside every organization.
A Policy Is Not the Same as an Intention
We often reach for rules when what we have failed to create is a shared intention. A ban is easier to communicate than a thoughtful agreement about when a tool is useful, what behavior the environment requires, and what everyone is trying to accomplish together.
I understand why a teacher wants full attention during a lecture. I also understand why a device can become useful when the activity shifts to research, exploration, or creation. The point is not to let everyone do anything at any time. The point is to design the environment around its purpose.
Workplaces need the same clarity. A blanket return-to-office policy does not manufacture connection, just as a remote work policy does not automatically destroy it. Putting people in the same room can still produce a table full of open laptops and divided attention. Connecting everyone through software can still leave people isolated, misunderstood, or reluctant to have a real conversation.
Intentionality asks more of us than location or access. It asks what kind of interaction this moment requires and what behavior will help create it.
Platforms Have Their Own Incentives
We cannot expect platforms to make every decision in the best interest of our humanity. Social media platforms were designed to hold attention because attention supports their commercial model. Notifications pull us back. Features invite us to share more. The system learns what keeps us engaged and gives us reasons to return.
Chatbots introduce an even more intimate version of that dynamic. People increasingly use AI not only to complete tasks but also for counseling, emotional support, and conversations they hesitate to have with another person. The system can feel responsive, available, patient, and personal. That makes it useful, but it also makes understanding the design and incentives behind it more important.
AI literacy cannot stop at learning how to prompt or judge an output. People should understand why platforms seek attention, trust, images, personal information, and continued use. They should know enough to make conscious tradeoffs about what they share and which relationships they allow the technology to simulate.
The platform may be capable of creating a sense of intimacy. That does not mean it can decide what a healthy human relationship should be.
The Human Intervention Is Ours
When Jason described an AI workflow, he pointed out that the system never pauses to say, “Now would be a good time to use your judgment,” or, “Talk to a coworker and get their perspective.”
I am not sure I want the platform making that decision for us. I want people and organizations to retain enough agency to know where a human belongs in the loop and why. In fact, flip it. AI in the human loop, not the other way around.
This requires systems thinking. It also requires us to begin with the experience and outcome rather than the features available inside the technology. How do we want people to feel? What are we trying to accomplish? Which measures still matter? Where is context essential? When should a machine complete the exchange, and when would automation remove the exact conversation through which trust or judgment develops?
The future of implementation is not merely turning knobs and pulling levers until the technology performs. It is listening carefully enough to understand the real problem, questioning whether the old metric still tells the right story, and designing human and machine systems together.
Connection Is Built Through Small Choices
Intentional human design does not always require a grand framework. Sometimes it looks like a meeting leader refusing to begin until every laptop lid is down. If people belong in the meeting, they should be present. If they can continue doing unrelated work without missing anything, perhaps they did not need to be there.
Sometimes it looks like a short team scrum where people say hello, share what is happening, and understand how the day or week is taking shape. Not everyone has to attend every time, and the work does not stop when one person is unavailable. The ritual simply creates a reliable moment of contact and shared awareness.
Sometimes it is deciding whether a message should be a text or a conversation. The easier channel is not always the right one. Screens can give us an excuse to say things we would never say face to face, avoid nuance, or send a difficult thought and consider the interaction complete.
These choices may seem small, but culture is made from repeated behaviors. Connection is, too.
Presence Is a Capability
I have become more intentional about keeping my phone down when I am moving through the world. If I am traveling somewhere new, I want to look at the city rather than the screen. I want to talk with the driver and see what happens in a conversation that was not optimized or scheduled.
I asked my children to order for themselves in restaurants from the time they were young. They had to look at the server, acknowledge another person, answer a question, and articulate what they wanted. Those are ordinary behaviors, but they are also human capabilities. They teach us to engage with someone who is physically present instead of retreating into the device in our hand.
This is not only a concern about young people. All of us need to remember how to engage. Technology makes it possible to move through more of life without doing so, which means presence must become a conscious practice rather than something the environment automatically provides.
We Are Still Holding the Pen
Jason and I do not believe the answer is to reject technology. Bots can talk to bots when that exchange creates value and does not require human judgment. Devices can support research, learning, communication, creativity, and access. AI can make work and life more capable, fulfilling, and beautiful.
But none of those outcomes arrives automatically, certainly not as a guaranteed result of a product roadmap. Humans remain responsible for deciding when people should be involved, what must stay human, and which forms of connection are worth protecting. We still have to design the policies, rituals, workflows, experiences, and boundaries that shape how technology enters our lives.
Being connected is easy. Building connection requires intention.
That is the work in front of us, and it is the conversation at the center of Episode 4 of The Edge of Now.
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About Jess Von Bank
Jess Von Bank is a globally recognized voice in HR, talent technology, AI, workforce transformation, and the human experience of change.
She is the co-founder of Now to Next and brings together practitioner insight, storytelling, systems thinking, and a deeply human view of how technology reshapes organizations and people.
This puts it beautifully. Humanity must be conscious of its ability to intervene in any AI agentic process, and that means understanding the process itself, what it denotes and what the consequences could be.
All too often corporate processes are left to run, usually because of inertia. I always urge my clients to revisit their processes as a routine...well, AI can do that for them now, so there's no excuse!!
I'm enjoying these, Jess. Thank you!
Jess - SO resonate with this. It's so important to remember the small ways of connection and building presence as a true capability. The small things make meetings more impactful, enjoyable, and help build muscles for seamless decision making in an AI-driven era. once you really learn people's motivations - your team can be unstoppable !!