DEAI Featured in Forbes

About a month ago, my co-author and dear friend Jayson Counsel and I put a thought into the world. Maybe it was a provocation. Maybe it was an opening argument. Maybe it was simply our way of trying to enter a conversation that felt both incomplete and intentionally exclusionary.

We all know that he conversation around AI is moving fast. Every day brings another claim about what these tools can do, what they might replace, what they might make possible, and what they might destroy. There is a necessary and ongoing debate about whether we should be engaging with AI at all, and I understand the skepticism. I share a good deal of it.

But Jayson and I were also sitting with another question: As AI embeds itself more deeply into our institutions, our workplaces, our schools, our creative practices, and our daily lives, what responsibility do those of us who have spent years thinking about power, bias, exclusion, repair, dignity, trust, and institutional design have to this moment?

What do people who have done serious equity work have to offer to the conversation about AI at a time when words like “impact”, “equity” and “inclusion” have fallen out of favor in so many spaces?

Our answer was that DEI has helped cultivate some of the very questions this moment demands. Questions about who is centered. Who is erased. Whose labor is being extracted. Whose knowledge is treated as authoritative. Whose pain is considered acceptable collateral. And what happens when institutions pursue speed, efficiency, and scale without first examining the values embedded in their tools.

That was the spirit of the piece we wrote introducing DEAI. An initial salvo. A beginning. A way of saying: this conversation needs more voices in it.

Now here we are a month later and it is deeply gratifying to see the idea taken up in Forbes by Afdhel Aziz in his thoughtful and expansive piece, “John Henry For The AI Era: Why DEI’s Greatest Legacy May Be Saving Us All.”

I want to express real gratitude to Afdhel, not only for writing about the piece, but for the care he brought to it.

I know what it feels like to get on the phone with a journalist and realize quickly that they have not really done the reading. And sometimes what comes out on the other side feels simplified and reductive.

This was the opposite.

Afdhel listened deeply. He asked serious questions. He brought his own experience and insight to the frame. He did not simply summarize what we wrote. He extended it. He translated it for his audience. He placed it inside a larger cultural and historical story. That is a gift.

So I am grateful to Afdhel for giving the piece a broader audience, and for treating the ideas with the seriousness they deserve.

If you have not had a chance to read the original essay Jayson and I wrote, I hope you will. But I might actually encourage you to begin with Afdhel’s piece. He offers a beautiful and challenging entry point into the question we were trying to raise:

What if DEI’s greatest legacy is not behind us, but directly in front of us? What if the very work so many institutions are retreating from is part of what we most need in order to meet the AI era with wisdom, humility, and care?