AI lacks a body. It has no skin in the game. Like you, I spend every day talking about and talking with AI, so I needed to remind myself of that.

I recently attended a somatic workshop and immediately found myself feeling deeply, professionally uncomfortable. As a coach for tech leaders, I live from the neck up. We talk ideas, concepts, and frameworks.

Guided by the fabulous facilitator Mike Sagun, my goal during the workshop was to connect with others without sharing "content." In other words, to communicate through emotion rather than information. Something AI simply cannot do.

It led to an affirmation: When a message aligns with the body, people don't just understand the speaker's thoughts. They feel their truth.

To lead in the age of AI, we'll use these tools to help us manage complex systems. The silver lining is that it frees up space to integrate our beliefs and actions into our bodies, so that the people around us don't just hear us. They understand us.

Here is how you can use the most disembodied technology to become more present:

The more you outsource memory (data, logistics, history) to AI, the more capacity you have to inhabit your body. Use AI to synthesize key context before a meeting so you aren't burning energy trying to remember while someone is talking to you. During the session, let AI handle the transcription. This frees you to do three things: be present, read the room, and notice what you're feeling.

If you aren't yet comfortable sharing raw or messy feelings with other humans, you can explore them through AI first. There's a strange irony here: a disembodied intelligence helping you better understand your embodied experience. Describing a frustrating situation to an AI lets you triangulate your reactions and find your ground before you find your words.

Iterating with AI is a high-speed way to generate language at volume, but the output isn't the point. Resonance is. Sift through the suggestions until you find the phrasing that produces a physical click of alignment. You aren't looking for the perfect script. You're looking for the words that, when you say them out loud, feel true to who you are.

AI can sound exactly like you. But it can't be you. Michael Pollan in this video offers a fascinating look at the biological mystery of consciousness. Pollan explores reinforces the idea that our physical bodies are the ultimate differentiators in an automated world.

The danger of the AI age isn't that computers will become too human. It's that humans will become too much like computers, treating life as a series of optimized outputs while our bodies and hearts go quiet.

Rethink your relationship to AI. You might find your relationship to yourself deepens. You have something AI can never have: a lived human experience, used to communicate a message that makes others feel what you feel.