Before we get to the data
I spent my entire adult life
as a corporate employee.
I figured that was the whole story.
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How I actually got here
I took a promotion I only wanted for the title and the money.
Then I learned my loyalty was worth nothing to the company I'd given it to.
I burned out so hard I couldn't go back. I hit a wall.
The day I came back, they told me I had six months. I trained my own replacement. Then I was gone.
What I didn't plan for
I couldn't face going back. So I started a business with no idea how. I'd been an employee my whole life.
I opened AI for the first time just to fake my way through it.
Turns out what gave me energy wasn't strategy. It was joy. Play. Messing around out loud.
And people started asking me: how are you doing that?
Someone finally named what I actually do for people.
"You give people permission
to stop performing."
Permission.
That's the whole job.
AI Confidential

Deb Haas

I help scared people get brave with AI.
Me
AI Confidential
I make people feel safe, sparked, and brave. I get them past the fear and into curiosity.
Brannon Skillern
Carnelian Collective
Built the structure and ran the training. Brilliant at ops. It was her engagement. She brought me in for the part she knew mattered most: getting people brave enough to start.
A company hired us to get their people using AI.
Here's what happened.
debhaas@gmail.com  ·  aiconfidential.net
The setup
Everything was in place.
  • A founder who was a public AI advocate
  • Gemini and Claude deployed across the whole org
  • Permission from the very top
And people still froze.
Not on fear. Not on skill. On one question.
"What would I even
use this for?"
Not fear. Not skill. This question.
Why this matters in this room

You have this problem too.

Not the company we worked with. Yours. Every company you're building runs on people actually using the tools you hand them.

"Can they use it" was never the question.
"Will they" is the only one that matters.

One org. Four weeks.

~150
people we DMed, one at a time
65+
real use cases surfaced in 4 weeks
10
people demoed their own builds to 100+ colleagues
Take away access, tools, and the mandate from the top. What's left is permission.
What it looked like up close

She asked for help with her Slack threads.

Someone in Customer Experience. Her ask was small and specific: turn Slack threads into action items with owners, then nudge those owners to follow up later. Four weeks later she demoed what she'd built herself, in front of 100 people: a site that worked like a full learning platform.

Asked for a to-do list. Built a platform.
What you can't see from the top

The patterns nobody else could find.

One person can't tell that their exact pain shows up in six other departments. We could.

7+ people, completely different departments, all independently wanted the same thing: "the Slack messages I read and forgot to answer." None of them knew the others existed.
A Finance person was manually grinding through a compliance task. A senior engineer wanted to build that exact tool, just for fun. Neither knew the other existed until we put the patterns side by side.
4 people surfaced asks where AI was the wrong answer. Naming what NOT to automate was worth as much as naming what to.
What we actually did

The method.

Take it. No strings.

DM-first, never channel

Channel silence isn't disinterest. It's "I don't know what I'd say." A DM asks one person for one small thing.

"A tiny intern in your laptop"

Permission to think small. Petty tasks count. That one phrase killed the fear of looking dumb.

Pattern library across cohorts

One person can't see their pain shows up in six departments. Looking across everyone, we could. That's where the org-wide builds came from.

Showcase, not training

No lecture at the end. People demoed their own work. It spread sideways, peer to peer. "If she built it, so can I."

Where I fit

The method is the easy part.

Any of you could run that playbook tomorrow. The hard part is being the person people aren't afraid to look dumb in front of. That's the part I'm good at.

So if you're building something that only works when people actually use it, that's the wall I help with.

Permission is cheap. Almost nobody hands it out.
"Can they use it" was never the question. "Will they" is.
Permission is the cheapest thing in the room.
It's also the only thing that gets people to move.
Go give it away.
Deb Haas · AI Confidential · aiconfidential.net
with Brannon Skillern · Carnelian Collective