AI was everywhere, but I wasn't focused on product launches. I was looking at how companies think about data itself: how it's shared, governed and ultimately turned into decisions. And across conversations with executives and sessions on security and compliance, a pattern emerged: the technical limitations that once justified locking data down have largely been solved. What remains difficult is human. Alignment, trust and confidence inside organizations are now the true barriers.
Balancing gut feelings with hard data isn't a soft skill. It's a strategic advantage. In an era where AI, automation, and ubiquitous dashboards flood us with metrics, it's tempting to believe that better spreadsheets alone will yield better decisions. But our most consequential choices rarely emerge from a cell in column D. They arise from an ongoing negotiation between intuition and rational analysis.
I am a worrier, and have been for most of my life. At some point, someone dear and smart teased me that I worry about the wrong things. The things that hit me, she noted, were never the things I worried about. For a while that left me feeling like an incompetent worrier-until my research caught up. I realized that the things I worry about often don't end up hurting me precisely because worrying helps me diffuse them ahead of time.
