First it lived in a smart speaker at home. Then it moved into a pair of AR glasses and could see what you saw. Later it sat beside you in the car, helping you stay connected without looking away from the road. Most recently, it worked inside Gmail, helping people understand and act on a crowded inbox.

Each generation became more capable. But after ChatGPT and large language models took off, I found myself thinking less about what assistants could do and more about what they would change.

Will AI strengthen human agency, or quietly weaken it? What happens to the way people relate to one another when a model joins more of our conversations and decisions? How will organizations change when work can be delegated to machines? And how will businesses evaluate, buy, and adopt AI when the technology is moving faster than their organizations?

In 2025, I left Google because I wanted to explore those questions by building, not only debating them. I started UserApproved.ai, began experimenting with AI simulations of users, and learned what it means to start a company from zero.

One year into the journey, I do not have clean answers. I have made mistakes, changed my mind, and seen enough to know that building and adopting AI is much messier than the confident predictions make it sound. It feels like the right time to start writing things down.

I expect to focus on three subjects.

The builder journey: what I am learning from leaving a large company, starting from zero, and trying to turn a conviction into a real business.

AI simulation: whether models can help us understand people before we build for them, what simulated users can and cannot tell us, and how we know when to trust the answer.

Human agency: how AI changes our attention, judgment, relationships, and organizations, and how we can build technology that gives people more control rather than less.

This will not be a weekly summary of AI news. I will write when experience has taught me something worth sharing, or when a question feels useful enough to explore together.

My earlier writing and product work live at https://www.reynoldwu.com.

If these questions are also on your mind, stay with me. Reply, disagree, and share what you are seeing. I am looking forward to learning together.

Reynold

Happy Builder