I think about my students every day. It is summer, and I am in the thick of redeveloping courses, trying to figure out what entrepreneurship actually looks like next year. The entrepreneurial landscape is an amusement park. You never know where the ride goes next. Predicting what works, what fails, or what people will want is nearly impossible.

There is a mystical belief in the “self-made” entrepreneur. The idea is that someone did it all alone. It is a fallacy. It is a lie. Nobody does it on their own. We are all dependent on people we never see, never hear, and never talk to. Entrepreneurs rely on engineers, salespeople, marketers, operations staff, factory workers, contractors, and thousands of invisible connections that converge to make an enterprise function. Even in small ventures, no one builds everything completely solo. But when a business scales to serve millions, that dependency explodes into the thousands.

We ignore this in our current climate. We point to a founder and call them “self-made,” acting as if they need no one. Yet we all need each other so desperately, and we keep forgetting it.

Because of this, I have shifted my entire approach. My classes are no longer about executing a rigid plan. Instead, we focus on the big questions we try to answer as individuals, teams, and a whole class. These answers do not come because one person is individually brilliant. They come because we ask the right questions, stay open to possibilities, listen to each other, and test ideas. We do not assume we know everything. We question. We try. We fail. We learn.

As we face a bumpy, uncertain future defined by AI and technological shifts, this is the most critical lesson. We do not know it all. AI certainly does not know it all. Tech CEOs definitely do not know it all. We need each other. We need to talk, listen, and believe in one another. Only then can we build a future that serves the humans who will live in it. Not the companies. Not the algorithms. And certainly not some imagined future of AI overlords. We build it for the people.

And that brings us to the hard truth. If we let AI think for us, we are not just losing our jobs. We are losing the very capacity to ask the questions that matter.

We hear so many messages these days about “being present.” But what does that actually have to do with who’s driving in your life? Everything, actually. If you’re not present and not driving, then who is?

I used to think that being present was hard work because I had to let go of all the other things going on in my head. Turns out, when I do let go of all that, it’s much less work. Being present isn’t sitting cross-legged and meditating. It’s the act of paying attention so you can notice when you’ve been on autopilot.

And that’s where the question comes in. Are you handing over the wheel to technology? Because this is really about our relationship with technology.

Think about it. When you’re scrolling aimlessly through whatever your social media of choice is, are you present for that? When you let AI write your emails for you, do you read them? When you search something and just accept the Google summary, do you question it? These are little transfers. Each one, you’re transferring your agency.

Now, I’m not anti-technology. I use the crap out of technology. I’m on it constantly. I’ve worked in IT. I’ve been an AI coordinator. I’ve been at the forefront of this stuff. But all of that experience has made me realize something: I have handed over agency to the technology. And we all do it. We look at our feeds, and our feeds are just feeding that back to us, right? We don’t go out and find the content. It shows up. We click on something, and more of that shows up. People forget about this.

So I’m not saying you need a digital detox. I’m not saying we all need to put down our phones, though it’s probably a good idea to put them down sometimes. What I’m saying is that we need to stay present in our relationship with technology.

And what does that really mean? Especially with AI, are you leading the conversations, or are you following them? Because to me, that’s the biggest question we need to ask ourselves as we head into this future. Are you behind the wheel, or are you in the passenger seat letting the machine decide where you’re going?