The Third Path: AI for Trusted Communities
Moving beyond work tools and personalized chatbots to unlock collective wisdom
AI is being pushed and pulled into our lives through two primary pathways right now.
The first is into work—through enterprise and business, bringing tools for productivity, automation, and scale to workers in every industry. The waters are choppy here. It’s exciting and threatening at once, full of questions about jobs, value, and what gets optimized versus what gets left behind.
The second is into life—into our personal, individual spaces. Recent research shows people are using generative AI almost equally for work and personal needs. In the last year, emotional processing, creative exploration, learning, even companionship have risen to be some of the top use-cases for AI (all of which are new ways of using AI from even one year ago).
Many of us are experimenting in small ways with this powerful technology on our own. But those experiments tend to stay isolated—individual conversations with AI, disconnected from the people around us.
We believe there’s a third pathway: into community—the trusted networks where we actually do our most meaningful thinking, learning, and creating together, and where we find connection, values, and culture.
Here’s why this matters: Technology has promised to connect us more, but in practice has often isolated us further. AI could amplify that isolation—or it could unlock something different: collective wisdom, collective action, collective imagination.
But only if we design it that way. Only if we build AI WITH communities, rather than FOR them.
We started talking about this vision with our local community of AI aficionados over a year ago—the Rocky Mountain AI Interest Group (RMAIIG). And one of the sub-groups leaned in: Women in AI.
With a shared conviction that this was important, we’ve been partners since—learning with them, understanding their values, co-creating practices and platforms together.
Our partnership opened the door to the Grace Hopper Celebration 2025, where we’re soft-launching Manifest AI as an invitation:
What becomes possible when communities choose to shape the future of AI on their own terms?
What can we create when we move from human-centered design (focused on individuals) to community-centered design (humans in social context)?
Your most potent capabilities don’t just sit within you—they emerge in connection with others. The true potential of AI will be unlocked by communities patient enough to ask: What serves our collective flourishing? What helps us do our most meaningful work together?
If you’re at GHC, come find us in the AI Studio. If you’re reading this remotely, welcome. You’re already part of the community we’re building with.
Ready to explore this with us?
Check out some of our initial posts:
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