The Masters’ Tools

Last week I was a panelist at Research for Work in the Age of AI, a conference hosted by ESSEC Business School in Paris. The audience was almost exclusively European business school professors. My co-panelists represented large global consulting firms and European private equity.

We were each asked to explain how we are using AI.

I went first.

I explained to the room that in the 1930s, President Roosevelt led the country in enacting the New Deal in response to the suffering of the Great Depression. The New Deal was designed to protect the common worker, but domestic and agricultural workers were deliberately excluded from its protections. Lawmakers from formerly slaveholding states ensured that the occupations most held by women and people of color were carved out of minimum wage guarantees, overtime protections, unemployment insurance, and old-age benefits.

This systemic inequity persists in caregiving. Care work is treated as essential but not recognized as real economic labor. This leaves the people doing the work vulnerable to low wages, unstable jobs, and few protections. One quarter of Americans work in low-wage service jobs today, scrambling to cover rent and basic expenses. Home care workers often work well over 60 hours a week for a single company without overtime pay. Many are immigrants, navigating a new country, culture, and language, providing intimate and critical care for the most vulnerable among us, made invisible by the society they serve.

I explained that we are designing AI tools to support these workers as they step into their power, with ever increasing levels of professional agency. We are starting with collaborative scheduling and have plans for many more things.

Then the intelligent, attractive, successful professionals in the blue suits next to me spoke; agentic AI, efficiency acceleration, dramatic productivity gains, putting money in the bank, safeguards, controls.

The final question to the panel was what concerns we had about AI going forward in our work.

Big Business went first, concerns about new hires using AI to get answers without developing judgment, accepting outputs without questioning them, not being curious, not being innovative.

I had no concerns or fears. Not for our work. We know what we are doing and why. There is no right answer in caregiving; there is presence, readiness, and love. AI helps us explain and advocate for that work. I see only blue skies.

Then it was time for audience questions. The entire room turned toward the suits. Not one question directed my way.

As I rode the Paris Metro to our group dinner, I pondered my favorite words from Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” What had I been doing in the house where it appeared this new tool was being shaped to concentrate more wealth with greater speed into fewer hands?

Then dinner. Together in a warm, crowded room, course after course, professor after professor found me. They had endless questions, compliments, and that particular energy of people activated by an idea. They wanted to know exactly where each support fit into caregiver workflow, what interactions were eased and improved, how the tool increased connection and support among peers who never met in person but shared work. They were still asking when our dessert plates were cleared. Several had read previous installments of this column on their own metro rides to dinner.

Our organization is shaping this new tool to build a new house. I rode the metro wondering what I’d been doing in the master’s house. I left dinner knowing.

This column ran in the Santa Fe New Mexican on July 7, 2026, under Business Different.