There is a photograph you might have seen. Or rather, two photographs of the same place, eight years apart.
In 2005, a crowd gathered at St. Peter's Square in Rome. People stand close together, facing forward. A few hold early mobile phones loosely at their sides. In 2013, a different crowd fills the same square. Nearly every person holds a smartphone or a tablet raised above their head, lit up, recording.
Nobody decided this would happen. No company announced it. No government policy created it. Millions of individuals, making millions of small choices: to buy a phone, to take a photo, to hold it up, transformed the texture of a public moment completely. In eight years.
The smartphone did not change productivity first. It changed how people navigate, remember, communicate, relate to moments, relate to each other. It changed private life first, quietly, without permission, and largely without awareness. The organizational world followed, eventually, surprised.
Roy Amara, a technology researcher, put it this way: we tend to overestimate the impact of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. The short run of the smartphone was apps and maps and cameras; visible, debatable, quickly absorbed. The long run was a crowd at St. Peter's Square, every person holding a screen above their head, and nobody quite deciding to make it so.
I think we are in the underestimation phase of AI. Not the part where people wonder if it will be useful — that conversation is largely over. The part where we have not yet seen what it will do to the texture of everyday life. To how we trust. To how we communicate. To who we think we need.
The first wave of AI was about what it could do. The second is about what it does to us.
For the past few weeks, I have been writing about what is happening now. Today I want to look two years ahead. Not at companies or industries, but at the places where the real change is happening: in living rooms, on family walks, in text messages that take longer to write than they used to.
Hans-Peter is the mayor of a small Bavarian town. He has been using AI to process building permit applications for more than a year, and he is proud: his municipality is modern, forward-thinking. The new process saves time on all sides, and the people in city hall have more time for the complicated cases. At a community meeting, a retired schoolteacher asks: And who decides, in the end? Hans-Peter says: We do, of course. He means it. But that evening, alone at his desk, he tries to find the gap between the 'Submit' button and his own signature. He sits with this for longer than he expected.
Michael has been using AI to prepare for every product meeting for more than a year. This is simply how he works now. One Tuesday, the tool is down: a server issue. He sits in the meeting room and realizes he cannot recall what he actually thinks about the roadmap, unmediated, unrefined. He has been very efficiently refining someone else's thinking. His hands are slightly cold. The muscle, it turns out, has begun to atrophy.
Sabine is 56. After her diagnosis, she used to sit in waiting rooms reading her fear in the faces around her. Now she arrives with printed summaries, tracked symptoms, a list of six questions in order of importance. Her specialist calls her his most prepared patient. But that is not the point. The point is that something she had long accepted as fixed, the dependence on people who knew more than she did, has quietly lifted.
Uncle Frank was too ill to attend the family reunion. When Anna, his daughter, goes through the photos afterward, he is in every one of them. Someone had added him in carefully, warmly, with obvious love. He had been so sad to miss it. Anna is glad he is there. She is also not entirely sure what she is looking at. She doesn't bring it up.
And then there is Markus. He did not notice it happening. We will stay with him.
What these scenes have in common is not AI. It is something harder to name. The sense that the world is shifting in ways that are neither clearly good nor clearly bad. Things are being added: capability, access, a new kind of confidence. Things are disappearing: the automatic trust in a received text, the thinking that happens while you do something yourself, the certainty of what is real. And some things are simply different now, in ways we are still working out.
This is how cultural transformation moves. Not through announcements. Through the accumulation of small decisions about what is acceptable, what feels right, and what has changed so gradually that you cannot say exactly when. The norms governing how we live with AI are being written right now: By Hans-Peter at his desk on a Tuesday evening, by Anna looking at a family photo and not knowing what to say. Not in policy documents. In moments.
Markus is 44. He is good at his job: project management, mid-size consultancy, fifteen years of experience. He did not plan an AI transformation for himself. He was just living his life.
In early 2026, he prepared his normally messy tax returns with AI for the first time, not proudly, just because a friend said it worked and he was late on the deadline. It helped.
A few months later, he animated his children's drawings. He fed their crayon dinosaurs and paper castles into an AI and watched them walk and crumble across the screen. His children were delighted, happy to try it themselves, creating stories full of fantasy and joy for weeks afterward.
Before a difficult call with his mother, she had received difficult news from her doctor, he spent an hour thinking it through with AI. What she might be feeling. What she needed to hear. What he wanted to say. The call went better than most he could remember. Afterward he sat with a slight strangeness. Not guilt. The intimacy had felt mediated, and he wasn't sure yet whether that was a loss or just a difference.
He was, without planning it, writing norms: for his children, for his mother, for the kind of person he was trying to be. In the space between one thing and the next.
One morning, making coffee, he realized that his relationship to the people and institutions around him — his kids, his friends, the state, the expert, his employer — had changed. Not dramatically. Just enough that going back to the old defaults felt, for the first time, like a choice rather than a given.
AI had transformed his life without him noticing.
My point is that the transformation that matters is not happening in boardrooms. It is happening in waiting rooms where someone arrives with questions instead of fear, in family photos where someone who wasn't there somehow is, in phone calls that go better than expected, in the cold hands of a product manager who has forgotten what he thinks.
People are changing, individually, quietly, without a strategy or a mandate. And changed people change the world around them. This is not a generational story. Markus is 44. Sabine is 56. Hans-Peter is 64. The variable is not age. It is whether someone has let a small experiment change how they see something they thought was fixed. They arrive at work having already delegated their private anxieties to an algorithm: Not looking for better tools, but navigating a world where the ground has shifted.
AI transformation is not about efficiency. It is not about adding a chat interface. It is about a new reality assembling itself in the places we consider most human… and the change is not arriving as progress or as catastrophe. It is arriving as texture. As strangeness. As something you notice when the tool is down, or when you look at a photo and don't know what to feel.
This change is not going in one direction. Things are gained, things are lost, and some things are simply different in ways that resist easy evaluation. What are you noticing in your own life, and how are you sitting with it? The certainty of what is real is shifting: war footage, family photos, messages from people we love. What happens to trust? In politics, in relationships, in the small daily acts of taking someone at their word? We are delegating more to AI in our private lives than most organizations currently do at work. Does private life start to feel like work, or does it open something else? And the people arriving at your organization over the next two years have already been living inside this. The question is not whether they have changed. It is what they now expect and whether you are ready to find out.
Let's talk about these changes.
Because those who are addressing them will lead the second wave of AI.