I wanted to write this as the first part of a longer piece about my experience with AI.
Part of that story comes from working in a large government organisation in New Zealand for a number of years. Part of it comes from being an early adopter of AI, not because I thought it was a gimmick, but because I could see real value in it very early on.
But before I can properly talk about AI, I probably need to explain why it mattered so much to me.
Because for me, AI was not just a tool.
It helped me tell my story in a way that had not really been available to me before. It helped me take the thoughts in my head, which were often clear to me but hard to structure on a page, and turn them into something other people could actually read.
That matters because I have dyslexia.
I was diagnosed very late in life. I am 48 now, and I was only diagnosed about four years ago. By then, I had already spent most of my life carrying a certain belief about myself.
I left school very, very early. I never followed the traditional education pathway. I did not go to university. I did not collect degrees or letters after my name.
And because of that, there was always a part of me that felt stupid.
Not all of me. Not all the time. But enough of me that it shaped my life.
It shaped the jobs I went for. It shaped the jobs I did not go for. It shaped the rooms I thought I belonged in. It shaped the way I judged my own opinions before anyone else even had a chance to judge them.
When I talk about "educated" people, I mean formally educated people. University-trained people. People with bachelor's degrees, master's degrees, PhDs, backgrounds in science, arts, political science, psychology, engineering, and all the other areas that society tends to recognise as proof of intelligence.
For a long time, I measured myself against that.
And because I did not have those qualifications, I often assumed I was less than them.
The strange thing is that throughout my life I kept ending up in conversations with people who were very educated in that formal sense. And not only could I keep up with them, I could often contribute something useful.
Sometimes I could see something they had missed.
Sometimes I could spot a gap, a pattern, or an inconsistency.
Sometimes I could challenge an idea in a way that made the discussion better.
But even when that happened, part of me still doubted myself.
Because society had already taught me what intelligence was supposed to look like, and I did not look like that.
How I first realised I might have dyslexia
The way I found out I might have dyslexia was interesting.
There was a person in my life at the time who had a PhD in psychology. She was not clinically trained, but she had a real passion for organisational, structural, and community-based psychology. She was very analytical and very good at noticing patterns in people.
One day, after we had known each other for only a few months, maybe five months, she turned to me and said:
"Have you ever been tested for dyslexia?"
It surprised me, because it was not really about something I had written and shown her.
She said it was the way I spoke.
She noticed that I could be talking rationally, intellectually, and with purpose, but then I would suddenly lose words. I would know what I wanted to say, but the word would not come. Or it would come out wrong. Or I would have to search around for it.
I have not gone away and researched that in any great depth, and to be honest, I am not sure it matters for the purpose of this piece. What mattered was that it made sense to me straight away.
Because when I looked back, it explained a lot.
When I was about 15, speech was difficult for me. If I became nervous, which was a significant amount of the time, I would fumble my words. Sometimes even now, people say I mutter. Back then, it was worse.
I would spend a lot of time practising what I was going to say in my head before I said it. I would try to take the jumble of words and organise them before they came out of my mouth. I would try to anticipate what someone might say back to me, so I could be ready.
I did not want to be embarrassed. I did not want to stumble. I did not want to stutter over my words and feel exposed.
It was especially bad if I was talking to someone who made me anxious.
I remember one person in particular who made that feeling intense. No matter how hard I tried, I could never get my words out cleanly around them. It made me feel less than. It made me feel stupid.
Everyone else seemed to be able to just talk.
For me, it felt like the words were in my brain, but I could not slow my brain down enough to get them out properly. I could not always slow my speech down enough to organise the words into coherent sentences.
That is probably a story for another day.
But the strange thing is that over time, speech and verbal communication became one of my strengths.
I did not know it at the time, but every day I was practising. Internally, constantly, I was practising how to speak. I was anticipating other people's speech. I was thinking about how they might respond. I was learning how to change the way I communicated depending on who I was speaking to.
I learnt to change my tone, pitch, diction, intensity, and sentence structure. I learnt how to communicate with different people at different levels. I learnt how to make complex ideas land with people who might otherwise not understand them.
That became a skill.
But under stress, those earlier patterns still come back. That old feeling of not being good enough, not being smart enough, can still rear its head. And if I am not careful, my speech can go backwards very quickly.
The old wiring is still there.
The first time I started to question the old belief
As I went through life, my jobs and the people I came across slowly started to change the way I saw my own abilities.
One of the first times I seriously questioned my internal belief about not being smart enough was when I worked as a project manager.
That job gave me my first real exposure to people who were institutionally qualified as experts. I had to deal with engineers across a range of areas, including electrical, mechanical, hydraulic, fire, and other technical fields.
A big part of my job was to look at engineering reports and convert them into project plans, or use them to help build project plans.
And I started noticing something.
More and more often, I could spot errors. I could see inconsistencies. I could ask questions about things that did not seem right.
I am not claiming I was an engineer. I was not. I am not claiming I was an expert in those fields. I was not.
But for some reason, I could have factual, logical, intelligent conversations with qualified engineers. That did not happen overnight, but it did happen.
Two things came out of that.
The first was that I started to wonder whether I had more ability than I had given myself credit for.
The second was that I started to see how some qualified people react when they are challenged.
Only a couple of people said it directly, but the attitude was clear enough:
"You are not an engineer. What would you know?"
That response was not always about the strength of the argument. It was not always about the facts. It was not always about whether I was right or wrong.
Sometimes it felt like a default position.
You do not have the qualification, therefore your opinion has less value.
That was the first time I really noticed it.
And it was the first time I started to think that maybe intelligence and qualification were not the same thing.
Sitting in rooms full of doctors
That belief developed further in my early 40s, around the same time the person in my life suggested I might have dyslexia.
I had just started a new role. I was in a smaller team of about four or five people, and a wider team of about 10 to 15.
What stood out very quickly was that almost everyone seemed to have the title "Doctor" in front of their name.
There were PhDs. There were degrees. There were people with serious academic backgrounds.
And then there was me.
No degree. No formal academic pathway. No title.
Just me.
At first, that old feeling was there again. That belief that I did not quite belong. That I had somehow entered a room I had not been officially approved to enter.
But over time, something changed.
I started noticing significant things about institutional learning, intelligence, thought processes, bias, beliefs, and how government departments actually work at a strategic and intellectual level.
I found that I could participate in conversations with these people. Not just by sitting there and listening, but by adding to the discussion. Sometimes I was participating at an equal level. Sometimes I was pushing the thinking further.
And again, I noticed the same pattern I had seen earlier with some engineers.
Some people seemed to define expertise by qualification, not output.
Expertise by qualification, not the quality of the thinking.
Expertise by qualification, not the strength of the argument.
That does not describe everyone. I want to be very clear about that.
I have met highly qualified people who were brilliant to deal with. People with an amazing ability to listen. People who could open themselves to new ideas. People who could sit with grey areas. People who could have their thinking challenged without treating it as a personal attack.
Those people had a major impact on me.
Those conversations were valuable because they helped me grow. They helped me see that intelligence is not just about what you know. It is also about how willing you are to keep thinking.
Some of the best people I have worked with were the ones who could change their mind when the facts changed. They could test an argument. They could challenge their own assumptions. They could sit in uncertainty for a while without needing to shut the conversation down.
Those interactions helped me understand that I had something to contribute.
Not because I had a title.
Not because I had a degree.
But because I could think.
Where AI comes into it
This is where AI enters the story.
For me, AI was never just a tool for cheating. It was never just a shortcut. It was never about replacing intelligence.
It was something very different.
AI unlocked something in my brain that had always been there, but had never had a clear pathway out.
For someone like me, with dyslexia, with a lifetime of tangled words, self-doubt, and internal translation, AI did not make me less intelligent.
It helped me express the intelligence I already had.
It helped me get ideas out of my head and into a structure other people could understand. It helped me organise thoughts that were already there. It helped me communicate at the level I had often been thinking at, but could not always write at.
That is why I saw the value in it early.
And that is also why I struggled when I saw people dismiss it as lazy, dangerous, cheating, or just a toy.
Because for me, it was like switching a light on.
It gave me access to a version of myself that had been there all along, but had been blocked by language, structure, confidence, and the old belief that I was not smart enough.
This is probably where I will stop for now.
The next part of this story is about how AI developed in my life, how I used it inside a large government organisation, the challenges that came with that, and what I started to notice in the people who resisted it.
Because I do not think AI is just a technology story.
For me, it is also personal.
It sits right in the middle of education, class, confidence, status, disability, and who gets taken seriously in a room.
For me, AI did not replace my thinking.
It helped me finally get my thinking out.