Three Kawartha Lakes leaders join forces to ask what AI is really changing. The Path is a public platform arguing that measuring AI by efficiency alone misses what it actually does to work, knowledge and trust.

Tod Ward (Colour And Code), Jason Sandison (Aislen) and Tonya Kraan (SHCG) have joined forces to launch The Path, a public platform for working out what responsible progress with AI should mean for organizations, and for publishing what they learn so other leaders can use it. The three founders, all leading their own businesses, started with a narrow question: how should a single organization decide to use AI. The further they followed it, the wider it reached.

“We sat down to answer one question and it kept getting bigger,” said Tod Ward, president of Colour and Code.

“We wanted to understand how an organization should use AI, not which tools to buy. What we found is that it does not stop at the organization. It reaches the people in it, what they are trusted to decide, and the communities around them.” The Path argues that the current conversation starts in the wrong place. AI is being measured almost entirely in time and money saved, which the founders say is the smallest part of what it changes, and that everything else it changes, such as what work is worth, what an organization remembers, and what the public is willing to accept, arrives unexamined.

“Faster and cheaper is not the same as better,” said Jason Sandison. “The knowledge nobody ever wrote down is often the part most worth protecting, and it is exactly the part an efficiency calculation does not see.”

Rather than publishing a position and calling it settled, the three are building it in public, and are inviting leaders to shape it. “Broad input is only useful once it becomes priorities someone owns,” said Tonya Kraan, whose background is in community consultation and project management for rural communities, municipalities and non-profits. “That is the work: get real experience into the room, then turn it into something a leader can actually act on.”

Four Lenses

The Path frames the change through four connected lenses, each asking what progress should mean from a different position:

  1. Business Future
  2. People and Relationships
  3. Technology and Organizational Intelligence
  4. Responsibility and Public Trust

Each lens carries four questions leaders have to answer for themselves, published in full at thepathwechoose.ai

Three Ways To Take Part

Leaders in business, non-profits and government are invited to contribute in any, or all of the three ways:

1. Share an AI story, whether a tension they are carrying, a response to one of the lenses, or a case note from their own implementation.

2. Take an anonymous leadership survey, with the findings published and returned to everyone who takes part.

3. Join a roundtable, a small in-person group working through one question at a time.

Contributions are not published with names attached unless the contributor agrees. What The Path publishes is synthesized: the patterns, the language and the tensions leaders are working through.