Last week I watched something I cannot stop thinking about.
Mo Gawdat — former Chief Business Officer of Google X, one of the most credible and candid voices in the global conversation about artificial intelligence — sat down with Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO for a two-hour conversation that every business leader should make time for. You can find it here.
I am not going to summarize the entire interview. What I am going to do is pull out the moments that landed hardest for me — as a CEO, as a technology builder, as a human being considering the impact of AI on our humanity and our future.
Because what Gawdat describes is not an abstract future. It is arriving now. And the choices we make today — as builders, as buyers, and as human beings — are going to shape what it looks like when it gets here.
AI is not the enemy. But its misuse can be.
Gawdat is emphatic on this point: AI is not the enemy. His concern is not the technology. His concern is humans — specifically, humans directing AI to act against other humans.
The biggest risk AI poses comes not from machines turning against us, but from how governments, companies, and individuals deploy increasingly powerful AI systems. A hammer is not dangerous. A hammer in the hands of someone with bad intentions is. The difference between those two scenarios is not the hammer. It is the person holding it. And in the case of AI, the people holding it include some of the most powerful corporations and governments on earth.
This is a distinction worth sitting with, because the public conversation about AI tends to collapse into one of two poles — either breathless optimism about everything AI will solve, or existential fear about machines taking over. Gawdat cuts through both. The technology, left to its own logic, will likely be fine. The question is who directs it, toward what ends, and with what accountability.
For a business in the moving and logistics industry, this is not an abstract geopolitical question. It is a vendor selection question. It is a product evaluation question. It is a question you should be asking every technology provider who brings AI into your operations: whose interests is this system designed to serve? And what has that provider been willing to sacrifice to stay true to the answer?
There are two camps. And the difference is not marketing.
This is the part of the interview I found most clarifying — and most consequential.
Gawdat draws a clear line between AI companies that are genuinely operating with ethical intent and those that are not. The test he applies is not what a company says about its values. It is what a company does when its values cost it something.
The example that stopped the conversation in its tracks: Anthropic refused a $500 million DoD contract rather than allow its AI to be used for human targeting and surveillance. Half a billion dollars. Declined. Because the use case crossed a line the company had drawn — not in a press release, but in practice, at cost. OpenAI came in and accepted the contract.
“When I want to know if someone’s values are true, I look at what they’re willing to sacrifice in the near term that’s against their incentives. They will give up something in the near term for what they believe in over the long term. It’s usually money.” — Steven Bartlett
That is the standard. And by that standard, not every AI company in the market is operating from the same place.
Gawdat’s position is direct: it is time for every person and every organization to make a conscious choice about which AI providers they support — and to hold accountable those who have demonstrated that profit comes before principle.
At EDC®, we built MERCED™ independently. But the ethical standard Gawdat describes is one we recognize and share. We believe that AI should serve people, protect data, and operate within ethical boundaries that do not move when a large enough check is placed on the table. That alignment is not coincidental. It reflects who we are as a company and the standard we hold ourselves to in how we build, deploy, and stand behind our technology.
What Gawdat wants AI builders to do
Gawdat is unambiguous about the obligation that comes with building AI: developers have a responsibility not just to build responsibly, but to educate. There is a moment, he says, where you recognize that the world may not use what you are making the way you intended. And at that point, silence is not an option.
This is a principle we share. The “From the Trenches of AI” series exists precisely because we believe that operators in the moving and logistics industry deserve honest, informed perspectives on what AI actually is, what it actually does, and what it actually requires — not vendor talking points dressed up as thought leadership.
We are builders. That comes with an obligation. And part of that obligation is this: telling you what we know, including the parts that are uncomfortable, so that you can make decisions that are right for your business and your customers.
Don’t be afraid. But don’t be passive.
One of the most important things Gawdat says in the interview is also one of the simplest: do not be afraid of AI.
AI integration is inevitable. The answer is not to stop using it. The key is to use it more — but with discretion.
Fear produces paralysis. Paralysis produces irrelevance. The differentiation that is coming is not between humans and machines. It is between humans who have plugged into AI and those who have not.
“You’ll see people building a company in six weeks and people that are not fully plugged into AI really struggling to find a job.” — Mo Gawdat
For the moving and logistics industry, this is a real and pressing call to action. The companies that are thoughtfully adopting AI tools now — for routing, for survey and estimation, for customer service, for compliance, for predictive operations — are building advantages that will compound. The companies that are waiting for the dust to settle will find, when it does, that they are significantly behind.
The question is not whether to adopt AI. It is which AI, from whom, with what governance, and toward what end.
The most surprising prediction — and why it should give us hope
Of everything Gawdat covers in two hours, this is the point I want to end on — because it is the one that resonated with me the most.
He predicts that after the disruption — after the difficult years of economic transition and workforce displacement — what emerges on the other side is a humanity more focused on what makes us irreplaceably human. Freed from repetitive and mundane work, we will be guided by love, community, and meaning rather than consumption and greed.
When asked what the last job standing will be, his answer is not a technical skill. It is human connection.
There is something quietly profound in that for an industry like ours. Moving companies are not in the business of transporting boxes. They are in the business of one of the most stressful and emotionally loaded experiences a family or individual can go through — the transition from one life to another. The human dimension of that work — the care, the trust, the presence — is not something AI will replace. It is something AI can free us to do better.
We are in this for the long game. And the long game, if Gawdat is right, belongs to those who never forgot what they were really doing in the first place: serving people.
“From the Trenches of AI” is an ongoing EDC® LinkedIn series exploring artificial intelligence through the lens of an industry that moves people, not just data.
