Designing Gentle AI - Systems Worth Collaborating With

Still Thinking Series: Part 2

As the line between human and machine collaborators blurs, this post builds on the McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2025 (July 2025) and asks: What does it mean to design AI systems that are not just powerful, but liveable?

We’ve built systems that can do extraordinary things.
Now we face a different challenge:

Can we build systems we want to live with?

The next wave of AI won’t just be fast, smart, or accurate. It will be present—in decisions, in collaboration, in context. Tools are becoming coworkers. Interfaces are becoming initiators. And that means we’re entering a new design era.

We don’t just need usable systems.
We need trustable, conversational, and co-regulated ones.
We need gentle AI.

The End of the Operator

McKinsey’s report frames the shift from automation to augmentation:

"More natural, productive collaboration between people and intelligent systems… dissolving the boundary between operator and co-creator."

That’s a profound shift.

We’re moving from commanding machines to negotiating with them.
From writing scripts to responding to suggestions.
From building tools to navigating relationships.

Which means we must ask a different set of design questions:

• How does this system behave when it’s unsure?

• How does it handle contradiction, ambiguity, or emotion?

• Does it adapt to human rhythms—or demand that we adapt to its logic?

These are no longer UX questions. They’re governance questions.
And increasingly, ethical ones.

What Makes a System Gentle?

To me, gentle systems are those that:

• Empower without overwhelming. They extend capacity without stealing agency.

• Respect context. They know when not to act.

• Embody care. Not sentimentality—but coherence, humility, and clarity.

• Hold tension. Between precision and ambiguity. Between control and surprise.

This is where Designing Gentle Systems and Systems as Spiritual Practice converge. Because at their heart, both ask:

Can we create structures that elevate the human spirit, not just efficiency?

Gentleness, here, is not softness.
It’s integrity in the presence of power.

Where Design Becomes Governance

As AI becomes agentic, design and governance become inseparable.

An AI agent that books a meeting or drafts a document also makes implicit value judgments—about priorities, tone, trade-offs. If that system has no embedded ethics, no explainability, no graceful failure modes… it may still work, but it won’t be welcomed.

The future of AI won’t be won through compute alone.
It will be earned—through systems that people can live with, evolve with, and trust.

Designing Like We’ll Be Living With It

This is the shift I think we’re all feeling—subtly, uneasily. It’s not about sci-fi futures. It’s about proximity. These systems are close now—in our emails, our meetings, our decisions.

So the design question becomes existential:

How do we design for proximity?
What kind of collaborators do we want to invite into our lives, our workflows, our minds?

My answer: Gentle ones.
Because in the age of intelligent agents, how a system behaves may matter more than what it does.