Over the past year, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern among many of the mission driven organizations Creative Repute serves.
Clients who once proudly highlighted their teams, values, and commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion are now asking us to quietly remove team pages, soften mission statements, and replace explicit references to DEI with broader, less politically charged language.
These requests rarely come because their values have fundamentally changed. More often, they’re driven by an increasingly uncertain funding environment, rising operating costs, and growing political pressure, particularly for organizations that rely on federal grants or serve historically marginalized communities.
At the very same time, many of these organizations are accelerating their investment in artificial intelligence.
They’re exploring AI powered marketing, content creation, software development, customer service, and internal operations with remarkable urgency. One investment is being treated as essential to the future. The other is increasingly viewed as politically risky.
That contrast has stayed with me.
Not because I believe technology and diversity should compete with one another, but because I believe they’re both manifestations of the same leadership challenge.
When uncertainty is high, what deserves long term investment?
The conversation around artificial intelligence often focuses on productivity, while the conversation around diversity has become increasingly political. I think that’s a mistake. Both ultimately shape an organization’s ability to innovate, build trust, attract talent, and adapt to change.
The organizations that endure won’t be the ones chasing every new technology or retreating from every controversy. They’ll be the ones disciplined enough to invest in people, technology, and credibility at the same time.
When Values Meet Market Pressure
Few companies illustrate this tension better than Target.
In January 2025, the retailer announced it was ending its three year DEI goals, renaming its Supplier Diversity organization to Supplier Engagement, and stepping away from several external diversity benchmarking programs. The company emphasized that it had not abandoned inclusion, but had repositioned its efforts under a broader strategy called Belonging at the Bullseye.
The public response, however, demonstrated an important lesson about organizational trust.
Target faced criticism from multiple directions, organized consumer boycotts, and declining customer traffic. CEO Brian Cornell later acknowledged that the controversy surrounding the company’s decision contributed to business headwinds, alongside inflation and broader economic pressures. While no single factor explains the company’s financial performance, the episode highlighted how quickly public perception can influence business outcomes.
The lesson wasn’t simply about DEI. It was about trust.
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Target publicly committed to investing more than $2 billion with Black owned businesses and expanding opportunities for diverse suppliers. When the company later changed how it communicated those commitments, many customers interpreted the move as inconsistent with the values the company had previously championed.
Whether that interpretation was entirely fair is almost beside the point.
Trust isn’t determined solely by intention.
It’s shaped by consistency.
Organizations earn credibility over years but can weaken it much more quickly when their actions appear disconnected from their stated values.
Leadership Isn’t About Choosing Between AI and DEI
This is where I believe many organizations are making a strategic mistake.
During periods of uncertainty, leaders should absolutely reevaluate budgets, programs, and messaging. That’s responsible leadership.
But many organizations are reacting to political pressure far faster than they’re evaluating the long term implications of artificial intelligence.
Ironically, they should be asking the same questions about both.
What kind of organization are we trying to build?
What capabilities will matter five years from now?
What investments create lasting resilience instead of temporary relief?
Artificial intelligence has extraordinary potential to transform organizations, but only when it’s implemented intentionally. Likewise, organizational values should evolve thoughtfully rather than simply responding to the loudest voices of the moment.
To me, AI and DEI aren’t competing investments. They’re complementary ones.
One helps organizations process information faster. The other improves the quality, breadth, and originality of the information people contribute.
Both ultimately strengthen decision making.
And better decisions remain one of the few competitive advantages that technology alone cannot guarantee.
Why AI Makes Human Perspectives More Valuable
Much of today’s conversation about artificial intelligence revolves around efficiency. We celebrate AI’s ability to summarize meetings, write emails, generate presentations, produce software, and create marketing content in seconds. Those are meaningful productivity gains, but they represent only part of AI’s value.
The more interesting question is this: Where does AI’s knowledge come from?
Large language models don’t create ideas from nothing. They recognize patterns across enormous collections of human-created language, images, music, software, research, and conversation. They recombine that information into responses based on probability and context. They don’t possess lived experience, cultural memory, personal conviction, or independent judgment.
In other words, AI doesn’t replace human knowledge. It depends on it.
That’s why I believe artificial intelligence increases the value of diverse human perspectives instead of diminishing them.
Technology can identify patterns, but people introduce new ones.
Every culture, profession, neighborhood, generation, and life experience contributes knowledge that didn’t previously exist. AI can learn from those contributions, but it cannot create them independently. As AI becomes better at synthesizing information, original human insight becomes increasingly scarce and therefore increasingly valuable.
The Internet Taught Me This Lesson Years Ago
I remember when search engine optimization first became mainstream.
As a young Black woman, I often searched Google Images for braided hairstyles before visiting my hair braider. Instead of seeing the protective styles I was looking for, I was repeatedly shown images of white women wearing French braids.
The hairstyles I wanted certainly existed.
The people creating them certainly existed.
But many Black salons and creators hadn’t yet learned how to optimize their websites, images, alt text, and metadata for search engines. Google reflected the content that had been best organized for discovery, not necessarily the diversity of the real world.
Eventually that changed.
Black entrepreneurs, creators, and publishers learned how search worked. They optimized their content, documented their expertise, and expanded what people could find online. Search results became more representative because more people contributed to the knowledge the internet could discover.
Artificial intelligence is beginning to follow a similar path.
The Bubble That Concerns Me Most Isn’t Financial
Many economists have questioned whether today’s enormous investment in AI infrastructure has created a financial bubble. History tells us that nearly every transformative technology experiences periods of speculation before markets separate sustainable innovation from hype.
That may happen again.
But I’m even more concerned about a different kind of bubble.
A cultural one.
Artificial intelligence becomes more useful when humanity continues producing new knowledge.
If fewer people create art…
If fewer journalists investigate…
If fewer researchers publish…
If fewer communities preserve their histories…
If fewer entrepreneurs document what they’ve learned…
AI won’t invent those missing perspectives.
It will simply keep recombining the information that already exists.
Over time, that creates a feedback loop.
The same voices become more visible.
The same ideas become more influential.
The same assumptions become increasingly reinforced.
Meanwhile, perspectives that were never documented become even harder to discover.
That’s why I don’t think the conversation around diversity, equity, and inclusion is separate from the conversation around artificial intelligence.
One determines whose experiences become part of our collective knowledge.
The other increasingly determines how that knowledge is discovered, synthesized, and shared.
Those systems are inseparable.
Merit Requires Access
During a recent Bloomberg Businessweek discussion on the future of DEI, one observation stayed with me.
Merit cannot exist without access.
Organizations cannot consistently hire the best people if qualified individuals never have the opportunity to contribute in the first place.
That idea cuts through much of today’s political rhetoric.
The purpose of diversity has never been to lower standards.
Its purpose is to widen the pool from which excellence can emerge.
Research continues to show that organizations with diverse teams make better decisions and generate more innovation. That isn’t a political argument. It’s a business one.
Ironically, artificial intelligence strengthens that business case.
As machines become increasingly capable of recognizing patterns, organizations need people who can challenge those patterns, question assumptions, and introduce perspectives the technology has never encountered.
Technology can scale information.
Only people expand it.
Why I See AI Differently
My perspective on artificial intelligence is probably different because I came to it as an practice visual artist before I approached it as a business owner.
Long before founding Creative Repute, I was experimenting with new materials, introducing technology into my mural process through projectors, and carrying a camcorder everywhere I could for content creation. I wasn’t asking whether new tools would replace creativity. I was asking what they made possible.
Artists rarely fear the paintbrush. We learn to master it.
I approach AI the same way.
Artificial intelligence isn’t the finished product. It’s another creative material.
Its value isn’t determined by what it can generate on its own, but by what thoughtful people choose to build with it.
The Next Competitive Advantage Isn’t AI. It’s Organizational Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is still in its early stages.
Most organizations are using it to improve individual productivity by generating meeting notes, writing emails, creating presentations, or helping developers write code. Those are worthwhile applications, but they only scratch the surface of what’s possible.
The real transformation begins when AI stops functioning as another chatbot and starts understanding how an organization actually works.
One of the most important developments pointing in that direction is the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard introduced by Anthropic. MCP allows AI applications to securely connect with an organization’s existing systems, databases, APIs, codebases, documents, and institutional knowledge through a common framework.
Rather than relying only on what an employee types into a prompt, AI can access the context needed to understand how the organization operates.
As Anthropic engineer Mahesh Murag explained during a technical workshop, “Models are only as good as the context we provide them.”
That may become one of the defining ideas of the AI era.
Businesses won’t gain a lasting advantage because they purchased the same AI subscription as everyone else. They will gain an advantage because their AI understands how their organization works, where knowledge lives, how decisions are made, and where friction slows people down.
In other words, the future of AI isn’t another chatbot. It’s organizational intelligence.
AI becomes most valuable when it helps people spend less time searching for information and more time solving meaningful problems.
Technology Alone Has Never Been Enough
Artificial intelligence is changing how organizations work, but it isn’t changing what makes organizations successful.
People still choose where to work based on trust.
Customers still choose brands they believe in.
Communities still support organizations that consistently show up.
Investors still evaluate leadership.
Employees still want purpose.
None of those decisions are made by algorithms alone.
They are shaped by reputation.
For years, organizations competed on access to information.
Today, information is abundant and so it’s the human factor that adds value.
Judgment becomes more valuable.
Credibility becomes more valuable.
Original thinking becomes more valuable.
Relationships become more valuable.
Trust becomes more valuable.
The competitive advantage is no longer having more information than everyone else.
It’s demonstrating that your organization can be trusted to use information wisely.
The Investments That Will Matter Most
If we’re entering an economy shaped by artificial intelligence, I believe leaders should focus on four long-term investments.
🤝 Invest in trust.
Trust isn’t created during a crisis. It’s revealed by one. Organizations that communicate consistently, honor their commitments, and remain transparent build credibility that compounds over time. That credibility cannot be manufactured with a marketing campaign after confidence has already been lost.
🎓 Invest in learning.
Artificial intelligence is evolving too quickly for any executive to assume they’ve already figured it out. Organizations seeing meaningful returns aren’t simply buying software. They’re redesigning workflows, training employees, establishing governance, and creating cultures that encourage responsible experimentation.
👥 Invest in people.
Technology scales existing knowledge.
People create new knowledge.
The broader the range of experiences, expertise, and perspectives inside an organization, the more opportunities there are for innovation. AI becomes more effective when it’s informed by a richer understanding of the world, not a narrower one.
🏆 Invest in reputation.
Reputation is often treated as a marketing outcome when it should be managed as strategic infrastructure.
Every customer interaction, employee experience, community partnership, article, podcast interview, and recommendation contributes to the credibility an organization carries into future decisions.
Increasingly, that credibility will influence not only how people evaluate organizations, but how AI systems discover and recommend them.
Organizations aren’t simply competing for attention anymore.
They’re competing for confidence.
The Bubble We Should Be Paying Attention To
Much of the conversation surrounding artificial intelligence has focused on speed.
Who can build it first? Who can deploy it first? Who can automate the most work?
Those are important questions.
But I believe a more important question is emerging.
What kind of knowledge are we continuing to create?
Artificial intelligence depends on humanity’s willingness to keep asking difficult questions, conducting research, making art, documenting history, solving problems, and sharing lived experience.
If that pipeline of original human knowledge begins to shrink, AI doesn’t become more intelligent. It becomes more repetitive.
That’s the cultural bubble I worry about.
Not because AI lacks potential, but because its potential depends on us.
Conclusion
Artificial intelligence, economic uncertainty, and the changing conversation around diversity are often discussed as separate challenges. I don’t think they are.
They’re forcing leaders to answer the same fundamental question.
What creates enduring organizational value?
Some organizations will respond by chasing every new technology.
Others will respond by retreating from controversy.
The organizations that thrive will remain curious enough to keep learning.
Disciplined enough to make long-term investments while others chase short-term certainty.
Confident enough to embrace new technology without abandoning the people whose experiences make that technology valuable in the first place.
Artificial intelligence will continue to evolve.
Political priorities will continue to shift.
Economic cycles will continue to rise and fall.
Those changes are inevitable.
What remains within every leader’s control is how intentionally they build their organization.
Because organizations don’t endure simply because they’re innovative.
They endure because people continue to believe in them.
Artificial intelligence may reshape how that belief is discovered.
But trust is still how it’s earned.
-Nile Livingston, visual artist & founder of Creative Repute