Who Holds the Mic in the Age of AI?

I love education and story. And if you’ve read me before, you’ll know I’ve taught myself a fair few things along the way off the back of others' experience and kind hearts sharing their expertise.

Lately I’ve been knee-deep in home renos, teaching myself how to do some simple things to support the rebuild, a result of nearly burning down our little studio because I was chasing cows that had escaped. Story of my life… until I finally invested in a portable electric fence (side note: reach out if you want the full cow-chasing saga).

But here’s what I’ve noticed: when I get stumped on how to do something, whether it’s fixing the car (a while ago now, but relevant and soft flex), wiring a light, the place I turn has shifted. Where I used to go straight to YouTube or Google, I now open Chat.

It summarises others’ information at speed and knows my context. I’ve been an electrician, a car mechanic, and a cow wrangler in the space of a few afternoons, all thanks to having a digital helper that can walk with me in real time.

But let’s be real: this won’t last forever. Commerce will fold in. Selling information will creep back. Yet the egg has been cracked and scrambled, there’s no going back.

So where does that leave us in the art of storytelling?

The Bias Loop Problem

It leaves us at a crucial juncture. Not just personally, but at the level of connective tissue, the stories that hold organisations, communities, and cultures together.

Because as we step deeper into the Age of AI, the danger is obvious: we’ll all get stuck in our own homemade information biases, talking to ourselves, reflected back in the voice of our chosen AI.

Each of us is convinced we’re right. Each of us feels smarter than we are. But all of us are stuck in private bias loops.

At the same time, AI offers a chance to collect perspectives at lightning speed. The risk is letting those perspectives sit in silos. The opportunity is to bring them into facilitated spaces where co-creation and co-design turn raw input into collective narrative.

No shared ground. No collective narrative.

What Actually Moves the Needle

People don’t adopt because of features. They adopt what they believe in and what they see themselves in.

That’s why Chat feels sticky: it reflects us back, only a touch smarter and faster. But reflection alone isn’t learning, it’s mimicry.

So yes, use AI to move faster. But if you want change to stick, whether in schools, sectors, or workplaces, you need to design for application and shared meaning, not rote.

It’s like the future of education: the future isn’t kids, parents or teachers learning separately, but starting with all in the room together, bringing their perspectives to the table, what needs to change and why. Each one of these stakeholders understands a piece to the puzzle the other doesn't, and the more they understand each other the better the outcome. The same applies to AI in organisations: staff and leadership shaping engagement together.

Co-Creation as Survival Infrastructure

This is why co-creation matters.

The process of creating, co-creating, and co-designing stories isn’t a side project, it’s survival infrastructure for the Age of AI.

Because co-creation delivers what AI alone can’t:

Trust: people act on stories they helped shape.

Diversity: one narrative, many voices.

Cohesion: shared authorship that builds shared meaning.

AI can surface hundreds of voices, patterns, and perspectives in seconds but speed isn’t meaning. Facilitation is what transforms noise into narrative. Co-creation is where those perspectives stop competing in silos and start forming shared ground.

And in a world of hyper-individualised information loops, shared meaning may be the rarest and most valuable resource of all when thinking about how to move the needle, with its kryptonite being the attention economy. So how do you fight that?

Co-design and co-creation: bring in the audience to help tell the story. This, if you will, takes it a step further than the influencer phase of content, or UGC (user-generated content), which if you’re in the biz is code for low-end follower accounts producing work to make a brand feel more authentic and build trust and perspective of desire.

This can be played out when thinking about using AI in programs and products: bring in the audience to help shape the design, feel, usability, but also the story of why this matters, and how it is to be used.

When doing this, systems and processes matter to make sure your audience and co-creators are being looked after.

Our Stance in the World

At PUR Production, our stance is simple: in the Age of AI, co-creation is the only antidote to fragmentation.

Who holds the mic matters more than ever. But it’s not enough to just hand it over, we need to support people to craft narratives that cut across, stick, and shift behaviour.

That’s the challenge in front of us: rebuilding the way we tell stories so they don’t just entertain, but actually connect. Not siloed AI outputs, but human-centred, co-created narratives that give us common ground.

AI isn’t the enemy here. It’s the accelerant. It can pull in perspectives faster than anything we’ve had before, but it can’t tell us what to do with them. That’s our job: to create spaces, processes, and stories that guide those perspectives into shared meaning.

Because without that, we’ll all be talking to our own AI's, about our own truths, until there’s nothing left to say, only confirm and re-affirm.

Onward,

Patrick