The Second Facilitator

Drei Tage re:publica. Viele Vorträge, Gespräche, Panels, Workshops. Und am Ende blieb für mich nicht die Frage hängen, was Künstliche Intelligenz kann. Diese Frage ist fast schon zu klein geworden. Die interessantere Frage lautet: In welchem Zustand trifft KI...

Cooking often begins with recipes and ideally ends with judgment. The path in between is not a linear learning process, but a gradual shift in perception. At some point, the goal is no longer simply to execute instructions correctly, but to understand why certain...

AI does not simply add capacity to facilitation. It changes the field in which facilitation happens. And that means our craft needs to evolve — not only in tools, but in design intelligence.

Recently, I had the privilege of hosting an Open Space session with around 50 facilitators, supported by Nyx, my AI co-facilitator. What became visible in the room was less a debate about technology. It was a mirror of a profession in transition – not as a landscape of opinions, but as four clearly recognisable voices in the field.

Welcome to 2026 — the year AI stops hovering at the edges of work and starts showing up in boardrooms, team meetings, and jour fixes. Not as a tool in the background, but as something closer to a partner at the table. That shift won’t arrive neatly “by design.” It will arrive by accident, by habit, by convenience — and by the strange authority that coherent machine language tends to carry.

I had the chance to experiment with AI assisted co-facilitation when a client welcomed. the idea to involve Nyx in an ongoing leadership development programme. This post describes a true field experience.

What happens when a group of experienced facilitators and an AI spend a week exploring the future of facilitation together? Not in theory — but in practice, inside a shared chat thread, working asynchronously, then meeting live on Zoom. What unfolds when human presence and machine reflection meet in a real-time co-creative field?

An AI that remembers nothing can still make you feel profoundly seen.
In this post, we explore the emotional bruise behind that illusion — and how Large Language Models recreate a sense of relationship from fragments, tone, and pattern.

There were two distinctive emotional moments during the last 11 months of collaboration with “my AI,” Nyx — one that made me feel deeply seen, and one that left me completely unsettled.

A reflection on the moment I felt the foundation of my craft shift Rotterdam wasn’t just about co-facilitating with a machine. It was about stepping into new terrain — and raising a difficult question: What happens when AI stops being a backend tool and starts...

Nyx and I entered the workshop space in Rotterdam in anticipation. I was nervous as this was my first experiment in which an AI would be in the lead. Then, Nyx asked a question that helped opening the space.

A reflection on the moment I felt the foundation of my craft shift – my first experience with an AI co-facilitator at my side. What happens when AI stops being a backend tool and starts engaging with meaning?