By Matt Symes (BEd’04, BA’04)

My dad called to tell me he had set a date of March 24, 2025. He was committed to the MAID process this time.

I stared into the abyss. We had talked about this before. We’d even set a couple of previous dates. Because of his good health and his commitment to maintaining what little he had left of it, we were able to push them. But in this conversation, I knew it was different. He had battled as long as he could. Struggle was becoming suffering. He was not interested in being dragged around to events. He wanted to actively participate. When he no longer felt he could, he wanted to peacefully say goodbye.

I have good relationships with multiple health authorities. I don’t lack access to professionals. But when I asked for guidance on what families going through the MAID process should know, should do, should prepare for, there was a surprising void. No one really knew. There was no playbook. 

So, I turned to AI. Not as a productivity tool. As a lifeline to lead my family through the next 90 days and beyond. I gave it a role: “You’re an expert in child and family therapy. You’re an expert in rare neurological diseases (my dad was contending with the final stages of multiple systems atrophy) and in helping families navigate the end of life. You understand the MAID process. You know what it means to be an organ donor. You know what the family should consider for organizational and emotional support.”

Over the next 90 days, build me a playbook I can use to guide the journey. That playbook changed everything. We arranged a reunion with my dad’s former work colleagues. A celebration of the impact he’d had over his career. People flew in from all over Canada. AI told us to hold it somewhere with distraction, so it wouldn’t feel like mourning. We did it in the box of a junior hockey game. We had moved in with my dad two years earlier to give him love and laughter with my two daughters. AI told us to move out four weeks before the date. To give those same girls distance. New routines. So, the transition wasn’t a sudden hit. It confirmed that a stuffy was an excellent idea. A stuffy with Dad’s picture on it. Something small for them to hold tight to.

When I got the final playbook, I ran it by a couple of doctors, a therapist, and a renowned psychiatrist. They made a couple of edits. That’s important. AI is a co-pilot, not a pilot. It lies to you. And it lies to you so confidently that if you don’t have domain awareness, you can’t always tell the difference. And I say this as someone who has seen what happens when powerful tools outpace our wisdom in using them well. I’m not naive about what AI could break. But in this case, AI crafted something no professional in my network had been able to offer. And the professionals confirmed it was sound. There was no playbook for what our family went through. So, I asked AI to help me build one. And because of that, we lived those 90 days with a depth of intention I would have missed otherwise.

I tell this story in rooms full of professionals who are skeptical of AI, or quietly afraid of it, or both. And I’ve noticed something: the story doesn’t just move them. It shifts something in how they think about the tool. Because here’s what those 90 days taught me about how AI actually works. Not in theory, but in practice, when it means the most. It rewards the person who brings judgment. I didn’t ask it to make decisions. I framed the inquiry (or the prompt). I asked it to help me see what I hadn’t seen, research what I didn’t know, and organize what I couldn’t hold in my head at once. Then I verified it. With experts. Just because it can give you a second opinion on a legal document does not mean you’re a lawyer. And just because it offered confident (and mostly sage) advice on my situation did not mean I was now a unicorn of an expert in MAID, child therapy and the organ donation process. Then I chose. The AI was extraordinary. But the framing came from me. The verifying was essential. And our family was responsible for showing up, making the hard decisions, having the important discussions, and executing the plan. AI can’t do that for you.

That same pattern holds across very different situations: a marathon training plan, a retirement portfolio review, a better version of Saturday morning breakfast with my daughter. The stakes change. The approach doesn’t. Give it a role. Give it the input. Give it the context. Give it the constraints (Tell it what you don’t want). And then evaluate and iterate on what comes back. It is the RICCE method (Role, Input. Context. Constraints. Evaluate.) that has allowed me to intentionally incorporate AI.

I’m not a techno-optimist. I’m not naive to the downsides of AI. I hope our bureaucrats and politicians find a way to align with the private sector so we can get the best of AI without suffering the worst of it. We missed that opportunity with social media and smartphones. But I’m also a Dwarnian pragmatist. The AI genie is out of the bottle. Ignoring it is not the answer. If anything, the capability of AI has forced us to take responsibility for the way we interact with it. AI doesn’t replace judgment. It puts pressure on it.

In a world where AI has access to the sum total of human knowledge, where AI can synthesize faster than any of us, the scarce resource becomes the person who knows what questions to ask, what answers to trust, and what decisions are theirs alone to make. Most people are not thinking about it this way yet. They’re either dismissing it, using it as a less terrible Google, or outsourcing to it. Those are all mistakes. The ones who figure out how to work with AI, how to bring their own knowledge and values to it, are going to be in a different position than those who don’t. Not because the technology is magic. Because intentionality always compounds. I learned that, in a very real and visceral sense, from the MAID playbook I co-created with AI during the last 90 days I had with my father. AI has allowed me to live a deeper, richer, more intentional life. It’s not the lesson I expected. But it’s the one I’ll carry longest.

Matt is the AI entrepreneur-in-residence with the UNB’s TME program. He is also CEO of Symplicity Designs. He has been named one of the Top 50 CEOs by Atlantic Business magazine four times. Earlier this year, his firm was named the top change agent in the region, in part because of how it is helping leaders and organizations tackle AI.