A few weeks ago, I told Stephen he was moving too fast—not through the material, but through the pauses. He’d ask something thoughtful, then fill the quiet before anyone had time to think. It’s a reflex most of us have.

So he started counting to ten.

I do this myself in almost every meeting I lead. When I ask for questions, I pause and count. Most times, someone speaks up. It feels awkward every single time, and it works almost every single time.

This week, Stephen went past ten and was about to give up. He even messaged me privately: ah well.

The question he’d asked was whether their participation in this program had changed how people thought about AI’s impact on the profession. He’d just demoed a reference agent he built for the Graduate Center—it pulls from LibGuides and the Primo API, and in his tests it outperforms the current chat service. He hasn’t deployed it. He’s still thinking carefully about what it means for an AI agent to be someone’s first interaction with the library.

Then Will started talking. He’s in library school and new to the profession and these AI tools, and he was honest about feeling genuinely unsettled. He could see how well AI handles reference questions so that wasn’t really the issue. What gave him pause was what that efficiency means for the person on the other end. The relationships, the friction, the slow work of getting curious about something—are we moving toward or away from those? “What actually is the point?” he asked. And then, almost in the same breath: it’s also really cool to learn how this works.

The rest of the room had a lot of feelings. Robin talked about technology and humanity in the long view, neither doomer nor booster. Jason reframed it as an information literacy question. Ashley raised the political stakes—what are our obligations as librarians when the tools we’re using are developed by companies making decisions we don’t control? Shamiana said she doesn’t fear AI going away; she worries more about access eventually becoming limited to certain groups.

Nobody rushed to resolve any of it, which felt right.