What "The Wild Robot" taught me about AI

Just watched "The Wild Robot" on Netflix with my kids, and I'm still processing it through the tears.

Here's a robot named Roz, programmed with artificial intelligence for efficiency and logic, suddenly thrust into the most illogical job in the world: raising a child.

As parents, we don't get an instruction manual. We debug on the fly, adapt our programming daily, and somehow find ways to nurture growth in tiny humans who definitely didn't come with user guides or knowledge bases. Like Roz, we learn that our greatest strength isn't following our original design... it's evolving beyond it.

The parallels to our professional lives hit me hard, too. How often do we find ourselves in roles we never trained for? Leading teams through uncharted territory? Building something meaningful in the midst of chaos?

The best leaders I know are the ones who, like Roz, learned that authentic connection wins over perfect execution every time. They've discovered that vulnerability isn't a bug in the system, it's the feature that makes us human.

Whether we're teaching a gosling to fly or mentoring a colleague, the real magic happens when we stop trying to be the perfect machine and start being the imperfect parent, leader, and human that others actually need.

I've been living, sleeping, and breathing AI for the better part of the last year, and this movie came into my life at just the right time. I needed the reminder that sometimes the best code is written with our hearts, not a large language model.