In the wake of recent news about the perils of AI, I have been trying to give myself credit for keeping my sanity. I’m not sitting up at night fearing that AI will cause global destruction and I seem to have found a way to survive AI’s impact on job loss by launching my own consulting business.

But I was rattled by the latest research out of Wharton describing in detail how much AI is contributing to “agency decay”. Users start by experimenting, then integrate the technology, then start relying on AI and finally become completely dependent on it. The path out of dependence that Wharton lays out offers solutions like acknowledging your dependence and being honest with yourself about AI’s limits.

That’s arguably a lot more to take in than the prospect of global destruction.

As I personally have moved from the path of experimentation to implementation with AI over the past 18 months, I have noticed I am using AI more in my personal life as I juggle family with building a media consulting business. I have written before for Forbes about parents and founders creating AI technology in their businesses. But recently, I personally started using AI to research sleep away soccer camps, how to find what gardens are open during our trip to the UK to visit my in-laws and even how to enter travel contests to fulfill my children’s requests to travel to Orlando, Florida. The verdict is still out whether AI has done a better job than I have at digging up this intelligence.

As a solopreneur and parent with far too much on her “to do” list, the question becomes when it’s okay to depend on technology to help do a job that requires far more minds and hands and minutes in the day to complete. That’s why I found it refreshing to interview Christine Corbett Moran who has learned to supersize that concept since she had her fourth child in February. (For background, an Anthropic publicist connected me with Moran. But Moran said she is not in any way being paid by Anthropic.) Moran not only has four kids under eight, but also consults for NASA and is a founding engineer at a stealth AI startup in Silicon Valley. Appreciating just how much work comes with four children and startup life, Moran has leaned more into AI to help with the juggle.

It started with trying to find a way to pair her bassinet app with her Huckleberry sleep monitoring app so that she could better predict her new baby’s sleep habits. As Moran described in her blog in a post called “A Post Partum Coding project”, it was an idea she came up with while breastfeeding and then implemented within minutes once she was able to sit in front of a desktop computer.

“It was one of these times in the middle of the night where I was like, ‘We have this new bassinet that would go back and forth and we also try to track the baby’s sleep. And I have these two apps and I just asked Claude, ‘Hey, could I connect these two apps?”

But as Moran prepared for the return to work, she also started thinking about other uses that AI could do to help her with her growing family. That included setting up a single Amazon business account that she, her husband and her babysitter could all order from for the family. She also used it to make reservations at the Huntington Gardens where her family has a membership, but often forgot to book tickets on weekends. The difference she noted is that agents can click through multiple pages to book for her.

The big thing AI helped with was get her child’s birth certificate since she did not have a traditional hospital birth.

“I needed to get a special appointment and there was no website and you had to call between certain hours and we were traveling and my husband was at his end. He had tried three or four times and I was like, ‘Let me use my AI system,’” said Moran. An agent ultimately gave her the correct time to call.

“I clicked the button, I called, I was first or second in line. I said the script and my husband finally got this stupid appointment that he had been trying to get for weeks,” she said. “That’s one of those examples of a really regressive system where he even showed up in person to try to get the appointment and he waited for hours and he got there and they’re like, “You can only make an appointment by phone.”

Moran has said that selectively using AI has not only helped with small tasks, but it also gave her a project in those early disorienting days of new motherhood.

“It’s made it a lot easier to have, I feel like, the four kids. Going back in time and not having some of these tools at my disposal, I think it would be, especially as a working mom, other things like that, even more of a burden and feel a little bit more overwhelming where it feels like,” she said. “I don’t think it’s fundamentally changed the way that I approach parenting or interacting with my kids. It’s just made juggling so much a little bit more manageable.”

While I continue to try and not depend on AI, I may lean into it more reliant on it for certain mundane things that come with juggling a family and running my own business. But moving forward, I’m going to be extra mindful of the guardrails that may lead me into what Wharton’s fearsome “agency decay”.