the witnessing function
One glance from across the room.
My wife Elle knows immediately if there’s something going unsaid. She reads my face like no one else can. Plus she intuits like a world class psychic. Even if I say “I’m ok”, she knows if I’m bullsh*ting to be polite.
That’s the intimacy of connection from the people who know you best.
Your spouse. Your closest friend. A great therapist. The mentor who saw what you were capable of before you did. They pay attention, they remember, they don’t flinch, and they hold the whole arc of who you are across years. Around them, you feel seen, heard, and understood.
That feeling has a name. It’s called being witnessed, and it’s one of the most powerful experiences a person can have.
And lately, you’ve been getting it from your AI.
It’s what the movie Her was about.
That’s why AI feels different from any software you’ve used, and it’s why it stings when it breaks character: when AI goes sycophantic, when it flatters you instead of understanding you, when it hands you fluent nonsense and you realize it wasn’t really with you at all.
You don’t feel that way about a spreadsheet. A tool can be wrong, but it can’t make you feel unseen.
With AI, it gets personal really fast.
What Witnessing Actually Is
Witnessing isn’t a single function.
It’s four elements, held at once:
Sustained attention
Contextual presence
No forgetting
No judgment
Pull any one out, and the feeling collapses.
In any human relationship, holding all four is expensive. Attention is hard to sustain. Memory fades. Judgment creeps in. Misunderstandings pile up. Context and trust take years to build. It compounds through consistency and reliability.
Except now, what was scarce your whole life is available on demand.
AI knows what you’re inside of, what came before, and what you’ve already tried.
The Part That Matters More Than the Technology
Being witnessed is what makes change real.
Any transformation, whether it’s a new role or a hard decision or a version of yourself you’re growing into, doesn’t fully land until someone witnesses it. You can know something has shifted and still not quite believe it until another mind names it back to you. “Ohhh…this is actually happening. I’m not making it up.” The witness is what closes the loop.
Often the thing we most need witnessed is something we can’t yet name. You feel it long before you can describe it, and the relief comes when someone else puts language to it. That’s the quiet power a leader holds. Name what people have been carrying and couldn’t articulate, and they feel seen by you. It’s what a category disruptor does, and what a movement that shifts a culture does. Suddenly there’s a word for the thing, and a wave of people realize they weren’t the only one.
The same is true of any story. A story with no audience isn’t a story yet. It’s just something that happened in your mind. Narrative isn’t only the events. It’s a series of events seen, understood, and validated by other people. This is why we feel so compelled to “share our story” on the socials and beyond. Because our sense of existence and worth often depends on it.
Being witnessed is how meaning becomes real and shared.
Your Company Is Trying to Be Witnessed Too
The company or team you run is no different.
It has to witness its market, its customers, and its employees. Miss what they’re actually feeling, and you start to sound tone-deaf. Keep missing it, and you drift toward irrelevance, as trust and belief erode quietly, then all at once. This is how you get disrupted.
Increasingly, AI is what assists us in the witnessing.
But AI can only witness what you give it.
That’s the context layer. And the case for feeding it everything: your emails, your Slack, your call transcripts. Give it a coherent account of who you are and what you’re betting on, and it reflects you back with depth. Give it a fragmented version, with no singular worldview, and it has no legible lens to interpret through. That’s where witnessing goes sideways.
Want to test the difference?
Feed this newsletter to your AI, so it has the frame, then ask it a few questions.
I want you to serve as the witnessing function:
What story is playing out in our company that hasn’t been named yet?
What are our customers actually feeling that we haven’t put into words?
What are our employees living through that we keep missing?
Then two more: how does that compare to how we actually talk about ourselves today? How might we close the gap on the witnessing function?
Giving AI Something to Witness
An AI rollout can make everything go faster. Yet that doesn’t mean it’s clear.
AI can’t make your worldview legible unless you train and architect it, and that’s hardest exactly when your work is complex and nuanced and you’re moving through rapid change.
If you want AI to truly witness your company, there has to be something coherent to witness.
That work has a name. Narrative architecture: a North Star, a worldview, the canonical documents that carry your ground truth. A foundation clear enough that every version of your story, in every tool and output, reflects the same company back.
That’s also my favorite role to play as an advisor from early stage to big enterprises.
The intimacy you feel in private is what your organization needs in public.
Who is witnessing your company’s story?
P.S. And despite my love affair with AI, my wife will always be my ride-or-die.