Taken from the Meaningful Conversations with Annyse Podcast 

What happens when one of the water sector's leading voices on AI says the most important thing the technology could give us is time to slow down?

In this episode, Annyse sits down with Gigi Karmous-Edwards. What begins as a conversation about artificial intelligence becomes something much bigger: an invitation to stop measuring our worth by how busy we are and to start asking what kind of lives, workplaces and communities we actually want to build.

About Gigi

Gigi Karmous-Edwards is CEO and President of Karmous-Edwards Consulting, where she advises water utilities and technology companies around the world on digital transformation and generative AI. Her career spans more than 25 years across data communications, academia and, for the last 13 years, the water sector. She was technical lead and co-principal investigator on the Water Research Foundation's project on generative AI for the global water sector, founded the SWAN Digital Twin Work Group, leads AI market insights at BlueTech Research and is an adjunct lecturer at NC State University. She holds a degree in Chemical Engineering and a master’s in electrical engineering - and, as you'll hear, she is just as passionate about pickleball, gardening and painting.

Choosing "Bold"

Annyse invited Gigi to choose a card that spoke to the future she longs for. She chose Bold.

For Gigi, that word sits at the heart of how she lives. She believes we should all be designing our lives, picturing clearly what we want to see, then going after it with bold action. She has lived this way for as long as she can remember. Often, when she shares an idea, people tell her it's crazy. To Gigi, that's usually a sign she's on the right track.

Listening when life speaks

Both Annyse and Gigi believe that life responds to bold action and that it is always talking to us, if we listen.

Gigi shared a recent story. She had her tickets booked for the SWAN conference and was looking forward to seeing everyone there. Her first flight was delayed. Then the next one was delayed too - two separate incidents, on a day when the weather was perfect. She had tried everything to get there. In the end, she took it as a clear message to stay home. She hated missing it, but the decision turned out to be the right one.

That kind of acceptance, she says, has been around twenty years in the making. As a working mother of two girls, she read Eckhart Tolle through Oprah Winfrey's book club and wondered whether she would ever find that kind of calm. Over the years, she came to see life as a river: sometimes it bends, sometimes it rains, sometimes you simply go with the flow. That doesn't mean you stop trying. It means you pay attention to the cues around you - from people, from your surroundings - and let them guide you.

Another book shaped her too, built on the idea that whatever happens is the best thing that could happen, even when it doesn't look that way at first. Every event carries something to learn from. Annyse added that we need contrast to grow.

The gift in all of this is energy. Gigi could have fought the delays, felt guilty, or stewed over what she was missing. Choosing acceptance brought her peace instead and freed her to put her attention into the work she loves, rather than leaking it away.

AI and the limits of busy

The conversation turned to AI, a subject that had come up at a leadership retreat Annyse ran earlier in the summer. Annyse believes AI may be here to show us the limits of linear productivity. Once it takes on the tasks it does well, what discipline will we need to make different choices about our lives? What bold action and what vision will we need?

Gigi has a phrase she uses for every big decision: What would the cavemen do? Our ancestors weren't busy all the time. Over the last few centuries, through the industrial age, then the computer age, we have become busier and somehow proud of it. We tell each other how busy we are as if it's a badge of honour. Gigi doesn't believe that's what we're here for. The word she keeps returning to is present.

She is clear-eyed about the risks of AI and hopes to see more regulation. But the technology isn't going anywhere, so the real question is how we live alongside it. Her hope is that AI takes on the work we don't care about.

The skills that matter most - communication, empathy, collaboration, kindness, creativity - have long been dismissed as "soft skills". As the bottom line became everything, we lost sight of their value, and lost some of our connection with nature, with the earth and with each other. Gigi believes that if we strip away the busy work, we could become more human than we have been in centuries.

She also sees science and ancient wisdom meeting at the very moment AI grows powerful and she doesn't think that's an accident. It's a call to come back to ourselves and to flourish: to have our basic needs met, our minds and bodies cared for, and then the freedom to be present with one another. Her biggest frustration is the decision everyone knows isn't quite right, justified with "well, that's business." In the future she hopes for, how we treat people will matter more than ever.

Breaking up with busy

Annyse raised a real risk: if AI clears away the easier tasks, we may end up moving from one demanding piece of work straight to the next, with no breathing space in between. Without discipline, AI could fuel burnout rather than ease it.

Gigi hopes for the opposite. Think about coming back from holiday full of fresh ideas. That burst of creativity comes from rest. The 40-hour working week, she reminds us, is our own invention. Before it, we gathered more as communities, grew our own food, kept animals and had time to do nothing at all. There is good evidence that downtime boosts wellbeing and productivity and she hopes leaders take that to heart. Productivity should no longer be how we judge a person.

Annyse sees busyness as a flywheel: the more we focus on how busy we are, the more busyness we attract. Stillness is where we discover what really matters and that can feel uncomfortable. It takes courage to break up with the value of busy. Gigi hopes everyone gets to make that break. For her, that is AI's big, bold invitation.

When work and play become one

Gigi started her own company about eight years ago and stepped away from the 9-to-5. Many of her friends assume she has retired. She hasn't - she simply works on what she loves. She brings the same energy to a report on a subject that fascinates her as she does to pickleball, gardening or painting. Why separate them? In her life, work and play carry equal weight. AI, she says, can be the invitation to live this way too. We get to choose how we take it.

From solving problems to building flourishing communities

Annyse pointed out that so much of how we work, lead and learn was built around the Industrial Revolution. These are constructs, and we're free to rethink them. If our value is tied to solving problems, we will always find an endless supply of them. What if our purpose became building healthy, flourishing communities with wellbeing at the centre? What would an economy built on that look like - one that recognises our worth simply because we are alive on this beautiful planet?

Gigi agreed. Just as organizations need to step back and rethink their processes for AI, society needs to step back and rethink its systems. Ours have benefited some and left many behind. Now we have a chance to rebuild so that everyone can flourish, in harmony with each other and with nature.

Annyse brought this home to water. The affordability debate, she says, misses the point. We're treating surface problems one at a time, when the real issue is our relationship with how we fund utilities -  a construct created under rules that no longer serve us.

AI and the digital divide in water

Gigi's own path into AI began almost by chance. When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, she was at an AWWA technology think tank in San Francisco, where a colleague brought it up. She was hooked. She read everything she could find - so much so that her husband and daughters stopped wanting to hear about it. By March 2023 she was building custom chatbots for the water sector and later that year gave her first talk on generative AI at BlueTech Forum in Edinburgh.

She went on to serve as technical lead on a Water Research Foundation project exploring the role of AI in the global water sector, co-sponsored by AWWA and WEF. Around 21 utilities took part, both large and small, across the United States, the UK, the Middle East and Asia, with Moonshot Missions helping to bring smaller utilities on board. Together they ran about 22 pilots, from simple chatbots to agentic AI.

Five priorities came out of that work:

• Data governance - the most critical foundation.
• Workforce training - everyone at every level needs a shared understanding, or conversations about AI fall apart.
• Security.
• Scalability - building something once and sharing it across many utilities.
• Bridging the digital divide - the one Gigi cares about most.

She explains the divide simply. A utility's revenue comes from the people who pay their water bills. A big city has many of them; a small town has few. Yet a small utility often has just as many pumps and pipes to maintain. Larger utilities can afford sophisticated sensors and digital tools; smaller ones are often still working with pen and paper, with every spare euro or dollar going to their assets. It's purely down to how we pay for water.

And because water is connected, the divide affects everyone. A large utility and a small one may draw on the same source. It's the same water. We have to bring everyone up together and Gigi believes generative AI could be the technology that finally makes that possible.

When she couldn't find anyone willing to build basic AI training for the sector, she did it herself. Working with Lisa Haney and The Water Tower, she created a free, five-module, self-paced online course. No background needed and by the end, you'll be able to build your own chatbot and agent and understand how agentic AI works. You can find it through The Water Tower.

Gigi's advice if you're unsure about AI

Gigi recently spoke to a women's professional group in Raleigh, where there was plenty of hesitation in the room. She understands why. AI still makes things up. It carries bias, because it learned from us. There are real ethical questions and real concerns about data centres. All of these need addressing.

But with an AI race between the US and China, and seven major companies competing to outdo each other, this technology is moving faster than anything we've seen. Gigi calls it a bullet train. She'd love to see the world collaborate on it, but it seems we are as addicted to competition as we are to busyness.

Her advice is simple: don't ignore it. Learn a little. Start using it for fun - a recipe, a family schedule. Build on small wins until it feels comfortable.

Gigi has built her own AI agent, which she proudly describes as "badass". Each day it sends her an email on the latest features from the major AI companies. It has helped her think through a difficult relationship and approach it with warmth and empathy. It helps with her gardening. Imagine, she says, being able to read every book and remember how it all connects. That's what a good assistant can offer.

The real invitation

This conversation isn't really about technology. It's about what we choose to do with the time and space AI could give back to us. Will we fill it with more busyness or will we be bold enough to slow down, be present, and build something better together?

What would you do with an extra hour of stillness each day?