Building Just AI Policy Through ‘Yes, And’

In my capacity as Director of Advocacy and Policy Development, I’ve had the privilege of hosting dozens of startup founders in direct conversation with policymakers. I’ve sat with educators, librarians, workforce leaders, and administrators who are not theorizing about artificial intelligence but living with its consequences and possibilities every day. Across those rooms, one truth keeps asserting itself: good policy does not start with fear, and it does not end with control. It starts with listening, and it succeeds only when it remains accountable to the people doing the actual work. AI Salon was built on values that are deceptively simple. Play first. Create mindfully. Generously lead. These are not soft ideas. They are operating principles. In advocacy and policy, those values take on sharper edges. They require discipline, humility, and restraint. They ask us to resist the urge to flatten complexity into talking points or to mistake visibility for impact. When we bring founders into policy conversations, we are not there to lobby for carve-outs or shortcuts. We are there to restore fidelity between how systems are designed and how they are actually used. A founder building an AI tutoring tool for rural schools understands constraints that no white paper can fully capture. An educator working inside a district navigating procurement, privacy, and parental trust understands friction points that never show up in legislation drafted at a distance. Our role is to create space where those realities can be heard without distortion. This is where our advocacy posture diverges from the default. We do not arrive with a fixed script. We arrive with a “yes, and.” Not a reckless yes. Not a performative one. A disciplined yes that says: we acknowledge the risks, and we also acknowledge the costs of inaction. We recognize the harms of poorly governed technology, and we refuse to pretend that prohibition is governance. In practice, this means advocating for policy that is…