AI as Antibiotic: The Case for Stewardship
By Vash Ebbadi-Cook (he/they), Founder & Principal Consultant, Endura Consulting
Increasingly, we are forced to face a stark reality: AI is now everywhere, and it's adoption is accelatorating. If you're in the social impact, healthcare, or public sector space, you've probably already encountered it, whether you sought it out or not. It's showing up in grant applications, meeting summaries, policy briefs, and client reports. And the question most of us are asking isn't really "should we use it?" anymore. It's "how do we use it well?"
But I want to slow down on that for a second. Because "should we use it?" is still an invaluable and legitimate question. In fact, it's the right question to start with, every time. The pressure to adopt AI tools is real, and in some contexts, so is the pressure to resist them. Neither impulse is wrong on its own. What matters is that the question gets asked thoughtfully, with attention to the specific context, the communities involved, and what's actually at stake.
I've come at this question from a few different angles: as a user, as an educator, and as a consultant helping organizations figure out what AI means for their work. Here's the thing about AI that I think gets lost in the hype: it's often neither Artificial nor Intelligent. It's a human tool, built on human data and human models, carrying all the same biases, gaps, and limitations that any human source does, just at an enormous scale and speed. That combination is what makes it genuinely useful and genuinely risky at the same time.
I've started thinking about it the way I think about antibiotics. A powerful intervention that, used well and intentionally, can do a tremendous amount of good in addressing the complex challenges that marginalized and disenfranchised communities face. But overused or misused, the harms can outweigh the benefits quickly. That framing, the idea of stewardship, is what I keep coming back to. Not uncritical adoption, but intentional, measured use and most often, not using it at all.
There are real costs, and we should name them
Using AI isn't consequence-free, and pretending otherwise does a disservice to the communities we work with. The environmental footprint of large AI systems is significant. The social and political costs, from labour displacement to the concentration of power in a small number of technology companies, are real and ongoing. Yet, often we can’t opt out entirely. However, we can pause, assess, and make deliberate choices. What problem are we actually trying to solve? Is AI the right tool for it? What are we trading off by using it?
These aren't rhetorical questions. They're part of the stewardship practice.
Where Endura Consulting stands
At Endura, we are pondering these questions and grappling with them with colleagues, clients, and our team. Some of our clients are eager adopters; others have real and valid concerns about AI touching their work. We aim to meet people where they are and raise critical questions about the use of AI each time.
What we do commit to is transparency. If AI is part of how we develop a deliverable, we'll tell you. If it's not the right fit for your context, we'll say that too. And we'll always bring our own expertise, judgment, and accountability to the table, because no tool, however powerful, replaces the human relationship at the centre of good consulting work.
The journey of figuring out how to use AI ethically is one I'm genuinely still on. I don't think that's a weakness. I think that is the point. The organizations and practitioners who will navigate this era best aren't the ones who have all the answers. They're the ones who are asking the right questions, staying curious, and course-correcting when they need to.
As we at Endura continue this journey we will share our ideas and findings with you. In the coming months we will be developing and posting a statement on the use of AI in our work along with a primer on what we ask our clients and partners to consider in the use of AI in our collaborative work. How are you navigating these questions? We want to hear from you! Book a consult or reach out at info@enduraconsulting.ca .
