Tali Despins
Builder | Claude Ambassador | Psych-informed AI Enablement
Madison, Wisconsin, United States
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A multidisciplinary builder with 16+ years of experience across design, marketing, front-end development, and entrepreneurship.
Today, my work focuses on AI enablement: helping organizations adopt AI in ways that are practical, sustainable, and psychologically informed.
What differentiates my approach is a focus on the human side of AI adoption. I bring cognitive science and psychology to AI transformation, not just tools, prompts, and workflows. I help organizations better understand the human factors that determine whether AI adoption succeeds or fails, and what to do about it.
My perspective is grounded in a background in psychology. I earned a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and spent more than three years as a lab manager in the Lupyan Lab, studying how language shapes thought, memory, and perception.
In addition, as a Claude Ambassador, empowered by Anthropic’s Claude Code Community program, I work with local AI communities to connect ecosystems, and help people meaningfully adopt emerging technologies through hands-on education, events, and real-world collaboration.
Working across Tel Aviv and Madison, Wisconsin, I focus on bringing practical AI culture, builder energy, and accessible learning opportunities into communities and organizations navigating rapid technological change.
www.tdespins.com
Area of Expertise
Topics
Cognitive Debt and Our Duty to the Generations to Come
People talk about AI's environmental cost: the data centers, the water, the power.
But what about our humanity?
This talk goes deeper than "AI makes people lazy."
Drawing on research from Harvard, MIT, and Oxford, we examine cognitive offloading, cognitive debt, neuroplasticity, and data-belief asymmetry: we will look at the quiet ways AI reshapes how we think, generate ideas, and decide, and what happens to us when we outsource more and more of our lives to AI.
The stakes are highest for young minds still forming. Protecting their capacity to reason is the most important ethical imperative of our time.
You will leave with concrete ways to use AI responsibly; to enjoy the gains in productivity without surrendering the capacity to think, and therefore to protect who we are and what makes us human. Not just for us, but for the generations to come.
The Dark Side of AI
Beneath the immediate gains lies a significant, often overlooked cost, one with long-term consequences we are only beginning to understand.
This talk explores the overlooked impacts of AI on decision making, creativity, and business performance, drawing on research from Harvard, MIT, and Oxford to examine concepts like cognitive offloading, cognitive debt, and data belief asymmetry.
We see how AI reshapes how we think, generate ideas, and make decisions, and what happens to teams and organizations as these processes become increasingly intertwined with machine-generated insights.
The session ultimately focuses on how to use AI wisely, offering practical strategies to maximize outcomes while preserving the human capabilities that drive long-term innovation and competitive advantage.
Panel Discussion
Closing panelist at AgentCamp Milwaukee, discussing the path from AI prototypes to real organizational impact. Drawing on a background spanning product development, front-end engineering, entrepreneurship, and cognitive psychology, I focused on the human side of AI adoption: how trust, behavior, organizational design, and thoughtful implementation turn capable AI systems into tools people actually use.
BeyondConf 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
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