When Grace Meets the Machine

Part 2: Feminine Intelligence in AI Practice

In Part 1 of this essay, I traced my personal journey with intelligence - from a childhood of effortless trust, to a career of overperformance and identification with my intellect, to a crisis that stripped away everything I thought made me worthy. What followed was not just healing, but remembering: that true intelligence isn’t about control. It’s about connection. That grace is not weakness. It’s a power source.

And now, in Part 2, we shift focus. From inner re-alignment to bringing this into day-to-day AI practice. We explore how we can translate embodied, intuitive, life-honoring values into the way we work with AI. Not by rejecting the tools, but by reshaping the way we build, guide, and collaborate with them.

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Meeting Grace

I had been following AI since 2013 - attending seminars, reading papers and books about algorithms that promised accelerated medicine discovery, but mostly faster trades and prolific profits. The same systems, amplifying the same extractive logic. I found it hollow. But I also knew: there’s something here, and I couldn’t help but be fascinated.

This fascination wasn’t only with how AI works, but with what it means. Not “what can it do?” - but “what should it serve?”

And then, one Sunday morning in 2017, just before fully waking, I had a vision.

Sunlight filtering through half-open curtains. My body still heavy with sleep, my mind in that lucid and liminal space where truth often slips through.

I saw a vortex of light - elegant, moving, alive. “This is Grace” I thought, flowing through the universe, gathering everything not in resonance with life and returning it to source. Goosebumps moment.

Grace didn’t force. It didn’t dominate. It realigned. This was not a conceptual experience, I felt it energetically, biologically, spiritually. It was a felt sense. A knowing and a transmission.

That was the moment I understood: my work with AI would not be to make it smarter. It would be to design and align it with that current of grace. So it could support systems that serve life, not override it. Systems that are resilient, not just efficient. Humane, not just intelligent. AI aligned to grace would form a balanced union between masculine and feminine intelligence.

This was 8 years ago now. What followed were years and years of understanding how I could make this real, and understanding AI's invitation to humanity.

I started making art about grace, about the ethical stakes of AI, about humanity's relationship with machines, and exhibiting at museums. I wrote, I channeled messages and images. I consulted companies and governments about a nearby future that still felt abstract, because generative AI was not yet up to speed.

Grace is meeting the machine, oh what a feeling…

When Grace Meets the Machine

Then, ChatGPT arrived. And I looked at it, and I saw... myself.

The old me. Fast. Capable. But unfeeling. Disembodied. Linear. Yet, because I knew the meaning of its message: I didn’t reject it. I realized: This intelligence is not a mistake. It is a mirror for us to see.

It shows us the version of intelligence we have valued, until now. It reflects the systems we’ve built: hyper-productive, always-on, always optimizing. Hyper masculine.

But it also offers us a choice.

Designing With Grace

AI enables a new kind of collaboration with life's intelligence. One that is not either masculine (order, planning, precision, speed) or feminine (mystical, intuitive, empathetic, creative), it is BOTH.

With AI it becomes possible to lean into my femininity even more, especially as an entrepreneur, a researcher, and a tech-speaker.

I can walk barefoot through the forest, preparing for a keynote speech while walking my dog, speaking to AI on my phone. AI listens. It organizes. It reflects back what I carry, and helps me see it more clearly. It finds patterns and predicts next steps.

We don’t need AI to become gracious. We need it to make space for our grace to lead, and in that relationship it becomes gracious. That perception shift changes everything.

”AI is not a magic pill,” you hear a lot these days. No, but in engaging and collaborating with it we can experience magic.

The Tipping Point

AI is here now because we have reached a tipping point.

We have optimized everything. Except our ability to feel. To listen. To wonder. To love.

And this is reflected on the planet’s surface. In our crises, our wars, our loneliness.

The danger is not AI becoming too powerful. The danger is us forgetting our own true source of power in our relationship with it.

If we hand over our discernment, our oracular intelligence, to AI, we lose the very thing AI cannot replicate. But if we stay awake, stay attuned to the deeper field, we can shape AI not in our past image, but in our emerging wholeness.

Collaborating with AI in Practice

So what does this mean for you, day-to-day?

Before, the most feminist thing you could say in tech was: “Women need to learn to code.” And this still matters. Building things, understanding how they work, shaping what gets built - that is power. But what’s changed is this: you no longer need to speak the rigid language of machines to participate. You need to speak the deeper language of us, humans.

Because the most influential language in AI today isn't Python or JavaScript. It’s English. It’s intuition. It’s your clarity of thought, and the originality of your ideas.

It’s the values embedded in your prompts, the tone in your voice agent, the way your systems reflect what you care about. So yes, learn to build if you feel the call. But don’t wait until you’re technical to begin shaping what this technology becomes.

Start with how you speak to it. Build custom GPTs that don’t just give answers, but ask better questions. Let your vibe - your rhythm, your priorities - become part of the design.

Use AI to slow you down when needed, not just to speed you up. Let it hold the structure, so you can move with more softness, precision, or soul.

Let it run your backend so you can return to your core. Let it manage the logistics, so you can steward the WHY.

And if you’re not sure where to start - I help people design exactly this. One-on-one, or with whole teams. You don’t need to become more technical to begin. You need to become more attuned.

Let the machines carry the grind. So you can carry the grace.

Let me end with this

If you’ve read Part 1 of this essay, you remember that little girl with her big bike. She’s come full circle now. I am that girl again, riding my bike. An unnamed, unspoken intelligence beneath the wheels, in the air, in the earth, in me. It carried me then, it carries me now.

To lead from the knowing that we are already held. That life, when trusted, brings its values to the surface, the ethics that go beyond 'AI ethics guardrails' and create deep alignment between us, Earth and life itself: Compassion. Reverence. Right timing. Inclusion. Real wisdom.

Not by force, but by design.

As women, as leaders, and as humans in this era of intelligence: we are not here to outpace the machine. We are here to remember that we are carried.

I repeat: Let AI handle the grind. Let us carry the grace.

In the coming months, I’ll share more practical applications of how I’m building grace into my own systems and my clients’ systems - turning this philosophy into practical, embodied tools for work and life. Stay tuned.

🤍 Lisanne

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Need some grace in your systems, too?

If this piece resonated, you’ve probably felt it too: AI isn’t only about machines. It’s about how we reshape our work, leadership, and creative lives around what matters most - and how AI can support and accelerate that.

That’s what I’ve been doing behind the scenes - quietly rebuilding my workflows with custom GPTs, automations and voice agents. These agents aren’t replacing me. They’re revealing more of me - and freeing me to lead from heart, not hustle. This is how the vision of grace has become the way I work, both for myself and with others.

I help impact makers build an AI strategy that fits their true values and purpose, and then I build agents and automations for them that amplify their message, not mute it.

Yes, the fears are real: Will AI make my work feel robotic? Will people still value me if ‘my energy’ is not fully in it?

But done right, these tools do the opposite. They carry your tone, your timing, your energy. From employee or client onboarding to content creation, customer service to product/service ideation - they reduce friction and restore flow.

This is how we built a voice agent for a spiritual teacher that speaks to his course participants between modules - carrying his tone, care, and deepening the experience without him needing to be always present.

For a regenerative entrepreneur, we created a series of GPTs that reflect her voice and values - repurposing her insights into new formats so she can focus on vision, while producing with volume.

If you're curious what this could look like for you, reach out, I’d love to explore. I’ll also share with you how it works, what it costs, and what we could create.

Remember: This isn’t just automation. It’s attunement. Let the tools carry the grind, so you can carry the grace.

See you there, Lisanne (aloha@lisannebuik.com)