The Augmented Practitioner: Putting AI to Work for the Impact Economy

For most of the impact economy, the conversation about artificial intelligence has been dominated by anxiety — about bias, opacity, displacement, and the concentration of power in a handful of technology companies. Those concerns are real and worth taking seriously. But they are only half the story. The other half is about agency: what happens when entrepreneurs, investors, and changemakers stop treating AI as a threat to be managed and start treating it as a capability to be mastered. Sateesh Nori has spent his career on the side of agency. After two decades on the front lines of New York City Housing Court, standing between families and eviction, he became one of the most credible voices arguing that AI is not a luxury for the well-resourced but a force multiplier for those working at the margins — the difference, as he puts it, between matching the scale of our tools to the scale of the need.

In this Luminarias conversation, we move from diagnosis to practice. Sateesh will share how he actually uses these tools — not in the abstract, but concretely: how to prompt large language models to think alongside you rather than merely answer you; how to encode your own judgment, voice, and analytical frameworks into AI systems so they extend your expertise rather than dilute it; and how a single practitioner, properly augmented, can now do work that once required a team. For impact entrepreneurs designing new ventures, for investors weighing finance and diligence decisions, and for organizations stretched thin against rising demand and constrained resources, the practical question is no longer whether to engage AI, but how to engage it well.

This is a session about reclaiming initiative. Drawing on his book The Augmented Lawyer and his work building direct-to-people justice tools, Sateesh brings a rare combination — frontline service experience, hard-won ethical clarity, and genuine technical fluency — to the question that matters most for our community: how do we wield increasingly powerful tools in service of systemic change, equity, and human dignity, rather than waiting to see what these tools do to us? Join us for a pragmatic, optimistic, and unusually hands-on exploration of AI as an instrument of empowerment in the Impact Economy.

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