Put the Phone Down: When AI Has No Place in Your EO Forum 放下手机：AI在你的EO Forum中没有位置

I want to tell you about a moment I have seen hundreds of times.

Someone in the room starts to speak. They pause. Look down at the table. Then look back up — and what comes out is not what they rehearsed. It is something rawer. Something they did not even know they needed to say until the room held them long enough for it to surface.

I have been in EO since 1996. I have facilitated more than 500 Forums across more than 30 countries. I have trained more than 11,000 members. And I can tell you this without any uncertainty: that moment — the real one — never happens when technology is in the room.

I am not afraid of AI. I run RetailCare, an Australian-based retail technology company. We are an AI-first business. I use AI every single day and I think if you are not doing the same right now, you are falling behind. I mean that.

"AI cannot see into our hearts. AI cannot see into our brains. The human being has to do their own thinking and their own feeling. And if we outsource that, we stop growing." — Carlo Santoro

There are spaces where AI has no place. EO Forum is one of them. Not out of nostalgia. Not because of tradition. But because thirty years in that room, in every culture on earth, has shown me something that no technology can replicate — and that every piece of technology in the room quietly destroys.

What Forum Actually Is

EO Forum is a confidential monthly peer group of six to ten entrepreneurs, facilitated by a trained peer Moderator. Forum is not a business meeting. Not a mastermind. Not coaching. Not therapy. It is built around a single principle that cuts against almost every instinct a driven entrepreneur carries into a room: you are here to share your experience, not give or receive advice. No fixing. No solving. No "have you tried this." Just witnessing one another. And being witnessed.

"Forum is not therapy. We are not trained in that and we should never pretend to be. What we are is present, honest, and human. We do not fix, solve, or save. We witness. We learn. We grow together." — Carlo Santoro

I have seen Forum save businesses. I have seen it save marriages. I have seen it change the trajectory of people's lives. And every single time, the mechanism was the same: a person walked into a room, told the truth about what was actually happening, and was genuinely heard by people who carried the same weight. Best practice: eleven times a year, first two weeks of the month, afternoon on an early weekday. And one absolute rule — complete technology silence for all four hours.

Why Entrepreneurs Need Forum

At the top, it is lonely in a way that almost nobody around you can fully understand. Your team needs you to project confidence. Your family needs you to be present. Your board needs you to have answers. There is almost nobody in your life to whom you can say plainly, without consequence: I do not know what to do. I am scared. I am struggling.

Research confirms what every long-serving Forum member already knows: half of all CEOs report significant loneliness in their role. Entrepreneurs are several times more likely to experience it than the general population. And that loneliness is not just uncomfortable — it measurably reduces the quality of decision-making, erodes passion, and increases the likelihood of walking away from everything you built.

The Technology Tax

The science on devices in the room is now unambiguous. Studies from the University of Texas at Austin found that the mere presence of a smartphone on a desk reduces available cognitive capacity — even when the phone is off, face down, and nobody is thinking about it. The brain devotes a portion of its resources to actively not engaging with the device. The researchers called it brain drain.

"One glance at a phone in Forum does not cost three seconds. It costs up to 23 minutes of full presence — and it costs every person in the room a piece of the safety they came there to find." — Carlo Santoro

When technology leaves the room completely, vulnerability increases on its own. The room opens faster. Sharings go deeper sooner. Silences become productive. I have seen Forum groups transform within two or three sessions of truly enforcing the no-technology norm. The only thing that changed was removing the devices.

"Use technology everywhere else. Let Forum be the one place you do not. Four hours a month of full human presence in exchange for a lifetime of deeper leadership — that is the best return on investment I know." — Carlo Santoro

The Basket

During the soft start — before the session formally opens — every member places their phone, smartwatch, iPad, laptop, and any other device into a basket on a side table. Out of reach. Out of sight. This is not the Moderator's job to police. The basket is simply there, visible when people arrive, and the group norm — established together — is that devices go in it.

The Moderator's role is simply to model it. Arrive first. Put your own devices in the basket. When members walk in and see the Moderator's phone already in the basket, the expectation is set without a word being said.

"Every EO value comes to life in Forum. Trust and respect. Thirst for learning. Think big, be bold. Together we grow. When technology enters the room — in any form — it puts every single one of them at risk." — Carlo Santoro

Forum, ADHD, and the Neurodivergent Entrepreneur

Research finds that around twenty-nine per cent of entrepreneurs have ADHD, compared to four or five per cent of the general adult population. And eighty-five per cent of people with ADHD are undiagnosed. In a Forum group of eight people, statistically two or three are living with ADHD or significant ADHD-like traits, most without ever having named it.

A phone on the table is not simply a distraction for someone with ADHD traits. It is a neurological pull of a completely different magnitude. Take the device away and the pull disappears. Forum is genuinely one of the few professional environments that works with ADHD traits rather than against them — intense, real stakes, personally complex, and stimulating in exactly the way ADHD brains engage well.

AI cannot feel what you feel. It cannot be genuinely moved by your story. Research differentiates between cognitive empathy — understanding another's perspective — and affective empathy — actually sharing in another's feelings. AI may achieve something like the first. It is permanently excluded from the second. When you arrive pre-processed by AI, you deliver a performance of vulnerability rather than vulnerability itself. The room senses the difference every time.

The 5% — And Why It Is Disappearing

Members are arriving and saying things they never said before: "I do not know my feeling word." "I have no 5% topics this month — everything feels fine." "AI has been helping me work through everything."

"If you can share it easily, it is not your 5%. Your real 5% is the thing you just decided not to say. Start there." — Carlo Santoro

"When a member tells me they have no 5% topics because AI helped them work through everything — I do not hear someone who has healed. I hear someone who has been given answers before they had the chance to truly feel the questions." — Carlo Santoro

Writing the 5% Reflection

You write it the night before — ideally around 9pm, after the day is done and the noise has settled. Not in the morning. Not on the way there. The night before, when the accumulated honesty of the past thirty days is sitting right at the surface, before you have had the chance to rationalise it away with a fresh start.

"The 5% reflection written at 9pm the night before is the most honest version of you. By morning you will have found a way to make it more comfortable. Send it to your Moderator before you sleep. Lock it in. That is the version the room needs to hear." — Carlo Santoro

Once done, type it up and email the PDF to your Moderator that same night. The Moderator prints the reflections and brings them to Forum. At the moment it is your turn to share, the Moderator hands you your own printed page. This process exists for one reason: to make sure nobody changes their reflection in the morning after a hard night's sleep.

Confidentiality — And the Question About EO GPTs

Forum runs on one sacred commitment: what is shared in the room stays in the room. AI breaks that seal — not out of malice, but simply by being used. The moment anyone processes Forum content through an AI system, your prompt contains other people's stories. Something that was never supposed to leave the room has just entered a third-party platform, been stored on servers you do not control, and potentially used in ways you have never read about in the terms of service.

"Before you use an EO GPT, ask yourself three questions. Who built it? What did they upload to make it? And where does what I put into it actually go? If you cannot answer all three with confidence, close the tab." — Carlo Santoro

Stories Stay. Learnings Leave. And Then Use AI Everywhere.

There is a phrase I have used in Forum training for years: Stories stay in Forum. Learnings leave. The story — the specific details, the names, the personal circumstances — belongs only to the people in that room. The learning — the wisdom you gain from hearing another person's experience — belongs to you. You earned it by being present.

But a learning that is not written down is not a learning. Write your learnings by hand — in a notebook, in your own words, within twenty-four hours. Research from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found that handwriting activates far more interconnected regions of the brain than typing, especially those linked to memory formation.

Then — use every tool available to you. Here is how I do it. I come out of Forum with my handwritten learnings. I review them, usually that same evening. Then I bring AI into the process with full force. I research the ideas. I use AI to ask me deeper questions about what I am trying to change. I build projects. Forum first. Human work first. Then AI — as much as you want, as powerfully as you can.

"Forum is where I do the human work. Everything outside Forum is where AI helps me act on it. I madly write my learnings in the room. I review them after. Then I use AI to research, build, and change things. That is the sequence. Protect the first part and the second part becomes extraordinary." — Carlo Santoro

The Work Is Yours

After 30 years in Forum rooms across more than 30 countries, after 11,000 members trained, here is the most important thing I know: you have to do the work on yourself. Nobody else can do it for you. Not your coach. Not your therapist. Not your Moderator. And not your AI.

There are roughly 720 hours in a month. Forum is four of them. Four hours where you get to do something completely, radically different. Where you are not the CEO, not the operator, not the one with all the answers. Where you stop performing and start being honest. Where you stop processing everything and start feeling it.

"Stop spending your energy making Forum feel like the other 716 hours of your month. Do something completely different in that room — feel instead of perform, listen instead of advise, be honest instead of polished — and something completely different will happen. That is not a theory. That is thirty years of evidence." — Carlo Santoro

The chain — show up, feel it, share it, hear it, write it, act on it — is the entire mechanism of Forum growth. AI interrupts that chain at every single link inside Forum. Outside Forum, it amplifies every single link. Know the difference. Protect the line.

Put the phone down. Leave the watch. Leave the AI at the door. Walk into the room as a person. Do the work. The person you are capable of becoming is waiting for you in those four hours. And AI will never be able to get you there. But you can. You always could.