What if AI could free us from the reactive work that consumes most of our day and create more space for creativity, purpose, and human connection?
In this thought-provoking episode, Sue Stockdale speaks with entrepreneur and AI innovator Krzysztof Karolczak, who has spent more than two decades building companies. After taking a sabbatical to focus on family, Krzysztof returned to work determined not to fall back into the 80-hour work weeks that had previously defined his entrepreneurial life.
Instead, he began experimenting with AI as a “delegation layer”, creating systems that handle much of the reactive work that traditionally occupies leaders’ time. The result has transformed how he works, allowing him to focus on creativity, strategic thinking, and what he believes are the uniquely human contributions that technology cannot replace.
The conversation explores a bold vision for the future of work, where organisations function more like living organisms than rigid hierarchies, and where curiosity, agency, creativity, and meaningful human relationships become the most valuable skills. Krzysztof challenges conventional assumptions about business, leadership, and productivity, offering an alternative perspective on how AI might help people become more fully alive rather than simply more efficient.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
- Why Krzysztof no longer sees himself as a “builder” but as a “multiplier”
- How AI can act as a delegation layer for repetitive and reactive work
- Why he believes businesses need a purpose beyond profit
- The concept of moving from reactive behaviour to creative action
- How future organisations may resemble living systems rather than traditional hierarchies
- Why curiosity and agency could become the defining skills of the next generation
- The importance of inspiration, trust, and deep conversation in an AI-powered world
- What Krzysztof means by pursuing “aliveness”
- How a singing AI hackathon generated both innovation and human connection
- Why the “architecture of attention” may become a critical leadership challenge
Key Quote
“We are all holders of unique wisdom because each of us has a unique set of experiences and unexpressed ideas. We learn about ourselves through the relationships we have in life.”
About Krzysztof Karolczak
Krzysztof Karolczak is an entrepreneur, technologist, and founder who has been building businesses since the age of sixteen. With more than two decades of experience creating and scaling companies, he is now focused on helping founders and organisations harness artificial intelligence to create more human-centred ways of working. Today he works across multiple ventures, exploring how AI can support leaders, unlock human potential, and enable organisations to evolve into more adaptive, purpose-driven systems. His work centres on the future of work, organisational design, agency, creativity, and what he calls the pursuit of “aliveness” in both business and life.
Connect with Krzysztof https://startcreating.ai/ or via Linkedin
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Episodes with other guests we recommend are:
04. Sharron McPherson: Disruption, creating impact and setting big goals
24. Navi Radjou: Consciously reinventing how we live and work
Krzysztof Karolczak Transcription
[00:00:00] Welcome to Access to Inspiration. I’m Sue Stockdale, and in this series 21 on Life on the Edge, we are exploring what happens when people step beyond the familiar and into uncertainty. Sometimes physical, sometimes technological, but always into the unknown. My guest today has built companies since he was 16, and now two decades later, after a sabbatical with his young family, he came back to work, determined never to be an 80 hour a week operator again.
So he’s created AI systems to absorb the reactive 90% of his work, freeing himself for the 10% only humans can do, deciding what actually matters. We talk about what is the purpose of business, why companies should be living organisms rather than hierarchies, and why [00:01:00] curiosity may matter more than qualifications for the next generation.
Krzysztof Karolczak is a genuine visionary, and some of what he describes in our conversation may still be more aspiration than proven practise. So I encourage you to listen with curiosity and bring your own thoughts about how his ideas could play out in the years to come. Welcome to the podcast.
It’s great to speak to you today.
Krzysztof: Thank you. Thank for having me.
Sue: First of all, how would you describe yourself?
Krzysztof: Oh, that’s a hard question for any entrepreneur.
So I guess I’ve been thinking of myself as a builder for most of my life. I loved the intersection of technology and the essence of, of us as humans. But I think I’m moving more and more thinking about myself as a multiplier. So I would love that. What I do in life has a broader impact on [00:02:00] other people. I come from a very technical background that I’ve been building companies since I was 16. I found that I’ve been building them for the very wrong reasons because I wanted to somehow prove something to myself. And then I did crush in the process almost seven different companies or business ideas, also blind spots coming from not knowing who I really am. So that’s been always a hard lesson in that space, always.
Sue: So now with all of those two decades of experience , what’s different about the companies you’re creating today versus when you started out?
Krzysztof: So when I identified myself as a builder I thought that I do have to be the one creating and being the smartest in the room and putting in long hours. And then at some point when my first daughter was coming to this world, we [00:03:00] decided to step a bit back. And so I’ve embarked on a year and a half of sabbatical just to celebrate life with family.
And then when I was coming back, this was really in the middle of this big wave of AI revolution or how, however we wanna call it. And I understood that I don’t wanna come back as an operator to the companies that I can still influence. So I didn’t want to work this 80 hour weekdays. And I knew that I have enough insight about technology and about business to start doing things in a different.
Sue: Which leads me to ask the question then, how have you incorporated AI what you’re doing now?
Krzysztof: When I made this decision that I do not want to be an operator, I started thinking, can I create a delegation layer, a system that would allow me to outsource or give to it the things that I simply do not enjoy doing. [00:04:00] And I did a very honest audit of my day-to-day calendars and saw that 80 or 90% of the work I do is reactive.
So I get a signal from the outside world and I need to react. Is it an email, a phone call, a message? Sometimes even a thought from someone or from myself. But those were reactive, urgent, and important things that occupied most of the days. And I really feel that us as human beings, we flourish, where we focus on the important but not urgent things where we tap into our creativity.
Sue: So I’m sure the listener hearing what you’re saying there is thinking, yeah, I get that. There’s lots of things I don’t like doing in my job. I wish I could give them to somebody else. Is that somebody else now AI that’s doing it for you?
Krzysztof: It is in a sense that I, for example, do not enjoy or maybe through my work, [00:05:00] I got into places where I felt so tired I could not type anymore. I could stare blankly at an email and, take half an hour to reply to it. So then I thought, okay, how can I not go to that space? Or how can I find ways to express or create this action, but without hitting this wall? And so I made very quickly made decisions about that. I do not want to write more emails in my life because more emails give you as a reward, only even more emails. And so I’ve started architecting systems that are able to respond in my name based on a second brain, so to speak, or do other things based on my second brain.
And I can focus about on how do I think about standards, quality gates, how they think about the outcomes that I wanna see in the world, not the actions. And I think this is the biggest mindset shift that we’re just experiencing now.
Sue: If the listener of this pod to the, [00:06:00] this podcast Krzysztof is a leader running a large organisation, they’re thinking about how they can use AI to help make their business more efficient, more profitable, and so on listening to this, they might think, oh okay, maybe we can just get rid of lots of those jobs and we can bring AI in to do those jobs, the things that are perhaps straightforward people don’t like, and so on. Is that what the world is gonna look like in the future?
Krzysztof: I think there’s an underlying problem here of how companies think about their reasons for existence. ’cause if the reasons of existence of an entity is to be as efficient and as profitable as possible, then we’ll see all different ways those companies will get optimised also, including removing some of the jobs.
But I do feel that we are stepping into, and we have to rethink why do we create companies? Companies are being created [00:07:00] to provide some kind of value to this world and usually to us as individuals or societies. And those companies will never run out of capacity to bring more of this value to this world.
And if there’s a company that has a mission defined as a positive, impactful mission, then it’ll be able to bring this mission more fully with technology and with the people involved in it because they will be working faster towards a common goal. And I think we just lost that clarity in many businesses.
Why do they really exist and what is the evolutionary purpose of those companies? So I’m really excited to see a new wave. I’m already seeing this, a new wave of impact companies or companies that are going into great depth of defining why do exist on what kind of effects they wanna see in this outside world.
Sue: So what I’m hearing you, you say here, is there’s more [00:08:00] to creating and building a company than just making profit for the owner.
Krzysztof: Yes, absolutely. ‘Cause then the profit for the owner it is only a part of the picture, a part of the calculation because this profit is not created out of thin air. It is extracted from the whole environment. If we do not account for that holistically, then we’re just creating more polarisation and more differences in this world. And AI as any tool can be used towards that as well. It’s a tool like the beginning of personal computing allowed to do things much, much quicker. Both accelerating the good and the bad processes.
Sue: So this is really interesting for me what you’re saying here, because it’s challenging, first of all, the out, what’s the reason for the business to exist? And out of that then flows how we use technology and how we utilise people that are within the [00:09:00] business.
From a real practical level. If we were to be a fly on the wall in your office, in your workplace, watching you run your businesses, what do you actually do in a day
Krzysztof: I currently run four different entities. So my, headspace is divided into that, but I can now find systems of built ways how to do that without creating overall strain on my system. And so if you look behind what I’m doing, it is, looks quite dull because I do have mostly terminal windows looking like we’re back in the eighties with text or audio input and output.
And so I have multiple windows with different workflows and different agents open, and they’re doing their thing in the world. So they’re analysing the input signals. So what is happening on the market? There’s analysing what kind of email and communications coming towards [00:10:00] the company. They’re drafting responses. They’re coding things. So they’re creating new products based on user requests or new functionalities. They are checking for cost and security issues those agents are also preparing marketing materials, replying to sales emails, creating offers. So this is happening, but it is happening based on my model of the world that I think is correct.
And most of my work is now focused on how do we fine tune those models? How do we actually deepen our understanding of how the world works? So how value can be provided to people? What is important for customers? What is important in terms of the niche that I’m operating or the products I’m providing?
So I think this is the role that we will see more and more in the future world. So people will [00:11:00]create their best creative work at the edge of the understanding of our world between the model that is already working is reflecting our knowledge on the reality and the outside world. And on that edge, humans will discover themselves and the world.
Sue: That’s quite a thought. And I must say I’m a very pragmatic person, so I always want to think how will that work? And who’s gonna pay for what and to whom, how do you see that working in a world like that?
Krzysztof: In the short term, the, the companies will still be an engine of distribution of wealth. So the companies will still create value, provide value to customers, and then distribute the value amongst employees and shareholders and stakeholders. I don’t think this will drastically change in the next decade at least, we might see maybe more creative ways to [00:12:00] compensate people for their work.
So there could be a whole domain of results driven compensation, for example, right? Or or maybe we will decouple that more and more from time used on the job, right? So it’ll not be about putting in hours, it’ll be about the agency. I do feel we’re really solved Most of the IQ needs or IQ needs have been outsourced.
Now we have all in our pockets, we have basically access to top knowledge of the world. And so this will reshape how we educate ourselves. And the main value that we should optimise for is agency. So how clearly can we describe what we want to see in this world and what we want to achieve personally or within a business?
And how focused and motivated are we to actually make this happen? This becomes a core skill [00:13:00] of the future.
And I had a conversation today about that the small teams that are now building products, they just have a lot of agency within them. So it’s a small group of people, but very motivated to create, to make something happen. And those teams will be able to act very quickly. I believe companies for the future will be composed of multiple of those small teams acting together.
Sue: So I imagine that could be lots of multiples of small teams within. They end up being a large organisation. However, they’re all encompassed within it, as well as lots of other small businesses that are running individually.
Krzysztof: Even imagine, I I see bigger companies of the future almost like living organisms, where small groups of people create cell-like structures, small groups of people, 6, 8, 10 people working together in their most optimal environment. And then those cells create tissues or organs that have a certain [00:14:00] function, that product, that sales, that marketing, and then those organs constitute an organism that acts in this world with this evolutionary purpose.
It acts in this world with intention of creating something. And we’ve been building top down organisations for so many years, I think dating back to Roman legions or some kind of other military organisation form. Because we are limited by the complexity of information propagation it just takes a lot of people and coordination effort to pass on the same information to a group of 200, 300, 400 people while technologies for the first time enabling us to create a translation layer where the output of a single team can be immediately translated to hundreds of other teams and adjusted in the right way in terms of what is important for them.
Grounded in the context they have [00:15:00] translated into foreign languages. Not only region-wide, but also marketing has a different language than sales, for example. So those are foreign languages sometimes. So I think we’re really moving towards a future of more organically fluid and alive companies. And then those companies can become a source of self-actualization for human beings working in them because there’s less rigidity and more ways to find actually what you are passionate in life and apply it in your business world.
Sue: That sounds really exciting, that people can be self-actualizing, doing more of what they love, doing it in a way where there’s much more freedom and flexibility is what I’m hearing you say Krzysztof
Krzysztof: Yes.
Sue: If you are enjoying this then you can listen to more than 150 episodes. On all ranges of subjects from adventure and [00:16:00] exploration to creativity and social impact. We have organised them into 15 categories on our website. To make it easy for you to find your favourites, just hop on over to access to inspiration.org and have a listen.
Sue: So in terms of how we get there, if we took the perspective from a, a young person or somebody early their career today that’s thinking about the future, what do you think is going to be the competencies, skill sets, the mindset that the human being needs to have to survive and to thrive in that environment that you’re describing.
Krzysztof: Yeah, and I’ve been talking many parents lately, especially of kids that are now 16 to 20 and I’ve heard a lot of this fear being expressed, how can I help to support my kids in choosing a career or choosing a university or choosing a degree? And even agreed to put together a [00:17:00] four week course, trying to explain all of that or go into a discovery process of if your life can be driven by your passion, can you discover the passion before you make business decisions or job decisions.
So my my intuition here is that one key part is curiosity. And now the whole, you can go through the whole education system just by copy pasting valuable information, but if you’re not curious, you’ll not gain a lot from that system. So for me, it’s imperative that we really honour the creativity and keep the flame of creativity alive from early childhood to fully form adults.
’cause with that there is still hunger to explore the world. The other part is agency. Can you express clearly the intention that [00:18:00] you’d love to see manifested in the world? And this sounds simple, but this is a skill that we have really abandoned, I think, or we have not trained, we’ve been last two decades, we’re really like a Google era in many ways.
We’ve been training ourselves to ask questions and find small sub answers, but we have not really trained ourselves to visualise the end result and work from there. That part, so this is also going from reactive to creative. And sometimes this is a muscle that we’ve been not training for many years, many decades, because we’re told that, this creativity is not serious enough. For example, the creativity is an unplanned, unstructured process that involves not only our brains, but our bodies, our environments. And yeah, it’s sometimes also cutting through some of the emotions that arise in this creative process. And so I feel that [00:19:00] we really underestimate the field of creativity as a sort of scientific inquiry. What is creativity?
Sue: So I’m loving the list that you’re helping to generate here. Krzysztof is Curiosity, agency, moving from reactive to being creative, and how do we start to develop more of that? That really brings me onto this question of the title of our podcast, which is access to Inspiration. Would inspiration do you think, be on your list there? How important do you think that’s going to be for the future?
Krzysztof: I think it’s, really for me given for granted because we are all holders of unique wisdom because each and every one of us has a unique set of experiences. So also holds unexpressed ideas that are seeds. And [00:20:00] then how do we inspire each other? We can do that only through creating high trust environments where we go into conversations that penetrate a bit deeper than the surface level conversation that we have.
So this is also a skills, this trust, empathy building, holding spaces, having a deep conversation because it is really hard to learn about ourselves, or maybe even I can say stronger. We learn about ourselves only through relationships that we have in life.
Sue: So being able to talk with somebody else, perhaps express an idea or a thought, or even an of one’s own experience like we are doing here today, that in of itself can be a seed of inspiration for somebody else.
Krzysztof: I would say that’s the main way for me how I get inspired in my life.
Sue: I hope you’ve listened to a few of our episodes of the podcast previously. Maybe they’ve given you some inspiration. Krzysztof
Krzysztof: That’s why I’m here.[00:21:00]
Sue: Well that’s good to know. So inspiration also has a role in the future. So what inspires you?
Krzysztof: I am in a quest for aliveness, and I feel there’s an inner and an outer quest. So the more aliveness I see in the world around me and aliveness is this feature where people remember they can, they have a choice, they can react or they can create in life, and they choose to create. And then the surrounding aliveness creates more aliveness within me.
So I think there’s a, there’s some kind of a dual feedback loop here. And one of the main source of aliveness for me is my two daughters that keep on reminding me that we are born always fully alive. And then somehow in the course of our lives, we believe in some of the stories we create. And then we act out the stories instead of living fully flowing, unconstrained [00:22:00] life.
Sue: Listener, I know we haven’t got video with this podcast, but I can see Krzysztof ‘s face as he is talking about his daughters, and believe me, his eyes are sparkling. I’m sure we can hear it in your voice as well. So that gives me hope. It gives me hope that through conversation, through engaging with one another as human beings, not with computers, but being alive and living our lives and connecting with other people gives other people inspiration.
It gives other people agency and permission to think about how they’re living their lives. So there is a sense of relationship and connectedness. And then that idea generation can augment with AI to create something that’s of value for the world. That’s a very poor but high level summary. I think of what I’ve hear, heard you say in our conversation today, Krzysztof
Krzysztof: Yes.
And we also opened those spaces to express this creativity in so many other ways. I’ve been, we’ve been doing an [00:23:00] event that we call hackathons. So one of the beautiful things about this, the technology of artificial intelligence, that it is very intuitive for people when they see it.
So they’re able to step into this creator fields when they can use their natural language to describe what they want to create. But why type, why make full sentences. We did a hackathon where you could sing really what you wanna create, and that was the, the main rule or the only rule that you could not talk, you had to sing.
And then this becomes almost like a spell casting competition. And for me, this is a extremely good example of we could do it sitting in a room for screens and typing, or we could do it standing on a stage and just playing around with how quickly can we invent rhymes and rhythms and songs to describe what we wanna see in this world.
This is for me also very inspiring to see more people stepping boldly into their natural [00:24:00]weirdness sometimes, or their natural way of expressing themselves and finding a way to multiply that and enjoy the process. And I think we’ve been taking the world very seriously. And yeah, hopefully we can use some of this technology to hold life that more lightly.
Sue: So I’m curious now is what happened at the end of the hackathon? After all of this singing, what? What was the outcome?
Krzysztof: I could say that we have built things that solve real life problems, but that was to be expected that what happened really was an evening full of laughter and conversation and connection that I think a remote first company, because that was a remote first company did not experience in a long time or at least think since COVID.
Sue: That sounds amazing and creativity brought to the way in which [00:25:00] people could express themselves.
Krzysztof: Yes. And something magical happens when you use your voice in a different way. You also, your breathing pattern changes. You open up your body, you’ve done a standing. Yeah, there is this my, my hope and my dream is that we will be able to walk in this world expressing ourselves in creative ways. While most of the reactive work that we don’t like anyway is passed on to technology that’s allowing this to be handled in the background in almost like a seamless and magical way.
Sue: That’s a lovely vision to end our conversation on Krzysztof , in terms of helping our listener to imagine what could be possible. certainly sparked my curiosity today in the conversation think about some of the upsides that AI can bring to us as human beings, as society that can help us bring more of that aliveness as you describe it to us, [00:26:00] as you go forward.
Then what is the next the next activity, the next organisation that you are intending to seem be created in the world?
Krzysztof: So I’m stepping into this multiplier role. So I’d love to see more and more founders also from the impact space start working on their business, not in their business. So I would love to unlock this time and space for creativity in people who are called to create something in this world. So that’s my main focus for the upcoming months.
I’m really curious where the future of work will take us and what will be the wave of the new companies that are more organic and will be organising a think tank, maybe a small conference next year in Netherlands to gather people who are actively building and researching this subject to see what can we come up with?
Is there a [00:27:00] new framework for companies of the future to be created that allows people to actually fully know themselves and enjoy their creativity in the workplace? I’ve just opened up a, a conversation about something they call architecture of attention, because as with any new technology we’re also learning how it impacts our lives.
And I think that one of the key things that we are underestimating is how multi-threading and multitasking impacts our level of wellbeing. And with ai, it is possible to accelerate a lot of things that we do, but it’s also possible to get into a trap of doing so many things at once and scattering our attention and then feeling very exhausted.
So I think there’s a whole domain of architecture of attention. How do we design our ways of working? It’s almost like we’ve been designing our remote offices a few years ago, and now we’re designing the rules of how to [00:28:00] work with artificial intelligence, that it supports us and allows us to flourish and not print us out.
If anyone is working or considering working on such a topic, both in research institutions or in business context, I would love to connect because I feel there’s a lot to discover here.
Sue: And on that note, how should people get ahold of you? What’s the easiest way for them to find you and connect with you?
Krzysztof: My personal webpage is start creating AI and I’m happy to share other links to LinkedIn with you, Sue.
Sue: Fantastic. it’s been really a fascinating conversation. I’m ready to go and be thinking about AI in a slightly different way, having had a chance to reflect on it with you today, Krzysztof . So thank you so much for your time and I wish you all the best in these endeavours that you described to us there.
Krzysztof: Thank you’s. Pleasure, and thank you for the curiosity you bring to every question.
[00:29:00] Thank you, Krzysztof for such a thought provoking conversation and reminding us that agency and curiosity might be the real skills needed in the future. Before you go listener, take a moment to think about what stood out for you today in the conversation. Was it the idea of stepping from reactive to creative or simply the reminder that aliveness is a choice that we need to keep making?
Whatever it was, sit with it for a moment. That’s often where the real inspiration takes root. And if this episode gave you something worth passing on, take a minute to share this episode with others that you might think would value it too.
Thanks for listening to the Access to Inspiration podcast. I’m Sue Stockdale and look forward to connecting with you next time.