Room to Be Human: Our Future is Relational | Qi Zhai- McCartney | TEDxAsia Pacific U

AI can already produce a flawless deck in five minutes. Qi Zhai-McCartney calls that amazing and suffocating in the same breath, and argues we cannot out-execute the machine on output, which means the question everyone is asking is the wrong one.

Qi is the founder of Atlas Therapy & Coaching, a finance professional turned psychotherapist and couples therapist who has lived in six countries and nine cities. She makes the case for Relational Intelligence as the essential skill of the AI era rather than a soft one.

Drawing on the 88-year Harvard Study of Adult Development, Amy Cuddy's work on first impressions, Harlow's monkeys and polyvagal theory, she offers three relational truths: warmth matters more than competence, stop solving and start witnessing, and co-regulate before you argue the facts. We are human beings, not human doings. Qi Zhai-McCartney is a psychotherapist, coach, & founder specializing in Relational Intelligence, the "human technology" required for today’s hyper-rational world. A Stanford-educated ""cultural chameleon,"" Qi spent two decades in global finance at institutions including Capital Group, Credit Suisse, and the World Bank. Her career transition was sparked by a profound realization: that over-indexing on technical performance at the expense of our humanity actually caps our potential for making real impact.

As founder of Atlas Therapy & Coaching, Qi works with global leaders, high-stakes teams, and multicultural families to bridge the gap between technical wealth and emotional poverty. Her approach combines the pragmatism of finance with deep clinical insights to help people move from output-based survival toward a life of purpose. A media guest expert for Bloomberg and other media outlets, Qi is also VP of the Stanford Alumni Club of Singapore and a mother of four in a blended family. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx