A few years ago I started hosting networking events in New York because I was looking for something I couldn’t find anywhere else: a room where people could meet without feeling like every conversation had to turn into a business opportunity or transaction, especially if they were pursuing a unique path.
That’s how my community, For The Firsts, was born. As the first person in my family to build a career in corporate America, I was a “first”. And I wanted to create a room where other “firsts” could connect without the pressure and judgment of more traditional networking environments.
After dozens of these meetups, the same thing kept coming back to me. The conversations people remembered almost never started with a job title, a company, or an elevator pitch. They stuck because at some point the talking moved away from trading credentials and toward actually understanding the person across the table.
That difference matters more now, because the way we build professional relationships is changing underneath us. As AI takes over more of our routine communication and hybrid work strips out the informal moments we used to take for granted, the ability to build trust through conversation is only becoming more valuable.
Technology Has Made It Easier to Connect, Not Necessarily to Communicate
Over the past decade we have gotten good, maybe too good, at professional communication. You can introduce yourself on LinkedIn long before you ever shake a hand. Meetings get scheduled without anyone speaking. AI will draft the email, summarize the call, and line up the follow-up in seconds.
All of that took the friction out of connecting and opened doors that didn’t exist a generation ago, but it also changed something about how real those relationships feel.
For a lot of people, especially anyone working remotely or across a distributed team, the moments that used to build trust on their own have gotten rare. There are fewer hallway conversations, fewer lunches with colleagues, and fewer chances to find common ground before the work talk even starts.
Those small moments are not soft or optional. They are where trust actually gets built, and when they disappear, both people and the companies they work for pay for it. The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation made that case directly, tying social connection not just to how we feel as individuals but to how our organizations perform. It makes me wonder whether all of our efficiency is quietly costing us the connection we were after in the first place.
Most Networking Advice Starts in the Wrong Place
Most networking advice starts by gathering information. What do you do, where do you work, how long have you been there? Those questions give you context, but they rarely produce the conversation someone is still turning over weeks later, because they pull people toward the polished version of themselves instead of the interesting one.
The conversations with real staying power tend to start the moment someone gets curious about another person’s experience instead of their resume. So I stopped asking people what they do and started asking what they had been excited to learn lately. Instead of how long they had been somewhere, I wanted to know what surprised them most when they switched careers. And rather than where they saw themselves in five years, I asked which decision had shaped their career the most so far.
None of those questions are original, and that is not the point. They work because they ask for a story instead of a summary, and a story shows you how someone thinks, what they value, and what they have learned, the things a standard networking script never gets near.
Curiosity Is Becoming a Competitive Advantage
One lesson caught me off guard more than the rest. The people who create the conversations everyone remembers are rarely the most charismatic ones in the room. More often they are the ones who are genuinely curious about everybody else. They are not waiting for their turn to talk, they are locked into the story unfolding in front of them.
That kind of curiosity has become one of the most valuable things you can bring to modern work. Companies pour money into communication training, leadership development, and presentation coaching, and all of that is worth doing. But curiosity, the ability to ask a real question, listen closely, and make another person feel understood, still gets treated as a trait you either have or you don’t, rather than a skill you can build. I think that is a mistake.
Strong teams run on it, and so do good managers, the best salespeople, founders, recruiters, and mentors. Understanding where another person is coming from shapes nearly every kind of knowledge work we do, and it is one of the few skills almost no one practices on purpose.
The Future of Work Still Depends on Human Relationships
AI is going to keep changing how work gets done. It will take on the repetitive tasks, lift the administrative weight, and help us communicate faster than we ever have. What it cannot do is make another person feel heard, and that is still the foundation under collaboration, leadership, mentorship, hiring, and every partnership worth having.
As the workplace keeps moving online, my guess is that we will spend less energy optimizing how we communicate and a lot more energy trying to make it mean something. The people who stand out will not be the ones with the biggest online network. They will be the ones who can build trust across a table from someone they met ten minutes ago.
I built For The Firsts, and later a deck of cards called First Round, on a pretty simple bet: that the right question asked in person still does something no feed or algorithm can. Nothing about AI has made me doubt that. If anything, it has made me more sure that the people who win the next decade will be the ones who never stopped believing a good conversation is worth showing up for.
