The story

Over 30 years of watching how people use — and misuse — powerful tools.

Dr. Kilburg is a Cognitive Strategist for the Age of AI — a practitioner, theorist, and institution builder working at the intersection of experimental psychology, human factors, and AI adoption. His work focuses on what AI does to people: how judgment, trust, responsibility, and expertise change when AI is embedded in decision-making. The real system being transformed, in his view, is not the tool. It is human cognition interacting with it.

His career spans three decades and five continents, beginning with U.S. Army Infantry service and moving through academia — where he taught experimental psychology at Eastern Washington University and conducted research as a Japanese Government Monbusho Fellow — and then into a 21-year career as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer at the State Department.

His diplomatic work included service as a Press Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, briefing Secretaries of State and ambassadors, directing press for engagements involving U.S. presidents and vice presidents, contributing intelligence analyses to the President’s Daily Brief, and serving as Spokesperson for the Bureau of Energy Resources. He ghostwrote for senior officials in the Financial Times and Foreign Policy, directed U.S. strategic communications across Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and contributed to billion-dollar U.S.–EU trade messaging. He managed 50+ staff and $20M in assets, and served on the crisis team that evacuated 25,000 Americans following Hurricane Wilma. A recipient of multiple Superior and Meritorious Honor Awards, he holds a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology (Social Cognition) from DePaul University and is trained in four languages. Throughout his career he has exemplified the scientist-practitioner model — bridging rigorous research and real-world application at every stage.

When generative AI arrived, Dr. Kilburg recognized its significance before institutional guidance existed. He pioneered “ChatGPT Diplomacy” at the State Department — building custom GPTs for diplomatic operations including audience segmentation, strategic communications guidance, media analysis, and narrative development, and deploying them across thousands of Foreign Service Officers at posts worldwide. He applied AI-assisted research to public opinion analysis across five countries, producing actionable intelligence on what moves favorability toward U.S. foreign policy objectives. The initiative he led produced a cable that went to every diplomatic and consular post in the world, under the Secretary of State’s signature. It earned a nomination for the Department’s AI Innovation Award.

What he discovered in that work became the foundation of Mind Leap Institute: that the technology was never the hard part. The hard part was the human — whether the person using AI retained their judgment, their discernment, and their sense of purpose. Or whether they quietly handed those things away.

Philosophy

The goal is not to slow AI adoption. It is to make it conscious — and to build the discipline that makes it wiser.

The dominant narrative about AI is a productivity story — more output, faster delivery, lower cost. That story is real, but incomplete. What it misses is the question of what happens to the human in the process. And what it misses entirely is what happens to the collective — the institutions, the epistemic infrastructure, the democratic conditions — when hundreds of millions of individuals each make individually reasonable choices that aggregate, at scale, into civilizational consequences.

Dr. Kilburg’s work is grounded in a different question: not “how do we get more from AI?” but “how do we remain fully ourselves while using it — and how do we protect the conditions on which civil society depends?” The frameworks he has developed — The Triad™, REWIRE™, the Purpose Ladder™ — are the answer to that question at the individual and organizational level. Cognitive Civic Studies and the Hierarchy of Intelligence Governance are the answer at the civilizational level.

The organizations and individuals who will thrive in the age of AI are not those who adopt the most tools. They are those who build the human capacity to use them wisely — and the institutions that protect the cognitive conditions on which everything else depends.