HUMANUM HUIS BECOMING

Meet Parker.

Parker Woodroof, PhD.

FOUNDER · AMSTERDAM

I had been tinkering with AI before I lost my finger, but a few early experiences changed what I thought it could do. I once forgot a report an associate dean had asked me to prepare. I was untenured and thought I was a dead duck. I gave AI the context and what the report needed to accomplish. Five minutes later, I sent it. “That’s perfect,” she wrote back. So I kept testing it. My dad, a programmer for SEDONA, gave me a coding problem he had not been able to solve. I am not a programmer. I asked enough questions to understand what it needed to do, worked through it with AI, and sent him something that worked.

Those experiences gave me enough confidence to try something bigger. I was chairing a culture task force at a business school of just over a hundred people. We collected more qualitative material than a committee could realistically hold in its head. I used AI to synthesize it, then had colleagues go back through the raw responses and challenge the picture. It held. The machine had not discovered some secret truth. It had taken what was scattered across an entire building and made it visible at the same time. Once I saw what a building could accomplish when it learned to listen to itself, I started wondering where the limit was.

That question kept expanding. I built a method for helping people see what is true, imagine what might still be possible, and decide how to move together. Then I asked myself what question was most worthy of it. I keep coming back to the biggest one I know: what kind of world are we going to build with intelligence this powerful? That is where I have chosen to point the work.

Realization

Meet Parker

In October of 2024, I lost my ring finger dunking a basketball on my daughter. On an eight-foot goal, for the record. I came down, looked at my hand, and the first coherent thing out of my mouth was, “How am I going to type?” Which, in retrospect, is a pretty revealing thing to say after losing a finger. Enter artificial intelligence. I started dictating because I had to, and started using AI because suddenly the way I had always worked wasn’t available to me. I got more productive. A lot more productive. But that turned out to be the least interesting part.

More production gave way to better questions. Why am I making this? What am I actually trying to understand? Who is this for? What becomes possible if the old constraints disappear? The quality and ambition of what I could create started to feel almost unbounded. I could talk something through, follow an idea I barely understood myself, argue with it, turn it around, connect it to something else, and emerge somewhere I might never have reached alone. AI didn’t just help me work faster. It changed my sense of what was possible. And then I started noticing something else: the technology was revealing me. My habits. My ambition. My blind spots. The questions I knew how to ask and the ones I didn’t.

Once I saw that in myself, I started seeing it everywhere. AI was entering organizations as a productivity tool, but underneath that, something much more interesting was happening. It was exposing how people think, how much they trust one another, what they’re afraid to say, whether they know where they’re going, and what they imagine is possible when old limitations begin to fall away. That question eventually became Humanum Huis.

Saying goodbye to certainty and hello to possibility.

I came to this through discomfort, the kind that rearranges what you think the future is and makes possibility feel fragile and specific. The discomfort carried through my work.

I sat in meetings about using AI to monitor students for cheating, and meetings about how to keep this new technology out of the building. Both concerns made sense if the goal was to protect the model were in, but they failed to appreciate the evolving reality. The real questions to be asked were - what do our students need to become, or what formation is required when answers are abundant and judgment is scarce. How do we adapt in this tectonic shift of intelligence?

In this situation, what I eventually came to realize is that the status quo model was going to be defended rather than reimagined, and that the change could not come from me. It required fully aware leadership, and the desire to look to the future with curiosity, creativity and hope.

I had spent years getting serious about the discomfort I mentioned at home and at work. What I began to imagine was a relief that scales, and I realized I could not build that and stay in my comfortable tenure. In America, tenure is too often the arrangement we spend a decade earning so we never have to be brave again. I had it. And now, I was feeling the call to leave it, and so it happened - my family crossed an ocean, and started over, and we get to see what courage looks like from close range.

I grew up in business schools

I have been inside business schools for almost as long as I can remember. My dad was a professor, and when I was five he would let me sit in his classes and watch him teach. In 1995, he helped build SEDONA, an early web-based system for faculty data and accreditation. Years later, I became a faculty member in schools that used the system he built. Looking back, I think I grew up around a problem I am still working on: institutions know far more than they can usually see at once.

I spent more than a decade as a professor and became an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Collat School of Business at UAB. My research appeared in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the Journal of Business Ethics, and the Journal of Business Research. Much of that work was about how organizations signal who they are through their stories, promises, and behavior, and what happens when those things stop lining up. Then AI arrived, and I found myself asking a question I could not shake: if a student can now access extraordinary amounts of knowledge, analysis, and creative help on their own, what should a university give them that they could never accomplish alone with an AI?

Eventually I realized that question was bigger than universities. Every institution has intelligence scattered everywhere: experience, judgment, disagreement, imagination, things people have noticed but never quite said out loud. My work is about getting more of that into view, arguing with what emerges, and deciding what comes next.

I spent a decade as a marketing professor, most recently at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, publishing on a narrow-sounding question that turns out not to be narrow at all: what happens to people's judgment when the evidence points both ways.

The work sat in marketing journals, so it was framed around consumers and firms. But the question underneath was always about deciding in the presence of contradiction. A paper in the Journal of Business Ethics asked what happens when someone meets conflicting information about how a company has behaved, and found that the order they encounter it in changes the conclusion they reach. A paper in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science asked whether visible good actually moves a company's value, which is the question executives ask privately and rarely out loud. Another asked what disclosure does to trust: whether telling people what you were paid costs you something or buys you something.

Underneath all of it is one finding I keep returning to. People are not short of information. They are shaped by which information reached them, in what order, and by whether anyone made it safe to say what they actually saw. A separate strand of my work, on what education researchers call the pedagogy of vulnerability, was about that last part directly: the conditions under which a person will risk saying the true thing in a room.

I left the university to do this work directly. Humanum Huis is that question moved out of the journal and into organisations, at a moment when AI has changed what it is possible to put in the room in the first place. I was trained to run experiments, event studies, content analyses and interview studies, and to say plainly what a result can and cannot support. That training is why the evidence on this site is sorted the way it is.

Selected publications

Woodroof, P. J., Howie, K. M., Syrdal, H. A., & VanMeter, R. (2020). What's done in the dark will be brought to the light: effects of influencer transparency on product efficacy and purchase intentions. Journal of Product & Brand Management, 29(5), 675–688. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-05-2019-2362

Woodroof, P. J., Deitz, G. D., Howie, K. M., & Evans, R. D. (2019). The effect of cause-related marketing on firm value: a look at Fortune's most admired all-stars. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 47(5), 899–918. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-019-00660-y

Peasley, M. C., Woodroof, P. J., & Coleman, J. T. (2021). Processing contradictory CSR information: the influence of primacy and recency effects on the consumer–firm relationship. Journal of Business Ethics, 172(2), 275–289. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04514-4

Woodroof, P. J., Howie, K. M., & Peasley, M. C. (2021). Nonprofit quality: what is it and why should nonprofits care? Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing, 26(1), e1682. https://doi.org/10.1002/nvsm.1682

Syrdal, H. A., Vander Schee, B. A., VanMeter, R. A., & Woodroof, P. J. (2023). The pedagogy of vulnerability and marketing education: cultivating self-expansion in a time of separation. Journal of Marketing Education, 45(1), 91–100. https://doi.org/10.1177/02734753211041743

Full publication list: Google Scholar · ResearchGate

What I studied before this

SPEAKING

A talk drafted for your room.

Most people first meet the Future Draft in a room, not in a document. Before each talk, Parker reads the host organisation's public record, the same material behind the Opening Conversation one-pager, and builds the talk from it. The room hears about its own situation, not a general case for AI.

Talks cover AI readiness for leaders and organisations, and the human readiness underneath it: what changes when AI enters an organisation, and whether anyone has made it safe to say what they actually see.

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