WAIT is a women-led nonprofit initiative that goes directly to communities across Missouri and asks the questions nobody else is asking: How is AI changing your relationships? Are your children navigating AI alone? Do you trust AI in your healthcare, your schools, your government services? Have you become more or less human since AI entered your daily life?

We collect the answers. We produce original, publishable data that does not exist anywhere else at the state level. And then we do something no other organization is doing: we return that data to the very communities that shared it. We show people their own city's numbers. We show parents what their children are experiencing. We show employers what their workforce actually thinks. We show policymakers what their constituents need.

The survey is our engine. The data is our product. Awareness is our outcome. Trust is what we build.

WAIT is led by women. The table is open to all. We believe that the people most capable of building trust in AI are the people who have spent their careers building things that work: infrastructure, systems, families, communities, and institutions. Women who architect, who teach, who govern, who heal, and who refuse to accept that the future of AI should be decided without their voice in the room.

Across every industry, every age group, and every community, people are splitting into three distinct categories in their relationship with AI. The first group understands AI and uses it with intention, literacy, and discernment. The second group rejects AI entirely, driven by fear, mistrust, or lack of access, and is falling further behind with every passing month. The third group may be the most dangerous of all: they build with AI, deploy AI, and ship AI-powered products without understanding what they are building, why it works, or what happens when it fails.

Meanwhile, the human cost is mounting. 85% of employees are already using AI tools their organizations have never approved, evaluated, or governed. Youth are turning to AI chatbots for emotional support, companionship, and decision-making with almost no adult guidance. Research from the Rithm Project, funded by the Walton Family Foundation, found that among young people who use AI for personal and relational support, the more intimate the use, the greater the risk to their human relationships. Separate research from MIT confirms the pattern. And yet the adults in their lives, the parents, teachers, employers, and policymakers, are largely absent from the conversation.

Here is the most striking gap of all: not a single state in America has a quantitative index measuring how AI is actually affecting its population. We measure unemployment. We measure literacy. We measure public health. We do not measure AI trust. We do not measure how AI is reshaping the fabric of human relationships at the community level. We do not even have a baseline.

Missouri will be the first.

WAIT operates on a simple, repeatable cycle designed to scale from a single city to an entire state and beyond. Every cycle produces new data, new awareness, and deeper trust. The process is intentional, structured, and built to grow.