I was about to write a post about ESG, but my tone turned out to be too negative - both toward the tool itself and the real-world results I see around it😈

So, going into 2026, I want to focus more on possibilities, not just criticism (at least when that’s possible). Let’s call it my New Year’s resolution.

Instead, I want to share a piece of news that genuinely stopped me🤩

Solutions may come from completely unexpected domains.

While the world seems to be splitting into two camps - those who fear AI and those who already use it daily in their work - there are stories that make it almost impossible to remain a skeptic.

One of the most striking examples came from medicine 💊

Researchers at the Columbia University Fertility Center used an AI system called STAR (Sperm Tracking and Recovery) to solve a problem that had defeated humans.

A couple faced severe male-factor infertility.

Lab technicians manually searched semen samples under a microscope for two full days - without finding a single viable sperm cell.

The AI system analyzed millions of images in just hours.

It identified 44 viable sperm cells - enough to proceed with IVF.

The result: a successful pregnancy. 🤰

This wasn’t “AI magic.”

It was computational scale applied to a problem where human time, attention, and endurance simply hit a wall.

The key takeaway for me 🧠

AI isn’t necessarily smarter than humans.

It is faster, tireless, and massively scalable - and that makes it uniquely powerful exactly where human limitations become the bottleneck. This is not about replacing people.

What struck me even more was the origin of this AI tool. STAR wasn’t born in a fertility lab - it was inspired by algorithms originally used in astronomy to detect distant stars and galaxies in vast data sets. Scientists literally took a method designed to search the cosmos and reoriented it to find rare viable sperm cells that human technicians could not detect.

This example perfectly illustrates why we should not think inside the boxes of our own industries - solutions may come from completely unexpected domains. ✨

Sources:

Time: https://lnkd.in/dGfCPbBh

Columbia Spectator: https://lnkd.in/dRXt-tVu

Drugs.com: https://lnkd.in/dyVCqw2i