SMA Empathy Exchange: AI & Your Teen

A discussion about AI and teenagers in 2026 with Michelle Randall and Mindjoy

This session will cover:

1. How teens actually search today

Teenagers no longer look things up. They experience information through algorithms that summarise, recommend and prioritise content for them.

2. What AI snippets really are

AI snippets don’t think or verify, they predict the most likely answer based on patterns in existing content.

3. How TikTok / social media decides what you see

TikTok amplifies what keeps people watching and reacting, not necessarily what is accurate or balanced.

4. The new source problem

In an AI-driven world, the source is often invisible, which makes it harder to know who created the information or why.

5. How to be powerful, not passive

The real digital skill today is not finding answers quickly, but questioning how and why those answers appeared in front of you.

About Michelle Randall

Michelle Randall is Deputy Head of Content at Greenpark, a global content agency, where she leads content strategy for international brands navigating the new AI-shaped information landscape. She has delivered award-winning campaigns for brands including Unilever, Nestlé, Campari, Clarins and others, helping them cut through in crowded digital environments.

Her expertise sits at the intersection of content, search and artificial intelligence, understanding how platforms, algorithms and large language models decide which brands get surfaced, summarised and shared. She works across web and social ecosystems to help brands become the most visible and authoritative voices in their category, knowing that in the age of AI, the source that gets cited is often the one that wins awareness and recall.

About Mindjoy (Developed by an SMA Alumnus)

Mindjoy is an AI-first platform committed to grow talent and help young people build the skills humanity needs to flourish with technology. We're building infrastructure that facilitates collaboration between human creativity and the best AI technology for learning. The promise of augmented human intelligence offers us an opportunity for an untethered education where every person can learn with an expert who guides our curiosity.

A good education creates a powerful ripple effect: enriching individual lives while building humanity's collective capacity to solve problems. A good education is not predicated on attending school. Being in school is not that same as learning.

Think back to when you learned something you truly loved. Maybe it was building your first website, learning to dribble, mastering a new board game, or learning to draw something in HD. That moment when everything clicked – that spark of "I can do this!" – that's not just a nice memory. It's the foundation of what it means to have agency as a learner. It's the moment you internalize that your efforts yield outputs, it's the aha moment that you can just learn to do things.