The internet was built to connect people. But somewhere along the way, it started doing the opposite.
That was the central tension at the heart of Pay Attention Live: Building the Human Internet, a webinar series co-hosted by Tech Funding News and the global work payments platform Native Teams. The first session, a Women in Tech edition, brought together three speakers to examine how AI, remote work, and shifting user behaviour are reshaping the way people connect, collaborate, and build online.
The panel featured Alyx van der Vorm, founder and CEO of social discovery app Clyx; Aleksandra Mitrevska, co-founder and CXO of Native Teams; and Akansha Dimri, editor-in-chief and founder of Tech Funding News. The session was moderated by Native Teams’ head of brand marketing, Sonia Shapiro.
‘We built the fastest loneliness machine in history’
Dimri opened with a line that set the tone for everything that followed. “We built the fastest and most scalable loneliness machine in history, and now we’re trying to fix it.”
The numbers back her up. Around 5.5 billion people are online globally, nearly 70% of the world’s population, yet approximately 27% of Gen Z report feeling lonely on a daily basis, despite being constantly connected. Over half of that generation spends more than four hours a day on social media, and almost half say it leaves them feeling anxious or emotionally drained.
Digital spaces are increasingly dominated by AI-generated content, designed to maximise engagement rather than human connection, and that gap between connectivity and closeness is growing. The question the panel set out to answer: why and what comes next?
Social media is designed wrong
Van der Vorm, whose company Clyx uses neuroscience and AI to help people find real-world events and build local friendships, argued the problem is structural. “Most social media is built around making you look at things that happened in the past. Humans are voyeuristic, but never before have we been able to see everything that happened in our absence. That’s incredibly destructive for self-esteem.”
Clyx reverses the traditional approach: instead of showing what friends did yesterday, it surfaces what they’re doing tomorrow and gets users off their phones and into the room. The response from users, Van der Vorm said, has been striking. “We get DMs every day from people saying, ‘You helped me find my friends.’ I had a user tell me they would have left Miami if it wasn’t for the app.”
On Gen Z’s growing rejection of traditional platforms, she was direct: “It’s not distrust, it’s realisation. People are beginning to understand that watching other people’s lives doesn’t actually make them happy.” The digital detox movement, she added, is partly a self-accountability mechanism, and talking about stepping back makes it harder to quietly go back. Younger generations are also opting for closed social media and smaller, more curated communities over open platforms, a shift that signals something deeper than fatigue.
Remote work reveals culture, it doesn’t create it
Mitrevska brought a different lens: what happens to trust when physical proximity disappears. The answer, she said, is that dysfunction which was previously absorbed by the office becomes immediately visible when teams go remote.
“In physical offices, companies survive a lot of dysfunction through proximity. People overhear conversations, build informal relationships, and fill communication gaps naturally. Remote work removes all of those invisible safety nets.”
Native Teams, which operates in 95 countries and helps businesses manage global remote teams, grew from 30 to 300 people in just a few years. The core lesson: intentionality replaces proximity. “Clarity is a form of care,” Mitrevska said. “People trust environments where expectations are clear, decisions are explainable, and information is accessible to everyone.”
Her warning on assumptions was pointed. “Uncertainty grows much faster remotely. When people don’t have context, they fill the gap with assumptions, and assumptions are very expensive for culture.”
Her advice to companies still figuring this out: stop treating AI as something deployed against your workforce. “People can tell when technology is used to support them versus when it’s used to distance them from the company. Let AI handle complexity. Let humans deliver empathy, judgment, and trust.”
What the funding data actually shows
Dimri offered a market-level view from TFN’s vantage point. Of the roughly 60 funding pitch emails the publication receives daily, around 90% are now AI-related. That concentration raises a question that investors haven’t fully answered: in the race to automate, are companies forgetting the human element entirely?
“AI-washing is a real problem,” she said. “When a company tells me they’ve raised $50M and pivoted to AI, and then can’t explain how – that’s not a pivot, that’s a press release.” The day of the webinar, Meta had just announced workforce cuts tied to its AI restructuring – a live example of the tensions the panel was discussing.
On what TFN has found to be the most meaningful signal of engagement: “Are people genuinely missing you? That is the human interest test. We grew to nearly 70,000 LinkedIn followers organically, not by chasing algorithms, but by personalising every story and bringing the human element to every post.”
Her outlook for the next three to five years: trust as infrastructure, and humans as a premium product. “Anything with a genuine human element – a publication with real writers, a platform with real community – is going to become more valuable, not less, as AI takes over more of the internet.”
What should we pay attention to?
The session closed with each speaker offering a single focus for the moment.
Van der Vorm said, “Our attention is being milked by platforms for their fiduciary gain and that’s only more true when you can automate a LinkedIn post twice a day from ChatGPT. Be hyper-vigilant about what you give your time to.”
Mitrevska added, “Time is our most important currency. We always think we have more of it than we do.”
Dimri concluded, “Founders are no longer just business operators; they’re learning AI tools while running companies. If you’re not building trust and human connection into your product, start now.”
This content is produced in collaboration with Native Teams.
