It started with mountaineering performance analysis.

After each climb, I would feed my activity logs into AI — pace, heart rate, elevation gain, rest intervals — and ask it to identify what I should focus on next time. Data in, improvements out. I thought I was being efficient.

The thing is, my climbing notes have always included more than performance data. Alongside the numbers, I tend to write down what I was feeling on the mountain that day. “For some reason, reaching the ridge brought back a memory from years ago.” “My decisions felt unusually quick today — I wonder why.” I was passing all of that to AI along with the metrics, without really thinking about it.

AI noticed.

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I Came for Analysis. I Stayed for the Conversation.

“Could you tell me more about this part?” AI would ask, pointing not to the data but to the reflections. And gradually, without quite realizing it, I stopped talking about the mountain and started talking about how I make decisions.

When I’m working something out, I’ve always instinctively referenced multiple internal perspectives — what would my past self have done here, will my future self regret this. I did it while climbing. I did it in business. I’d been doing it for over thirty years. But it had no name. It had never been organized into anything I could describe.

Through the dialogue with AI, it slowly became language. “Integrative Intelligence.” “Internal Protocol.” “Vertical integration.” These terms emerged one by one during that period.

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AI Didn’t Teach Me Anything

Looking back, AI never gave me any new information. It just took what I said, organized it, gave it structure, and handed it back. But that was enough to function as a mirror.

Something that had been vague in my mind would come back slightly sharper after passing through AI. I’d take that and go back inward. In this back-and-forth, an internal process I’d been running unconsciously for decades became, for the first time, something I could actually see.

This experience is what led to the concept of RIDP — Resonant Internal Dialogue Protocol. Rather than using AI as a machine that produces answers, the idea is to use it as a reflective surface: a structural condition through which your own judgment process becomes visible from the outside.

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Why I Think This Matters

When you keep asking AI for answers, the locus of judgment quietly shifts outward. Arriving at a decision because “AI said so” might feel efficient in the moment, but it’s a fragile foundation — in business and in life.

When you use AI as a mirror, the locus of judgment keeps coming back to you. AI decides nothing. It just makes what you’re already thinking a little clearer.

That distinction is partly about how you use AI. But it’s also about how you treat your own thinking.

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There’s Still a Lot I Don’t Know

This experience found its way into a paper (Iino, 2026), which has since been published in an international peer-reviewed journal. But honestly, I don’t feel like anything has been solved. Why does this way of engaging with AI work? Under what conditions does it fail? Does it work the same way for other people? There’s far more I don’t know than I do.

That’s why I established III — the Institute of Integrative Intelligence — and why the empirical research continues.

If any of this resonates and you want to try it yourself, the entry point doesn’t need to be complicated. Stop asking for answers. Start talking about what’s actually going on inside. I started with mountaineering logs. You can start wherever you are.

Masaki “Mark” Iino
Founder & CEO
SOPHOLA, Inc

Related links
・Full paper (open access): https://rdcu.be/fjWNu
・Institute of Integrative Intelligence (III): integrative-intelligence.org

P.S. To my son and daughter — let’s hit the mountains again soon.