Tag: teams

Ben Thompson shared what feels like a very important insight in yesterday’s Stratechery newsletter:

I think there is a massive AI-enabled opportunity that is currently being missed by all of the major model-makers, or at least their product teams: human-AI agents.

Right now all of the consumer-focused AI interfaces — i.e. the chatbots — are built for a single user… There is a huge productivity unlock, however, that happens when you make them multiuser.

He goes on to describe an interaction he had in the last few days with his assistant Daman:

Last week Daman did some initial research for a complex decision using ChatGPT; he then shared a link to his chat, which meant I could go back to the beginning and trace his assumptions, the back-and-forth of his conversation, and then continue the conversation on my side. After diving deeper into various options — and correcting a few errant assumptions from the beginning — I came up with a promising course of action and, instead of having to explain it all to Daman to follow up on, I simply shared a link to my version of the chat back to him for reference.

What Thompson is describing is team interaction with the participation of a chatbot — like having it as part of the team. Sort of like having a water cooler conversation with a group of colleagues, one of whom (the chatbot) has done a lot of work and is sharing it with the others who then “embrace and extend” its findings.

Ben concludes:

I was absolutely blown away by how well this worked. Instead of replacing Daman with an AI agent, … I accidentally stumbled into a way to supercharge Daman’s value to me: he’s my human AI agent!

Seems like this is such a great idea that it will be quickly embraced by the various team centric platforms. Maybe it already has been somewhere? Reminds me a bit of the NotebookLM podcast capability where you can interrupt the conversation going back and forth between the two hosts.

Fascinating stuff! Look forward to seeing how this evolves as it involves treating AI as an adjunct to human productivity rather than just a white collar job replacement.