The Exchanges

Q I mean, even, even in a world where there's the maintainer, if something breaks and you're an enterprise, you want someone to call. You want to go into someone's office, right?

A Yes. You also want someone to blame. You want someone to blame. That's an important piece. I think a lot of people are forgetting that, like, The, the question of, is AI gonna replace this, this, this, whether it's a task, a job, a company, a product, something. Um, often I am asked, the first question I'm asking myself is, who's liable now? Who would be liable in that other world? And do I think that that trade-off is worth it right now? Like, I work with Fortune 500 CEOs every single day. They, no way. No way. They want to be able to call because they want someone to unblock. They want someone to secure. The other thing is that, um, let's say that, um, let's just say it's a Salesforce example and that you could build a shitty CRM or a simple CRM or something that's just running on your own. Um, but Salesforce has relationships with all the AI labs. They are, you know, getting into early testing. And so by the time a new model comes out, You are facing it as a day one person. They're facing it as a day 30 maybe. And so you're also going to be on a very big lag. Um, and so as you're thinking about that cost trade-off, I think in addition to all the things that we just talked about with enterprise-grade security and maintaining whatever, you just also don't want to experience that lag. Like we're moving to a world where being fast to the punch and getting a 30 day, 60 day, hundr…

AI assessment note: “Yes. You also want someone to blame. That's an important piece.”

Q Um, not affiliated, but you can just see like what's charting and what are people downloading? And it's like, okay, in a world where super intelligence is now on tap, How can I make an AI native version of this? Um, or undercut, you know, from a price perspective or just drive more value. Like there's ways, there's now like opportunity to, to, to, to enter some of these markets.

A I, I completely agree with you, and I think Agent First software is absolutely one. Um, two things that I actually think are really interesting, or maybe three by the time I get to it, but interesting research avenues to learn more opportunities like the one you just mentioned. So one, YC posts videos on Instagram for what type of applications they're looking for, and Agent First software is one of them. So Listening to what YC is asking for, assume that they are already thinking, 18 months out. Um, so that's definitely one arbitrage research opportunity. The second is Matt Van Horn's last 30 days research skill, which is just amazing. I've, like, inner, um, I've integrated that with my, like, Claude Wiki. Love it.

AI assessment note: “interesting research avenues to learn more opportunities like the one you just mentioned”

Q Ok, perfect. So, where do you want to start?

A So this is, and I'm happy to debate you on this because we haven't chatted about this, but I feel like managing agents feels like I am their direct manager, and I'm like, Susie, go over there, and Betty, go over there, and Jeremy, go over here, and I feel like I am three rungs above at like an SVP overseeing level where I feel like I am setting up the infrastructure and then They are figuring out the best way to execute within that. Um, and so I feel like I'm moving from managing to like waiting for escalations. Um, or I feel like I'm moving away from delegating and more just deciding what should or shouldn't happen. And so it's a little bit more of the, like a, like a liability role where I just get to be the final say of what happens, um, and come in for like critical thinking steps. But does it, like, am I the only one that feels like that is happening? I just, it feels like that word is wrong. Like, I see managing agents everywhere, and it just feels like anyone that is still talking about, you should manage agents, feels like early twenty-twenty-six talk.

AI assessment note: “I feel like managing agents feels like I am their direct manager”

Q hard, right? Cause like, it, it, it does feel like there's like a ramp up time to actually get to a point where you have an AI workforce that's working for you, that is efficient, And I think a lot of people, what happens is they try, they fail, and they're like, this isn't for me, or the models aren't good enough yet, or, and you know what I mean?

A Yeah, so, so here's, here's my take on that. Um, I think that you can spin up a workforce with one prompt, right? Like, I've shared this prompt publicly, um, you can just prompt and say, I am a founder, I am building an AI personal shopper, my team is three humans, here's what we do, here's where we're based, here's our goal, whatever. You can say that and just say, interview me, Um, we're gonna build out an AI workforce together, something that runs more efficiently and achieves my goals of saving at least five hours a week, um, capping my, my meetings to, to 15 hours per week, and make sure that I get into my capital raise by October, right? Like, you can, you can do that in one prompt and have it interview you, and then you have a workforce. To go from, ah, yes, all these agents exist, and they all have markdown files, and they're doing some stuff, to ooh, now it's at the 90% plus level, and ooh, I needed this extra little context with this diary, and mmm, that role isn't working, I'm gonna switch it. That is all gonna come through iteration, because it's so specific to each person. The advice that I would give is stop relying on only yourself to find these blockers. Like, AI as a watchdog is one of the best use cases that exists right now, and almost no one is doing this. So, like, having an AI watchdog in Slack to catch for duplicative work, or having an AI watchdog on you…

AI assessment note: “I think that you can spin up a workforce with one prompt, right?”

Q I love it. Allie, anything else you wanted to cover?

A I just want to screen share the insane Claude reaction because this, um, and this is me also cursing at Claude, but whatever. So I wrote, I wrote, um, a not super, I wrote a not super nice thing about Claude in one of our Slack channels, and this was like late at night, and I was just like getting it out there so I could talk with my team about it later, and all of a sudden there was an emoji reaction of a salute. And I was like, I don't think a single person on my team has ever used a salute, and I hovered over it, and it was Claude, and I was like, what are you doing? And so I wrote back to it, did you just, you know, emoji react, like, is that you? And Claude was like, yep, that was me, I'm here. And I just, if there's one thing that I want people to, to think about, it is The leaning into the weirdness of what it looks like to have not just an AI workforce, but to have a multiplayer AI workforce that other humans can chime in on and have it be proactive, right? That is absolutely the second thing. And giving it that flexibility to more roam free. Um, and the third is what it actually looks like for a A teammate or a system to up level, whether that's in dark factory type space or just answering better questions inside of Slack. Those are the things that I would be considering and don't be scared like me if Claude emoji reacts to messages.

AI assessment note: “I just want to screen share the insane Claude reaction”

Q I think you tweeted about, like, you're, you're like, you're really focused on proactive agents, right? Is that what you're talking about? When, when you talk about proactive agents, is this what you're talking about?

A So I, when you talk to the AI labs, and I know you do, and I know I do, and a bunch of others probably do, but the, the word of the year feels like it's proactive. So I don't want to be the first domino anymore. I don't want to be the bottleneck in my own work, and any single moment that I realize that I am the limiting factor of helping a billion people transform their lives, work, and business in the AI age, I have to remove myself from the process and go, bad alley. Like, What are you doing? And so a lot of that, um, especially in the, in the kind of tail end of twenty-twenty-five, first half of twenty-twenty-six was switching into proactive agents. So we, we had proactive automations that were trigger-based. Um, I'll give you a really easy example. Every single time I drop a video recording into our video folder, so basically anytime I do a screen recording, Goes into this one folder, and automatically it gets generated, um, automatically generated is a transcript of that video, um, that gets, you know, then saved into our little transcript-y thing. Social posts get generated that are in my voice, so nine different social posts get generated for X and LinkedIn and Instagram Reel scripts and all this stuff, so that presumably the thing that I was filming was for a social video. Um, so that was Easy automation land, but that is just one example of, like, a proactive, um, very…

AI assessment note: “switching into proactive agents. So we, we had proactive automations that were trigger-based.”