Happy Friday

Happy Weekend!

Being Together

It was great seeing old friends and new at the Sales Kickoff last week in Denver. At a large, remote-first company, there are people I've worked with for years that I've never met in person. While I largely appreciate and enjoy the benefits of working from home, there is nothing that compares to being in person with people you are working with. I believe there's a number of reasons why this is true (and it ties back to where AI Security is going)

• Body Language - meeting with someone in person gives a lot more information for where communication is happening and not happening. We're able to tailor what we say and how we say it with the help of the feedback we get from being in the room with someone.

• Relaxed Timelines - running from meeting to meeting to meeting puts a constraint on what we can talk about and what topics we cover. Getting a meal or sharing a non-scheduled conversation

• Shared Context - coming out of an information session or hearing a speaker gives us something to respond to that activates different memories and thought patterns. This can lead to new insights and connections between ideas that we wouldn't get over a zoom call

• Interruption - It's a lot easier to stop a conversation going in an unproductive direction when you can see and understand the misalignment in person. Steering discussions towards productive uses is much harder when you're on a call

• Physical Space - Aligning a new physical space to a conversation creates better memory patterns and stronger recall. "remember that in Denver" versus remember our Tuesday 3:30 pm call.

I've been thinking about these things, because they're all lacking from the current iteration of Generative AI experiences. People I speak to are either using GenAI for every menial task they can think of or have largely shrugged off the value. A chatbot is not the most inspirational interface. But the foundational models that power chatbots make possible new experiences that can create more responsive digital experiences. Multimodal AI can process image and inputs that represent group dynamics. It can also bridge the gap for when meeting IRL just isn't an option. Information retrieval techniques enable the creation of shared context and information about a topic that is timely, useful, and unrushed.

Imagine a not too distant future where I have an AI assistant that knows all about my work, my recent experiences, and my challenges. How might I engage with that assistant to help find the people in my company and network who can help me solve a problem? What if it could reach out to me proactively when there are things it knows I need. Perhaps my agent talks to your agent, and they collectively agree that we really should talk. Or all our agents share information about the meetings that happened today and help to plan and contextualize the follow ups. One day soon you might even have an AI that can whisper in your ear before each meeting to help you prepare:

Today, many organizations are beginning to explore the capabilities of Copilots that can access various kinds of data and automate some tasks. Their utility depends on the amount of data that is shared with them and the ingenuity of the prompts users give them. They're also just the very beginning. Copilots are the first iterations of a long roadmap that includes greater autonomy and proactivity. They're getting better and cheaper all the time. Many technology companies and startups are focusing on variations of this capability. OpenAI is reported to be focusing on this capability. Breakthroughs in this field now will find their way into business software over the next 12-24 months.

Agents that provide more and more utility will soon have access to read and influence a lot of data and processes. Most businesses are working through how to secure and productionalize their first proofs of concept involving LLMs, but they are far from ready for this level of AI Agent workflow. But the value is clear: paying for a global workforce to travel periodically gets expensive. Enabling AI to streamline human interactions and communications will make terrific economic sense.

It'll be on us - the readers of this newsletter and those like us - to think carefully about the guardrails and monitoring necessary to capture the benefits and mitigate the risks.

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