Jean-Denis Greze on AI assistants, building a better corporate workspace, and avoiding "egg on face"
This podcast touches on AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here.
Last week on the Platformer podcast, Replit's Amjad Masad predicted that apps are about to enter a long twilight. Instead of installing individual pieces of software, he said, we’re much likelier to outsource work to agents powered by artificial intelligence. And so for the fifth episode of our miniseries about productivity in the AI era, I wanted to talk to someone working to realize that vision.
My interest here is more than merely journalistic. My Hard fork co-host Kevin Roose and I are in the process of standing up a new company, and it has given me a fresh influx of tasks to coordinate: hiring employees, finding office space, organizing formation documents, and much more. For the most part, these tasks and documents are hiding somewhere in long email threads.
Many small businesses today organize work like this using a tool like Notion: a blank page that you can fill with boxes and tables and databases. And I did create a Notion workspace for us, outsourcing as much of the process as I could to the tool’s embedded agents. It worked well enough, though I can’t say the process sparked much joy. Staring at our new workspace, I had the sinking feeling that I had given myself a giant new project to maintain.
