Prarthna

I talked AI with the Chief HR Officer of a $500m consumer business today. Everything they shared sounded crazy similar to where most enterprises are in their AI journey and the most common challenges they’re wrestling with. Notes I had from the call: - AI owners: joint ownership between CHRO and CTO - AI stage: Level 2. Chat-based AI used widely, broader single player AI tools used by power users, very little evidence of multiplayer AI use cases. Ways of working have changed minimally. No longer-term AI strategy. Early rethinking of org structure post-AI. - Current AI adoption: Everyone has ChatGPT access + basic prompting training; a smaller “AI-curious” group has Claude with deeper permissions. - Company is very open to testing AI tools - "no single tool we've said no to within reason" - Key challenge is “haves vs have-nots”: A widening gap between power users and the rest of the org; reluctance to roll advanced access to all employees without guardrails is creating tension.   - Most advanced users building agents for personal workflows, not yet for scalable company processes. - Cultural friction on AI usage: Managers frequently complain about low-effort/obvious AI-generated work; lack of clear standards for “acceptable” AI use and inconsistent enforcement across teams.    - Strategy gap: Company is still in a testing phase with no formal AI strategy yet. Most pressing need is to decide what to build vs buy as well as if AI transformation should focus on training/enablement or building agents that scale across functions. - Leaning toward bringing in consultants rather than building dev power in-house.

the next massive consumer ai opportunity is making personal agents feel as intuitive as an iphone. this is deeply important because this is the new software layer for everyday life. most ppl do not want to configure workflows, manage prompts, route models, or think about agents at all. they want software that just works & the winning products will hide almost all of the complexity with taste incl. context, memory, & orchestration. e.g. there’ll be baseline personal agents that come alive out of the box which are already understanding your context, patterns, relationships, preferences, apps, devices, routines, etc. then there’ll be ephemeral agents that spawn dynamically from intent, ambient capture, conversation, location, screenshots, email, calendar, camera roll, whatever. this is the software that assembles itself around the moment just like weather updates based on your location but way more in depth. today even the most state of the art agent products feel like giving normal people shell access to a distributed system. apple won by turning computers from something you operated into something you experienced. personal agents require the same transition. whoever solves this becomes the ambient operating system for human life. small category btw.

New blog post: The third wave of American philanthropy Hundreds of billions of dollars in new philanthropic capital will soon become liquid. The OpenAI Foundation holds 26% of OpenAI, worth about $220B at today’s valuation. Anthropic’s seven co-founders have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth and have instituted the most aggressive donor matching program for employees in tech history. How much does this all add up to? And how meaningful is that in the context of philanthropy today? I was doing some simple napkin math to wrap my head around the scale of what’s coming, and radicalized myself in the process. I had dramatically underappreciated the scale of the philanthropic capital that’s about to become available and the corresponding gap in talent and organizations that will be needed to make the most of it. This piece aims to directionally sketch the scale of what’s coming, the gap in operational capacity needed to absorb it, and what we can do to fill it. (Link to full post in reply)

If you are running a consulting business and you are deploying Anthropic or OpenAI directly into your organization (I’m looking at you PwC and Accenture) you are letting the fox into the hen house. OpenAI and Anthropic are openly funding and starting competitors to you while also using your usage to drive more success for them. This is not a failure on their part but a failure on your part. Consulting businesses that understand this are adopting a control plane that allows them to arbitrate where tokens go and who generates tokens for them. Controlling the tokens is controlling the spice (Dune). This was a key pillar of 8090’s global partnership with EY and they key feature of our Software Factory. We control token generation and can direct them to any model provider. We are close to another global partnership and will announce it soon. These organizations refuse to accept the disruption standing still or, even worse, by adopting and accelerating the companies who want to disrupt them.

A big pivot from Ken Griffin on AI: “Number one is, in the last few months, there has been a step change in the productivity of the AI toolkit. It is profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago. And for us at Citadel, that has allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases for AI. And it has been really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days. These are not these are not mid-tier white collar jobs. These are like extraordinarily high skilled jobs being, I'm going to pick a word, automated by agentic AI. And I gotta tell you, I went home one Friday actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society. When you witness it in your own four walls, when you see work that used to be man years of work being done in days or weeks, it's like, wow, like that's the first time I've seen real impact in our four walls.” This echoes my own experience with agents and the conversations I am having with students, friends & clients. The toolkit has dramatically transformed and it feels like in finance, for the first time, AI is real.

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen. Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation). Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI. As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more. 2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire" 3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies. 4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money." I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here. Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success". Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.