Post Category → AI

The Ship Is Pulling Away. Don’t Get Left Ashore.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been hearing some things on repeat from across many conversations when it comes to why someone hasn’t developed their AI usage skills beyond just prompting the chatbots:

  • I don’t have time
  • I don’t know where to start
  • I don’t know where I can use AI in my workflow
  • I don’t like that AI wastes water/energy/etc
  • I don’t want to support the work of artists being stolen
  • I would just be training my replacement

If you find yourself saying one of these things, you have to get over it.

I think the divide between the winners and losers will be very large… so we have to make sure we’re on the winning side lol

– something I said in a chat some months ago

In these past two weeks, I’ve been able to immerse myself more into AI tools/frameworks/harnesses/etc and I’m more convinced that the performance gap between the people who leverage AI and the people who don’t is only going to widen over time.

This is especially so if a person embraces agentic workflows resulting in free-ed up time and attention that can be redeployed to other problems that might also benefit from an agentic solution. It’s almost like spending time to write functions in code – you write it once, then you get to use it over and over again. While the setup might take longer, you benefit from the time savings in boatloads over time. In short, the advantage compounds.

We are, of course, in the somewhat early days still but if I were to visualise an analogy, it’s kind of like a ship that’s pulling away from the shore… and it’s pulling away fast. There’s going to be a point afterwhich you’re just stuck ashore.

So do whatever it takes to get a seat.
Because whatever your issue is with the use of AI, you’re powerless if you miss the boat.

Forming The Borg Collective

TLDR: I’m starting The Borg Collective — an invite-only group of founders and operators who are serious about building AI into their businesses. Different specializations, shared ambition, no spectators. If that sounds interesting to you, ping me.

I am trying to build a company with as few people as possible to deliver the maximum amount of value to society. Not new I know. But I think the productivity ratios are changing and fully leveraging it is going to require us all to figure out how the new workstreams of a company should look like.

Through an AI-first lens and as a software engineer/product developer who is oscillating between builder and founder modes, I find myself grappling with a few questions:

(tap to expand) 

1. How do I learn about about the specializations that I don’t have depth in faster?

Without sufficient appreciation for domain knowledge, I wouldn’t be able to craft an effective workstream – much less build and insert the necessary AI Agents in the right place. I could take the time to research and study of course but I need it done yesterday because we’re all in a race.

2. How do I structure the AI harness to be effective at what it needs to do?

There’s no one best way to do this and there’s not enough time to always go out there to find out how everyone in the world is doing it. How can I find out how others are doing it effectively in a time-efficient manner instead of reinventing things myself all the time?

3. How do I keep up with the frequency with which the space evolves?

Again, time is the constraint here. Things move so fast in the space that things change while you’re in mid-experiment. There needs to be a more efficient way of filtering the noise and sharing findings

4. How do I operationalize things?

All the knowledge in the world isn’t going to make an impact unless it’s put into operation. Depending on the workstream, this can look very different… but how?

As I thought about it, I became more certain that I can’t be the only one who’s asking themselves these questions. Perhaps, there’s value in bringing together a group of people with different specializations and interested in a similar outcome.

Introducing The Borg Collective

The Borg is a collective of individuals who run their own projects/businesses and are actively looking to operationalise AI into various aspects of their company. 

The collective is invite-only and aims to constrain representation for each specialisation to, at most, 2 people. For example, there might be a maximum of 2 people who specialise in sales, 2 in software engineering, 2 in HR, etc… 

The intent is for everyone to be able to tap on each other’s domain expertise, ingest it and learn how to implement agentic AI into their business workflows from each other. Over time it should help everyone build their own lean company that highly leverages the use of AI.

“From each other” is the operative phrase here – it’s not meant to be a group where people come to listen to talks. Everyone would be expected to share and be running their own experiments.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested to explore, ping me!