Nathan Labenz: belief

Transcript context

…I wrote an article because I used my exact queries, but it was something around the team mentality. And I think what we've talked about today, it's not a culture of rewarding individual performance, it's a culture of rewarding the team. It's also a culture of long-term thinking as opposed to other organizations. And so that innovative spirit, and I feel this every day, it's rewarded when you raise your hand and share the weird, wacky idea, share the future of what's possible with the enterprise graph. Those types of things that do differ case by case were some of the things I asked it in my early days. And now it knows enough about how I work where it's able to produce information that is unique to me. I'm also able to choose different models depending on the task at hand. And it has memory capabilities that it's constantly learning with every query, with every day what my priorities are. It'll proactively flag when I haven't followed up on an e-mail, which I am working at Asana for many years, I've become horrible at e-mail. So that's really helpful. And again, proactively telling me when I've missed something, when there's an action item in a doc that I've forgotten is helpful in making sure I don't drop the ball on too many things. So on that note of long-term thinking, tough question here for sure, but if you try to see through the fog and imagine maybe what Glean looks like in a few years and more broadly like what large companies in general look like a few years from now. What do you see? I think we kind of have the easiest time imagining a version of the world that's pretty similar to the current one, but where like a lot of stuff is automated and so the savings kind of get passed on to the consumer. Like, maybe companies are both more profitable and their stuff is cheaper and people are able to buy more because everything got so much more efficient. It does seem like though that idea of efficiency and both higher profits and higher consumer surplus is kind of premised on major labor cost savings, AKA companies are going to be smaller in terms of headcount than they are now. There's a lot of people who want to tell me a different story about how it's not going to be like that and it's really going to be about growth. And then I'm kind of always like, well, sure, it's going to be growth for some, but I also kind of see a trend in general in business that starts again with technology toward kind of winner take all dynamics. it seems like we're seeing more and more market concentration in a lot of different places. So I do believe that like some companies will really win through growth, but a lot of that's probably going to be taking share from other companies. So is there another vision that you find compelling Aside from that default vision, or is that ultimately kind of the future you think we're headed toward? The 2 separate questions. A vision I think is compelling is different than I think the reality that will play out. The answer everyone loves to give is AI frees us up for higher order work and we're going to have more jobs than ever before. I think we will. There's certainly going to be jobs created that have never existed before and that's exciting. I don't think costs are going to decrease in the short term at all when it comes to using the technology. And you speak with executives every week where they've blown their AI budgets in a very short time for the year. Sometimes they're blow. And we've seen headlines where you blow your token budget for a year and a month. The costs are not decreasing. And I think that is a very real concern for every organization. And that's why I think the future is not a single model platform. a multimodal, multi-tool platform. In the best cases, the AI is able to proactively route the task to the right model given a multitude of different dimensions, efficiency, complexity, cost as well. So that I'm pretty confident in. I think we are seeing smaller and smaller teams. And I think that makes sense because if we're using AI in the right way, A, it should reduce the massive coordination tax of work. we have slightly smaller teams, we should probably need fewer managers if a core part of the managerial role has been to manage this coordination tax that can now be taken on with AI. That becomes exciting in many ways because we are seeing an opportunity for specialists to become more generalists. We're certainly seeing roles rebundle where, and I've seen this in practice, in particular through my PhD, I saw the org chart pressure tested and organizations start to think about, okay, where can AI give me insights across silos in a way that now makes sense to redraw roles that previously lived in two, three, four different roles, now in a single role. I think we're going to see that in the companies that survive and thrive. I hope for a world where we're spending more work on the deeply human parts of work and we have a much clearer sense of what is the right division of labor. I'm starting to see enough evidence where I think that's a possibility. I spend a decent amount of time with an amazing CHRO at one of the largest healthcare organizations and they've used AI to task map all their roles and just determine that 70% of all tasks are overlapping with other roles across roles. And so in those sorts of situations, you can easily imagine the enterprise type graph making the determination in terms of, okay, what does make sense to live in a human role versus what makes sense to live in an agent role? How many agents is the right agent to human ratio? That is certainly going to be in flux. And I think organizations are going to grapple with that.…

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