“That’s not how we do it” is becoming a very expensive sentence.
Not because every old process is wrong, but because the gap between something becoming possible and a company figuring out the “official” way to do it is getting huge.
There are sales motions nobody would have staffed six months ago. Teams are learning jobs that don’t have a playbook yet. The people getting ahead aren’t necessarily the ones following the process best. They’re the ones willing to move before the process exists.
The old playbooks assumed the job stayed relatively stable while you figured out how to do it better. That makes waiting for someone else to tell you exactly what to do a pretty dangerous strategy.
Learn more at atonom.ai
An AI Agent Is Selling Another AI Agent
We’ve started using an AI agent to sell another company’s AI agent. I know, that might be the most obnoxious sentence in tech, and I kind of want to punch myself for writing it.
But they have 2K–4K deals that need a real conversation. It's too complicated for a checkout page and too small for a rep to give a sh*$ about. So buyers get ignored while everyone complains about pipeline.
So yeah, we’re giving an AI agent those deals. It can answer questions, follow up, and bring in a human when it needs one.
I’ll keep you posted on how our agent does selling their agent. What a ridiculous time to be alive.
This is the kind of AI use case I find a lot more interesting than another copilot. The old model basically said those deals weren’t worth serving. AI changes the economics enough that suddenly they might be.
That’s what we’re working on at Atonom: giving AI Employees real pieces of work to own, with humans stepping in where they actually add value.
And once the work starts changing that quickly, the way teams learn has to change with it.
Remote Work Is Getting Harder to Defend
Remote work is dying and AI is helping kill it. Which pisses me off as I love remote work. But my preference for working in sweatpants isn’t a business strategy.
I’m struggling to name a new startup in my circles building fully remote. At Atonom, I get why. We’re building an Autonomous Organization. Humans working alongside AI employees, in roles that barely existed a few years ago.
We’re figuring out the jobs, the handoffs, and the screwups together. Nobody has a playbook. Remote worked better when everybody knew their job. AI is changing the jobs faster than we can teach them. Pretending we can learn just as fast by trading Slack messages from our spare bedrooms is BS.
Sure, if you built your company around remote work, dragging everybody back is a nightmare. But we’re building ours now, and I’m not willing to slow it down to protect my commute.
I love working from home but I don’t love it enough to make the whole company learn slower.
That last part is really the issue for me. When the work is known, you can document it, distribute it, and optimize around it. When the team is inventing the work at the same time they’re doing it, learning speed starts to matter a hell of a lot more.
And I think the same thing is happening at the individual level.
A Players Don’t Wait for the Career Path
B players need a career path. A players create one.
I’ve got a lot more time for “I took this on and here’s what happened” than “Nobody told me what I needed to do to get promoted.”
I’m all for asking your boss for feedback and opportunities. Of course. But if you want to get ahead, stop waiting to be assigned every damn step.
This is probably going to matter even more as AI changes jobs.
A lot of the best opportunities over the next few years won’t come with a clean title, a training program, and a six-step promotion framework. Somebody is going to notice a problem, grab the tools available, and start doing work that wasn’t officially theirs yet.
By the time the company writes the job description, that person may already be doing the job.
Which brings me to the most important business question of the week: apparently I also need a playbook for having a birthday.
I Don’t Know How to Have a Birthday
It was my birthday last week. My plan was to work all day and maybe do something later in the night. My wife thought that was lame. I thought “maybe” was leaving room for adventure.
Seriously though, what do you do on your birthday when you’re an old dog? Take the day off? Go to the zoo? Eat lunch somewhere with a waiter?
Send me some ideas before I spend my birthday doing exactly what my wife told me was lame.
Reality Check
I keep coming back to the fact that a lot of the jobs, workflows, and company structures we treat like permanent rules were really just solutions to the economics and technology we had at the time. AI changes some of that math.
That means a lot of things we’ve been treating like fixed rules are about to become choices again. How a team is structured, where people work, which jobs need humans, what work is worth doing at all.
That is exciting, but it also means there probably won’t be a clean playbook waiting for us.
I don’t think waiting for the new official playbook is going to work very well. The companies and people who learn fastest are probably going to write it themselves.
Learn more at atonom.ai
