What is the right metaphor for how humans will work with AI?
There are (at least) two schools of thought right now.
The first is AI as a tool that helps you do everything, that turns you into an army of one able to do the work of 3,5,10 people. These superpowers can manifest as Skills, as Scheduled Jobs, as Agents. You invoke them when you need them (or schedule them), and you remain the vessel of work getting done.
But there is a second metaphor gaining traction; AI as a Teammate. This AI has a job req that likely bundles together a number of tasks and workflows, and that job req likely greatly resembles a human job req. It has a Slack account, and email inbox, and a memory. It knows why its role exists, not just how to do the thing.
One is a bag of handy magic tools, the other is a colleague.
Don’t get me wrong, the underlying tech is mostly the same. But how that horsepower is packaged is very different.
Take a workflow like drafting a blog post. You might have a Claude Skill that knows your voice and can generate posts based on source context like transcripts or news articles. You might have another skill that listens to your meetings and tries to pull blog topics out. And then you might have another skill that brands the output appropriately.
It’s your job to invoke the right skill for the right task, winning you back hours. Again, these skills, agents, scheduled jobs supercharge you in getting the thing done.
But there is another way to think about getting a blog post done. What if you had a creative writer on staff that knew your ICP, your preferred writing style, context about the company, and had a sense of what the POV should be. What if this writer had a Slack account, and an email address, and you could ping them when you needed something done.
Again, this is the same tech - intelligence on demand - but packaged differently. One is a bag of tools, one is a colleague.
Until recently I was in deep with the first mode. I had a handful of go to skills and agents that I triggered to tackle recurring work.
More recently, I have been kicking the tires on the AI Teammate model. I have created, using a platform called Skydive, an AI SDR, an AI Event Planner, an AI CoS. These teammates know their job reqs and the tools they have access to, and the guardrails. They run their own Slack and email accounts.
We are not really talking about differences in features or user experience. It is all still mostly chat. But packaging existing models and tools into something that looks like a human coworker just makes sense to me.
Why is the teammate metaphor working for me? Maybe it’s because I know how to write a job req, I know how to manage people, I know how to give feedback - it all just feels very natural to me, more natural than running a Skill or a Scheduled Job, or building a narrow agent.
The landscape is shifting so fast - I’m not sure what mental model is going to win out, but teammate is making a lot of sense to me.