The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - The Job Positions of the AI Future

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today on the AI Daily Brief, the job positions of this new agentic future. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, robots and pencils, retool, blitzy, and airtable. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash AI Daily Brief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And if you want to learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at AIDailybrief. Today we are once again turning to the future of jobs.

Starting point is 00:00:41 This episode is not about exploring what industries or types of roles are going to be displaced by AI, nor is it exactly like my episode from a month or two ago about the entirely net new roles that are going to be created by AI. Instead, this one is about new ways of working and some patterns that people are starting to observe about how the roles of jobs are changing as we get deeper into AI. Now, obviously, a lot of this is predicated. on the meta shift from doing a job to managing agents that do that job. That I think is going to be a big part of the common shift for all roles

Starting point is 00:01:15 is a process of people exploring how much of what they do on any given day or in any given week can be more effectively outsourced to teams of agents that actually do the execution and then working backwards from that, what is the actual substance of the role that remains. Likewise, as with a lot in AI, a big part of what us non-technical users are doing is looking over at the developers and technical users and trying to map their experience back onto the types of roles that we have. Now, this particular episode was inspired by a very specific tweet from ClaudeCode creator Boris Churny.

Starting point is 00:01:48 At the end of last month, he wrote, As engineering, product, design, DS, etc. melt into a new kind of role. I was reflecting on what roles might look like in the future. For example, when I look at the Claude Code team, I see what I think is five archetypes. One, the prototyper, comes up with brand new. ideas, turns out many ideas, most of which don't ship. Two, the builder, quickly turns a prototype idea into production-grade product and infrastructure. Three, the sweeper. Cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system. Un-ships, optimizes performance. Four, the grower. Takes a product

Starting point is 00:02:21 that has been built and iterates on it to improve product market fit. Five, the maintainer, owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales. Many people span across two roles, and sometimes three roles. I also notice that. I also notice that that these roles are not really tied to job function, e.g. across Anthropic, some designers match category one, some two, some three. Same for engineers, PMDS. A healthy team needs a mix of these depending on the product. A product that is new and pre-PMF needs people that are strong at one, two, and three, and three, and three. A product that is growing and is found product market fit needs two, three, three, and four, and four, and four, maintainer. A product that has strong product

Starting point is 00:03:02 market fit needs 3 plus 4 plus 5, sweeper, grower, maintainer, and some, too, builder. Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this and less like the domain-specific roles of today. Now, this is one of those great posts that's detailed enough to dig into, but also open enough and exploratory enough to build off from. And so what I wanted to do is go a little bit deeper into each of these five roles, try to apply it to areas outside of engineering and product work, and then look at what I think might be missing.

Starting point is 00:03:29 Now, so one common thread in all of the positions outlined by Boris is that they are product-facing. In other words, they more or less face inward connected to the product that is being built. The order is also a rough life cycle of a product. Boris even articulates how different teams need different combinations of these things based on where in the product's lifecycle the product is. So let's talk about each of these five work-facing roles. The prototyper is a role that many of you inhabit on a fairly regular basis. This is a person who is generating brand new ideas and using things like Claude Code

Starting point is 00:04:02 and Codex to do the first version of them. Now, historically, the knock on the idea person was that ideas were free and it was all about execution. Now, what execution means, I think, is getting a little bit different as taking the first steps towards bringing that idea to life gets vanishingly simpler in the context of code generating agents. And what's interesting about the archetype of the prototyper is that while obviously Boris is talking about it in the context of the actual.

Starting point is 00:04:27 product team, this is not at all constrained to product builders. In fact, increasingly, the capability of using agents to prototype and build things means that product-style thinking is infiltrating other parts of the organization. People who have never touched a product before are thinking about how they could build their own products or tools to make whatever it is that they're doing easier. But the prototyper isn't just valuable because they figure out how to solve problems using code, but also because they're pushing the shape of what their function can actually do. The prototyper cuts down what used to be an endless discussion phase into much more directed and applied conversations based on looking at something real. In other words, the prototyper isn't just coming

Starting point is 00:05:07 up with new ideas. They're also eliminating an entire step in the conversation which can be extraordinarily time-consuming because that conversation can now be had while looking at something real and tangible. Next up, we have the builder. This is someone who can take that prototype and turn it into something that is more production grade. Now, production grade is going to have different meanings in the context of a public-facing product versus an internal-facing tool. Obviously, a public-facing product is going to have a much higher burden or threshold on everything from security to bugs to whatever. Internal tools are going to have inherently a lot more forgiveness built in. Now, one thing that's interesting to consider is how much the archetypes of

Starting point is 00:05:41 prototype and builder are actually different people versus different mindsets within the same person. I think this is fascinating because I feel like I could argue both sides fairly compellingly. On the one hand, my guess is that many of you have gone through processes where you are both of these things at different points. You prototype at first, use that to generate the conversation that you need to have about the decisions that need to be made, and then move into this builder mode. However, at the same time, I do think that there is a little bit of a dispositional difference between people who are inclined to find themselves as prototypers versus builders. The things that you need to care about when moving into production grade are very different than the considerations when you are in that prototyping stage.

Starting point is 00:06:19 I can tell this because they're basically all the things that my brain instantly turns off around and stops caring about as soon as they happen. And yet, when it comes to the real world of real artifacts that people are going to interact with, there is obviously a much higher threshold that needs to be met. And so yes, although I think that many people are going to inhabit prototyper and builder at various points in the journey, I do think as we zoom out to the organizational level, these might be different personality archetypes. Now, when it comes to the sweeper, I think the key word is optimize. I don't think that what Boris is trying to say is that this is a person who just cleans up the mistakes of the builder. And in fact, I sort of think

Starting point is 00:06:53 that if you were to push on trying to combine any of these roles into a single one, sweeping kind of feels like just an integral part of building. The word optimizes where I think that perhaps changes. It's one thing to clean up the UI or simplify the code. It's another thing to think on an almost DNA level about how to optimize things and improve them. And again, if we're starting to map these position archetypes into personality archetypes, the person who is really designed for optimization is also different than the person who's good at building in a hardened way or coming up with lots of ideas. By the way, I think this will be even more apparent in some areas outside of product development, which we'll get into in a little bit. Now, what's interesting

Starting point is 00:07:32 about the next role, the grower, is that this is where what has so far been a largely work-facing, internal-facing set of positions, roles, and archetypes starts to turn outward to the rest of the world. The growers are the people who take the thing that is already built, and even starting to be optimized by the sweeper and instead is iterating on it towards an even better version, which could mean product market fit or product market domination. Now this is a role that almost definitionally cannot exist entirely in that internal facing way. The grower is doing things where the product as it exists is interacting with its intended audience and the learnings from that are what goes back into the grower's work. Preview of what I'm going to argue in a minute,

Starting point is 00:08:10 I think that the biggest thing missing from Boris's analysis is those externally facing roles, and this is kind of a hint towards that. One thing I keep seeing in Enterprise AI, companies hedging across every cloud, every model, every framework, or paying a GSI for a pilot that never ends. The team's actually shipping, they've picked a lane and they move fast. That's one of the reasons I like today's sponsor robots and pencils. They've gone all in on AWS.

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Starting point is 00:10:33 Claim your $1,000 in inference at hyperagent.com slash AI Daily Brief. Lastly, the maintainer. worked inside a big enterprise knows that there is a massive categorical difference in maintaining a mature system that already exists versus building something new. And is an entirely different set of work, an entirely different set of dispositions, an entirely different set of skills. And what we're seeing with Boris's analysis is that while the context might be changing and the mechanism of the job might be changing, that orientation towards maintaining a big system as something that is different than building the system in the first place continues and persists into this new agendic era paradigm.

Starting point is 00:11:11 Okay, but as I hinted, I think this is a really interesting and valuable analysis. I think this is a great way to break down, a lot of what a lot of particularly small nimble teams are feeling, as the slate of different roles, especially that go into the products that they're building. But once you start to look, especially outside of the product organization, it becomes really clear, really fast that there is almost a totally different orientation that's missing in Boris's analysis. And yet, the idea that roles are changing such that they are increasingly less,

Starting point is 00:11:41 about a specific narrow job description and instead about archetypes and categories of agentically enabled work persists even into the second category. If the first group of positions were the ones that face the work, the ones that interact with the artifact, the second group of positions, the ones that I think aren't explored with Boris's analysis, are those that face a little bit more externally. They face the people and the signal around the work. So let's talk about a few different examples. One is the editor. So what happens when the prototyper makes a dozen different ideas over the course of a week. Whose role is it to decide which they should pursue? Even or especially in a world where it's increasingly cheap to get on base, figuring out which projects you actually want to let run becomes even more important. The

Starting point is 00:12:23 attention of the market is still scarce, and you can't try everything, and that's where the editor comes in. The editor archetype is the person or people, or simply mindset, that helps decide which of the many prototypes deserve to be built. Now, importantly, recognizing the editor as a role does not prescribe what approach they might take to making those decisions about which of the many prototypes deserves to be fully built. Some editors are going to be empirical, some are going to be gut-based. What's common is that the selector and focuser of the energy around a particular option once those prototypes exist is going to be an increasingly important role. Now, part of what might inform the editor's work is the work of the scout. Where do those prototype ideas come from

Starting point is 00:13:03 in the first place? In many, if not most cases, they're going to come through interaction with the real world. Now, sometimes, if not many times, it'll be the prototyper themselves who's out observing things, who has the spark of the ideas that get built into that prototype. But especially as we move into larger and larger organizations and we think systematically about how organizations might redesign themselves, the idea of a role whose job is specifically to be out in the world, aggregating and exploring the signal coming in, and then bringing it back into the organization for the prototypers and others to start building upon, you can see as something that could be increasingly important. Now, scouting might also be something that in many organizations is largely

Starting point is 00:13:41 agentic. One of the things that agents are really good at is absorbing, coelating, and distilling huge amounts of information, which is kind of what the job of a scout is. Now, that doesn't necessarily speak to the taste that might be involved in scouting, but it's interesting to note that this is a role that I think in many organizations will be filled by agents, not just people. The next archetype, which is already admittedly a role that many organizations have is evangelist. These are the folks who don't just market the thing, but actually get the market to see the world in the same way that the builders see the world. This person's output might sometimes be around content, it might sometimes be around

Starting point is 00:14:15 conversation, it might sometimes be around community. But this is the position that starts to own the intersection of what happens internally and what happens externally. Next up, a role that I think honestly could exist both as a work internal facing role but also as an external facing role is the orchestrator. And what's interesting about this archetype is that orchestrators are going to function on multiple levels. I think to some extent, orchestration is a skill that everyone will have, even in the context of their own work, as they increasingly become managers of agents in addition to whatever they were before. And yet, especially in larger organizations, the orchestration layer of figuring out how all these new disparate pieces work together, especially as the work

Starting point is 00:14:54 output increases dramatically, is going to be extremely important. Orchestrators that live at the intersection, not just of these different role archetypes, but also of these different bundles of role archetypes across different parts of the organization are going to be increasingly important. We could do an entire episode about what it means to be an orchestrator on a micro or a macro level and barely begin to scratch the surface of where I think this is heading. Now, closely related and honestly, I don't know if it should exactly be its own thing or something that's just bundled with orchestrator is the conductor. This is a bit more specific to agent management instead of organizational management. But the point is that if we view

Starting point is 00:15:28 these teams of agents as actual synthetic or digital employees that need to be managed in some way and need to be made sure that their outputs can be coherent with one another, the conductor is the version of an orchestrator that is focused specifically on that type of work. Now, one final role that I think in particular is going to be extremely important, especially the larger the organization you get into, or the more sensitive to the area that its work relates to, is the risk steward. This is more than just a governance guideline sort of manager. I think that one of the implications of agents is that the speed at which all of us, even big organizations can operate and iterate goes way up. That inherently, almost definitionally,

Starting point is 00:16:08 is going to create new categories and new types of risk, and or it's going to amplify existing risks by having less time for organizations to adapt. The risk steward then becomes the archetypal position, whose whole focus is on greasing the governance gears of the system so that it doesn't get stopped and thrown off the tracks by a risk that got out of control. Now, interestingly, I think especially builders are often used to thinking about people who are focused on risk as the gatekeepers, the bottlenecks, the stoppers of work. But work now in the agentic era has such an incredible momentum that I actually think it's exactly the opposite, that risk stewards in this new paradigm are the people who are trying to anticipate a couple

Starting point is 00:16:46 steps down the line, what things could derail the whole process, and try to fix them before the project even gets there. I actually think that this new agentic era risk steward is going to be an incredibly dynamic, forward-oriented role, and the difference between organizations that continue to move fast versus move fast for a little bit and then have to deal with fits and starts and stops is going to be in this role. Okay, so now we've got this whole new set of positions, which as I mentioned are sometimes going to be bundled together in a single person, and which in many ways represent archetypes of work as much as they do specific roles, especially when it comes to the work-facing roles, the prototype or the builder, the sweeper, the

Starting point is 00:17:24 grower, the maintainer, it might be a little bit easier to visualize how they relate to software engineering or product design, than how they might fit in other parts of the organization. So let's look at these roles, but in a different area of the org, starting with sales. What would a prototyper look in the sales organization? Well, this might be a person who tests new pitches, segments, and offers. The idea person, but enabled to take the first steps in a way that they never were before. The builder are the archetypes who are going to take some of those new pitches or segments or offers or whatever it is, and turn it into a repeatable playbook that can scale across the entire sales organizations. The sweepers are the folks who are

Starting point is 00:17:58 going to go through and cut dead scripts or bag fit segments from the process. Basically, they're the one who are going to go prune the whole thing so that the velocity remains high without less valuable work getting amplified. Within the range of options, they are going to optimize what the builder built to make the public-facing sales process as valuable as possible. Now, the grower in the sales organization is where all these offers and new approaches and sales motions actually start to interact with the real world. They're the ones who are iterating to see how this strategy versus that strategy is performing and orienting the organization to what's working. They're thinking about deal velocity, expansion, and generally taking what's working and expanding it significantly.

Starting point is 00:18:37 Now, as this whole sales process matures, the maintainer is the one who turns this into and then maintains a complete sales system, not just a bunch of new sales strategies. They're thinking about pipeline discipline and account coverage quarter after quarter. So that's Boris's set of roles, but what about the more externally facing that we talked about? Obviously, the editor archetype has a role here. As you can see, the sales prototype, coming up with just a ton of ideas that might not actually be worth a squeeze. The scout archetype is obviously incredibly valuable as sales is so inherently about how what you're doing internally interacts with the world externally.

Starting point is 00:19:10 Finding the signal that can inform the prototyper becomes even more important. And I think in the context of sales, something like the risk steward actually is really important as well. Sales motions can sometimes have a tendency to try to get the sale at any cost. And yet some costs, be they actual cost or PR costs or something else, are actually two high to bear. And in this case, a risk steward can be thinking about those things, even in advance of where those issues might come up. I think marketing looks fairly similar. You've got the scout who's reading the audience, the culture, seeing what competitors are doing, and bringing those ideas as signals into the organization. The prototyper takes those signals and tries new narratives,

Starting point is 00:19:47 campaigns, and channels. The editor uses taste and discernment to figure out which stories, which angles, which narratives best fit the brand as it is or where it wants to go. With the combination of the scout-informed prototypes refined by the editor, the builder can take the spark of ideas and turn them into real campaign machines. That creates the need for the sweeper who's going to kill weak messaging and channel bloat, simplify the funnel, help prune and decide which channels aren't part of a particular campaign, and generally focus the efforts on the areas of highest potential leverage. The grower is the growth marketer who's obsessed with the data that's coming in, who isn't just using taste like the editor or broad signals like the scout, but is instead actually

Starting point is 00:20:25 optimizing conversion, optimizing for growth, optimizing for costs. And by the way, the work that the grower is doing is deeply aligned with the next set of scout work that's going to happen as well. The exhaust that spins off the interaction between current and potential customers and the campaign is what the scout uses to inform the next set of ideas that the prototyper will prototype. And of course, to ensure that all of this adds up to more than just a single campaign but an actual marketing system, you have the maintainers. Now, within the context of marketing, the maintainers might be everything from brand maintainers and really making sure that everything is aligned there to systems maintainers, the CRM, the lifecycle systems. Every marketer knows the pain of having to start from

Starting point is 00:21:03 scratch because the glue that kept the whole system together just wasn't there before. Now, one important note is that these sets of archetypes and positions aren't going to map cleanly to every function. They obviously were generated from the product and software development organization, and I think that they have some pretty clear fits with these sales and marketing organizations. But what about something like the back office, where you've got finance, ops, and HR? You might see in those areas a different type of concentration, where, for example, you have fewer prototypers and builders and more maintainers. In fact, in some ways, back office, you could argue is the maintainer of the core functions of the whole organization already, and so it makes

Starting point is 00:21:40 sense that that's going to be a key part of what they do internally as well. Now, that said, some of these roles really do fit. the sweeper, which removes redundant tools, zombie budgets, and bad metrics. Obviously, the risk steward is extraordinarily important in these sort of back office functions. Orchestrators, who actually make systems and data that can fit across teams, are incredibly valuable. The grower, the scout, that are inherently external-facing, don't make as much sense in these inherently internal-facing roles. And yet, interestingly, as a final thought, in some cases, one of the impacts of this new agentic way of working will be that,

Starting point is 00:22:16 even archetypes that don't seem exactly like they fit in an area like back office might start to fit more as they get their hands on agentic tools and agendic ways of working. Let's take the prototyper. The prototyper doesn't exactly, or at least not cleanly, have as obvious a role in something like these back office functions. Now, I wouldn't say that there's no role. Obviously, in any role, whether it's finance or HR or something else, people are constantly thinking about new and better ways to do their job. new tools they have access to, etc., and the prototyper can still be a valuable archetype in that context. But the idea of the prototyper as product builder might in the future have even more resonance in something like finance or HR than you might think.

Starting point is 00:23:00 And this is where the product organization and product thinking starts to infiltrate the rest of the organization. We have now had tens of thousands of people go through AIDB Agent OS and the New Year's program and Claw Camp and Enterprise Claw and Executive Agent Leadership and Executive Catchup, and the vanishing minority of them are in the product or software organization. But they are taking product and software ideas and approaches and bringing them to their areas. Picture a back office person writing a small piece of custom software to handle a very specific kind of expense report or expense reporting exception. It used to be that they would have had to file a ticket and wait a quarter, but now they can just build it themselves.

Starting point is 00:23:40 That is a form of prototyping, and to the extent that it works for their roles, could turn into building, growing, maintaining, etc. When making gets cheap enough, every function starts to grow a maker. And I think that if you are a person who is deep inside a specific function, one very good way to, at least in the short-term future-proof yourself, is to become the maker for that function in your organization, to take the idea of prototyping and bring it into what you do. Not because your organization is all of a sudden going to use small pieces of custom software instead of SaaS tools for whatever it is that you do, but because by building things, you're going to be able to push your organization to think differently and realize that it has more opportunities than it even new.

Starting point is 00:24:22 And in so doing, put yourself in an incredibly important role, not just when it comes to helping your organization do its job, but in terms of the essential organizational change that'll shape what the job is in the future. As I mentioned at the top of the show, the core change, I think, underlying all of this is the shift to having access to agents and being able to simply do more different things than was ever possible before. As we experiment with what those shifts are going to mean, I do not think that all of a sudden overnight every single role changes. But I do think that starting to think in terms of these different archetypes, which translate probably to people's personalities and temperaments, is going to be valuable as part of the process of organizational

Starting point is 00:25:03 change in exploration. And so with that, I turn it over to you. I am super interested to hear if and how this resonates with or is contrasting with your experience in organizations as they're operating right now. One great place to come talk about this is the AIDB operators community. I haven't been sharing it for a while, but it's up to about 2,500 different members talking a lot about this sort of organizational development work and other things. You can find it at AIDB Operators dot circle.s. And I'll include a link in the show notes as well. And let you get back to your July 4th weekend. Big ups to Boris Cherney, not only for building a great product in Claude Cod Cope, but in constantly sharing.

Starting point is 00:25:39 how they're thinking about new ways of organizing work. And thanks as always to you guys for listening or watching. Again, have a great weekend, and until next time, peace.

The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - The Job Positions of the AI Future

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