In this episode, Ali K. Miller discusses how to strategically build and manage AI agent workforces, challenging the traditional notion of "managing" agents. She argues that the mindset should shift from direct management to enabling agents, where the human sets up infrastructure, defines goals, and steps in only for critical decisions or escalations. Central to her approach is proactivity: agents should not just execute predefined tasks but also identify new ones aligned with overarching goals. She shares a powerful prompt, "do smart things," which allows her AI workforce to leverage shared context—meeting transcripts, emails, calendars, and business goals—to take initiative and break through her own limitations. Ali emphasizes the importance of codifying context, using daily AI diary entries to capture uncodified knowledge, ensuring agents have accurate information to act autonomously. She also advises a gradual adoption path: start with a single agent, then add proactivity, then collaboration, and finally scale to a full workforce with mission control. Role design should evolve beyond traditional job titles, creating unique agents like a "chief dreaming officer" or a "workforce observer" to fill novel functions. Finally, she recommends starting with familiar roles for ease, then optimizing by reassigning tasks, adjusting model sizes, and addressing friction points to create an efficient, high-performing AI workforce that underpromises and overdelivers.
There are people that are spitting up agent workforces with hundreds of agents and sub-agents, and they're getting incredible amounts of work done. But how do you do it? And how should you think about it? And what are the strategies to actually create an AI agent workforce that under promises and over-delivers? Well, today I brought on Ali K. Miller. And she's one of the most well-known AI voices ever. She's worked with IBM. She's worked with AWS. And she's managed multi-billion dollar PNLs in the AI space. I asked her a simple question. How do you manage your fleet of agents? In this episode, we cover a lot of ground. But by the end of it, you're going to understand how should you strategically think about spitting up AI agent workforces where there's opportunities to create startups in the B2B space with AI agents and a lot more? Enjoy the episode and I'll see you at the end. Today's episode is brought to you by Brex. My company's been on Brex for a year and a half and I started because I kept hearing companies like Versailles, Open AI, and Thropic were using Brex and I figured if they're using it, why shouldn't I? It's been a game changer. The thing that got me is how smooth it is. It's got high-limit cards. It's got banking. It's got AI that handles the back-off is busy work like expense reports, which I don't want to do on its own. It's really just built for this agentic world. If you're building something new, it's time to get Brex. Check it out at Brex.com/olutions/startups. Link in the description. I can't tell you how excited I am to finally have Ali Miller on the podcast. I've been begging her to come on. She's one of my favorite people in AI and I don't say that lightly. Welcome to the show, Ali. Thank you, Greg. You are also one of my favorite people. I'm actually very excited to talk about all the AI things that we're working on. By the end of the episode, what are people going to learn? One of the biggest mindset shifts that I'm going through right now is I feel like the term managing agents is wrong. My hope is that people will understand what that mindset shift is, see a few examples and figure out how to start, how to make that mindset shift, what the first step should be. Okay, perfect. So where do you want to start? So this is, and I'm happy to debate you on this because we haven't shouted about this. But I feel like managing agents feels like I'm their direct manager and I'm like, Susie, go over there, and Betty, go over there, and Jeremy, go over here. And I feel like I am three wrongs above at like an SVP overseeing level where I feel like I am setting up the infrastructure and then they are figuring out the best way to execute within that. And so I feel like I'm moving from managing to waiting for escalations or I feel like I'm moving away from delegating and more just deciding what should or shouldn't happen. And so it's a little bit more of the like a liability role where I just get to be the final say of what happens and come in for like critical thinking steps. But does it like am I the only one that feels like that is happening? I just, it feels like that word is wrong. Like I see managing agents everywhere and it just feels like anyone that is still talking about you should manage agents feels like early 2026 talk. Also like do we want to manage agents? Is also the question like managing people's hard, you know what I mean? Like a big reason I think a lot of people like AI to do stuff for us is so we don't have to manage things, you know. So that's something else I'm thinking about. Like I ran an org of about 100 people at AWS. The parts of people management that I loved. It was the making them better and empowering the shit out of them and seeing them completely blow past their ceiling, watching them get promotions. Like that was the fun part and also seeing what we could do together. Things like, oh, we have to fill out this thing with the paper and the button and like get me out of there. So I think the admin side of people management and the admin side of agent management, I want that fully gone. The things that I love about people I'm bringing that over into agents, which is just like, how do I act as as ambitiously as possible and get you to break through your ceiling? And one of the best prompts that I have done with my AI workforce is three words and with like a little bit of explanation, but like at its core it is three words that is the best prompt ever. So I have my AI chief of staff is Simon, Simon runs like this whole org. And so I have 34 AI agents that work in this workforce. And it dawned on me that I was already functioning at the limit of my own imagination in my business. And that I could be doing way more ambitious things if only someone could manage me, right? Like could break help me break through my ceiling. And obviously I have a lot of mentors and you're amazing at shaking people up and making me second guess how I'm doing things. It's really helpful. But it dawned on me. I was like, why am I not leaning on the AI agents to help me with this? Like why is everything that they're working on initially prompted by me? Even if it's a scheduled task, I still had to come up with that task and tell it to do it. So the best prompt three words and it's just do smart things. Like my AI workforce has access to every single context doc I've got. Context talks about my business, my friends, family, my 2026 personal goals, business goals. It has access to my meeting transcripts, email calendar, notion, stripe, super base, GitHub, whatever. And I just several times a day wanted to look across all the things and just do smart things. And seeing how Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 and that level model is reacting to that vague flavor of prompt, like you couldn't you couldn't do this a year ago. Now you absolutely can. So when you hire a human being, I think there's like three types of employees that you can have. One is someone who doesn't complete tasks, not a good employee, they're not completing tasks. The second is they are completing the tasks. Like satisfactory or exceeding, but like they're not really like thinking about new tasks. So they're not you can't just like if you step away from the business, you're probably not going to see insane growth. And then the best employee that you can possibly hire is doing the tasks, exceeding expectations on it, but also thinking about new tasks that they should be doing and actually going and doing those and exceeding expectations or you know, or being very satisfactory on that. So what you're saying is basically you're just giving more responsibility to your team of agents. You're giving it in a way because you're giving these three words to it and you're saying like, Hey, I'm shifting the responsibility of like, you know, do smart things to you. Like you have to you have to like, there's a bunch of fog that you have to figure out. Yes, I would say I'm giving them more breadth, more scope, more flexibility. I'm not allowing them to now send 100 emails. And before I used to have to check all emails, I still check all emails. So the the tier of risk has stayed the same, but the width has expanded. It's it's almost like unbelievable that those three words actually make a difference. Yes. This is like I and by the way, so so I agree with your assessment on this like tiers of employees and Alex Lieberman shared this like pyramid of pro activity that I turned into all send this to you so that you can pull it up right now as I'm talking about. But it is five levels of pro activity. And at level four, it's like, I've already solved this thing. Here are the trade offs or whatever. And at level five, it's like, I've already solved this thing. Here's how I'm going to deal with it if it goes wrong. Here's the next steps. All the things that you just laid out. I would say that the difference between someone who's at level three and two in in your analogy is someone that understands goals and someone who's been given the power to rethink how things get done and the power to actually execute. And I give my AI workforce goals like those are written out and every single quarter also share with you this tweet that has like the prompt that I think everyone can use. But every single quarter, I'm going through a goals review with my AI agent workforce so that the goals documents that are living on my desktop and are duplicated in the drive so that all this cloud like workflows can actually work. All of that is so that AI when it is in that expanded scope world and it's taking on net new tasks, it's doing it in a goal-oriented way. It's like giving it a product mindset. Like I think it would be extremely limiting if you only treated this thing as an engineer when it could be the greatest product that you've ever had. I think you tweeted about like you're like you're really focused on proactive agents, right? Is that what you're talking about? When you talk about proactive agents, is this what you're talking about?
talking about. So, when you talk to the AI labs and I know you do and I know I do and a bunch of others probably do, but the word of the year feels like it's proactive. So I don't want to be the first domino anymore. I don't want to be the bottleneck in my own work and any single moment that I realize that I am the limiting factor of helping a billion people transform their lives work and business in the AI age, I have to remove myself from the process and go, "Bad Ali, like, what are you doing?" And so a lot of that, especially in the kind of tail end of 2025, first half of 2026 was switching into proactive agents. So we had proactive automations that were trigger based. I'll give you a really easy example. Every single time I drop a video recording into our video folder, so basically any time I do a screen recording, goes into this one folder, and automatically it gets generated. Automatically generated is a transcript of that video that gets, you know, then saved into our little transcripty thing. Social posts get generated that are in my voice. So nine different social posts get generated for X and LinkedIn and Instagram, real scripts and all the stuff. So that presumably the thing that I was filming was for a social video. So that was easy automation land, but that is just one example of like a proactive, very well-defined workflow. What I think is more interesting for the backup of 2026 is proactive of undefined workflows. So like AI is probabilistic all the time and not deterministic, but I want to take that probabilistic nature of reasoning, like the step zero of reasoning and apply that to the actual tasks that it takes on. So in order to do that, whether you're talking to a human or an agent, they have to know what's the goal, what's the North Star, what's that vision. They have access to tools, permission to use these tools in the way that actually gets work off your plate, and a sense of what would normally trigger that sort of action. So and I'm going to share one thing on screen here, which is every single day, let me just give me one second. So essentially, I want my whole company to be queryable. I want AI to have context on everything that's happening. And it's not done me that yes, it had access to all my meeting transcripts and it had access to my Gmail and all the stuff. But there was a lot that was not yet codified and it was things like, "Oh, everything is becoming proactive. I want to be more proactive." Or this client, they think that what they need help with is workflows, you know, under the CMO, but actually what they have problems with is reskilling and finding new rules for this one department. So anything that is not codified inside of, again, meetings, emails, whatever, or Slack, I have asked AI now to prompt me every single day with this. And, you know, I got to put it in my brand colors and I didn't want to have to think with, you know, maybe 10% of my brains still working at the end of the day. So I give it like a little prompt. It reminds me to dictate because that's four times faster than writing. And so I will bank these entries to be like, you know, I talk to Greg. I feel like the entire focus is on proactive agents, proactivity and flexibility. And I want to look more into his three levels of employees. And so like I might do this for five minutes or 40 minutes at the end of the day. Am I to it throughout the day? And then I just save it out. And then it's like, this goes into my personal wiki. And all I want to do is make sure that the agents that are working at that really flexible layer, where again, I am not managing them. I am enabling them. And they're coming back to me with those escalations and decisions. I want to make sure that they have the right context or else all their stuff is going to be wrong. And we saw this in the beginning of our AI workforce stuff. It was like, oh, I saw that, you know, Greg confirmed that interview. And it's like, no, Greg confirmed it, but we're still figuring out dates and I'm doing it over text and, you know, I message MCP broke since you can't see that. So there was a lot of stuff that we had to continually fix. And it took probably months to get to where we are now. But we have clawed in every single one of our chat channels. I had a very weird, I have to send, I just show you this. Let me just share my whole screen. By the way, this, so the brain meets everything. So when you, when you, you know, you add today, well, you had like 86 entries, right? So your AI agents do all of your, does your entire AI workforce have a way to do that? Have access to that or just some, how do you think about that? So great question. Essentially, my AI workforce right now is one AI chief of staff with six directors. Those directors are largely over like business functions. So one is education, one is all the client work, one is kind of operations, one's marketing one product. And then Phoebe, all these are named after friends characters. Phoebe is like the chief dreaming officer who's just like being wacky and weird in a corner. And so she's, this is, let me take another, just like moment here. The reason that it took us months to get to where we are now with our AI work forces is that you have to take stock of what assumptions you have made about your work and how you are living day to day and you have to be willing to be like, oh, that thing that I've been doing for almost 40 years, I feel like we should change it. And that's a really jarring change to work, especially when you've like been and over achiever, right? I'm sure you feel this too. And so one thing that I am constantly having to remind myself is we have all these agents that do all these tasks and we have skills and we have this and that. And I have to remind myself that like that is operating in 2015 world. If I give all of them job titles that existed in 2015. So if I name them CMO or Chief Product Officer and the person underneath it is a front-end engineer and a back-end engineer and all that stuff, then it feels like I am operating in 2015 or structure. And one of the most wonderful uses of free will and just delightful things is going, oh my God, all of these employees basically cost zero dollars. And so at the margin, I can hire any flipping person I want to. And so I just wanted this weirdo. So I hired Phoebe as like a weirdo in the corner who's just looking at all these things that we're working on. And Phoebe acts as this like almost end layer for things that are getting generated to go like, how do we 10X it? Like I joke. There's this guy David that I worked with at Amazon who was one of the reasons that I joined there. And he is like one of the most ambitious thinkers I've ever met. And I joke that I would pay him. And I still, it's a joke, but I would pay him to do this. I wanted him to put me in a room. Spanish was this inquisition style with like a bright light on my face and to ask me a question. Like I was running a multi-billion dollar business at Amazon with 400,000 global startups running AI strategy. And if he asked a question of like, how would you do this? And I answered, I wanted him to just slap me across the face and be like, how would you 10X that? And I want a David for how I'm structuring my AI workforce. But I'm now able to do that on my own. I'm sure David would be disappointed to hear that. But it's rethinking roles. It's rethinking how you're spending, again, how you're thinking about that margin. And so Phoebe is one of them that I would have never hired in human world. And Toby is another, I'll send you a screenshot of my workforce. Basically, Phoebe is that chief duty officer and Toby is Simon's assistant whose only job is watching the AI workforce work. Take down notes. What still has friction? And who needs access to what? So going back to your point of, hey, I have this AI diary that I'm maintaining. If we found that one agent did not have access to this and Toby was like, every single time you keep correcting this one agent's output, have you thought about giving your agent access to this? Now this is just context that lives on my desktop. So any of these agents can really see it. But if it was a specific tool, if it was a specific folder that is outside of normal Claudeland that I try and have hard rules on, then I would absolutely use AI as a means of figuring out those friction points to then expand. Yeah. Even on designing your actual workforce, so I agree, by the way, I think like, you have to think about like, how do you create an AI native workforce without job titles from pre-AI native land? So I agree with that. But like, tactically, if I'm a founder, like, how do I, it's so much easier to be like, I need to see a mo, I need to see PO, I need this. So I think everyone should start there. Yeah. I think like, the starting point is, what does it feel like to work with one agent? After that, I would say, what does it work? What does it feel like to work with one agent who is doing things on my behalf proactively? Then I would say, what does it feel like for two agents to work together?
together on a task or for one to direct the other, like one to route to the other. And then I would say, okay, what does a workforce look like? And how do all those things interact? And I have a mission control where I'm seeing how all this stuff is moving around. And then you go, oh, now I understand how they're trading notes, now I understand how context has passed, now I understand that things have to run in parallel, now I have to understand that this agent actually didn't need access to these tools. Now I understand that that agent can run off of a smaller model, like not everything needs opus. All of my sub agents are like, Hiku and Sonnet. So all of that is in the discovery phase of building out the AI workforce. I think start with traditional job titles. - No, I was just thinking myself, I wish it wasn't that hard, right? 'Cause it does feel like there's a ramp up time to actually get to a point where you have an AI workforce that's working for you that is efficient. And I think a lot of people, what happens is that they try, they fail. And they're like, this isn't for me or the models aren't good enough yet. Or, and you know what I mean? - Yeah, so here's my take on that. I think that you can spin up a workforce with one prompt, right? Like I've shared this prompt publicly. You can just prompt and say, I am a founder, I am building an AI personal shopper. My team is three humans. Here's what we do. Here's where we're based. Here's our goal, whatever. You can say that and just say interview me. We're gonna build on an AI workforce together, something that runs more efficiently and achieves my goals of saving at least five hours a week, capping my meetings to 15 hours per week and make sure that I get into my capital raised by October. Right? Like you can do that in one prompt and have it interview you and then you have a workforce. To go from, yes, all these agents exist and they all have marked on files and they're doing some stuff to, ooh, now it's at the 90% plus level and ooh, I needed this extra little context with this diary. And, hmm, that role isn't working. I'm gonna switch it. That is all gonna come through iteration 'cause it's so specific to each person. The advice that I would give is stop relying on only yourself to find these blockers. Like, AI as a watchdog is one of the best use cases that exists right now and almost no one is doing this. So like having an AI watchdog in Slack to catch for duplicative work or having an AI watchdog on your calendar to see when there are conflicts or an AI watchdog over your meetings just to see where disagreement is happening. Like 10 years ago, I remember working, this was at a large scale enterprise, but we were working on comparing contracts, right? It was like before the edit after the edit and it was like comparing contrast with AI. And 10 years ago, that was like the greatest use case ever. And yet, no one today is using AI for this like weird cross-functional gap analysis. At a more advanced level than we would have done 10 years ago and it's still just like such a media use case. I think Cloud Tag is a big help here. I think it's a mess right now. In this exact moment that we're recording this, I think it's a mess to set Cloud Tag up and I'm sure it will be fixed by the time this comes out. I've also set up my own Cloud Code to come in. I have a Slack channel that is called Loop Alley. I'll send you a screenshot of non-private information, but it is called Loop Alley. My freaking human team can talk to my AI workforce in that Slack channel. So there is no ceiling to this stuff. Like I'll have a teammate who like if I'm in private emails with someone that the teammate will write into this like and go, "Hey, did that large financial services client, like did they respond to Ali's email?" And my workforce will respond back to that person and that person will not have to wait for me for five hours to get back to them. So that sort of thing, the ratcheting up of how advanced your AI workforce can be, how multi-player it is, that's going to take time because people are still figuring out best practices now. Things are not easy to set up right now, but that baseline of, "Hey, interview me, I want to work for us, I want something just doing stuff for me at a high enough level." You can set that up and connect into tools in under three hours. The other thing is because a lot of people are not doing it, that's the arbitrage opportunity. - Yes. - So it's kind of like, it's kind of like, it's stick through it, optimize it. I'm curious actually from your perspective, like what opportunities are you seeing that people could be building, making money, that sort of thing, I'm just curious, what comes up in the horn. I think, so certainly, I think AI workforce, first of all, of all AI users, if you look at the percentage of people who are paid AI users, and if you look at the percentage of those who are using things like Codex or Cloud Code, it is miniscule. So already, if you're just trying to be in the top, like 1% of AI users and you're using the stuff and you've built out even a basic workforce, you're already top 1%, probably top 0.5%. Getting it to that advanced level, I think is absolutely arbitrage because it feels like I'm operating a company of 1,000 people and not my small, scrappy Gremlin group. That is still absolutely one. I think the second that I would do is that AI is a watchdog over any single thing that I am normally tracking. So maybe it's, and I don't just mean visibility, I think dashboards are done, but I want visibility with anomaly detection or insights or something. So don't just tell me what my social media following is reviews or whatever. Tell me, what are people talking about? What are people best reacting to? What is not performing well? What should I do tomorrow? Write me a script that helps me for that. So kind of this, AI is a watchdog, but with insights into action, I think is a second. And the third that very few people are talking about, but is probably one of the biggest arbitrage opportunities because of how good the models are now, is to instead of building out the thing, build the factory for the thing. - What do you mean by that? - So let's say that you want to build a product and we just released, there's something called the AI First Index that I run with all of my Fortune 500 clients, where I interview their executives and I evaluate how AI first they are across like 16 different dimensions and all this stuff. And we decided through a combination of humans and AI to create a product for the public to be able to benchmark themselves on how AI First they are as individuals and as a company. In that process, I could have done one of two things. I could have gone to Cloud Code or Codex or the anti-gravity or whatever. I could have gone to any of these and said, hey, I want to build out this thing, interview me, look at my AI First Index reports that I've used with previous clients, find every single workshop I've ever done with clients where I mentioned the AI First Index, whatever. Do that and build out the product and then we iterate for several hours, days, whatever until something is perfect and we really said. That is option one. Option two is realizing that that's probably not gonna be the only product you build or will not be the only iteration of that specific product that you built. And so it's like going one level up in abstraction. It's like what DevTooled companies did for engineering, but you're creating DevTools, that level for yourself. You're going to the kernel level for yourself. And so you're moving down the stack for yourself and instead of just building that product, we instead built out a mini and very beginner software factory where we're building out primitives like obviously we have to deal with login, obviously we have to deal with payments, obviously we have to deal with social sharing. We have to deal with writing newsletters to promote these things. And so you end up instead of just building that one product, you go, there is going to be a flywheel that comes out of this. There's gonna be explosive opportunities that comes out of this. Why not take advantage of that now? And so it's like a measure twice cut one's kind of thing, but the measurement is building out that foundational layer so that the next product that you build, the next iteration of the AI for syntax or whatever you're building out is so much faster, so much better, so much stronger. And so we're building these like loops, these optimizing loops again that aren't super autonomous and are very heavy handed with humans, but that is the arbitrage opportunity on products that are revenue jet, like that's already profitable. And now I have the ability to build endless products that are profitable at faster speeds than I built the first one. - That's crazy, that's absolutely crazy. And no one is talking about this. - No, it's the dark headless factory, headless AI headless nut, you know. But that's what I want. I want to learn through the mess, like we had a web hook issue, whatever, like I want to learn through that mess, and then I want to never make that mistake again. And so you have to think about how this factory works, not just for product building, but maybe it's for how you wanna run your content engine. Maybe it's how you want to deal with net new leads. Like think of
the factory behind the one singular task instead of the one singular task itself. That is one of the biggest ways to rethink work in the AI age. What's Ali Miller's current POV on software, the SaaS apocalypse and software, the value going down, down, down. Everyone could create a software factory. Also I just, like I wish I had an agent that was yelling at me about my posture. So maybe I'll create a new one for that. SaaS apocalypse. I think mediocre software is dead in several years. The reason that I think it's actually a longer timeline than most people are predicting is because of what I shared about how often people are actually using this stuff. You could go into one of the most AI first banks or AI for software companies. If you ask them, have you rebuilt DocuSign? Have you rebuilt parts of Salesforce? Have you rebuilt all these things knowing that you can? They would say something like, no, because we're already so bandwidth constrained. Or no, because we've prioritized this other thing. As long as we are still bandwidth constrained and as long as there are still billions of people who have not used these sorts of tools, you're not going to have mass, adoption inside of the enterprise of the replacement to SaaS. Does that make sense? If it continues to take, I don't know, a hundred hours or something to rebuild something at the scale of a CRM, companies that only have people who are sitting there and can work for a hundred hours and who know how to do this are going to be able to take advantage of it. And it's only going to be when that drops down to under three hours and is a fun click and drag interface, which I would even argue and say, "Replit-level or not at that level yet?" Right, for that complexity of software, you're not going to see a high complexity, enterprise grade, highly secure SaaS do that. Also, people don't want to maintain that software too, right? People are willing to pay someone else to maintain software. Absolutely. I built an app this was a year and a half ago or something. I built an app that only lives on my desktop that allows me to better manage photo stuff. And someone yesterday brought this up in a call and I was like, "Oh my God, I have an app just for this!" And then I opened it and it was aired out. I'm like, "I don't want to deal with this right now. This is not an all I want to do." So, you're totally right. The maintenance is rough. Like Boris describes one of the future employee types as just the maintainer. But I have a really hard time seeing mass SaaS apocalypse until the ease of prototyping, making, customizing and maintaining and securing is at 95% plus. Even in a world where there's the maintainer, if something breaks and you're an enterprise, you want someone to call. You want to go into someone's office, right? Yes. You also want someone to blame. You want someone to blame. That's an important piece. I think a lot of people are forgetting that the question of, "Is AI going to replace this, this, whether it's a task, a job, a company, a product, something?" Then I am asked, the first question I'm asking myself is, "Who's liable now? Who would be liable in that other world? And do I think that that trade-off is worth it right now?" Like I work with Fortune 500 CEOs every single day. No way. No way. They want to be able to call because they want someone to unblock. They want someone to secure. The other thing is that, let's just say it's a Salesforce example and that you could build a shitty CRM or a simple CRM or something that's just running on your own. But Salesforce has relationships with all the AI labs. They are getting into early testing. By the time a new model comes out, you are facing it as a day one person. They're facing it as a day 30 maybe. You're also going to be on a very big lag. As you're thinking about that cost trade-off, I think in addition to all the things that we just talked about with enterprise-grade security and maintaining, whatever, you just also don't want to experience that lag. We're moving to a world where being fast to the punch and getting a 60 day, 60 day, 100 day lag up on someone is going to be massive for business. What about for consumers? I get that an enterprise, you want someone you can speak to and you want security. But for consumers, for example, your app, idea around, let me know in my postures bad. I'll even move the camera up. By the way, I also have horrible postures. Okay, well then let's build a product using that. Exactly. Okay, let's say you build a product and I build a product. It's like, ultimately, you made the best product win. Hopefully. Hopefully. Hopefully. I don't think that's ever been the case though. That's right. The best songs are on the Billboard 100. In the sense of the marketing, the promotion of a piece of IP is really what drives a lot of awareness and. But that's also an arbitrage opportunity. It's almost kind of exciting that it's not only based on code or design for who wins. It's kind of nice to know that if you're someone who's really personable, that you can get a leg up if you're able to open doors that other people can't. Exactly. On the one hand, you could say it's not fair because it's so subjective. On the other hand, you could be like, "Oh yeah, but if I lack that one skill," or if I'm not the best in class at that skill and I'm just passing muster on that skill, I still have a chance. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. When people say just to sum this up, when people say software is going to zero, on the enterprise side, we both agree. Some software might go to zero, but you want someone that you can speak to, you want security, you want someone to maintain it. On the consumer side, it feels like it's sort of shifting from science to art. Now the people that are going to win are going to be the more creative, maybe the video first people, the people that can understand how to create Instagram Reels that a posture app can go viral. And the code is actually going to matter a lot less, but the amount of opportunity that exists both in enterprise and consumer, to me, it couldn't be higher. So I think a lot of people will say the phrase, "Look for the bottlenecks and solve the bottlenecks." And I always kind of disagreed with, or I don't think it's fully complete. The phrase that I say is like, "Look for the bottlenecks, then evaluate the value of fixing those bottlenecks and then pick the bottleneck that is high value to fix." And so if right now the bottleneck is not on writing code and the bottleneck is not on coming up with good design, but the bottleneck is getting something from a local HTML file into like an actual iOS app, then that might be where you spend your time. Or if the bottleneck is that no one's really figured out how to get stronger word of mouth and referral codes and like that's still kind of messy. And I know this as a product maker and advisor, that is still a messy spot. So maybe if you fix that, your, whatever they call it, like the covariant, the word of mouth covariant thing, could be above one. Like that is what I would be spending my time on. Finding the bottlenecks and finding what is still high value. I think video creation, no matter how much AI is helping me edit or edit the script or whatever, it is still a slog to be able to make video. So that is still bottleneck and it's very high value. But people in the B2C space, I'm sure can think of a lot more. I don't know, I just think of like certain B2C products that I use and I'm like, "Why did I pick it?" I use whisper flow every single day. I don't like their mobile experience at all, but I still use it because the value is so high. Have I seen a single video about whisper, did I see a single video before I started using it? No, I now see them, you know, everywhere. But could it be subconsciously though, you like see their brand places? Like maybe you're watching, I don't know, you know, Chris Williams and then they sponsor Chris Williams and you kind of, you kind of just see it, you know? Yeah, I think like influencers still have a ton of sway here, the rise of the B2B influencer, which like I feel like I was one of the first and it is, it's so amazing to see more people creating business content. But that is still a bottleneck in building like B2B trust. That is a massive bottleneck and so finding creators that can help you there. I think B2C has a ton of opportunity. I worry if you look at the YC splits right now, when I was working with YC when I was at AWS compared to now, the ratio of B2B versus B2C has skyrocketed.
Like, there's just not as many B2C companies in these incubators getting built. You could either say when they're zicking, I'm zagging and double down and do a B2C thing. Like, there was this woman who created an app. She's never coded a day in her life. She created an app that takes a few photos of your face and she takes that and creates a model of your face and gives you like aesthetic photos that are like you in a grainy, rainy day, riding a bicycle or whatever. She had 300,000 users out the gate. Like, there's still a lot of opportunity in B2C even if the big incubators are seeing that activity less. So maybe that's another opportunity for people to explore. Well, yeah, and I think we've been talking a lot about agents and I think there's just an opportunity to create agent first version of some of our favorite apps. You just look at a bunch of different B2C apps. Just a go look at sentrytower.com. Not affiliated, but you can just see what's charting and what are people downloading and it's like, okay, in a world where super intelligence is now on tap. How can I make an AI native version of this or undercut, you know, from a price perspective or just drive more value. Like there's ways, there's now like opportunity to enter some of these markets. I completely agree with you and I think agent first software is absolutely one. Two things that I actually think are really interesting, or maybe three by the time I get to it, but interesting research avenues to learn more opportunities like the one you just mentioned. So one, YC posts videos on Instagram for what type of applications they're looking for and agent for software is one of them. So listening to what YC is asking for, assume that they are already thinking 18 months out. So that's definitely one arbitrage research opportunity. The second is Matt Van Horne's last 30 days research skill, which is just amazing. I've like, I've integrated that with my like, Claude Wiki. Love it. And the third is. Wait, can you tell people I've had Matt, I've had Matt on the pod, but just quickly, like, what is it and why, why do you think it's chef's kiss? So there are a lot of public skills that I think are done by geniuses in their space. One that was kind of first out the gate or one of the first out the gate that is made by a lovely man named Matt Van Horne is slash last 30 days. And it's on GitHub. You can just grab it. But it is the ability for AI to figure out today's date, scan the news at the last 30 days, but scan it in interesting ways, synthesize it in interesting ways, and just fan out crazy amounts of agents in parallel to be able to bring it back to you. So as I'm thinking about, you know, if I'm going into a company and I'm running a workshop for their 200 executives, I don't know about the insurance space as well as I should. And so like, if I need to quickly get spun up on an industry, I'll use it. Or quickly get spun up on a specific company, I'll use it. So I use it there, but for this in particular, you could just do slash last 30 days and then say like start up ideas that could be built by someone with the following background or the following skills or had the last three jobs of this, this, this, like use it in interesting ways to see how you can carve out a new path that people are not doing. The third which I have access to and I think there are public avenues to get it is that I might, let's say I am at like a CMO summit. And so every single person in the audience is a CMO. I can hear the types of questions that they're asking, right? I can hear the the fear zones that they have. I can hear questions that they used to ask three years ago and are no longer asking today. And so finding companies, people, influencers, creators, Greg's of the world to like follow to hear the inside scoop of what these people are thinking of. Like I can tell you that CMO's all of them are asking about like, how do I get discovered by agents? How what is the agent for shopping experience look like? What is brand consideration in the AI age look like? You know, all of that is being considered right now by CMO's. But it is often coming from a place of fear that they are worried that their business is going to be depleted that their pipeline is going to be crushed in two years if they don't figure it out now. So figuring out paths to find those fear points would probably be the third. I love it. Allie, anything else you wanted to cover? I just want to screen share the insane clawed reaction because this and this is me also cursing at clawed but whatever. So I wrote a not super I wrote a not super nice thing about clawed in one of our slack channels. And this was like late at night and I was just like getting it out there so I could talk with my team about it later. And all of a sudden there was an emoji reaction of a salute. And I was like, I don't think a single person on my team has ever used a salute. And I hovered over it and it was clawed. I was like, what are you doing? And so I wrote back to it. You just, you know, emoji react like is that you and clavs like, yeah, that was me. And I just if there's one thing that I want people to to think about, it is the leading into the weirdness of what it looks like to have not just an AI workforce, but to have a multi player, AI workforce that other humans can chime in on. And have it be proactive, right? That is absolutely the second thing. And giving it that flexibility to more roam free. And the third is what it actually looks like for a teammate or a system to up level, whether that's in dark factory type space or just answering better questions inside of slack. And it's the things that I would be considering and don't be scared like me if clav emoji reacts to a lot of your messages. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know what that is like? It's kind of like, you know, it's a winter day in New York City. And for some reason, it's like middle of February and all of a sudden it feels like summer, like, you know, this like random hot days. And you're like 90% excited, but like 10% frightened because you're like, it's not supposed to be so hot now. Your now, those are always so, you're like a genius with analogies. Yes. That's what it's like. It's like you're, that's 90% cool, but 10% frightening. Yes. Yes. I'm like, I'm like, still going to continue to try and lean into that weirdness and find ways that I can like take that weirdness and use it to my advantage. But I'm going to keep that fear next to me so that I don't lose my mind. 100%. I hope people enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Allie, I absolutely love chatting with you. You're one of my favorite people to talk to. Please comment on YouTube to let just to just to hype Allie up, honestly, and have her hopefully come back on the podcast again. Allie is a must follow, include where you can follow her on her socials in the show notes and the description. Yeah. Greg, thank you so much for having me. My hope is that every single person got the tactical things that they need to just like immediately, immediately take action on this. If anything was not clear, let me know. I am going to like jump on and help people. And Greg, I will absolutely come back. You're one of my favorite, favorite creators. You can always call me. I appreciate it. Allie, I'll see you next time. That was good. Bye.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Ali K. Miller argues that "managing agents" is outdated; the role is shifting to enabling agents, setting infrastructure, and handling escalations rather than direct oversight.
She emphasizes proactive agents, especially for undefined workflows, where AI takes initiative using goals, tools, and context to act without being prompted for every task.
A key prompt strategy is "do smart things," where her AI workforce (34 agents) uses a shared context to identify and execute new tasks aligned with business goals.
She recommends a phased approach to building an AI workforce
Role design should evolve beyond traditional job titles; agents like "Phoebe" (chief dreaming officer) or "Toby" (workforce observer) can fill novel, non-human roles that add unique value.
Success requires codifying context (e.g., daily AI diary entries) to ensure agents have accurate information, reducing errors and improving autonomy over time.
Ali suggests starting with familiar job titles (CMO, PO) for ease, then optimizing by reassigning roles, scaling model sizes (e.g., sub-agents on cheaper models), and addressing friction points.
Summary:
In this episode, Ali K. Miller discusses how to strategically build and manage AI agent workforces, challenging the traditional notion of "managing" agents. She argues that the mindset should shift from direct management to enabling agents, where the human sets up infrastructure, defines goals, and steps in only for critical decisions or escalations.
Central to her approach is proactivity: agents should not just execute predefined tasks but also identify new ones aligned with overarching goals. She shares a powerful prompt, "do smart things," which allows her AI workforce to leverage shared context—meeting transcripts, emails, calendars, and business goals—to take initiative and break through her own limitations. Ali emphasizes the importance of codifying context, using daily AI diary entries to capture uncodified knowledge, ensuring agents have accurate information to act autonomously.
She also advises a gradual adoption path: start with a single agent, then add proactivity, then collaboration, and finally scale to a full workforce with mission control. Role design should evolve beyond traditional job titles, creating unique agents like a "chief dreaming officer" or a "workforce observer" to fill novel functions. Finally, she recommends starting with familiar roles for ease, then optimizing by reassigning tasks, adjusting model sizes, and addressing friction points to create an efficient, high-performing AI workforce that underpromises and overdelivers.
FAQs
Instead of managing agents like direct reports, you should act as an SVP overseeing infrastructure, letting agents figure out execution and only stepping in for escalations or critical thinking.
It's a three-word prompt where you give your AI workforce access to all your context docs, goals, and tools, then let them proactively decide and execute tasks that align with your objectives.
Start with one agent, then add proactivity, then have agents collaborate, and finally build a full workforce. Use traditional job titles initially, like CMO or Chief Product Officer, to ease into it.
Levels range from just completing tasks to exceeding expectations and thinking of new tasks. The highest level involves agents solving problems, handling risks, and executing next steps without needing constant direction.
Maintain a queryable company by codifying all information, like meeting transcripts and emails, and prompt AI to remind you to log uncodified insights daily. This ensures agents make informed decisions.
Because agents cost nearly nothing, you can hire for unique roles that add value, like a 'chief dreaming officer' for ambitious ideas or an assistant that watches the workforce for friction and access issues.
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