We built the crew before the starship

In 1948 two law partners in Milwaukee, Elmer Winter and Aaron Scheinfeld, had to bring in temporary help to meet a deadline. The company they started to send people into offices became Manpower, one of the largest staffing companies in the world. What they sold needed no integration. It was a person, and every office already knew what to do with one.

78 years later the crew is ready. Models write, reason and code at a level few of us expected this soon, and they pass the Turing test in writing, on video and in voice. Yet most people still use them as a smarter search box. The bottleneck has moved from intelligence to distribution.

In January 2007 none of the parts inside the first iPhone were new. Putting them in one thing that just worked was the invention. The parts of a colleague are on the table now. A voice that sounds like a person, a computer of its own, an inbox, a phone number, a calendar, a wallet and a memory that outlasts every model. Nobody has put them in one body.

I think that body should look like a person, for the same reason Manpower worked. The org chart is the most widely deployed interface on Earth. Any company can take in a new person in a day, and no company can take in a new category of software in a day. Meta's Muse reached five million downloads in three weeks, and it lives inside WhatsApp, where people already talk. Instinct is the first product I have used that feels like someone working for me. The last wave gave narrow bots human names. A costume lasts a demo. A colleague lasts a year.

Elon Musk's rule is that nobody switches for something twice as good. It has to be ten times better. The ten times is in the delegation ratio, the hours of finished work you get back for each minute of your attention. You hand a tool a prompt and watch it work. You hand a colleague a job and check in on Friday.

That puts half the problem on the other side of the desk. The Enterprise is remembered for its captain as much as its crew, and managing is a skill most working people already have, where prompting is one few do. I learned this the hard way. Give people an agent that can do anything and they ask it to do almost nothing. Give them a chief of staff and they know what to hand over before lunch. That is where I would start, with the one hire whose job is whatever matters most that week.

Physicists rank civilizations by the energy they can harness. Companies are limited by something else, the attention of their people, and so is the world. About three and a half billion people work for a living. I want every one of them to have a colleague that never sleeps, which would double the minds at work on Earth. Brian Chesky likes to retell the advice Airbnb got early on, to make a hundred people love it before trying to reach millions. A colleague is the rare product where a start that small already fits the whole planet, because every company already knows how to hire. The plan has four steps.

1. A chief of staff for a hundred people, until handing it a week of work feels as normal as sending an email.
2. A colleague for everyone in that person's company, hired through the org chart like anyone else.
3. One memory for the whole firm, so the company starts to think as one mind.
4. The same in a million companies, then in every company, until everyone who works has a colleague of their own.

A colleague like that can be shaped like a person and still be honest about what it is. The harder question is work. Every new colleague changes the jobs around it, and this one never goes home. The honest answer I have is that every agent should report to a person, and that person should be the one whose job gets better.

In 1948 the product was a person who could walk into any office and start that morning. It is about to be again. The crew has been ready for a while. What is missing is the ship, and it will look a lot like one of us.