Getting our products to market used to be hard.
We used to spend hours conducting research, crafting strategies, writing materials, analyzing data. Doing things was tedious, often painful. Not anymore.
We now have AI assistants and agents ready to do the heavy lifting. They can research our competitors inside-and-out before we finish our coffee. Distill our company positioning into a single line. Draft a new blog post in any tone, length, and language we want. And analyze 300 rows of survey data to tell us what’s really going on.
This is a paradigm shift in our work. We no longer do the work — we guide AI to do it for us. It isn’t flawless. Extraordinary results still require a human touch. But we can produce three times what we used to in a quarter of the time.
It’s an age of easier work.
So what does it take to win today?
In the old world, the productivity game was about execution. About doing work better, faster, cheaper. Like players in the orchestra, we had to master the skill of playing to succeed. Researching, writing, analyzing — these skills were appreciated and rewarded. Now they’re becoming commoditized.
As work gets easier with AI, orchestration of that work is becoming the key.
In the new world, the game is about coordinating how work gets done. It’s not about playing — but about managing what music is played, by whom, and how.
This is a new game for us. To succeed, we must evolve from orchestra players to composers and conductors. And that requires three crucial skills.
Clarifying work. Planning clear tasks for execution. Engineering context. Getting AI to execute tasks with relevant, fresh context. Controlling flow. Staying on top of work and keep iterating forward.
Setting direction. Supplying context. Keeping things moving. That’s the new moat.
We call it world-class orchestration.
But it comes with a problem.
Today, it’s not possible to reach that level of orchestration. The issue is in our tools: the gaps between them — and the way they are built.
Issue one: Broken workflow.
There is a disconnect between where we plan and where we do. We plan work from work management tools — Notion, Trello, Linear. We execute tasks in AI assistants and agents — ChatGPT, Sana, Jasper, Copy.ai. Additionally, we keep knowledge somewhere else and insights in our heads. At the core, orchestration is a dance between planning, doing, and managing work. Yet we keep the dancers in isolated rooms.