AI Agent Newsletter. - Week of 7.14.25

How treating AI as digital intelligence or employees to be deployed, rather than software, enhances success rates, adoption and better harnesses the moment we are in.

This week I wanted to build on last weeks mail, which dipped the toe into the 4E/4P cognitive science framing I use to think about myself as well as how we use AI, and lean into what I mean by a digital employee and rather than just a meme, hype or sales pitch, this approach is a very productive way to think about how to integrate AI.

There's an opportunity here or I would say a necessity to reimagine our workflows, not driven by a benevolence, although that would not be a bad thing ethically, but rather by the fact the best and fastest way to integrate AI is by way of employee collaboration. The AI is an extension of the people already in your organization. It gets better the and generates more value the more it is integrated and used and the better the feedback. It's a dynamic, evolving tool and collaborative process that needs guardrails and guidance which are themselves dynamic and will change over time in subtle then material ways, best understood by the people already doing the work.

So...if we use the 4P approach as a way to think about the kids of work we do, and we expect that AI will increasingly take over our propositional and procedural work, but we know AI represents imperfect, "jagged" intelligence, we can easily see how there is a collaborative or even dependent relationship between human and digital workers. AI will run reports, search the web, gather info, draft emails as well as "think" about and provide input into how we might approach or solve a problem. Small at first and possibly bigger over time.

So AI is doing things you previously did but that output is feeding into your communications, analysis, research, planning etc. But it's also dynamic and interactive and can be proactive and not just reactive, whilst constantly needing your advice, guidance, review and so forth. This is very different from working with Excel or a database, or tools like Figma or gmail. These are software with very well defined features that enable discrete components of your work. AI is much more porous and evolving but capable of doing more and more over time.

It is constrained both by it's capabilities but ALSO by our understanding of it and it's integration into our workflows. The very integration into your workflows is itself a kind of IP unique to your firm and the people in it. The same digital intelligence can be deployed in different firms in the same industry and functions in very different ways, depending on the appetite and approach of those firms.

The goal then, assuming you're on board with the idea that AI will increasingly take over the propositional and procedural work, to integrate this as quickly, securely and successfully as possible, since the productivity gains could be immense and it transforms what your employees are focused on.

The next question then is one of AI solutions as a category versus something to be integrated by each firm themselves. Kind of the build versus buy discussion. That is something I want look at next week.

Signal versus Noise section...

• Signal
  • More and more people are leaning into the idea that you should leverage the model not the tools of the foundational companies. They are playing the long $10T game, and we're the ginny pigs.
• AI Browsers. Thats the discussion of the week. Perplexity released comet which can fully integrate into your email, calendar etc and by all accounts, this seems like a good bet on the next evolution of AI UIs.
• "42% of FMS believe that AI is already increasing productivity" per BoA recent survey.
• Seems about right from Jensen when he says "AI isn’t likely to cause mass layoffs unless ‘the world runs out of ideas'".
• Noise:
  • Benchmarks!?!
    • Grok 4 was impressive but real world user evaluation versus benchmarks are diverging as Nate gets into here.
    • But even those who should know better, still buy into benchmarks as THE standard and "AI Experts" react to Elon’s Grok 4.
  • SGI - "developing super intelligence is now in sight”...the hype continues but I am not sure whether it is to attract talent or customers. Maybe the former for now.

People / teams I follow constantly for insight:

• Andrej Karpathy - Technical genius
• Nate Jones - Product manager / AI Agent deep diver
• All-in pod - Can be nauseating but they are smart and connected
• BG2 pod - Like All-in but less nauseating
• John Vervaeke - The most important public intellectual on matters of the mind, cognition, meaning and what it means to be human.
• More to come...

Ciao for now. Have a great weekend.

Contact details

Email: tom@bundlrco.com

LinkedIn