How would you know what to ask?

Ten times

Benjamin and I say things to each other ten times. One of us says something, and the other says it back with different words to get a yes.

"Do you mean it like this?" "Yes, so you mean it like this?" A plain "yes, I agree" would have been enough.

We each want the other to hear that we understood, so we say it back in new words. New words sound like a new question, and we sit for minutes saying the same thing. It still happens every week. We catch it sooner now.

We talk about a thousand things a day, with Benjamin on hypotheses and me on the companies I've called.

If we get each other wrong, Benjamin builds the wrong thing and I tell the companies I call something else. Two days later we're running two different companies.

A thousand calls

Benjamin's first instruction to me was "make a thousand calls." I asked him what for.

I hadn't been that nervous since I was new at a job. The person who picked up said hi the way you answer any call, but for me that call was the start of everything.

Benjamin didn't want me stuck in my own head. The point of the calls made sense to me once I'd picked up the phone and made the first few myself.

After those first calls we changed what we wanted out of them. Now each call had to bring back the objections, like "we already have a product" and "we're already automated."

Before that first call, I couldn't have known what to ask Benjamin.

The first minute

And your first AI colleague starts with the same problem. It works in your tools on a whole computer of its own, and you tell it what you want taken care of. Then it gets going.

Say you ask it to book a meeting with three people next week. It can ask you one thing back, whether it may move your own meetings to make room.

First it reads what your business already wrote down, from decisions to lessons. If it can't tell what it owns or may do without asking, it asks you about that part first.

It saves what you asked for in your own words, and each colleague you let in reads the sentence you wrote. A yes in writing takes one round.

An Evaluation compares each result with what you wrote. And if a result teaches you something, tell the colleague, then the ask changes, like our calls did after the first few.

Benjamin was right about the calls. You do the work and understand it as you go, and now your first colleague does too.