Co-pilots vs. Agents, Personal user Manuals and How to Create a Startup Ecosystem

The amateur does not know what to do. The master knows what not to do.

Good morning

I’m looking for an outstanding Full Stack Engineer to work with as at Proofs. Please let me know if you are interested or know someone who’s a great fit.

In today's edition, among other things:

• The Autonomy of the Enterprise

• Personal User Manuals

• AI Data Infrastructure

• How to Design a Corporate Venture Studio

• The State of AI in Europe 2024

• Startup Ecosystem Framework

• Self-Esteem

• Navigating Corporate Venture Capital in 2024

Onwards!

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The Autonomy of the Enterprise

Couple of weeks back, a venture fund investor asked me a question: what do you think is obvious today that few people want to acknowledge? Had a couple of answers, one of them being: chatbots/co-pilots are a bet on stagnation, agents are a bet on progress.

Co-pilots today are about augmenting personal productivity today. You use GitHub Copilot as an engineer, and it can make you 40% more productive. Five engineers being 40% more productive using the same tool won’t make the team or company 200% more productive.

Agents are different. AI Agents are augmenting a process. They make the whole process faster/cheaper/better end to end. The can also introduce a totally new process instead of the existing one - the most difficult and most rewarding option - that, if successful, will lead to creating the category and market defining companies for the next years.

They can take an existing process and make it 10x better end to end.

Let’s go a bit deeper, this time with Decibel by

AI Pioneers at Work

. First, it’s tech progress and distribution at its best:

Second, the Co-pilots:

The Dawn of AI Copilots

Most AI-native applications deployed in production over the past year took the form of copilots. These systems require human prompting and maintain a human-in-the-loop approach, relying heavily on sophisticated UI/UX layered on top of foundation models. These copilots are useful, particularly for incumbents who want to add AI features to existing products for the benefit of their users.

However, it's crucial to understand the limitations of copilots. While powerful, copilots fundamentally remain reactive tools, dependent on human initiation and guidance. They excel in augmenting human decision-making in real-time, but they require synchronous activity – inherent to a copilot is that the human must be in the loop. 

I believe copilots will continue to proliferate in the enterprise space, but their development is likely to be dominated by incumbent players. While creating a truly effective copilot is far from trivial, established tech companies with existing data moats, distribution advantages, and robust engineering teams are well-positioned to integrate copilot experiences, often as chatbots, into their product suites. Startups aiming to disrupt incumbents solely through copilot offerings face a steep uphill battle, as they aren't fundamentally altering the business model or ROI calculation for potential buyers. Copilots also will not fundamentally change the way businesses operate.

Thirds, the AI Agents:

At their core, autonomous AI agents are end-to-end systems orchestrating multiple specialized models and components:

• A driver model for high-level decision making and task planning

• A passenger model for oversight and error checking

• Explainability models to provide transparency in decision-making processes

• Alignment models to ensure actions align with defined goals and ethical constraints

• Editor models for self-correction and optimization

• Traditional data pipelines and software engineering components for information retrieval and action execution

• Advanced natural language processing for web search and information synthesis

• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for combining learned knowledge with up-to-date information

• Code runtime environments for dynamic script execution and testing

And the rundown:

You are either building for tomorrow, or optimizing for today. The first favors the bold, the latter - the incumbents.

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Personal User Manuals

Personal User Manuals, also known as Personal Operating Manuals, which I wrote about a bunch of articles through the years, are becoming more and more popular again. What are PUMs: