AIWA "The One Thing" #03: "Run at it." Bill Gurley's advice hits different when AI crosses from "helpful tool" to magic you can't unsee.

Talking about AI in the workplace can be hard. Every 2-4 weeks, foundational assumptions need revisiting. 

A few recent signals to consider:

1: Claude launching inside Excel

2: OpenAI’s CFO floating profit-sharing model on drugs AI helps discover

3: Shane Legg (DeepMind co-Founder / Chief Scientist) posting a job for a Senior Economist focused on “long-term economic impacts of AGI, questioning existing assumptions about scarcity, wealth, and distribution”

4: Vibe coding driving a 60% surge in new App Store apps in December

Then you see something you can’t unsee. 

Watching Claude Cowork organize 6 months of receipts into a categorized spreadsheet with monthly breakdowns is unreal. 

You instantly see what this is. The friction removed. The time saved.

Yesterday, it was an important but tedious “part of doing business”. Today, it’s no longer something that requires a human workflow.

And then it hits you, “wait, if it can do that, what else can it do?”

When AI crosses from a “helpful tool” to “this feels like magic,” something fundamental shifts.

The gap between “AI is overhyped” and “AI just did that” closes. Permanently.

What happens next?

Sometimes, the thinking moves to fear, rooted in a belief that the pie is fixed.

Understandable but keep two things in mind.

1: Lump of Labor Fallacy: 

The mistaken belief that there is a fixed amount of work. So if AI does more, humans do less. In reality, history shows the opposite. AI augmentation tends to create new tasks, roles and demand.

2: Jevon’s Paradox:

The observation that when technology makes a resource more efficient to use, total consumption often increases rather than decreases. So as AI makes work faster and cheaper, organizations tend to do more of it, not less.

Instead of a zero-sum game, remember it’s Humans + Machines, not Humans vs Machines.

We’ve been through paradigm shifts before. The people who’ve navigated them successfully have patterns worth hearing.

Bill Gurley is one of those people. 

Bill Gurley on BG2 Pod, June 2024: “We evolve with our tools…That just has always been true in our society and so if you are a programmer who is worried about this, the best thing you can do is run at it.”

Doers who run at it will thrive.