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While products like GrokBot push the 'team of AI agents' metaphor, some argue this is counterproductive. An alternative model is emerging: a shared workspace where teams access skills and context, treating AI as a shared utility or consultant rather than managing numerous individual AI 'teammates.'

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Instead of each employee using their own separate AI, the more effective model is a central, multiplayer AI that acts as a shared 'company brain' or teammate. This approach, which Motion is building with its 'Runneth' agent, prevents duplicated efforts and builds a shared company-wide context.

Every initially gave each employee a personal AI agent but found this created a massive maintenance burden and knowledge silos. They shifted to shared agents focused on team functions (e.g., analytics). This centralizes maintenance, improves continuity when employees leave, and scales benefits across the entire team.

Early AI adoption by PMs is often a 'single-player' activity. The next step is a 'multiplayer' experience where the entire team operates from a shared AI knowledge base, which breaks down silos by automatically signaling dependencies and overlapping work.

Viewing AI agents solely through the lens of automation is limiting. The more powerful mental model is to treat them as a cofounder, giving them access to tools, context, and capabilities to act as a strategic partner, not just a task-doer.

Isolated AI workflows create team disconnects. Pablo Stanley argues for integrating agents into shared, Slack-like environments where they become first-class participants. This allows for transparent, collaborative work between humans and AI, rather than having individuals work with agents in private.

Instead of asking an AI for a single answer, Reid Hoffman advocates for "role prompting"—creating a team of AI agents with different expert perspectives (critic, historian, etc.). This simulates a board of advisors and represents a shift from individual contribution to managing AI teams.

The next frontier for AI isn't just personal assistants but "teammates" that understand an entire team's dynamics, projects, and shared data. This shifts the focus from single-user interactions to collaborative intelligence by building a knowledge graph connecting people and their work.

Treating AI as a personal assistant solves individual tasks but not team coordination. The solution is to deploy "AI Teammates"—integrated agents with specific roles, permissions, and the ability to work with multiple stakeholders within a shared workflow, autonomously moving projects forward.

Today's AI agents like Codex primarily operate as single-player tools on your desktop. The next wave involves multiplayer agents that live in collaborative spaces like Slack. These team-based agents can be accessed by anyone, share knowledge, and automate group workflows, creating new challenges in permissions and shared memory.

Lindy CEO Flo Crivello argues that for AI to be a true teammate, it must inhabit shared spaces like Slack and possess a deep, shared context of the team's history. Raw intelligence is less useful without this context, making agents potentially better than humans at onboarding.