AI as Background Workers

Shaan Puri believes AI is fundamentally changing how work gets done by acting as proactive background workers rather than passive tools. He's experiencing a shift where AI doesn't just respond to commands but anticipates needs and executes tasks autonomously, creating a new paradigm of productivity.

Key Points:

• AI as Background Workers:

  • AI should constantly work for you in the background, not just when prompted
  • The idea is to have workers that are "gonna be constantly working for you" without needing to ask
  • Tools should figure out what to do based on what's going on, rather than waiting for instructions

• Practical Implementation Examples:

  • Content Strategy: Used ChatGPT to analyze My First Million's YouTube performance, identify outlier videos, and generate a complete one-month content plan with video titles, thumbnail strategies, and topic selection—all in 19 minutes
  • Voice-to-Text Workflow: Uses Whisper to ramble ideas while walking his dog, then has AI structure and organize the content into polished book chapters or blog posts without ever looking at a screen
  • Meeting Prep: Tools like Nebula (by Furqan) automatically create prep docs for upcoming meetings by reading your calendar
  • Code Monitoring: AI automatically reads GitHub commits, summarizes changes, and reports them without being asked
  • Email Management: Uses ChatGPT to rewrite angry emails into productive responses that solve problems

• The K-Shaped Economy Theory:

  • Jobs are bundles of tasks, not monolithic roles
  • 80% of tasks will be replaced by AI
  • 20% of tasks will be enhanced by AI
  • The winners will be those who use AI to 10x or 100x their output
  • The losers will resist because "this is too new, this is too fast"

• Shift in Work Philosophy:

  • "Creativity is the new productivity"—the last 50 years were about who could be most productive, but now with AI everyone's instantly productive
  • It's actually about who's got the best ideas
  • Work doesn't look like traditional work anymore—his dad would see him walking around talking and think "this is not work"

• Current State and Future Direction:

  • Tools like ChatGPT's Pulse feature proactively search and write about things you care about daily
  • These capabilities are "getting better and better"
  • Early prototypes exist but aren't fully functional yet—he's testing tools that aren't polished but show the direction things are heading
  • The key is AI that can be "automatically triggered by reading what's going on" in your Slack, Gmail, calendar, etc.