Two years later: AI did it
I wasn’t really thinking about AI. In 2022, I’d had my big realisation that what was making me effective in marketing might be even more valuable in product work. And at the start of 2023, I’d worked my way up through the gears building out my first idea — dozens of customer research interviews, prototyping in Webflow, AirTable, Softr, Figma, then Bubble.
I’d reached the moment where independence felt more of a sacrifice than a benefit. I thought back to working relationships that had been times of great satisfaction and opportunity — James Kennedy at AxiCom, Danny Whatmough at Wildfire, Christian at Tradeshift.
And within 24 hours, I got a WhatApp, and an email from Christian about a new AI startup.
Two weeks later, I was sat around a dining room table with Malte, Joakim, Mikkel Bo, Christian and Kate, hearing about the work they had done in the month since starting the company. And so, so excited.
I remember there was no question about the power of AI — it was always about agency. If LLMs can describe a flow of work, there’s no reason you can’t connect the tools for them to do it.
The real question was HOW.
How do you think of units of work that are now being completed with AI? How should AI and humans collaborate?
How do you describe this new idea, and all its interlocking components, at such a nascent stage?
It was a few months later when Mikkel Bo showed something I still haven’t seen beaten. It wasn’t even an interface, just words pointing to each other.
Running with Malte’s concept of work “authoring”, he designed this workflow for creating work blocks:
- Show the system input: a file, a folder, incoming email, RSS, API, whatever
- LLMs are really good at saying “this looks like an invoice” and assuming the most likely 2-3 automations you are intending to build. Even more so if it knows your business, your job etc.
- It shows you a number of options: “do you mean like this”?
4.a) Yes thankyou. And now it does that work forever.
4.b) Yes but actually they are invoices from Denmark and I need you validate that latest interest rate then feed them back into our ERP.
This “show, don’t tell” is still the most brilliant solution to automation work that I have seen. Dragging and dropping boxes in a WYSIWYG workflow builder seems the obvious early dead end. The one where you copy what existed before instead of conceiving how it should work natively.
I haven’t seen anything as elegant and ingenious as this. I haven’t seen anything as accessible. It’s still my highlight of the last 2 years working in AI.