Jared

The Inevitability of the Company AI Harness At some point in the not too distant future (probably less than 6 months), the CEO of every business will be faced with answering this question: would you like to one-click install superintelligence into your business? When we reach this point, adopting AI will no longer be a process of asking individuals in the business to use Claude Cowork or ChatGPT Work to help them be more efficient in their work. Instead, it will be a decision that management teams and boards make for the entire organization. The harness will be installed at the company level, and the harness will enable AI models to drive their own adoption and deployment into the business. With access authorized at the highest levels, the company harness will: 1) Connect to all of the systems of record that contain the artifacts and assets generated by the operations of the business: email and chat, document storage, source code repositories, accounting systems, CRM, marketing campaigns, purchase and revenue data. 2) Ingest and analyze all of the external-facing activity that matters to the success of the business in its market. 3) Use the data it finds in these systems to identify and synthesize the skills needed to replicate the external-facing activities of the business to human-level quality or better. 4) Correctly assess that the vast majority of internal-facing activity in large companies is make-work, and should not be replicated. 5) Find the narrow set of processes that do actually drive the critical external outcomes, and seek to replicate and improve those. 6) Treat the creation of the automated skills and workflows that matter as a reinforcement learning learning problem. 7) Use historical data as the reference set and build itself a loop that trains a skill (or perhaps eventually a bespoke model) to deliver superhuman performance in that task. You might say that AI will never be able to learn how to do all the things a company does without humans hand-crafting the skills or teaching it their proprietary processes. That take will not age well. You might feel that this is a dark future. I don’t agree, but it won’t matter. The incentives to adopt the company harness will be too strong to resist. You might worry that this will be massively disruptive to the way that most companies operate, and you will be right. When company harnesses land, the nature and pace of AI adoption will be a difference in kind, not merely degree. Up until this point, AI diffusion has been limited by a natural brake: the rate that humans in an organization can absorb new tools, translate their workflows into agent skills, and supervise/direct the operations of their agents. The introduction of the company harness will remove that brake. It will be designed for a world where AI is doing the work for us instead of doing the work with us. The company harness will bypass the rate limits of organizational diffusion in favor of a recursive self-improvement loop that is bottlenecked only by computational constraints: tokens, data, and eventually, energy. It will be simultaneously be both thrilling and terrifying, depending on how you position yourself. Some will seek to accelerate it, others will seek to slow it down, but either way adoption will be inevitable.