Today’s update in tl;dr format: It’s clear from the tech landscape that as a company, we need to continue to become experts on using existing AI tools and we need to actively prepare to use agentic AI as it rolls out this year. We’re creating some structure around that learning and preparation to help focus our efforts, and will be sharing our findings as we go.
The longer version:
AI advancement is showing no signs of slowing down, and the last few weeks have seen some big jumps forward, with OpenAI’s o3 reasoning model release, Satya Nadella’s announcement today about the new Core AI division at Microsoft, Sam Altman’s statement that OpenAI already knows how to build AGI, and Mark Zuckerberg’s public comments about AI agents becoming mid-level software developers at Meta in 2025. Economically valuable work is already being done by AI, despite the open questions around safety and ethics, regulation, environmental impact, etc. Even if no further technological advances were to happen for quite some time, the current tools will have a profound impact on how knowledge work gets done across the globe for years to come.
At Steyer this year, we’re moving out of our “experiment with it and keep up with the news” era into more a pragmatic preparation and integration mode. Our mission continues to be to create good jobs for (human!) content professionals—we’re not looking to replace the incredibly talented people who work here with AI. I believe there’s plenty of work ahead for content professionals, especially in parts of content services that require discernment, strategic thinking, and empathetic service. At the same time, to continue to compete as a business and provide value to our clients, we need to be experts at using the latest tools to their fullest capabilities—and we need to be experts at knowing those tools’ strengths and weaknesses.
Josh Krenz (Director of Content Services) and I are working on a formal AI program for our content services that will help us prepare for and integrate AI agents. For every project, we will go through the exercise of documenting: what would AI need to know about this project to successfully help us? What would we ask it to do? What AI tools specifically would we need to use, today? What would the costs be? And what value are we humans bringing to the mix at each stage of our work? We’ll be talking to our current and future clients, one by one, about ways to make the most of the tech, and working with them to adapt workflows to incorporate the tools where it makes sense. (PMs, this will be a major topic at the next PM sync with Josh.)
We’ll share our findings as we go, and we’d love to hear from you about what you’re learning, too! I very much welcome your ideas for how Steyer can best prepare for agentic AI. If you’re not already in the #generativeai channel, that’s a good spot to watch and contribute. Please consider joining our Tuesday morning AI chats this year; they are open to the public and have been an incredibly useful “appointment learning” mechanism for me personally to monitor and discuss the quickly changing landscape. (Let me know if you’d like an invite.) We will also continue our monthly FridAI series of workshops, available only to Steyer folks, to give you more opportunities to learn about and use AI tools.
Thanks for reading this wall of text—it’s super important to me to be communicating with you early and often about this massive shift and how Steyer is responding!
Thanks,
Katelyn
kreilly@steyer.net