Town's CEO on the self-organizing company

Jean-Denis Greze: I think it touches today probably 10 or 20 percent of the toil of a knowledge worker. The other 80 percent of the work — I don't think we're there yet. I just think in practice, if you go to Cleveland, Ohio, and you talk to 100 knowledge workers at accounting firms and local businesses — how much are you doing with AI? How much time is it saving you? — we're still in the 10-to-20-percent bucket, and not in the 'it's doing everything for me' bucket.

Jean-Denis Greze: But the immediate problem is that you can't take the union of every user's files, because there's private information. ... And if you tell the LLM, 'When you're creating the team library, make sure not to put any HR information in there' — well, what if the LLM evaluates that wrong and puts people's salaries in a spreadsheet by mistake? Then you've got big egg on face. You have to be thoughtful when you build the team and company versions of these things, and that's the real challenge.

Jean-Denis Greze: The dossier is the first 'a-ha' moment for the user. You sign up and you name your assistant — we call them townies. And then we say: hey, my name's Ivy, I'm your townie, here's what I know about you, and here are a few things I can do to help you. And most people are like: what? You know me? You understand me? And that's when it clicks. People feel like it's not a product — it's actually a relationship. This feels more like someone I work with than a piece of software. The reason we try to do it really quickly, even if it's not as accurate, is because it's the first thing that makes you feel different — a different emotional feeling toward this product.

Jean-Denis Greze: It's not like they're on vacation for the 20 percent of their time that they've saved that week. There are plenty of things they could do that would make them a better executive assistant. So now they're doing more of that kind of work — and that work is by definition not something the AI can do. Over time, the automation just gives us more opportunity to do the things that are higher value in the human economy.