AI Anticipation & Mental Load

AI helps us ship code and run companies, but will it make our daily lives easier too?

Here’s a scenario: your GE dishwasher is on the fritz, and you realize it needs a new heat pump. So there you are scrolling through replacement parts you don’t fully understand on Home Depot’s site, looking for a deal, fighting decision fatigue and wondering to yourself, Golly, should I just buy a whole new dishwasher instead?

Now imagine if AI could tell you the likelihood that your heat pump, based on age and make, is only likely to give you another week or month of life from your Ultrafresh Dishwasher with Microban. This question around predictiveness and anticipation, rather than inputs/outputs, has become intriguing to me. And not just because my dishwasher and I aren’t getting along.

My teammate (and, some say better-looking, friend) Clarence, posed a few of these questions to me recently, and it led to a discussion about how AI will completely redesign companies organizationally, in the future. Short story, as many of us are realizing: the companies we run today won’t look anything like the companies we run in twenty years.

Here’s a quick example from Flipside: a customer let us know that they’re changing their entire business model (they’re pre-product launch, but awfully close). They explained what was changing and – pulling no punches – it was very complex and technical. Frankly, most of it went over my head.

Typically it would take me hours to distill and then reframe the conversation to my team, but with some simple AI note-generating solutions and querying, we consolidated the discussion into language our engineers could understand. It took 10 minutes and let me both look capable to my team and enjoy (alas!) a leisurely lunch and walk, a luxury for the founder set. (FWIW, I gobbled down some soup, which AI did not create for me.)

I think we’re all seeing some form of this reduction in (or transfer of) mental load, but AI anticipating what we need before we know we need it is another layer I’ll be curious to see unfold. While the completion of the work had its wow factor, the significance goes well beyond that. Organizations of the future will be designed around these solutions which simplify our work or change the nature of what work we do altogether, meaning employing different forms of talent, reworking operating structures, and getting signals that tell us what to work on – the next phase beyond incremental improvements.

Where you may have required decades of pedigrees, you might be able to execute just as well with individuals in their first year out of college. Where you may have needed a dozen people, maybe you’ll need just one. What will an organization look like when the distance between the most skilled and most naive becomes almost imperceptible? And how long will it take for my dishwasher to speak up and warn me before it retires in advance of me hosting a holiday meal?

Dave Balter is an investor at True and founding-CEO of crypto analytics company Flipside. He previously built multiple software companies, several of which were acquired. He’s known to crack jokes, even in the board room, and can help founders navigate M&A opportunities. Once you’re backed by True, Dave’s one of the many experts in your corner.