Hello, World: Charting a New Course for Human-AI Collaboration
The phrase “Hello, world” has echoed through computing history since Brian Kernighan first printed it from a C program in 1978. Today, as we stand at the threshold of what I call the Virtual Employee (VE) revolution, it feels fitting to invoke this tradition—not to announce another technology platform, but to inaugurate a fundamentally different approach to working with artificial intelligence.
After four decades tracking enterprise technology’s evolution—from mainframes to microservices, from waterfall to DevOps—I’ve witnessed countless paradigm shifts. Yet none matches the tectonic implications of AI agents transitioning from tools to colleagues. The Salesforce ecosystem alone, which I’ve chronicled since its inception, now pivots toward Agentforce and autonomous Revenue Operations. IDC projects the global AI market will exceed $1.8 trillion by 2030. But raw market size tells only part of the story.
A New Paradigm for Human-AI Collaboration
The real narrative unfolds in how we, as knowledge workers and business leaders, adapt our mental models, governance structures, and economic frameworks to this new reality. Traditional management science assumed a clear delineation between human judgment and machine computation. That boundary dissolves when large language models demonstrate emergent reasoning capabilities and multi-agent systems orchestrate complex workflows with minimal supervision.
This is why I’m honored to launch Work Different With AI—not as another AI news aggregator or vendor showcase, but as a nexus for rigorous thinking about human-AI collaboration’s future. Our community brings together practitioners who recognize that working with AI isn’t simply about prompt engineering or API integration. It demands reimagining fundamental assumptions about productivity, creativity, and value creation.
Consider the parallel to the early internet era. In 1995, skeptics dismissed the web as a curiosity while visionaries glimpsed its transformative potential. The difference lay not in technical understanding but in willingness to question established patterns. Today’s AI moment demands similar intellectual courage—to examine how cognitive automation reshapes everything from software development lifecycles to legal research methodologies.
Building the Nexus for AI Leadership
Our charter is ambitious yet focused: to become the premier forum where enterprise leaders, technologists, and policy thinkers converge to shape AI’s trajectory in professional contexts. We’ll publish field notes from the frontier—not breathless hype but evidence-based analysis grounded in real implementations. We’ll host Law Labs exploring regulatory frameworks and AI Salons fostering cross-disciplinary dialogue. Most importantly, we’ll build a shared vocabulary and conceptual toolkit for navigating this transition.
The “different” in Work Different With AI isn’t mere wordplay. It signals our commitment to moving beyond both AI catastrophism and uncritical enthusiasm. Neither extreme serves leaders making eight-figure technology investments or architects designing systems that will process millions of transactions. What they need—what we all need—is clear-eyed assessment of capabilities, limitations, and implementation pathways.
I bring to this endeavor insights gleaned from advisory work with Salesforce’s executive team, economic modeling with UC Berkeley Haas, and countless conversations with practitioners deploying AI at scale. But the real intellectual capital will emerge from our collective intelligence—each member contributing observations from their unique vantage point, whether that’s wrestling with data governance in healthcare or optimizing supply chains with predictive agents.
Together, we’ll chart the future of human-AI collaboration with the rigor it deserves. Not through speculation but through systematic analysis of what works, what fails, and what surprises us. The journey begins with this simple greeting to the world, but our destination remains unwritten—a future we’ll code together, one insight at a time.
Welcome to the nexus. Let’s work different.
Vernon Keenan is a senior industry analyst and founder of Work Different With AI. Based in Oakland, California, he has spent four decades tracking enterprise technology evolution and currently focuses on Virtual Employee Economics and AI-driven transformation.