From the proverbial ‘six degrees’ to no separation at all

[jrineakter]

Human progress has steadily been propelling us toward what Byron calls the “Agora”, a planetary public square, in which the “superorganism” is now emerging. In his fourth book published last summer, Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think – How Humans Learned to See the Future - and Shape It, Byron summed up the new cognitive choreography this way: “If knowledge is power, such a system is by definition the ultimate in empowerment.”

In his new and fifth book, We Are Agora – How Humanity Functions as a Single Superorganism That Shapes Our World and Future, Byron takes it further: “Agora includes all the world’s people who are connected to one another, which today is virtually everyone.” In that book, which will publish in December, he puts the AI-driven Agora in context: “The entire world now functions as a single metroplex, and so Agora has grown to be a planet-scale superorganism. Not only is it all humans, it is only humans.” Take a moment to ponder and savor that sentence.

Last year, I explored that fourth book of Byron’s in a six-part series leading up to his keynoting of our data.world summit last year: “We will become a single vast intellect, and will gain mastery over the future,” Byron told our summit attendees.

Another great perspective on this “vast intellect” – the collective thinking of teams – comes from Inflection AI co-founder and CEO Mustafa Suleyman in his brilliant new book on AI, The Coming Wave – Technology, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma.

“Organizations too are a kind of intelligence,” writes Suleyman. “Companies, militaries, bureaucracies, even markets – these are artificial intelligences, aggregating and processing huge brazil whatsapp number data amounts of data, organizing themselves around specific goals, building mechanisms to get better and better at achieving those goals.”

That catalyst of all human progress – ‘Great Groups’

Byron threw this pitch and Suleyman is knocking it out of the park. Yes, we need to master AI to extend the reach of the human mind. We need to empower students with AI tutors, and teachers with AI assistants. But the heavy lifting in the coming transformation will not be carried by the swashbuckling “heroes” the media so like to venerate. No, it will be carried out by what Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman dubbed “Great Groups” in their also-brilliant book a quarter century ago, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration. The much larger challenge than the one we’re debating is this question: How can we use AI to extend the reach and grasp of our collective team intelligence?

One Great Group seeking to answer that question is the one better known as data.world. We are marching forward at a very brisk pace. Or, really sprinting, as a matter of fact.

As I mentioned above, this sprint is now framed by two interlocking initiatives. Internally, we're harnessing AI to elevate our teams and foster critical thinking, introspection, and empathetic collaboration. Externally, we’re using AI to reshape how we engage with customers and prospects, liberating them from the virtual arms race of sales tactics to provide an efficient and informative platform to explore how our services align with their own unique needs. So far, I believe we are the only company in the data space with a tool like “Interactions with Archie”. In exploring this as we’ve refined our AI strategy in recent months, I should add that I’ve drawn heavily from lessons on which I elaborated in my book, The Entrepreneurs Essentials, in the fourth chapter on the always be learning life. That’s another core idea here: always be learning, and do so with these new tools.

It always starts with the kids and then it affects us all; AI will become our new norm and expectation for skill mastery. You won’t be replaced by AI but you may very well be replaced by someone more skilled at your job because they have already mastered AI while you have chosen to lag behind (and it really is a learning choice that only you can make).

Toward that goal, back in May we integrated generative AI into our data catalog platform to make it easier for everyone – even non-data experts – to use data in a meaningful way. As I wrote at the launch of those capabilities, called Archie Bots, generative AI is helping us extend our mission as an organization. Our company’s mission has always been to build the most meaningful, abundant, and collaborative data resource in the world – to make data accessible to everyone who wants or needs to use it.

There are prohibitive barriers to entry, however. On a fundamental level, many people simply aren’t yet comfortable working with data, and query languages SQL or SPARQL particularly. They don’t know where to start, what questions to ask, how to answer those questions, or how to determine if they are using the right data in the first place. Ultimately, this discomfort with data leads to low adoption and data abandonment. Workers then resort to standing in a “data breadline” waiting for the more data-skilled workers to serve them, as described so clearly in the great book Winning with Data: Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People, and Shape the Future by Frank Bien and Tomasz Tunguz. This is frustrating and slows everything down, including the collective intelligence of the entire company, really challenging the “superorganism” concept in practice.

By integrating generative AI into data discovery via our Archie Bots, we are changing the way people interact with data.world. Archie Bots make it far more efficient to get to the data, or facts of the business, that you need to do your job and then query it, document it, and ultimately learn from it.

In fact, the name “Archie” was inspired by Archimedes, the noted mathematician and engineer, and Merlin’s clever pet owl in the animated Disney film The Sword in the Stone. With Archie Bots, users have a data expert at their disposal, one that knows the ins and outs or their organization. By simply using natural language, Archie Bots can trace complex relationships between data, people, tools, and decisions to find answers and return relevant data. Archie Bots can suggest definitions or concepts where they don’t yet exist. These friendly bots guide the user through the means to work with data by suggesting use cases and bridging the SQL gap by automatically translating natural language questions into complex SQL queries (or interpreting those queries into natural language, so the user can understand what’s going on behind the scenes)