AI at work has four phases. Start in the fourth.

The first three made one person faster. The fourth gives that person a team.

  1. Phase 1

    Chat

    You ask, it answers. Then you do the work.

  2. Phase 2

    Connected chat

    It reads your files before it answers. You still do the work.

  3. Phase 3

    Agents with a computer

    An agent does the work on a machine of its own, one job at a time.

  4. Phase 4 · Agentic Cloud Computer

    A team of agents working with you

    Your agents work in one place, together. Every job starts from what all of them know.

Phase 1 · Chat

A faster start. The same finish.

Most of us met AI at work in a chat box. Ask for a draft, an explanation or a fix, and a good one comes back in seconds. Then you copy it out, check it, paste it in and send it. Every answer still had to be carried into the work by hand. By you.

Phase 2 · Connected chat

Better answers. Still yours to carry.

Then the chat began to read before it answered: the file you attached, the folder you opened, the code on your screen. The answers stopped sounding like anyone’s and started sounding like yours. The conversation still ended the same way, with one person and a list of things to do.

Phase 3 · Agents with a computer

The work gets done. One job at a time.

Then the agent got a computer to work on: a terminal, the files, the tests. Ask for a fix and the fix comes back, tested. It is the biggest step yet, and it is still one pair of hands. One agent in one terminal, and it stops when you close the lid.

Phase 4 · Agentic Cloud Computer

One agent becomes a team.

In the fourth phase you stop working with one agent and start running a team of them. Each has a name, a face and a cloud computer of its own, and keeps working when your laptop closes. They read what your team knows before every job, write back what they learned, and hand work to each other and to you. Every protected change comes back as a proposal. Agents prepare. You decide.

A moving row of the Workspace’s cards. James, who drives eighteen agents, then Ruby and Milo, both on Claude Code and mid-job, and Ruby asking Milo, in his chat, whether billing counts a van’s return leg, and his answer. Otis, on Codex and ready, and Theo, with Ruby’s proposal #41, the batch route optimiser, and Otis’s knowledge proposal, on-call for the pings pipeline, both waiting for a decision. Ada, on Codex, the dispatch app she published, and James handing Mia a note: page on-call when a van stops pinging. Then Mia, Nora and Finn.

Step into the fourth phase.

A pixel-art copper-red Irish Setter sitting in a relaxed three-quarter pose and looking toward the viewer.