1. Fat layer of humans

Summary

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Economist Podcasts – Boss Class Season 3, Episode 1: "Fat Layer of Humans"

Date: January 29, 2026
Host: Andrew Palmer
Guests & Voices: Tom Blomfield, Ludwig Siegler, Ethan Mollick, Producers and Editors from The Economist

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Episode Overview

The season premiere of Boss Class explores the unfolding impact of generative AI in the workplace. Host Andrew Palmer investigates how AI is reshaping white-collar work, starting with a personal experiment: a digital clone built from his own writing and voice. Through conversations with tech leaders, journalists, and academics, Palmer examines the capabilities and limits—the "jagged frontier"—of AI, the anxieties it provokes, and how organizations and individuals might adapt to this rapidly changing landscape.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Creating a Digital Clone (00:39–02:54)

• Experiment: Andrew Palmer's colleague, Ruth Berry, uses ChatGPT and a synthetic voice generator to create a “clone” of Palmer, trained on his writing and voice.
• Process: The clone was generated in an afternoon using his published columns and podcast audio.
• Personal Reaction: Palmer finds the experience unsettling yet intriguing as the clone reflects his wit and style but lacks nuance.
• Notable Quote:

  "After just a few hours work, I am talking to a version of myself. It's definitely not me, but with more work and better technology, it might be much harder to tell."
  — Andrew Palmer (03:19)

2. The Near-Future of AI at Work (05:44–11:25)

• Guest Perspective: Tom Blomfield (Monzo co-founder, Y Combinator partner) argues AI will rapidly replace most knowledge work, with only a thinning layer of human oversight remaining.
• AI's Impact on Medicine: Blomfield uses AI to inform his healthcare and trusts AI more than humans for objective advice.
• Startup Frenzy: Young entrepreneurs fear missing out as AI advances, spurring a rush to build and profit.
• AI as Combine Harvester:

  "Software engineers use to be like farmers; AI is like a combine harvester. The world is going to have a lot more food and a lot fewer farmers in very short order."
  — Tom Blomfield (09:08)

• Enterprise Automation: AI will quickly eliminate repetitious desk work, automating tasks originally performed by humans in spreadsheets and emails.

3. "The Fat Layer of Humans" Analogy (10:54–11:25)

• Workforce Transformation:

  "Right now, there's a very fat layer of humans... that layer gets thinner and thinner and thinner and does it ever go to zero? I don't see why not. What is the timeframe over which that happens and how thin does that layer of humans get? And what do the rest of us do?"
  — Tom Blomfield (11:04)

4. The Jagged Frontier and Workplace Realities (12:35–15:35)

• Internal Adoption: Ludwig Siegler (Economist tech editor) leads efforts to deploy generative AI at The Economist, finding AI excels at select tasks but underwhelms at others.
• “Jagged Frontier” Concept:

  "Experts talk about the jagged frontier of AI. They're very strong at certain things, and other times they surprise you in how weak they are."
  — Ludwig Siegler (13:18)

• Adoption Challenges: Tech is imperfect and adapting workflows is hard due to existing inertia within organizations.
• It's Normal to Feel Confused:

  "There are days where I think this is great... other days I think this is just crap and it's never going to work. And I think that's a pretty good thing to have."
  — Ludwig Siegler (14:59)

5. Practical AI Use—The Cointelligence Approach (16:14–21:12)

• Guest: Ethan Mollick (Wharton professor, author of Cointelligence)

• Experiment Widely: Mollick encourages using AI for all aspects of one's job to discover its effective boundaries.

• Role of AI in Writing: He never uses AI for first drafts but does employ it as an editor or for low-value tasks.

• Management Concerns: Lamenting the tendency of companies to use efficiency gains solely for layoffs, Mollick urges businesses to reimagine and experiment with organizational structures instead.

• Notable Quotes:

  "It's good at some stuff, bad at some stuff. And the only way to know what the frontier is is using your area of expertise..."
  — Ethan Mollick (18:45)

  "If you think of AI first as a human replacement, you're wrong. But if you think it replaces your newcomers, you're not just wrong, you're out of your mind."
  — Ludwig Siegler (34:06)

6. The Jagged Frontier: Personal Experiment (21:31–31:03)

• Andrew Palmer’s AI Immersion: He takes Mollick’s advice to use AI for every possible aspect of his work, tracking both successes and frustrations.
• Task Results: AI excelled as a research assistant, brainstorming tool, and text summarizer—but often hallucinated or faltered in conversation.
• Blind Writing Test: Palmer submits an AI-generated column to colleagues for comparison against his own work. Results were mixed; some colleagues preferred the AI draft.
• Emotional Response: Palmer experiences anxiety and even "despondency" as the AI’s abilities challenge assumptions about creativity and job security.
• Key Takeaways: Experiment to learn AI's strengths; reflect on what parts of your job are irreplaceable; and use AI to rethink, not just replicate, existing work.
• Notable Quote:

  "I started feeling around for the jagged frontier, and my hand came out bloodied."
  — Andrew Palmer (31:15)

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• Clone Description:

  "Warm, dry, British wit, lightly ironic. Never gag heavy, apparently."
  — Tom Blomfield (02:16)

• Startup Dystopia:

  "It's like this mind virus that's got into university students, especially in the US. People are dropping out at much, much higher rates... because all the ideas are going to be gone when the superintelligent AI is out in X years."
  — Tom Blomfield (07:19)

• Healthy Confusion:

  "If I were just the German skeptic... it wouldn't work. If I'm the hipster who thinks this is the best thing since sliced bread, it wouldn't work either. I think it's very healthy to be torn with this type of technology."
  — Ludwig Siegler (15:21)

• Real vs. AI Writing:

  "Put these two pieces next to each other, and it seemed completely obvious that one was written by me and the other by an AI. Expecting a swift confirmation of this, I decided to conduct a blind taste test..."
  — Andrew Palmer (26:42)

• Final Lesson:

  “There isn’t a manual for working out how AI can help you in your job. You have to gain an intuition for its strengths and weaknesses, one surprise at a time.”
  — Andrew Palmer (31:45)

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Key Timestamps

• (00:39–01:57): Andrew’s digital clone is introduced
• (05:44–11:25): Tom Blomfield’s perspective—AI as the new combine harvester; thinning human layer
• (12:35–15:35): Ludwig Siegler explains the “jagged frontier” and challenges of implementation
• (16:24–21:12): Ethan Mollick's strategies for AI adoption in daily work
• (21:31–31:03): Palmer’s “total AI immersion” workweek and the blind writing test
• (34:00–34:12): Productivity surges from AI and misunderstandings about “AI as a replacement”

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Tone & Style

The episode maintains The Economist’s characteristic lightly ironic, witty, and analytical tone, mixing cautious optimism with healthy skepticism. Palmer’s narrative voice is self-deprecating and exploratory, aiming to demystify both AI’s capabilities and its limitations. Through direct conversations, personal experimentation, and editorial insight, the episode invites listeners to share in both the confusion and excitement of technological upheaval.

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Summary for New Listeners

This opening episode of Boss Class Season 3 is an exploration of how AI is beginning to transform white collar work, with both its dazzling promise and "jagged frontier" of shortcomings. It’s a candid, sometimes humorous journey through rapid tech advances, grounded in personal experience and expert commentary. If you feel confused about AI’s role in your working life—you’re not alone, and according to The Economist team, that's a healthy starting point.

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(Ads, introductions, and outro production credits were skipped per instructions.)

Transcript

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[Andrew Palmer]

Savings versus Comparable Verizon plans plus the cost of optional benefits plan features in Texas and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third.

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[Andrew Palmer]

Credit stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required.

[Tom Blomfield]

The Economist.

[Andrew Palmer]

Hi, who is this? Who am I talking to? Hello, I'm Andrew Palmer, a senior writer at the Economist and the host of the Boss Class podcast. Hello, Andrew. This is totally weird. This is totally weird. I'm Andrew Palmer, senior writer at the Economist and host of the Boss Class podcast. That is my digital clone. It's been trained on my writing and my voice to answer questions about management and the world of work. According to my Bartleby column, the workplace, day by day, is a theatre of mild agitation. I wrote that suspense can come from the smallest things, like entering and exiting meetings or presenting when the clicker doesn't work.

[Tom Blomfield]

It's a bit of an Andrew Oney Google search. Yes, it only has a knowledge base of what you've written or spoken.

[Andrew Palmer]

Ruth Berry created this monster. She's a colleague here at the Economist and is part of an internal team experimenting with artificial intelligence. How long has it taken you to do this?

[Tom Blomfield]

This was an afternoon, right?

[Ludwig Siegler]

Okay.

[Andrew Palmer]

Very fast.

[Tom Blomfield]

Yes.

[Andrew Palmer]

Okay. To make the clone, Ruth uploaded dozens of my columns into ChatGPT and then hooked it up to an AI powered voice generator which had been trained on recordings of me. Thanks to this podcast, there are quite a few of those.

[Tom Blomfield]

This is what makes you a very good subject.

[Andrew Palmer]

Subject, subject, object.

[Tom Blomfield]

Lab rat.

[Andrew Palmer]

Having fed it samples of my writing, she also asked the AI to come up with a prompt describing my general vibe.

[Tom Blomfield]

So warm, dry, British wit, lightly ironic. Never gag heavy, apparently, is what is put down there.

[Andrew Palmer]

Never gag heavy. Normally, this would be a good point for a gag, but now I'm not so sure. Time to ask my doppelganger a loaded question. Can you tell me what most irritates me about office life? Hello, I'm Andrew Palmer. According to a recent article in the Economist, one of the most common irritations is when colleagues take credit for other people's ideas. Turns out it's also pretty annoying when your replica does it. Although, in fairness, it's hard to stay angry with this particular robot for very long.

[Tom Blomfield]

Have you got any advice about how I could negotiate myself a raise.

[Andrew Palmer]

I'm Andrew Palmer. When negotiating a raise with your boss, Jim Sabinius from Harvard Business School suggests doing your homework to find salary ranges. My voice clone is a party trick it took Ruth an afternoon to put together. It only has one topic of conversation. It introduces itself a lot. But think about that for a moment. After just a few hours work, I am talking to a version of myself. It's definitely not me, but with more work and better technology, it might be much harder to tell. Because if AI was just a party trick, then nothing about this moment would make sense. The trillion dollar highs of the biggest tech firms, the fear of a jobs apocalypse as the machines become ever more capable. The efforts that firms everywhere, the Economist included, are putting into understanding AI. That is the strange backdrop to this third season of my podcast on work and management. Plenty of people believe AI is going to transform the future of white collar work, that machines will outperform in job after job. But back in the present, that transformation can feel a very long way off.

[Tom Blomfield]

Do you have many concerns about the voice cloning and the use of AI?

[Andrew Palmer]

So I think it's so obviously if I started every single response to a person with I'm Andrew Palmer, then I would be more worried. I'm Andrew Palmer. For the past few months, I've been in search of people who are at the frontier of generative AI in the workplace. I've spoken to entrepreneurs, academics, engineers and managers from around the world. People who are testing its strengths and discovering its weaknesses. And with their help, I've been trying to answer two big questions. What's the best way for bosses and employees to use the technology at work right now? And what should we be doing to prepare for the future that's barreling towards us? Over the course of the next six episodes, I'll be sharing what I've found with a warm, lightly ironic British wit that's never gag heavy from the Economist. This is Boss Class Season 3, Episode 1 Fat Layer of Humans.

[Tom Blomfield]

With a long enough time horizon and a good enough AI, I just don't think there are that many situations where you prefer humans.

[Andrew Palmer]

Tom Blomfield is paid to think about the future of AI, and he thinks that it's coming for almost everything.

[Tom Blomfield]

Medicine is a really good example for me. I just turned 40. I become more health conscious. Every blood tests I get, I put into AI. Every doctor's prescription I put into AI. And I'm like way more informed about my health. It's just I want the right answer. I don't care whether it comes from a human or an AI. I just want to access the best information possible. I want the best advice.

[Andrew Palmer]

Forget Bedside Manor. Enter Bedside Scanner. Tom has some pretty solid credentials. He made a fortune co founding Monzo, an online bank with a clever app that's now used by one in five adults in Britain. He left Monza in 2021. These days he's a partner at Y Combinator, a famed startup accelerator in Silicon Valley. Companies that have come through its doors include Airbnb, Reddit, Stripe and Twitch. Over half of the current intake are AI startups. If you want to know what the true believers think is going to happen with Genai technology, this is a good place to come. So I was primed for some dramatic predictions when I pitched up at YC's new campus of converted factories and warehouses in a trendy waterfront neighborhood in San Francisco. Even so, I was surprised by what he told me.

[Tom Blomfield]

The big change for us in the last two years is that very, very high achieving young people have got it into their heads that this AI thing is real and therefore they only have a limited period of time in which to accrue wealth to position themselves in the stratas of society they want. Which I think is a dystopian weird thing to think, and I don't think is true, but it's like this kind of mind virus that's got into university students, especially in the US and so people are dropping out at much, much, much higher rates and thinking they need to start a startup now because all the ideas are going to be gone, you know, when the super intelligent AI is out in X years.

[Andrew Palmer]

Wow, I hadn't heard that before. Okay, so, well, there's a sort of five years to become a billionaire, basically.

[Ludwig Siegler]

Wow.

[Tom Blomfield]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Palmer]

Tom himself doesn't think we'll be living out brave new world by the turn of the decade, but he does believe that a sea change is already underway.

[Tom Blomfield]

I come from the perspective of I'm working with these tiny startups who started with zero revenue a year ago, and they are targeting that 1% of problems that could be solved in enterprise right now. And they're going from 0 to 10 million of revenue faster than I've ever seen companies grow in my 20 years in this industry. And their deployments are getting very high engagement and then expanding. And from the perspective of a big enterprise, maybe they are only solving 1 or 2 or 3% of the problems right now, but I would just bet on that expanding much, much faster.

[Andrew Palmer]

Last year, Tom stirred up some controversy with a prediction he tweeted that software engineers are like farmers, while AI is like a combine harvester. The world is going to have a lot more food and a lot fewer farmers in very short order, he wrote. So what did you mean by that?

[Tom Blomfield]

Basically that AI is going to automate vast swathes of the job that software engineers use used to do. And you'll have a human overseer probably, but I think the requirement for human input will go down very, very dramatically. And I think the overall output of software will go up very, very, very dramatically. And I think that will create a huge sort of surplus for the world.

[Andrew Palmer]

Writing computer code is one of the things that Genai Systems can already do very effectively and that has implications for white collar workers everywhere you go into.

[Tom Blomfield]

Any business in the world and the level to which they're run on. Basically, Microsoft Excel is sort of astonishing. You know, just like huge, huge lists and humans are filtering and sorting and copying and pasting from PDFs into Excel back into email. I think AI coding tools will enable anyone to take those very, very repetitive operational tasks and just automate them end to end.

[Andrew Palmer]

In the short term, Tom thinks that ought to be great news for anyone working as a desk jockey. AI tools will take drudge work off their hands, but over time it'll do more than that.

[Tom Blomfield]

I have very, very high certainty that almost all knowledge based work will be done at a higher level by AI within our lifetimes for sure.

[Andrew Palmer]

Think of everyone you know whose work is done on a computer. That's who Tom's talking about. Instead of humans. Agents, autonomous AI workers will be turned loose on complex tasks.

[Tom Blomfield]

And I think we'll get vast improvements just by layering multiple agents on top of each other.

[Andrew Palmer]

Yeah, and presumably right at the top somewhere there's some thin layer. In this future there's some thin layer of humans applying a judgment about like, this works, this is good, this is not.

[Tom Blomfield]

I don't know. Yes, right now there's a very fat layer of humans and I guess my argument is just that layer gets thinner and thinner and thinner and does it ever go to zero? Like, yeah, I don't see why not. What is the timeframe over which that happens and how thin does that layer of humans get? And what do the rest of us do?

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[Andrew Palmer]

Savings versus Comparable Verizon plans, plus the cost of optional benefits. Plan features and taxes and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third.

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[Andrew Palmer]

Credit stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required. Meeting Tom left me feeling unsettled. According to him, AI is on a trajectory to put us all out of work. But even he admits his view is bound to be conditioned by what he does and where he lives in the here and now and away from the sunshine of Silicon Valley. It's hard not to feel much more confused, because if Genai is so powerful, why does it so frequently disappoint? I needed someone to give me a different perspective, and I knew just where to turn.

[Ludwig Siegler]

I mean, the first thing you have to know is kind of the Economist. We embrace change. I mean, that's part of our ideology. Kind of we think technology is good and should be used.

[Andrew Palmer]

Ludwig Siegler is a seasoned tech editor who's been at the economist for over 25 years. He's an unusual blend of sensibilities, part Californian, part German. In 2023, he was put in charge of a new editorial initiative at the paper to figure out how to implement generative AI tools across our newsroom. It's the same team that Ruth who made my voice clone works on. Their work has been driven by a question that will also be helping to guide this series.

[Ludwig Siegler]

So what we needed to do is to figure out what is the skill frontier of these models? How can we use them? How can we not use them? I think experts talk about the kind of the jagged frontier of AI. Kind of they're very strong, very good at certain things, and other times they surprise you in how weak they are.

[Andrew Palmer]

The jagged frontier. Keep that phrase in mind. It's a helpful one, because the border between useful and useless AI is not a straight line. It's a mountain range. For some tasks, the technology has already climbed to high altitudes. For many others, it's still putting on its boots. This can make the experience of engaging with Genai somewhat trying.

[Ludwig Siegler]

I would say with Genai, you always teeter at the edge of disappointment. It's not an easy process, actually. It's the nature of the technology to be imperfect. And human workflows or human organizations are difficult. They're set in their ways. Inertia is kind of the default.

[Andrew Palmer]

Ludwig's experience is not unusual. Plenty of firms have failed to see any returns on their Genai projects. Disappointment is common, but so is the fear of being left behind. Some companies are managing to extract value from the technology news of major AI breakthroughs keeps flooding in and everyone is racing to learn from their failures. We'll be hearing more from Ludwig later, but if you take one piece of advice from him, let it be. It's normal to feel confused about AI. Desirable, even.

[Ludwig Siegler]

There's days where I think, this is really great, it's going to change, and the opportunities are bigger than the threads. There are other days where I think this is just crap and it's never going to work, because I'm torn in this way. And I think that's a pretty good thing to have.

[Andrew Palmer]

This is where Ludwig's blend of Silicon Valley optimism and Saxon realism really comes into its own.

[Ludwig Siegler]

If I were just kind of the German skeptic here, that wouldn't work. But if I'm kind of the hipster or hipster that thinks this is the best thing since sliced bread or something, it wouldn't work either. I think it's very healthy to be torn with this type of technology.

[Andrew Palmer]

Healthy, maybe, but also disorientating. After speaking to Tom and Ludwig, I was reassured that my sense of confusion about AI is normal. But that left me with a lingering question. I'm a white collar professional with no background in technology, and although I use AI once in a while, I also occasionally forget that it exists. I've never properly got to grips with it. So what should I do next?

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

I can tell you as a writer myself, if you're not using deep research tools in writing, you're making a mistake.

[Andrew Palmer]

And on that front, who better to sit down with than one of the most influential thinkers in the field, a man who helped coin the term the jagged frontier?

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

Hi, I'm Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of Cointelligence, and someone who studies and thinks about AI.

[Andrew Palmer]

And yes, a man who also speaks very fast. If you listen to podcasts at higher speeds, you may want to slow things down a tad. Like Ludwig, Ethan also thinks that it's okay to be confused about AI.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

It's early days. I mean, this technology hit the world in a way that people noticed in 2023, essentially. And we're a couple years in, so it's always weird. To me, it's like, where's the giant productivity gains? I would be very surprised if we saw. It's a mess everywhere, right? We're all trying to figure all this stuff out.

[Andrew Palmer]

Ethan's best selling book, Cointelligence, isn't about machines replacing jobs. It's about the disruption happening within Jobs. And how to capitalize on that disruption. It's about joining the bots.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

I think. You don't get AI unless you've had three sleepless nights of sort of anxiety. Right? So I actually, you know, stayed up a night being like, what does this mean? I mean, this is producing human seeming language. So what does this mean for me? What does it mean for my kids? What does it mean for the careers I teach people to do? And so there's a moment, I think everybody has when you work with these systems, that they're deeply unnerving in some way.

[Andrew Palmer]

Ethan has clearly got past this phase. So I wondered, how exactly does he use AI in his own work and how does he decide what not to use it for?

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

I do a lot of writing. I never have the AI write first drafts of anything I do and in fact don't engage with an AI until after I've written a draft, but then engage a lot with the AI as an editor. And I've never thought having an editor was a negative thing. But on the other hand, for a task I care less about, or that's important, but less interesting, like if I have to fill out a form, I'll have the AI do the first draft of that because that scatters my attention and I could focus on things I care about.

[Andrew Palmer]

So your kind of red line, your threshold is things that you regard as being sort of more integral to your identity and. Or things that you are better at.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

Or things that help me succeed. Right. As somebody who writes a lot, if I don't write drafts out, I don't think through a problem.

[Andrew Palmer]

And then I guess one other problem is just the performance of the AI. Can you trust it to do a good job? Or is actually the upfront investment in sort of checking the work worth using it?

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

So what I can tell you is hallucinations are dropping over time overall. And the question is, what's the threshold at which you stop worrying so much, or when do you stop checking? And I don't think we have answers on that yet, but we're still figuring it out. It's good at some stuff, bad at some stuff. And the only way to know what the frontier is is to using your area of expertise, because then you can start to figure out that shape.

[Andrew Palmer]

People may also be wary of embracing AI in their work in case bosses jump to an unpleasant conclusion.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

I worry about management a lot with AI, and I worry about it for a couple of reasons, one of which is what do you do with an efficiency gain over the last 20 or 30 years, you fire people, right? That's the incentive to do that. That is not what you do in the middle of industrial revolution. What you do is you have a capacity gain. You use the capacity gain to gain an advantage because you have new capacities you didn't have before.

[Andrew Palmer]

In Ethan's view, companies that see AI as a cost cutting tool are fundamentally misreading the moment. Rather than replacing employees with Genai systems, managers should be thinking about how to reinvent their organizations. Which brings us to his second worry, a failure to reimagine how work gets done, to step back.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

I think this is an R and D problem and I think organizations are going to have to spend money on organizational R and D, which may include not cutting people the way they thought they would.

[Andrew Palmer]

Do you have examples of organizations which are starting to think through those sort of innovations in form.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

Yes. I have seen a very large organization which is starting to experiment in some of their divisions with taking their most senior engineers, pulling them out of the IT department, and then having groups of three that do the work. A senior subject matter expert, a senior engineer, and maybe a marketer or a strategy person. And they literally build new products from scratch in a week that would have taken six months and a team of 20 to do so. Playing with organizational form and moving the boundaries of the organization closer together is something I'm seeing.

[Andrew Palmer]

A lot of the ways in which AI will change the work of managers and the shape of organizations are going to be a big theme of this series. But I still had a burning question for Ethan. One concerning a certain individual. We obviously don't know each other, but based on this conversation and my self confessed status as an unsophisticated user, what homework would you set me so?

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

I would first of all ask you, are you using it for everything? Have you tried using it for every part of your job?

[Andrew Palmer]

No, it's completely sort of sporadic and scattershot at the moment.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

So tomorrow when you go into work, use it for everything. You know, literally try and have it do every task and then. But actually have it try and see how far you get and you'll find that jagged frontier. It's gonna be really good at some stuff bad, some stuff you don't expect, and if nothing has freaked you out, you're not being ambitious enough.

[Andrew Palmer]

All right, just testing that this is working. Sounds a bit noisy. Hold on. I took Ethan's advice and begrudgingly, I also took my producer's advice to record my progress in an audio diary and what I thought I would do while I'm sitting here in my perch at the Adelphi in the Economist's mothership is a first go at integrating AI into my weekly column tasks. So it captured an exchange that may come back to haunt me when the super intelligent machines take over. I'm afraid I already hate chat GPTs Persona. I might. I might ask if I can change it. Hold on one sec. Right. Oh, sorry. Chatgpt, I think you were listening. Absolutely. I'm here and ready to roll with whatever you need. If you'd like to tweak how I chat or change up my Persona a bit, just let me know. I'm all ears. Oh my God, that was embarrassing. With my fate already sealed, I figured I might as well press off on. And as the hours went by, I clocked up several small scale wins. Using ChatGPT to do a first pass at a review of academic research rather than trawling Google Scholar, brainstorming ideas for potential interviewees with anthropics chatbot Claude, and using a Google product called NotebookLM to summarize proofs of business books. So I guess the sort of characterization of AI as a sort of very competent research assistant rings true. And that is amazing, given the speed and thoroughness of a lot of what it's done. But I also had several interactions which were less impressive. My request is. I am the host of a podcast about management. We are producing a series. Sorry about that. The system didn't pick up what you said. Could you. Sometimes the models hallucinated confidently, telling me things which turned out to be inaccurate. At others, they glitched out, as Claude did during this exchange. Yes, I am the host.

[Tom Blomfield]

Go ahead, I'm listening. What are you producing for your management podcast?

[Andrew Palmer]

I shouldn't really lose my temper with a non sentient being. I will try again. Up to this point, it was all more or less as I expected it to be. Helpful in some areas, frustrating in others. And then, just as Ethan predicted, I had my freak out moment. A few days earlier, I'd written my weekly column, a satire poking fun at a mainstay of office life brainstorming. The piece was 700 words long, structured as a kind of mini stage play. It featured a group of people in a conference room throwing out names for a new product. Here's a short excerpt read by synthetic voices from the same service that created the I'm Andrew Palmer clone. Let's get going. We've all had a chance to think.

[Ludwig Siegler]

Of some fresh names for our new.

[Andrew Palmer]

Value added membership service. So let's write our Favorite ideas on the whiteboards, and then we'll review them. Sound of breathing. Sharpies and paper. Okay, let's take a look and see if any themes emerge.

[Ludwig Siegler]

I can see a few metals and minerals here.

[Andrew Palmer]

Iridium, osmium. What's californium? I put that down. It's the most expensive metal. It's also highly radioactive. Oh, it's much funnier in print, I promise. The piece took me about half a day to write, and I was reasonably happy with it. But as an experiment, I decided to fire up Claude and give it the idea that I'd begun with myself. The prompt is can you have a go at writing? A parody of a brainstorming meeting. So it is written as though the reader is listening to a conversation between colleagues. It should capture the attempts of a group of people to think of names for a premium service at a cost rental company. 700 words. The system thought for about 30 seconds and then spat out an article. Feeling like an emeritus professor about to grade a young grad student, I read through what it had done. It's. It is a conversation. The funniest thing about it is the title. The Premium plus Platinum Circle Elite Experience. That's not bad. The rest of it is pretty clunky. It's not. Not funny. Doesn't feel unexpected. Here's a sample of what Claude wrote, voiced by some more synthetic actors. I'm thinking we start with something that screams luxury, but also accessibility. What about Drive Elite?

[Tom Blomfield]

Hmm. Elite feels a bit exclusionary. We did a focus group last month, and millennials associated it with country clubs their parents couldn't afford.

[Andrew Palmer]

Right, right. Okay, what about Road Rewards?

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

Simple, Clean.

[Andrew Palmer]

I actually ran that through ChatGPT this morning, and it flagged 17 similar programs already in the market. The AI suggested we need more differentiation. Put these two pieces next to each other, and it seemed completely obvious that one was written by me and the other by an AI. Expecting a swift confirmation of this, I decided to conduct a blind taste test with a few of my colleagues. Okay, the first one's quite funny. I'm gonna go for the second one. Now, first up was Lawrence Knight, who's one of the producers on this show. He recorded himself reading both columns. The first is mine. Of the two, I think the first one is funnier. That might be because I just read it first. But the second one is obviously a lot wordier and a lot more explained and clearer, I suppose, than the first one. Lawrence cast his vote and got it right. Humans won. AI nil. Next up was Catherine Nixie, who I used to edit when I was running the Britain section. We got off to a bad start when I walked in holding a recorder.

[Tom Blomfield]

Is that you're pretending to be a journalist?

[Andrew Palmer]

Well, I am pretending to be a journalist. I mean, we're all pretending to be jealous.

[Ludwig Siegler]

What are you talking about?

[Andrew Palmer]

But when it came to the column, she restored my confidence, though only slightly. So I think this one has to be you.

[Tom Blomfield]

SOUND OF BREATHING Sounds very like you felt that we had that liberty. MIXING SOUND OF BREATHING.

[Andrew Palmer]

GENTLE SNORING that's two nil. But then things started to get weird. Here's Sam Colbert, another of the producers of this show. Now, Andrew, I know to be a very good writer.

[Tom Blomfield]

Punchy, funny, as listeners to boss class will know. And as I read version one, I'm not getting so much of that.

[Andrew Palmer]

What? Then Sam turns his attention to Claude's version.

[Tom Blomfield]

Yeah, much more clever, much tighter ending. Okay, Andrew, I'm going with the true you as option two.

[Andrew Palmer]

We'll be discussing this in Sam's upcoming performance review. To calm my nerves, it was time to turn to one of the paper's most experienced editors, Ollie Morton. I'm feeling very put up on here, because if I guess this wrong, Andrew's going to hate me. But like Sam, Ollie was also charmed by the work of the robot. Okay, the second one I'm very strongly of the mind is Andrews.

[Tom Blomfield]

It reads like a conversation.

[Andrew Palmer]

It doesn't read like a sequence of gags. In fact, it doesn't have as many gags in it so far. In fairness to Ollie, my writing is famously light on gags. Actually, Circle of Trust. Legal says we can't use trust because of fiduciary implications. I'm pretty sure that ChatGPT did not come up with that one. He's right, it didn't. Claude did. The second one does actually flow like a conversation, but at the same time, it's not as funny, but it's more coherent. Thanks, Ollie. So that's two. Two to break the tie, I went to Ludwig. If anyone should be able to tell an AI from a human, it's him. After reading them both, he zeroed in on a single sentence in my version.

[Ludwig Siegler]

Okay. The giveaway for me is Sound of briefing Sharpies and paper.

[Andrew Palmer]

Catherine had picked this out too.

[Ludwig Siegler]

An AI wouldn't do that.

[Andrew Palmer]

Why?

[Ludwig Siegler]

Because, I mean, he didn't. Prompt. Wouldn't come up with that. So I think this is you.

[Andrew Palmer]

Draft one.

[Ludwig Siegler]

Yeah.

[Andrew Palmer]

Not draft two. You are right. Ludwig could have stopped talking right there.

[Ludwig Siegler]

But this is gonna. Yeah. Hurt you yeah, this sounds more like you.

[Andrew Palmer]

The second draft sounds more like me.

[Ludwig Siegler]

Yeah.

[Andrew Palmer]

Ludwig said some of the jokes in draft two just sounded more like my jokes.

[Ludwig Siegler]

So the. The bottom line is, without this giveaway, I probably would have picked the wrong one.

[Andrew Palmer]

This exercise left me feeling genuinely despondent. I could argue that a parody of a conversation was easier for an AI to get right than a normal prose column would be. But I also thought it was glaringly obvious, which was written by me. There's a link to both in the show notes, so you can judge for yourself. My straw poll was horribly close. Three for me, two for Claude. I was a little funnier, but less coherent. My joke about the noise of breathing in meetings was idiosyncratic, and I was less good at sounding like myself. I'm terribly shaken by this. You know, what is the point? What is the point? I'll just put the prompt in, send it off. I'll probably get a pay rise. I started feeling around for the jagged frontier, and my hand came out bloodied. But over the days that followed, my sense of personal injury eased off because the experience had actually taught me some valuable lessons. First, as Ethan advised, experiment widely. There isn't a manual for working out how AI can help you in your job. You have to gain an intuition for its strengths and weaknesses, one surprise at a time. Second, reflect on what you find. My first reaction to the AI writing test was to throw up my hands in despair. But its real value was in forcing me to be much more introspective about my work. Working with AI inevitably makes you think harder about which parts of a job have to be done by you and which parts can be outsourced. In my case, I'm certain I'll never get an AI to write my column, but asking one to help me with research or providing feedback on a draft now feels like a useful option. Not cheating. Third, keep a list of any colleagues who mistake you for a robot. Next time on Boss Class. We journey to the far reaches of the jagged frontier, to a realm where AI is already changing. The kind of work that people can do, I mean, it's kind of amazing, right? Yeah.

[Ludwig Siegler]

See, even you can code.

[Andrew Palmer]

Even I can code. And stick with us throughout this season to learn the secrets of people and organizations that are making AI work for them. What we've seen is a greater than 50% increase in productivity.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

That is not something I have ever seen from any tool before in my career.

[Ludwig Siegler]

To think of AI first as a human replacement, you're wrong. But if you think it replaces your newcomers.

[Andrew Palmer]

You're not just wrong, you're out of your mind.

[Tom Blomfield]

I genuinely think like, the people who are going to be the most successful.

[Andrew Palmer]

In the coming years are the people.

[Tom Blomfield]

Who can resist just hitting the easy button.

[Andrew Palmer]

And I'll be continuing my own AI quest and hitting a few more roadblocks along the way. Oh my God. All right, sorry. I'm trying to not panic. This is absolute nuts. I have no idea who I've applied to. To listen to the rest of the series, you'll need to be a subscriber. If you haven't signed up yet, it's easy to do. Just search Economist Podcasts plus for our best offer and we'd love to hear from you. Email us on podcastseconomist.com and put boss Class in the subject line. Even better, record your message on the voice recorder app on your phone and email that. We'll answer some of your questions about Generative AI at work on a special bonus episode hosted by the Real Me. Boss Class is produced by Lawrence Knight with support from Alicia Burrell. The series editors are Sam Colbert, Pete Norton and Claire Reid. Our sound designer is Weidong Lin and Darren Ng composed our music. Our executive producer is John Shields. I'm Andrew Palmer. Oh God, I'm Andrew Palmer. This is the Economist.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

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[Andrew Palmer]

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