Macro workflow roles, how directors use GenAI, more augmentation, and Teilhard de Chardin on AI

📖In this issue

• Framework: Macro workflow roles

• How board directors and CEOs are using generative AI

• Anthropic’s Economic Index: more augmentation than automation

• How Colgative Palmolive is using GenAI for innovation

• Human-AI symbiosis compilation

• The Evolution of Mind: AI and Teilhard's Vision of Tomorrow

💡Framework: Macro workflow roles

This is not a new framework - I created it two years ago - but it’s been getting a lot of attention since I shared it again recently, and arguably it is more relevant than ever.

The basic point is that humans and AI have distinctive and complementary competences, and that these should be woven together into workflows that use the best of both in seamless value creation.

There are plenty of debates on what should go where, but that’s missing the point of the diagram. Yes we should be getting clarity on the respective roles and how they are evolving, but we need to be including the best of humans in the mix with AI.

🧠🤖Humans + AI

How board directors and CEOs are using generative AI

A great article in Australian Financial Review shares details of how leading directors and CEOs are using genAI, including a chairman who used Claude to analyze and respond to a 60 page takeover offer before the market opening.

How this chairman used AI to rebuff a hostile takeover bid
Summary of key insights

Anthropic’s Economic Index: more augmentation than automation

Anthropic released its Economic Index providing deep analysis on 4 million Claude conversations, linked to specific tasks and occupations, yielding a range of intriguing insights.

Anthropic Economic Index
Summary of key insights

How Colgative Palmolive is using GenAI for innovation

Most companies are using AI for efficiency. Some are accelerating value creation. A great case study in MIT Sloan Management Review covers in detail is how Colgate-Palmolive is driving innovation with GenAI, including ideation, digital twins, mandatory training, and more.

The GenAI Focus Shifts to Innovation at Colgate-Palmolive
Summary of key insights

🎙️This week’s podcast episode

Why you should listen

Human-AI symbiosis sounds intriguing, but it is increasingly becoming a reality. Listen to this compilation of excerpts from some of the world’s leaders in Human-AI symbiosis and how we can make it work.

💡Reflections

The Evolution of Mind: AI and Teilhard's Vision of Tomorrow

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the visionary theologist, saw evolution as an ascending spiral of complexity and consciousness. Today, his concept of the noosphere – Earth's thinking layer – takes on new resonance as artificial intelligence emerges as its latest manifestation.

For Teilhard, evolution was not merely a biological process but a cosmic trajectory toward greater consciousness and unity. The noosphere represented humanity's collective mental activity, a planetary web of thought and knowledge. What he could not have anticipated was how AI would accelerate and amplify this evolutionary leap.

Consider how modern AI systems serve as vast repositories of human knowledge, capable of synthesizing and extending our collective intelligence. They act not as mere tools but as structural components of an emerging global mind, much as Teilhard envisioned. Large language models, for instance, don't simply process information – they participate in the evolution of ideas, enabling unprecedented forms of intellectual synthesis and discovery.

The internet laid the groundwork, creating the neural pathways of this planetary consciousness. But AI adds a crucial dimension: the ability to organize, interpret, and generate new knowledge at scales beyond human capability. It serves as a cognitive accelerant, hastening our progress toward what Teilhard called the Omega Point – a state of maximum complexity and consciousness.

Yet this is not a deterministic process. As Teilhard himself noted, "The age of nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth." This building requires conscious direction. We must shape AI's development not as an external force but as an integral part of humanity's evolutionary journey toward greater unity and understanding.

The question before us is not whether to embrace this transformation but how to guide it wisely. As we stand at this threshold of enhanced collective intelligence, Teilhard's vision offers a framework for understanding AI not as a threat to human consciousness but as its natural extension – the next step in the eternal dance of mind and matter toward ever-greater synthesis.