WEEK 1 · MON 2 NOV 2026 · US AND THEM

Us and them: why we’re starting this

A year of learning in public about AI, agents and autopilots, and why the divide between people and machines is the real problem.

For the last couple of years we’ve watched the same thing happen in organisation after organisation. The AI arrives in waves: first an assistant in the sidebar, then a few agents someone built on a Friday afternoon, then autopilots quietly running processes overnight. Each wave is useful. And each one leaves people a little further behind.

That’s the “us and them” we mean. Not people against machines, but people on one side trying to keep up, and a growing crowd of agents on the other that nobody can quite see.

The numbers say we’re not imagining it

In 2024, 75% of knowledge workers surveyed by Microsoft and LinkedIn said they used generative AI at work, and 78% of them brought their own tools [S4]. A year later BCG found frontline regular use had stalled at 51%, and only 36% of employees felt properly trained [S5]. Meanwhile Gartner expects over 40% of agentic AI projects to be cancelled by the end of 2027 [S1].

Fast arrival, slow catch-up, expensive mistakes. That gap is what this year is about.

What we’re going to do

• Write every Monday for a year: one thing learned about assistants, agents and autopilots.
• Build a manifesto, twelve lines, and let anyone propose changes.
• Build a shared floor in FrameVR: a place where people and agents work in the open.
• Turn it into a book, chapter by chapter, and launch it on 22 April 2027.

The rule

Every number we use will have a link. When something is just our view, we’ll say so. If we get something wrong, we’ll fix it in public. That’s line ten of the manifesto: mistakes are shared, not hidden.

Next week: three words for three jobs. Assistant, agent, autopilot, and why the difference matters more than the brand names.

DRAFT SEED POST · PART OF THE 52-WEEK PLAN IN DOCS/04-BLOG-PLAN.MD