<
https://redmonk.com/kholterhoff/2026/01/16/will-your-ai-teammate-bring-bagels-to-standup/>
"The phrase “AI teammate” has dominated marketing around AI and agentic
workplace collaboration tools for years. It’s warm, approachable, and rolls off
the tongue with the careful calculation of a thousand focus groups. Asana has
become the standard-bearer for this terminology, with their AI Teammates
product line of “collaborative AI agents,” joined by Atlassian, who published
an entire “Team Playbook” entry titled “Your AI Teammate,” walking through how
to identify tasks suitable for AI automation and general instructions for how
to build custom agents.
This week Anthropic made waves by dropping Cowork, which they’re marketing as
“Claude Code for the rest of your work.” This research preview for macOS users
is designed to perform entire workflows by accessing a folder on your computer,
which it can then manipulate. Super useful (if you’re not put off by the
potential security risk, of course). What is more, the name “cowork” seems to
fit this tool’s intended function. Even Simon Willison approves, noting:
Cowork is a pretty solid choice on the name front!
While AI enthusiasts rejoice, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Sarah
Franklin, CEO of Lattice, and the “digital workers” she predicted in an
infamous 2024 LinkedIn post. For those who can’t remember that far back,
suffice it to say that the internet did not like the term one bit. In fact,
according to Sam Forsdick at
Raconteur, Lattice “reportedly cancelled its AI
employee features following the backlash.”
I strongly suspect that if Franklin posted this thought piece today it would
barely make a ripple, and it’s worth discussing why. Consider our options.
Maybe Franklin is still wrong. After all, ”digital worker” is not synonymous
with teammate, coworker, or any of the bevvy of other labels vendors are
testing out to describe these AI and agentic tools. Maybe it is the wrong layer
of the stack. HR systems handle deeply sensitive personal information and are
bound by legal regulations. But I suspect that Franklin was simply too early to
the AI teammate party. Technology and model improvements aside, no one, and
perhaps HR software users in particular, were not prepared to hear that they
will soon have AI colleagues in 2024."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
