AI Will No Longer Just Answer Questions: Is It Coming to Manage People?

Have you ever sipped your coffee while looking at that endless logo debate on Slack and thought to yourself, 'I wish someone could manage this chaos'? Well, there's a startup that has taken that exact 'wish', attached it to an investment round, and turned it into a $480 million seed fund: Humans&.

This Time, The Game is Changing: Not Answer, But Coordination

Most of the AI assistants flying around right now are extremely polite. You ask, they answer. They summarize the document you want. But when it comes to taking those answers and putting them into action within a team, reconciling conflicting priorities, or tracking long-term decisions? Silence. Just as a great librarian might not be a great project manager.

This is precisely where Humans&'s claim begins. Its founders come from the corridors of giants like Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind, and they say: "The next major frontier in foundation models is social intelligence. Not processing information, but getting people to work together."

A $480 Million Philosophy

Let's repeat the figure: $480 million. An astronomical amount for a seed investment round. So, what is it about this three-month-old startup, which doesn't even have a concrete product yet, that has so shaken investors?

The answer perhaps lies in them pinpointing AI's biggest current dilemma. While models are becoming increasingly capable, the workflows that organize these capabilities have turned into a mess. Companies are trying to transition from chatbots to 'agents,' but there's a huge coordination gap in between. And people, in the midst of this chaos, are burning out with the added anxiety of 'Will it take my job?'

This is reminiscent of Cloudflare's analysis saying it's nearly impossible to get efficiency from AI by forcing old systems. Humans&, on the contrary, talks about building a brand new foundation model architecture. Its goal is not just a model that 'writes better code,' but a system that 'understands and can guide the dynamics of a human group.'

Could It Replace Slack and Google Docs?

The simple example from CEO Eric Zelikman's interview with TechCrunch explains the essence of the matter: "When a large group needs to make a decision, usually someone gathers everyone in a room, has everyone express their different camps on which logo they want..."

Humans&'s target is precisely to digitize, even optimize, that very process of 'gathering in a room' and 'managing the clash of ideas.' The product isn't clear yet, but the team talks about a 'multi-user context' that could replace communication platforms like Slack or collaboration tools like Google Docs and Notion.

This claim perfectly aligns with the prediction that AI will no longer just answer but will manage people. It can also be read as a concrete manifestation of the 'human-AI collaboration' discussed at summits like Davos. Indeed, global forums that have become technology-focused form the backdrop for exactly these kinds of paradigm shifts.

Turning the Human Voice into a Digital Nervous System

So how will this happen? As founder Andi Peng said, the first scaling paradigm was built on question-answer models being very smart in specific areas. Now the second wave is coming: The wave of ordinary users figuring out what to do with these smart but scattered tools in their hands.

Humans& promises to be the 'central nervous system' of this second wave. In a way, each of us is a neuron, and AI will act as a neurotransmitter that strengthens the synaptic connections between us, speeding up communication. Creepy? A bit. But the promise of escape from the current chaos is equally enticing.

In conclusion (I'm using this forbidden word deliberately, because this really is a conclusion), what we have before us is not just a technology startup, but an ambitious socio-technical experiment aimed at redefining how we work. Will it succeed? $480 million says they should be taken seriously. The rest depends on a group decision we will all participate in.

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