A couple of years ago, in most of my talks, I used the Iron Man and Jarvis analogy when to explain where AI could eventually go. The idea was not just to have a smarter chatbot, but to have an AI sitting alongside you, understanding what you are trying to do and helping you get the work done.

I think we are starting to see the early version of that.

Over the last year, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have been moving away from making us choose between separate AI capabilities. Chat, research, coding, documents, presentations, design and other tools are increasingly being brought into one experience. You describe what you want to achieve, and the platform figures out which capabilities, tools and systems it needs to use underneath.

I actually like this direction. I don’t want to think about which model to use, which tool to open, where to retrieve information from or how to put everything together. I want to tell my AI coworker what I am trying to achieve and let it coordinate the work.

But there is one thing that will determine whether I am actually comfortable making AI my coworker: how much control do I have over that coworker?

Can I teach it how I work? Can I define what it should and should not do? Can I control which data, applications and tools it can access? Can I set guardrails without having to build a complex system every time? Can I decide which actions require my approval? Can I see what it is doing and understand why it did something? And when something goes wrong, can I pause it, revoke access or stop it immediately?

The more an AI understands about me and the more authority I give it, the more important these controls become. I want a coworker that knows my preferences and working style, but I also want to know that I can constrain it, monitor it and override it.

For me, that is the next important step in this whole evolution. Building an AI coworker is not just about making the AI more capable. It is about giving the user enough control to trust that capability.

I write about hashtag#artificialintelligence | hashtag#technology | hashtag#startups | hashtag#mentoring | hashtag#leadership | hashtag#financialindependence

PS: All views are personal