AI Revisited - part 2

12:30Kimberly Rhodes:I don't really have any spoilers at the moment.

12:32Jason Fried:Tell me what you're thinking in terms of AI and our products. Is that something that as we're launching Basecamp 5, you're digging into? Is it a not now? And then also, are other products not just Basecamp, but Hay and Fizzi, kind of where are you thinking the next step for AI is for us?

12:48Kimberly Rhodes:Yeah, I mean, we explored it quite a bit in Fizzi. And I think there's, of course, an endless amount of things you can do and maybe we should do at some point. things we explored it for in fizzy weren't entirely useful at the moment that said i can imagine for example duplicate detection like this bug looks like these three bugs is this the same thing things like that i think would be handy yeah we had some summary stuff like summarizing a week worth of work and what's been going on and we just found those to be like adequate but like not interesting to read and i think that that ultimately kind of pushed us back away from it for a minute.

13:25Kimberly Rhodes:Like we can generate summaries, we can generate reviews of work, but like if no one really wants to read them, it didn't feel right. So we kind of backed away from that. Anyway, that was a few months ago. David and I and Brian actually just caught up yesterday about AI and Basecamp 5 and we're exploring some different avenues for inclusion of AI in the product. It's also very, very interesting time because, and this is sort of David's argument, which I buy. I also have other arguments that I'm trying to push forward that a lot of people have spent a lot of energy building a lot of custom AI stuff into their existing products.

14:01Kimberly Rhodes:The alternatives in the market, competitors, alternatives, whatever, other people in our sphere, basically, all have AI features in the products at some level. And they talk about them very proudly on their sites. It's very obvious that it's like pervasive now. And we don't talk about it and we don't have anything. And that's been an intentional decision so far. and David's point of view and again, I agree with it and I also disagree with it in other ways but I really agree fundamentally with it is that things have actually changed so much in the past month like with OpenClaw, for example and 24-7 running agents things are just perpetually running for you and the ability for agents just to log in as normal people that people are going to end up bringing their own agents to our products and just have them be normal users Like just have your agents sign up for an account and then you can grant it access and you can bring all the knowledge it has.

14:53Kimberly Rhodes:It can learn everything about your product in no time at all. We've seen this already. We already have agents in Basecamp in our Basecamp account. Like we've invited our own. And so you can see that there's a lot of custom work you can do to try to do those things. or maybe you can wait a little bit longer and the game's going to change where OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, Gemini, all these things will be offering these always-on agents. Just like OpenClaw is, OpenClaw is like extremely technical right now. You got to set up your own server or use a virtual server and it's very complicated, but it's a view into what things are going to be very, very soon.

15:30Kimberly Rhodes:So what we can do is make the product simpler, clearer. We are working on some other stuff, some CLIs, command line interface for Basecamp that would make it easier for agents so they don't have to use a browser. We're doing a bunch of that stuff too. But currently we're thinking that people are going to be bringing a lot of their own stuff into Basecamp. However, there's also stuff in Basecamp that we can be doing with AI that we're going to be looking into doing for Basecamp 5 when we've already begun to think about these things. So I can't reveal anything more than that. But I do think there's going to be this hybrid world of some native AI features within a product.

16:03Kimberly Rhodes:And then people are going to bring their own agents that are connected to all sorts of other things also, and that are going to know them really, really, really well. And they're going to bring those into the product as well, just as if they were coworkers. You've probably seen Jeremy's doing this and David's doing this and a few other people are doing this. And it's incredibly impressive. And it's interesting because we have to build anything to make this happen. And that's, I think, ultimately where the puck is going. That said, again, there are, I think, specialized things that we should be thinking about and things that are just more straightforward than having to think about signing for something somewhere else and then bringing it in versus just having a few things available to people.

16:36Kimberly Rhodes:So it's very exciting. It's very much like on the edge of following what's going on here and trying to determine what the best path forward is. And I'm actually very glad that we have not spent the past year building things that might be undone in a matter of weeks by a better way to do things. So, you know, there's a point though, you can't wait for someone else to invent the future that you want.

16:58Jason Fried:Yeah.

16:59Kimberly Rhodes:Because you might have to wait 18 months and it might be too long. So like it's figuring out the right timing for these things. It's always challenging. It's very hard to call the top or the bottom of any market or any situation.

17:08Jason Fried:Yeah.

17:08Kimberly Rhodes:At some point, though, you got to just go, oh, this is very interesting. This is going to change. What else can we do, though, in the meantime that still is very helpful?

17:14Jason Fried:Yeah. I mean, it feels like you should always be early on the early side of things. But this is one situation where like if you were early, you're redoing basically what you've already done. And with the small teams, like we don't have time to do that.

17:26Kimberly Rhodes:Yeah. Look, we also have a small team. You know, we have 62 people in the company. A third of the company might be people, engineers and designers, really, you know, ultimately. And like AI is very helpful in, you know, allowing us to develop faster and with fewer people and the whole thing. But ultimately, we don't have a company of a thousand people of which a hundred can go explore some of this stuff. So we still have to make decisions. There's a lot of trade-offs to make about what's worth focusing on. And we currently think that the core features of our product, Basecamp, for example, that are ours, that work the way we want them to work, is a better place to invest most of our energy.

17:58Kimberly Rhodes:will still be investing some energy into AI and also have open arms and open doors for people to bring their own AI into Basecamp and make it easier for those AIs or for those agents to be able to access data in Basecamp. So we're making that a lot easier. So I think we're going absolutely the right direction here. And again, I'm glad we didn't spend 10 ,000 engineer hours over the past year and a half or whatever it would be, building stuff that's like kind of going to be obsolete pretty soon.

18:24Jason Fried:Yeah. It's interesting because I see some of the customer feedback people write in or comment on our YouTube videos that people are very polarized by this topic. I've said it before, but there's people who are like, when is Basecamp getting AI? Like you guys are late. And there's people who are like, don't touch my Basecamp. It's like the only piece of software I have that hasn't been sucked in with shitty AI. So it is one of those like hard to balance between those different opinions and doing what's right for the product. For sure.

18:53Kimberly Rhodes:And we want to make both those sides happy. And I think we can. I absolutely think we can. Our approach is always to be as straightforward as possible, as no nonsense as possible. So like slathering AI on everything, everywhere, all the time is not going to be our approach. and I've used tools that are like that now where everything is like AI first and I just think it's a bit of a novelty at the moment and I think it's wearing thin in some ways and you just have to be careful not to sort of ruin things because not everybody wants that all the time. It should be available for sure and others are very gung-ho about it, want it everywhere.

19:28Kimberly Rhodes:So the good news is they'll be able to bring theirs and have it wherever they want and do whatever they want. Meanwhile, for those who don't want to go down that road or aren't sophisticated enough or aren't interested enough in doing that, We have to provide some assistance for them as well and give them some leverage that they didn't have before and show them that this stuff is very powerful and very useful, but also not in your way. So it's a delicate balance. But this is the same delicate balance we've been balancing on since the beginning of Basecamp. Everybody wants more stuff. This is the nature of software.

19:57Kimberly Rhodes:Everyone wants more stuff. And everyone has their two or three requests, and they can't understand why you haven't done them yet. And then you're like, well, there's 85 ,000 people asking for two or three things. And some of those things overlap, and many of them don't. And then you also, people also say like, I love Basecamp because it's so straightforward and simple and thank God because everything else is a mess. And you're like, big reason for that is because we've held back doing certain things that everyone's been asking us to do. And it's always a delicate balance. So it's no different.

20:22Kimberly Rhodes:Expectations are no different. They're just about different things. So it's always the thing we've been really good at, I think, which is understanding the limits, making things very accessible for a huge swath of people and not getting ahead of ourselves and making things complicated to benefit a handful of people who really want the most and the many. And instead, just kind of figure out like what's the right collection of things that makes the most sense for the most people that's easy and approachable and understandable for nearly everybody. And also, there's some more power around the corner.

20:51Kimberly Rhodes:If you really know how to get at it, you can do that. Like a good example of this, well, let's call it Basecamp 3. Actually, all the way back to 2 kind of had a handful of tools that were, you know, you could add to-dos and messages and files and documents and schedule stuff basically in a project. And that was the same up until a couple of years ago. We added this feature to allow you to add multiple tools to a project. So you could have multiple to-do sections. You could always have multiple to-do lists, but I give two to-do sections or multiple message boards.

21:20Jason Fried:Two separate chat tools.

21:22Kimberly Rhodes:Right. And so it's still simple for everybody. Like there's a collection of simple, straightforward tools that make sense to everybody. But those who want to reach around the corner and pick out a few more things off the shelf and put it on their project, they can. But it never gets in somebody's way if they don't want to think about the fact that they can do that. That's always the line we're trying to tow here. And so I think the same thing will be true with AI.

21:44Jason Fried:Okay, a little off subject, but I've read a lot or heard recently about the whole tech surge of people being laid off because AI is going to take over all these jobs and we don't need programmers and we don't need all of these different positions. I kind of wanted to get your take on that. One of the things I think of in particular that drives me crazy with companies, their use of AI, is support and offloading that support to AI robots where you can't talk to a real person. I want to kind of get your take on the company's philosophy when it comes to the roles that we have here and AI, how those might be supplemented or not.

22:22Kimberly Rhodes:My longstanding opinion about most companies is they tend to have too many people. I think companies tend to be too big, teams are too large. And we've intentionally kept our company as small as we possibly can, like since we existed. We've gotten a little bit bigger than we are today, but, you know, we're about 60 people. That feels like really good. and a lot of the people in our industry have teams of hundreds or thousands of people in their company. And I just never really understood that. Fair enough, whatever. So in general, I think that companies will often look for reasons to let people go that may or may not be true.

22:58Kimberly Rhodes:At some point, when their numbers aren't right and Wall Street, if they're public, Wall Street's demanding this or demanding that, it's easy to lay people off. And you can say, we're laying people off because AI is going to make us more efficient or more productive. And that might be true, but it also just might be an excuse to lay people off. So I don't know. I don't know. Sure. There's no question that it should make people more productive. But I think people should have probably been a lot more productive to begin with. I don't think you need a team of 12 people working on something that's relatively small, you know?

23:28Kimberly Rhodes:So it's all like one of the same for me there. I agree with you that like in some cases, AI-based customer service is actually quite good if you have a very simple, straightforward question. It's also incredibly frustrating when you have something a little bit more nuanced and you just have this boiling urge, like, I just want to talk to somebody who will understand where I'm coming from, who's not as intelligent as AI technically, but totally gets what I'm talking about because they just, they're human and they get it, right? Now, there's also terrible human customer service out there as well.

24:01Kimberly Rhodes:True. And that's because people aren't trained well and companies typically see it as a cost center. So they try to find the lowest common denominator. So it's not that humans are better or worse at this. It's like you want highly trained, long-term humans who know a product inside and out are extraordinarily good. And that's what we offer. We do offer some AI help in some places. You hit the little question mark and you can ask a question and stuff. But you just email support at Basecamp.com and you're getting a human. Right. So if we're around in 245 years and we're all dead and that like might be different in the short term, near term here.

24:40Kimberly Rhodes:I think humans are hugely important. I think we have a massive advantage because we have incredibly good humans on our support team, many of which have been here for many, many, many years, some of which been here for 15 years on support. Like this is a career job here, not just a temporary job, which it is in most places kind of a temp job. And we've developed incredibly good people who have a huge depth of knowledge about how our products work. And they really, really care. And I think it's a massive competitive advantage for us. And I would not want to give that up. That said, there's also times you just want to get a quick answer.

25:10Kimberly Rhodes:So we should have both and make both available. But it shouldn't feel like you must go through the AI and then get pissed off enough to get a human. I don't ever want to have us do that. those are the experiences i never want to have with other people's companies and by the way it's so different than like old school support like phone trees you know like like oh my god like press five and then the recording is so slow you're like and you just like slam the zero button or whatever and try to like break through it you know yeah i don't want anyone to ever feel that

25:38Jason Fried:like that with us yeah i the reason i brought it up is i recently had this terrible experience with an airline trying to get a question answered and talking to their AI bot, trying to get a real person. Like, okay, you're not answering my questions, so I need to get to a real person. And literally being in a circle of, no, I'm the bot and I can help you. Well, you're not helping me. No, I'm the bot. I can help you.

26:00Kimberly Rhodes:I'm like, oh my gosh. Infuriating. Well, there's this sort of know-it-all complex. And you'd imagine like AI technically does know more than any human at this point, essentially. But it's still different because people relate. It's not just about knowledge. It's about relating to somebody and inventing, frankly, to a human who understands that you're pissed and can feel that and understand how to respond in a way that's still just human to human. Humans want to talk to humans, especially when they're pissed. They just do. I mean, you could also yell at an AI and let it all out and not worry about insulting anybody either.

26:38Kimberly Rhodes:But I don't think that's what people actually want. I think when people really get a little bit frustrated and sometimes when they're writing support, they are.

26:44Jason Fried:Yeah,

26:45Kimberly Rhodes:they are. And it might be because they had a bad day. It's not that there's the product is terrible. They may have had a bad day or who knows what happened, right? They have a deadline coming up and they can't find this thing they knew was there. And like people are frustrated for all sorts of reasons. You want someone on the other side who can meet that, absorb it, understand it and know how to work with you on it. Now, it's not that AI can't be trained to do that. And I'm sure there's some very sophisticated models that can do that. But that's a technologist point of view. If I'm a human, there's a point and it's not a very deep point where I want to talk to somebody.

27:20Kimberly Rhodes:I just still do. Maybe in 20 years, I don't. Today I do. I believe that's true. I talk to our customers. I know it's true. And we want to make sure that we're never skimping on that.

27:31Jason Fried:Yeah. Well, that Seems like a perfect place to wrap it up. We will look forward to seeing what comes in the way as of AI as we launch new products. This is a production of Rework. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com slash podcast. Full video episodes are on YouTube. And if you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a voice recording. You can do that at 37signals.com slash podcast question or send us an email to rework at 37signals.com.