The Multiplayer AI Sprint: Build Your Team’s First Shared Agent

Nathaniel Whittemore (0:00)

2026 is undisputedly the year of agents. For years, we were talking about these things, but now they are actually here, and they are changing how we do work, at least on an individual level. The thing is, not all of our work happens on an individual level. Most of us, in fact, split our work pretty comfortably between work that we do on our own and work that we do in Teams. So far, agents have really only been able to impact about half of that equation. I believe strongly that that is about to change and that the best, most dynamic AI using Teams are going to shift from single-player AI to multiplayer AI.

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Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. The day that this episode comes out is Labor Day in the US, the traditional end of summer and the beginning of back to school and back to work. This is one of those inflection moments where a lot of folks come back to the office, whether it's virtual or real, reinvigorated and ready to crush out a couple of great months before the holidays descend. In fact, I think in many ways outside of New Year's, this is the time where I see the most excitement around new ways of working on an individual and a team level. Now, this year, Labor Day also happens to fall on my birthday, and I thought that I would give all of you guys a present. So far this year, we have released four free self-directed learning programs. We kicked off the year with the New Year's AI Resolution, a 10-week 10-project adventure, which was really meant to provide a very broad basis of basic core AI skills that were notably in general pretty pre-agentic. Agents would come a little bit later. In February, we released Claw Camp, which was a zero-to-agent team program that was not simple at all, but which gave people a guide to diving into this new crazy agentic world that had been enabled by OpenClaw.

Agent OS came just a little bit later and was the more mature grown-up version of Claw Camp that was not only platform and tool agnostic, but helped people build not just a single agent or even an agent team, but an entire agentic operating system capable of taking on increasingly complex work.

Finally, the AI Summer Adventure was a choose-your-own-adventure style program that provided a bunch of fun skills at a variety of different levels to people who wanted to stay sharp over the summer.

Now, there are a few things that all these experiences have in common. They were all free, self-directed, project-based learning experiences, the whole goal of which was to provide a framework for you to actually go do this work. The pedagogy behind them is pretty simple. It's that to learn how to use AI, you just have to use AI. They're all kind of anchored in the truth that at this point, there are still no AI experts, there are just people who have practiced with it more. But the other thing that they all are, ultimately and at core, is individual.

Now, with AIDB New Year's, you could form a team, but it was a team only in the sense of mutual support, people going through an individual experience in parallel. All the other programs follow the pattern that pretty much all agentic work has so far, which is people building and leveraging individual agents for their individual work. The thing is, not all of our work happens individually. In fact, for most of us, some major and meaningful portion of our work happens as part of a team. A recent survey of around 16,500 office workers found that something like 39% of the workday is spent working alone, while 42% of time is spent working with others. Another survey found that 57% of time is spent communicating, i.e. meetings, email, chat, etc., versus 43% creating individually. And yet another survey found that about 60% of time goes to work about work, communication, search, coordination and process.

In other words, a significant portion of knowledge work happens on a team, and the majority of knowledge work runs through team context. Collaboration, meetings, email, chat, coordination, search, those are the substance of a huge amount of work. And yet, so far, the vast majority of agentic efforts have been entirely personal. Think about all of the early experiments that you've heard about. It's all people building their agent teams, their researchers, their writer agents, their coding agents, their personal chief of staff agent. Advanced users are, yes, experimenting with agent teams, but it's agent teams that serve only the individual. Now, to be clear, I don't think that's going away. I think the fact that all of us now gets to be a manager of a big extensive team of agents that themselves can spawn sub-agents to do lots of different work is now just part and parcel of being an effective knowledge worker.