90 days at Speak: What it's like to build alongside AI

By Emma Clausen, AI Product Engineer 

When you start a new job, everyone has advice on how to crush the first 90 days. It's good advice. You want to make a good first impression and start contributing. But I think it's worth taking a minute at 90 days to notice how you actually feel about the place, not just how you're performing in it.

Upon starting this reflection, the thing I kept coming back to is how AI-forward Speak is. People at Speak are really, really into AI like super AI-pilled, honestly. If I wasn't sure AI was going to change how everyone works before I joined, I am now.

What follows are some of my musings around how we work 90 days in:

It's not just an engineering thing

The version of "we use AI" I expected was that engineers would be excited and everyone else would be left behind. That hasn't happened. Since joining I've watched demos from designers, marketers, PMs, execs, and engineers, all of them showing how they made their own work faster. One that stuck with me: a marketing manager built an influencer-ops tool in a week. No engineer touched it.

You have to find your own way of doing things

Every week some new tool comes out that's supposed to level up how you work. Some are great. Some are great for certain people and not others. Figuring out what actually works for you matters more than chasing whatever's new. It's never been easier to build your own tools, so I have been. One such example is a little Electron app that puts all my agents on a single screen while I work.

What makes this type of personalized exploration okay is that leadership pushes AI but doesn't tell you what your version of it has to look like. Finding what works for you is encouraged even when it looks nothing like the setup of the 10x engineer next to you.

And then you have to stay nimble

This sort of contradicts what I just said but you also can't get dogmatic about how you work. My coworkers are always doing something I haven't thought of, and most weeks I'm pulling a piece of someone else's setup into mine. You want systems, but you want them porous.

Sharing is the thing that actually compounds

One of my favorite things about Speak is how much people want to tell you what they've figured out. Blocking off time to read what other people are building has paid huge dividends and it is really fun. It happens over Slack, in eng and all-company demos, and in water-cooler (read: bevy or boba) conversations. Ideas move fast here because people are always building on each other's work.

None of it is free

Working alongside agents adds overhead. New habits, new ways to organize your day, hours spent on tools that don't pan out. What makes it work is that people are given room to experiment and to get it wrong. You don't get the upside without a company deciding, on purpose, to eat that cost.

What's next

Outside of findings related to AI it is worth stating the other big reflection. The people here are really kind and smart. They've been the biggest reason these 90 days have been so good. Smart, generous, and super bought in.

I'm still early. I'm still working out where AI genuinely helps and where it's just noise, and I don't have that fully figured out. But 90 days in, I'm more sure than I was on day one that the way we work is changing, and that Speak is already building like it has.