A way of working where diverse people and AI agents tackle the same Customer Problem at the same time, in one shared space, around one shared question.
Most teams are using AI the way a carpenter uses a power drill. As a faster version of what they already had. Press the button. Get more output. The work is still being done by the same person, in the same way, on the same things.
There is a different way to work with AI, and it is showing up inside the best teams we work with right now. AI has stopped being an external tool that someone uses, and started being a participant that joins the team. It listens to the brief. It picks up the same Customer Problem. It contributes its own work back. It is no longer a faster drill or a smarter search. It is, in practice, a teammate.
We named what we are seeing. We call it Augmented Collaboration. The book by the same name is the long-form case for it. This post is the short one.
What Augmented Collaboration is
Augmented Collaboration is a way of working in which diverse people and AI agents tackle the same Customer Problem at the same time. Not in handovers. Not in stages. Together, in one shared space, around one shared question.
Five phrases are doing the work in that sentence.
Diverse people means the team is not just one department. It is a mix of disciplines, perspectives, and capabilities. The diversity is the point. A single function cannot see the whole problem.
And AI agents means AI is on the team, not adjacent to it. AI is not the tool the team uses to be more productive. AI is a participant in the team's reasoning. The team makes decisions together.
The same Customer Problem means everyone is anchored to the same target. Not the same brief. Not the same goal. The same Customer Problem, written in one sentence, agreed by every person and every AI agent on the team.
At the same time means parallel work, not sequential work. Research is happening while strategy is happening while design is happening, because they are all looking at the same problem from different angles. There is no relay race.
Shared space means one place where the work actually lives. One canvas. One thread. One source of truth that the whole team, humans and AI, can see and shape.
Why this matters now
There are three structural problems we keep seeing inside organizations, and Augmented Collaboration is the operating model that dissolves all three.
The first is the Linear Trap. Most teams are organized as a relay race. Research hands its insight to strategy, strategy hands a brief to product, product hands a solution to marketing, and by the time the work reaches a real customer, the original insight has been diluted at every handover. Augmented Collaboration replaces the handover with shared work.
The second is the Speed Gap. AI is accelerating customer behaviour, competitive moves, and possible ideas faster than most organizations can absorb. Every week your governance rhythm cannot match the rhythm of your market, the gap widens, and you lose ground without seeing it. Augmented Collaboration closes the gap by collapsing the steps that used to be sequential.
The third is the AI Illusion. Adding AI to a slow organization does not make the organization fast. It makes the slow work faster, the wrong work bigger, and the noise louder. Augmented Collaboration directs AI at real Customer Problems, inside a team that can act on what it finds, instead of generating impressive-looking artefacts that no one knows what to do with.
What Augmented Collaboration is not
It is worth saying clearly what Augmented Collaboration is not, because the term gets used in ways we did not intend.
It is not AI as a tool. A team using ChatGPT to write faster is not doing Augmented Collaboration. They are using AI as a tool. That is fine. It is not what we are talking about.
It is not AI as a copilot. A team where AI suggests options and a human picks is not doing Augmented Collaboration either. That is still the human owning the work and AI supporting it. Augmented Collaboration is closer to peers than to assistants.
It is not a workshop, a sprint, or a single session. Augmented Collaboration is a way the team operates day to day. It shows up in how meetings run, how decisions are made, how Customer Problems are framed, and where AI agents sit in the room.
What changes when teams work this way
Three things change when a team starts working this way.
Decision speed goes up because handovers disappear. The team is not waiting on the next stage to make a choice. The team is making the choice together, in the same session, with AI agents contributing to the same conversation.
Solution quality goes up because more perspectives are at the table earlier. AI sees patterns a human team would miss. Humans see context an AI would miss. The combined view is sharper than either alone.
Team energy goes up because people stop spending their week recovering from misalignment. The chain of reasoning is visible to everyone. Disagreements happen on the problem, not on what someone thought the problem was.
Where to start
Augmented Collaboration is the central argument of our new book. The book gives the operating system, the tools, and the rhythm a team needs to start working this way next Monday, not next quarter.
Grab your copy of the #badversion of Augmented Collaboration, available now as a softcover and as a digital edition. The final version, with QR codes linking each tool to a live Miro template, arrives on 1 September 2026 and can be pre-ordered today.
The teams that get this right will not just move faster. They will move differently. The shift is here. The book is the map.
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