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If you’re new here, this is the latest edition of the Build Mode newsletter, where we gather the collective wisdom of the people building with AI, designing the future of work, and leading the most important companies of the next decade. Subscribe here to get the top insights in your inbox every other week.
THE BIG IDEA
Use AI to find the talent you’ve been missing in minutes
In the height of a global pandemic, while the world wrestled with COVID-19, Apprentice found itself at the heart of a high-stakes race against time. Angelo Stracquatanio, the company's co-founder and CEO, faced a challenge that would make even the most seasoned tech veterans break into a cold sweat: build an entirely new version of his platform to orchestrate the delivery of 400 million life-saving vaccines across the globe—in just 45 days.
This wasn't just a test of speed; it was a trial of talent. In the heavily regulated world of pharmaceutical manufacturing, overhauling a complex, multi-stack platform required specialized skills and firepower that went beyond the capacity of his existing team.
It was around this time that Angelo was introduced to A.Team — he quickly brought in 30+ specialized fractional engineers from A.Team to integrate with Apprentice’s core tech team, working from within their organization to ramp up efficiency and achieve what seemed impossible: launching a new version of Apprentice’s product on time to facilitate the distribution of nearly 400 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine worldwide.
Apprentice’s story is so remarkable because it’s so different from how most companies experience hiring. Our research shows that tech leaders now spend an average of four months to hire a top engineer, a timeframe that can spell disaster for critical innovation initiatives. And, the advent of Generative AI has only exacerbated this problem, igniting a digital transformation arms race and widening the already yawning skills gap.
Meanwhile, hiring managers — juggling under-resourced teams and endless hiring cycles — are increasingly burning out.
Over the past year, we’ve been working on a new generative AI platform at A.Team to solve these challenges and revolutionize the hiring process, enabling tech leaders to source, interview, and hire top-tier talent from A.Team’s network of 11,000+ pre-vetted experts. We launched it publicly this week as an experimental new feature, and it’s called Team Formation AI.
The secret sauce? A proprietary TeamGraph algorithm, which analyzes skills, experience, and working relationships to identify candidates who have successfully tackled similar challenges before.
Hiring managers now get access to best-in-class Silicon Valley talent on demand that they can onboard in days, not months. And A.Team’s expert network gets an AI that doesn’t take their jobs; it gets work for them.
Early clients and prospects that have used the platform — like Angelo — have loved it. Darren Murph, named the “Oracle of Remote Work” by CNBC and Forbes Future of Work 50, leads Technology Strategy at Ford Motors and has been another early user of Team Formation AI, believes it will transform hiring and the future of work for the better.
“Team Formation AI liberates leaders to focus their energy on articulating the scope of a business challenge rather than guessing at how to solve it — and it instantly gives you the best talent to tackle it,” said Murph.
Will AI-driven platforms like Team Formation AI become the norm, reshaping not just how we hire, but how we conceive of teams and organizations themselves? Only time will tell, but one thing's for sure: in the race for innovation, the ability to rapidly assemble teams of specialized talent may well be the difference between being the next big thing and being... well, Blockbuster in a Netflix world.
Try Team Formation AI for yourself here — at no cost (you don’t even need to fill out a sign-up form). Just tell it what you want to build or the roles you’re hiring for, and watch it take care of the rest.
CHART OF THE WEEK
Is AGI only 4 years away?
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In a provocative new essay, former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner paints a startling vision of our AI future. His 50,000-word opus, Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead, argues we could achieve Artificial General Intelligence by 2027 — a mere four years away.
Aschenbrenner traces AI's meteoric rise from GPT-2 to GPT-4, comparing it to a child maturing from preschool to high school in the blink of an eye. This breakneck progress, he contends, will demand unprecedented resources: trillion-dollar compute clusters and a surge in energy production to feed these silicon brains.
But with great power comes great responsibility. Aschenbrenner's work isn't just a celebration of AI's potential; it's a sobering look at the challenges that lie ahead. How do we secure superintelligent systems against bad actors? Can we ensure these digital minds align with human values? As AI reshapes global power dynamics, industry leaders face a stark choice: adapt or be left behind. Aschenbrenner's analysis serves as both crystal ball and call to action, urging us to embrace AI's promise while clear-eyed about its risks. In a world racing towards AGI, his essay offers a crucial roadmap for navigating the exciting, and sometimes terrifying, decade to come.
WATERCOOLER
Do We Make Better Group Decisions When Our Hearts Synchronize?
What if the key to perfect teamwork isn't found in trust falls or icebreakers, but in the united rhythm of our beating hearts?
This isn't a plot twist in a Dave Eggers novel—it's the groundbreaking discovery made by neuroscientist Michael Platt and his team at the University of Pennsylvania. The study, which involved 44 groups tackling a challenging hiring task, revealed that heart rate synchrony predicted the likelihood of groups reaching the correct consensus with over 70% accuracy. This biological marker outperformed traditional self-report surveys, offering a potentially game-changing tool for assessing and improving team dynamics. As Platt puts it, "I'm taken aback by this finding because it's so simple. Our hearts beat in time with each other, when we have the conditions that are met for using all the information that's available in a group.”
But what's driving this cardiac concert? Platt suggests it's an environment of "psychological safety"—a buzzword that suddenly carries weight. In high-functioning groups, members feel free to speak up, challenge opinions, and share unique insights without fear of dismissal. This openness, it seems, manifests not just in words and decisions, but in the very rhythms of our bodies.
In a world often divided, there's something profoundly hopeful about the idea that our hearts might literally beat as one when we're working well together.
DISCOVERY ZONE
Use Team Formation AI to hire the talent you’ve been missing in minutes.
MEME
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