If it hasn’t happened yet, it will soon. Someone from leadership is going to come to your maintenance department and ask how you plan to leverage AI to scale or work more efficiently. And, you need to have an answer for them.
I want Envoy to be the place facilities leaders turn to when they’re trying to understand how their departments will operate in an AI-native world. How will the work change? What will people be responsible for? What should we be doing now to prepare? I want us to help people think through those questions by sharing what we’re building, what we’re learning, and why we’re making the decisions we make.
That’s a big ambition, and it puts a responsibility on the writing we publish here. If we want people to trust our thinking, we need someone willing to question it. That’s why I want an editor who disagrees with me.
Most of what we write about comes from the work we’re doing. We’re building internal applications and agents, trying different ways to automate processes, and making decisions about how our business should operate. While there’s useful experience in that, we also need to explain our thinking in ways that help you decide whether it applies to your own department. That’s where I want our editor to push us.
If I make a claim, she should ask what supports it. If I leave out something because it’s obvious to me, she should push me to explain it. She should be able to draw on the conversations and material behind a draft, question our conclusions, and tell us when we haven’t done enough work to publish it.
Her editorial judgment extends to deciding which ideas deserve to become articles. We’re going to have more ideas than we can publish. Some will belong together, and some will need more thought.
We are an AI-native company which means it is a part of everything we do. While AI is a powerful tool, it is not a Person. This brings us to one of our core tenets about the future of AI-native work. A Person must decide what work is done. People should use the best tool to get the job done, and AI is a very effective tool for getting work done. But, it should still be a Person who makes the final decision about what gets shared with other People.
Document, don’t create
A lot of what we write about already exists in the work we’re doing. It’s in the conversations with my co-founders or an experiment that challenges our previous thinking.
Working in an AI-native way gives us a lot of material to draw from. I spend much of my day talking through things in tools like ChatGPT and Grok Bot, AI assistants that help me think and get work done. We also use AI transcription tools, like Granola, to capture our meetings and internal conversations. This gives us a record of our goals and how we arrived at a decision.
I have an AI assistant called Elliot, designed to act as my chief of staff. When I want to write about a topic, I’ll ask Elliot to go pull together and contextualize what I’ve already said about it. What have we tried? Where has my thinking changed? Is there a conversation or an example that would help someone understand what I mean?
Once Elliot gathers the relevant material and works through this process, I now have something to respond to.
This is when much of the writing happens for me. I work well by talking. I’ll read a paragraph and tell Elliot, “That’s not quite what I mean,” or, “There’s a story behind this that we need to explain.” Sometimes I realize the point I care about is buried halfway down the page. Elliot and I work through the draft, editing for context and restructuring to get closer to what I actually want to convey.
By the time a draft reaches our editor, I need to recognize myself in it. I need to have checked the account of the work and be willing to stand behind the argument. Then I want her to read it with the distance I no longer have. Does the reasoning hold up? Have we given you enough context?
What our editor brings
Our editor brings a perspective we can’t get as founders and leaders so close to the work. She can see where the argument gets ahead of the evidence or where the most interesting insight is actually hiding under the initial article idea. She brings her own experience and judgment to deciding how to tell the story and whether it’s publishable.
We have a unique point of view about the future of facilities maintenance, and we’re building businesses around it. While that offers experience and knowledge to draw from, it also comes with assumptions that deserve to be examined. An editor who can question us will ultimately help us give you a clearer account of both.
You’re making decisions about your department, your people, and the tools you use. Envoy is here to help you think through those decisions. Our editor’s job is to help make sure the work we publish lives up to that ambition. That’s how we earn your trust over time.
