BYOD was a scary word for a while in tech circles. Bring Your Own Device… The threat of outside nonsense brought into a network weighed against the capabilities that some employees could bring to the table if they were able to bring devices that they knew how to use well and could increase their productivity.
Are we about to begin a new era for BY-AI… Bring Your Artificial Intelligence?
Arguably when you go to (information) work in the pre-AI era, there was a relationship between the worker and the employer. There were usually some social norms around what work product was owned by the company, and what wasn’t. Usually the easiest rule-of-thumb was that if the person was “on the clock” when the work happened, the product of that work was owned by the company. Other rules and policies seemed to continue the idea forward, such as working on business-issued devices. If you write your next great novel on a work computer during work hours, there’s a reasonable chance you just wrote a novel for your employer and they can claim ownership over it (even if that topic has nothing to do with your job… which… I mean that’s what they pay for, right?).
But in this next era, what happens when we bring more than just ourselves to the office. What are the rules and standards to come that will revolve around bringing our own set of AI tools to the office? We know for a given (at least in most cases) that if you’re working within the confines of your work-issued AI credentials that the entire conversation from top-to-bottom is essentially owned by your employer. They likely have the ability and perhaps even the responsibility to be able to audit it, review the chat logs, all that good stuff. That seems clearly just like anything else in your compute and information environment. If you start creating cool Excel macros and share it with your coworkers, your boss may say something like, “That’s really cool and helpful, Dave, can you email that to me?”
I mean, I suppose you could say “No,” but that feels like a shortcut to the HR offices for a quick readjustment.
But in a future equipped with these AI, will there be either an expectation or even a way of managing personal trainings differentiated from organizational ones? For instance, on my personal Claude account I’ve created (through my own time and energy and tokens) a framework and tooling for standing up a “fake hotel.” This helps me think through ideas that I have related to the hospitality industry but not at any direction or as part of a work product for my day job. But the question becomes, for a future opportunity, would there be an expectation that this comes along with me?
When we go to a training at work, yes, we are being trained for our current jobs. But we’re also retaining and absorbing the lessons so that we gain experience and capabilities that will be valuable to future employers as well. What about when we train and improve our Memory.md and Claude.md files on our projects at work? Are those transferrable out? Are those considered standalone work product, like an Excel file full of important corporate data, or are they considered part of the experiences that we as employees are gaining and has some semblance of portability.
I think it will be interesting as we get into the next phase of these AI agents working on our behalf both in a professional and personal setting. Will having your own “quick start” AI agent kit help power our future opportunities, or will those new agents & capabilities be blocked at the door for fear of introducing vulnerabilities or malicious side-effects? Will we be expected to check our personal agents at the door, and would that diminish our ability to deliver the total experience we had been hired to deliver? Should contractors start putting in AI agent tooling and learning as part of their provisions in contracts, so they can bring agents in and take learnings out? A lot of what is getting developed today is a blend of lessons learned and applicable skills that the next employer will expect the person to have – and to be able to start faster with these tools in place.
Not sure where this ends up, but my hunch is over the next couple of years we’ll start seeing the rise of BY-AI policies more frequently, as well as odd carve-outs for those people who are building their own high-value special sauce. What do you think – is this is BYOD crisis all over again, or will bringing our own tools become standard and expected?