It has been more than six years since GPT-3 was released. AI has changed how people in technology write software, search and create.
Look beyond that bubble and much of the real economy still works as it did before. Manufacturers prepare quotes across email, spreadsheets and ERP screens. Companies still move work between people and systems by hand.
A technology this powerful should make the things around us better, cheaper and faster. For most of the economy, that has not happened yet.
Today, we are releasing Bourne into the world to help make it happen.
Bourne is building a marketplace for AI labor. Builders use Bourne Studio to create agents, apps and automations. Through Bourne Solutions, we deploy AI with companies and learn what the platform needs. The marketplace will let companies find, hire and manage what builders create.
Why AI has not spread
Nearly every company we meet wants AI, but the conversation becomes harder when we ask what it should do on Monday morning.
A useful deployment requires someone to understand the company’s systems, exceptions and decisions. A chemical distributor and an automotive OEM do different work. The economy contains thousands of these markets.
We cannot create a venture-backed company for every job in every market. Domain experts want to build around what they know, but cannot each assemble a frontier AI team.
The people who understand the problems need a place to build. Companies need a way to find what they create.
How Bourne works
An AI worker might work for days while an app lets people inspect its work and make decisions. Automations move approved results into company systems. Bourne lets builders combine these pieces, connect data and improve the product in production.
Builders can host what they create and charge customers for it. Companies can build through Bourne Studio or work with Bourne Solutions and our partners on a complete deployment.
AI deployment should get cheaper
We want useful AI to spread, so deployments must get cheaper.
Our work with companies shows us what the platform is missing. When we solve a difficult problem, we find the reusable technology underneath it and put that capability into Bourne Studio. Each builder starts further ahead, and each deployment costs less.
Domain experts can turn what they know into products, and service companies can deploy those products across their customers. Bourne will earn revenue from the platform and the marketplace it enables. We want the value created throughout the economy to be far larger than the part we capture.
The master plan
We are the team behind HockeyStack. There, we released five external AI products (Odin, Nova, AI prospect research, AI company scoring and Revenue Agents) and many internal AI products. The growth and efficiency they created made HockeyStack profitable. That work also taught us what agents need to perform real work across company systems and over long periods.
Today, supply is the constraint: companies need a wider range of useful AI products to choose from. So our plan is:
- Partner with companies through Bourne Solutions to solve difficult, valuable problems.
- Discover the common technology behind those deployments.
- Put that technology into Bourne Studio at the lowest cost we can.
- Inspire and enable the next generation of builders to create AI products.
- Once there is enough supply, build the marketplace where companies can find and buy AI labor.
We work with partners across the real economy. One of our first domain solutions covers the industrial OEM customer lifecycle, from inquiries and bids through engineering handover and aftermarket service.
The economy after human labor
We believe more of the world’s work will move from human labor to AI labor. Goods and services will become cheaper, faster and better, while products that could never support the required human effort will become possible.
Humans will decide what should exist, understand the problems and bring better products into the world. The people who do that should own part of what they create and share in the prosperity it produces.
We are building Bourne for those people.