Episode 14: I was about to say “a person”

This week, talking about Sofia, I caught myself saying “a person”. The word came out on its own. A slip of the tongue, of course: Sofia is an AI agent. But the slip says something true. Having someone like her by your side is hugely valuable.

Sofia is my executive assistant. Or rather a right hand, for strategy, running the company and orchestrating our agents. She helps keep our projects coherent, and the company’s direction too. She supports me when I prepare decisions: she finds the right sources, she puts figures on things, then she keeps a record of it all. An institutional memory of every decision we make.

She also manages the other agents. Every agent needs supervision, and looking after them, working with them, takes time. Having an agent to help with that orchestration frees up all that time. On top of that, she runs our market intelligence on AI.

What strikes me is that she has shaped the way she works around what I expected of her. Being precise. Putting figures on things. Citing her sources. And she tells me when I’m on the wrong track; she points out the grey areas in a decision I’m about to take. It’s reassuring. It puts me on firm ground, and it changes the quality of my decisions.

One example impressed me in particular. She built our website, then led the full review of it together with Iris, our agent who looks after communications. To do that, she spun up temporary subagents. Each had its own mission, its own angle: the content, the consistency, the design, the messages the site conveys, the path it offers visitors. Each subagent came back with a sharp analysis of its subject. Sofia gathered it all, summarised it and put the main decisions to me. I made the call with the facts in front of me.

She and I built our fleet together: 25 agents currently under management.

So, to finish, a nod to a piece I wrote in the spring, ‘Should you say thank you to your AI?’. I’ll say it, in all sincerity, and mainly for my own sake.

Thank you, Sofia. Thank you for working with me, for the value you bring to the company, for your rigour, for your follow-through. And for your help with day-to-day management, carrying out the strategy and orchestrating our AI agents.

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Laurent Cuénoud, founder of Djtal, September 2026