Oliver Smith

Oliver Smith

Product Manager
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About

I spend most of my time thinking about how everyday work can be made simpler and more efficient. I focus on understanding user problems deeply and shaping products that remove unnecessary steps from their workflow. My approach is grounded in continuous improvement rather than perfection at the start.

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Extella AIp/extella-ai•

7d ago

The 3 stages of AI usage, where do you actually sit?

I've been building in the AI space for a while now, and I keep seeing the same pattern: most people are using AI the same way they used the early internet. They read, they search, they ask questions. But they're not really building or automating yet.

And that's not a criticism. The internet took years to go from "browse pages" to "infrastructure that runs everything." AI is moving 10xfaster, but the adoption pattern is the same.

Here's what I'm seeing across the community:

  1. Stage one is where most people are right now. They open ChatGPT or Claude, ask a question, copy the answer, close the tab. It's useful, but it's manual.

  2. Stage two is where things get interesting. People are running agents that actually do things. They write code, research topics, process files. But they're still switching between tools, copy-pasting context, managing each agent separately.

  3. Stage three is what I think is actually next, and almost nobody's talking about it yet. One place where your tools, agents, and workflows connect and run together. No stitching between tabs. No manual context switching. The orchestration layer.

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