In the Arena #1: what small teams actually do with AI

Small teams stretching jobs with AI, the sixteen agent ceiling, and new EU disclosure rules.

A note from the team

Welcome to the first issue of In the Arena, our Monday letter on AI applied to real business: what we are seeing in the field, what is holding up under contact, and what is worth your time. We are not pundits. We build with this stuff every day, we get some of it wrong, and we would rather show our work than polish a take. If we ever use the word transformative, you may stop reading with our blessing.

If something here raises a question about your own operation, email contact@comavenai.com. A human reads that inbox.

- Justin

Worth your time

Small teams stretch furthest. OpenAI's research team analyzed more than 800,000 work messages and found people increasingly use AI to do work outside their own job description. The effect is strongest at companies with two to five people, where nearly one in five work tasks crosses into a different occupation. If you have ever been the marketer, the analyst, and the IT department in the same afternoon, this is your life in data. Read the research

Sixteen agents is the ceiling. Hidenori Tanaka and Elizabeth Pavlova at NTT Research, working with Harvard's Center for Brain Science, found that teams of AI agents got worse past roughly sixteen. Communication broke down, and human guidance improved results more than adding agents did. Remember that the next time someone pitches you an army of agents. Structure beats headcount. Read the findings

A field guide worth stealing. Ethan Mollick at Wharton published his practical guide to working with AI right now. The short version: pay the twenty dollars for a frontier model, hand it real multi-hour tasks, require approval on anything that sends, spends, or deletes, and manage it like a new hire. Read the guide

EU disclosure rules are live. As of August 2, the EU AI Act's transparency obligations apply. If your chatbot or AI-generated content reaches customers in the EU, you must disclose that it is AI, whether or not you have an office there. The high-risk rules were pushed to late 2027, but disclosure is in force now. The rules, explained

From the team

Queen City AI is now CoMavenAI. The rebrand is complete and queen-city.ai now points home to comavenai.com. Same team, same work, bigger name.

Our first client testimonial is live. Rich Neher, CEO of Conga Sports, put his name on what it is like to work with us. His words are on our homepage, and we are still grinning about it.

See you in the arena.

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