My AI Night Shift

Most mornings now, I’ve got a new routine. Before coffee, before social media, I check my phone to see what got done while I slept. Last Tuesday: a 2,000-word briefing on the risks of helium shortages to Asian semiconductor companies for my consulting clients. The report covered a dozen companies in some detail, touched on second-order effects, and, most importantly, surprised me. There was the nightly security audit of my software platforms—a small bug had been found and fixed. Another message confirmed that my daughter had received her French reading practice. Also completed before dawn: a huge customer segmentation analysis, which simulated 40 people reviewing a proposed new product. Astute readers noticed the passive voice in the previous paragraph. That was intentional. I didn’t complete any of that work. My small staff of AI agents did. R Mini Arnold (RMA) is an AI agent I set up in February. Why RMA? R is a nod to Isaac Asimov, whose robot names often begin with R, and they serve humans without an agenda. Arnold is the T-800 from Terminator 2: not the killer, but the reprogrammed protector, which is tireless, literal, and utterly loyal. Mini is a tribute to the popular tiny Mac, an elegant desktop box. RMA coordinates several other agents working in parallel: One is an editor, another a researcher/analyst, a third takes an investor’s lens, and a fourth focuses on data. Some evenings up to 10 general coding agents might join them. Together, they handle anything I queue up before I go to bed. RMA determines how best to deploy this squad to accomplish the evening’s work—the security sweeps, the software updates, the tedious technical housekeeping. The customer segmentation report was pretty good, but not perfect. I took 10 minutes to tweak it before I shared it with my managing director. If RMA hadn’t done that work, I’m not sure when we would have tackled it. Hiring an agency would have cost many thousands of dollars and taken too long. Every night, these types