Build more or build better | The maturity curve of team AI adoption
# Episode 3 YouTube Description — "Build More or Build Better? The Maturity Curve of Team AI Adoption"
Everyone on your team just built an agent. Now what?
AI has given individual professionals the power to build tools, dashboards, and agents that used to require a whole IT team. But as that power spreads across a team, a question starts to surface: are we building more just because we can, or are we building better? In this episode, Gretchen and Bre'Ana dig into the maturity curve of team AI adoption—from agent sprawl and AI brain fry to what it actually takes to move from building things with AI to creating real value with AI, for yourself, your team, and your org.
Rather than focusing on prompts, productivity hacks, or the latest AI product news, Coworkers with AI is about making sense of how AI is changing our work—and how we find our way through it, together.
## In This Episode
- The skills of the "frontier professional": delegation, judgment, and taste
- Why judgment and taste aren't the same thing—and why both matter
- Moving from task-level execution to orchestration to systems thinking
- Agent sprawl: what happens when everyone builds their own tools
- Why "build more" isn't the same as "build better"
- Thinking like a product manager as a business professional
- How team culture, rewards, and recognition need to evolve alongside AI skills
## Points on the Map
📍 The shift from executor to director is spreading beyond personal productivity into team-wide tool and agent building.
📍 Judgment comes from experience; taste is knowing what good looks like even if you've never built it yourself.
📍 Agent sprawl is a natural stage of AI maturity, not a discipline failure—Salesforce's 2026 Connectivity Benchmark found the average org uses 12+ AI agents, with half operating in silos.
📍 The next skill isn't just building tools—it's product management: understanding your "user" (your colleagues), designing for their actual needs, and pitching the value of what you built.
📍 What gets rewarded and recognized on a team shapes what people build next. Praising experimentation alone isn't enough—teams need to also reward integration, quality, and maintenance.
## Continue the Conversation
How is each person on your team becoming a value creator—and how is that changing your role and your team?
Share your thoughts in the comments. We'd love to hear your perspective.
## Resources Mentioned
- Microsoft 2026 Work Trend Index — the "Frontier Professionals" concept
- Salesforce 2026 Connectivity Benchmark — agent proliferation and silos: https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/connectivity-report-announcement-2026/
- IBM — AI agent sprawl: https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/ai-agent-sprawl
- BCG study on "AI brain fry" and workplace productivity, via Fortune: https://fortune.com/2026/03/10/ai-brain-fry-workplace-productivity-bcg-study/
- Charles Lamanna (Microsoft) — "Changing How We Build," on building more vs. building better: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/changing-how-we-build-charles-lamanna-xpitc/
- Elizabeth Stone (Chief Product & Technology Officer, Netflix) on systems thinking and specialist talent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0GiTyz4syY&t=265s
🌐 Learn more and explore additional resources:
https://www.coworkerswithai.com
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### About Coworkers with AI
Coworkers with AI is a conversational video podcast exploring how artificial intelligence is changing the lived experience of work. Through thoughtful conversations with practitioners, leaders, and researchers, we explore the opportunities, tensions, and emerging workplace norms shaping the future of human and AI collaboration.
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Music by Abby Hubbard
Available at: https://bit.ly/3SyZ0qD
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The views expressed in this podcast are our own and do not necessarily represent the views of our employers.