He’s Building AI for the Person You Want to Become

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. Dan Shipper goes in depth with Alex Komoroske, the cofounder and CEO of Common Tools, a public benefit corporation building a new way for us to interact with AI. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Here’s a link to the episode transcript.

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Most people use AI to get things done. But what if it could help you grow—nudging you toward who you want to become, not just what you want to do right now?

That’s the vision Alex Komoroske is building toward. As the cofounder and CEO of Common Tools, Komoroske is designing what he calls a “coactive fabric”—a new kind of digital space meant to foster human-AI collaboration. He doesn’t have more specific words to describe what this means yet because the paradigm he’s creating is still coming into focus, and he says it’s unlike anything that exists today.

Komoroske has spent years thinking deeply about how we interact with technology. He was the head of corporate strategy at Stripe and spent 13 years at Google, leaving as a director of product management. He’s also the author of Bits and Bobs, a public Google document where he records his raw thoughts and ideas every week.

In this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper sat down with Komoroske to explore what it means to build “intentional technology”—AI that aligns with our true, longer-term goals, instead of serving our monkey-brained desires, like most algorithmic social media feeds do today. They talk about how AI can break out of the siloed architectures the technology has inherited from the early internet, and the practical ways in which Komoroske’s vision can become a reality.

You can check out their full conversation here:

If you want a quick summary, here are some of the themes they touch on:

How to build AI that serves your values

Komoroske has no doubt that LLMs will be as powerful a technology as the printing press, electricity, and the internet. But that power cuts two ways. As he puts it, we can either go down the path of “engagement, maximizing hyper-aggregation, and going after what you want, not what you want to want”—or we can choose to build technology that’s deliberately designed to honor the goals we want to work toward.

For Komoroske, intentional technology rests on four pillars. It must be: