Before the 1800s, there was no universally agreed upon time. But as trains got faster, it became more important for each station to agree on what time it was; noon couldn't mean two different things in London and Bristol, otherwise you'd always be late or early for your ride. The railway system therefore synced the clocks, and the result was the "standard time" and time zones that still exist today.
Now we need to change the clocks again. AI has introduced faster thinking, but we haven't yet coordinated our workflows to keep pace. Agents operate in seconds. Teams meet weekly. Finance plans quarterly. Leadership revisits strategy annually. Each part of the organization inhabits a different present, each made using a different version of reality.
We need a new standard time, a new coordination mechanism for the age of AI: Call it standard status. This will be a continuously updated record of goals, decisions, permissions, and constraints, shared by humans and agents alike. This sounds like an engineering problem: Ingest the context, generate a status, and continually update it so that workers can stay in sync.
But staying in sync is not the same thing as staying aligned. The next challenge is to grapple with the ambiguity inherent in the way we work. Team meetings, financial plans, and annual planning were always part ritual, designed as formats to keep individuals and teams aligned, heard, and motivated. Can we let go of this theater in favor of standard status, or will we need to continue the human process of "just checking in!"?
When it comes to alignment, the company with the best clock may soon beat the company with the best model. But only if it remembers that knowing the time is not the same as knowing what the moment requires.
