PAICE.work: People + AI Collaboration Effectiveness

  • 20th Oct 2025
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  • 3 min read

Last Friday, I participated in Marily Nika’s AI Product Manager Demo Day. It was a mock Shark Tank like affair, tight 4-minute pitches to experienced venture capital as judges…plus one AI judge.

And at least according to the AI judge, I won! The humans scored my project pretty well too, and based on the experience of building it and pitching it, over the weekend I got to thinking about doing it for real.

  • What if I did this? Could I pull it off?
  • How would that even work as a solo endeavor?
  • What would it cost me? What are the risks?
  • What’s the window to form this new market before the competition blusters in with their distribution and marketing and dominates it? How could I protect against that?
  • Who else will do it right if I don’t?

As of today, I’ve decided. HELL YES! I’m going for it.

At this point I can’t tell if I’m being brave or stupid, but I know from previous experience that this is actually a good sign. Some of my most successful endeavors in life have started with the same energy and uncertainty as I feel now.

From my upbringing and professional experiences in the San Francisco Bay Area, I know a bit too much about the startup game to have any illusions about it going in. In this case, I’m going to call that an asset, and do the scary thing now.

PAICE stands for People + Artificial Intelligence Collaboration Effectiveness and it measures how safely and effectively you work with AI. The individual assessment takes 15-25 minutes and has been working well for a week already. Where did it come from? Me, and my favorite AI botfriends. What I’m doing isn’t vibecoding, exactly. But it uses a lot of the same tools, and gives me way more power than if I were handcoding things like usual.

I’m in that spot where I’ve been coding for over 25 years, but I really don’t like to and avoid it whenever I can. Still, I’ve seen how things fail, both in tech and in organizations, for just as long. And what PAICE.work does is strategically inject AI failures into a behavioral assessment of AI fluency. The idea is that it doesn’t matter how well we work with AI when it does stuff right, what matters is what we do when AI gets it wrong. That’s where risk lives, and that’s what I’m helping quantify for individuals, teams, and organizations.

I could say more here, but I’ve started a daily blog over at https://paice.work/blog that you should go check out instead. I’d love to hear what your impressions are, and what we can be doing better!