Cognitive Productivity: The Next Leap

Our expectations of productivity tools are still stuck in the pre-AI era. Most of what we call “productivity software” is really record-keeping.

• Project management systems store tasks so we can retrieve them later
• Messaging apps store and retrieve conversations
• Cloud drives store and retrieve files

These tools are very useful and incredibly popular - an $80B a year industry. They help us stay organized, but they do not engage with how we understand problems, form strategies, or achieve our goals.

AI opens the door to something more ambitious. Cognitive productivity is the next leap — a shift from tools that remember to tools that understand. These new systems won’t just automate steps in our workflow; they’ll collaborate in our thinking. They’ll understand our goals, hold relevant expertise, and operate autonomously enough to scale our ambitions, not just our efficiency. They’ll help us form opinions, spot blind spots, and make sense of the ever increasing flood of information that threatens to drown us.

I see cognitive productivity as a fundamental shift in how knowledge work happens. The AI frontier models we have today already hold immense latent power, but chatbots only scratch the surface. They can talk, but they don’t yet understand us — as individuals, teams, or organizations. There’s still a wide gap between the idealized world AI understands and the messy, real world where we make decisions and take action.

At Hubs, our mission is to close that gap. When people and intelligent systems share context and purpose, the space of possibilities radically expands. We become more efficient, more effective and more ambitious all at the same time. We'll have to be if we want to thrive in the accelerating AI-first era that is starting to emerge.

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Scott Wiener, Founder & CEO
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