Someone on Twitter announced their new role yesterday: "Builder in Residence."
My knee-jerk reaction was to roll my eyes. Sounded like a Chief of Staff with better branding. Or maybe a founder-in-residence who couldn't find a company to start. The tech world loves its titles.
But.
I've been sitting with this for two days now, and there's something here I can't shake. Something about why this role is emerging now when everyone's supposedly building with AI already.
It’s funny because the barrier to building has essentially dissolved. A product manager can spin up their own tools before lunch. Sales can automate workflows without filing a ticket. Customer success can create dashboards without asking permission. In theory, everyone becomes a builder. The democratization we were promised and marketed.
So why is everyone frozen?
The Weight of What's Possible
I was Chief of Staff during a 20→500 scaling. Started in March 2019, back when AI meant machine learning models that data scientists built in isolation. By 2023, everything had changed. ChatGPT had arrived. Suddenly, AI was accessible to everyone.
The company needed someone to figure out what that meant. So I became that person. Led our internal AI team while still doing the Chief of Staff thing. I had this weird freedom to explore new corners of the organization, test things, fail quietly (and loudly…). Nobody else had bandwidth for that kind of wandering. They had jobs to do. Quotas to hit. Customers to serve.
My job became, in a way, to not have a job. To be uncommitted enough to commit to exploration.
We decided we needed more to be involved, so I created this AI ambassador program - I'll write about the full mechanics another time, but the core insight was simple. We needed designated explorers in each function. People who could spend four hours a week just figuring out what could be possible.
Testing. Breaking things. We'd meet weekly, share what we'd learned, what failed, what surprised us.
The conversations in those rooms were fascinating. And terrifying.
Week one: "I built a script that does my weekly reporting in 12 minutes instead of 3 hours." Week three: "I built 50% of an SDR." Week five: "I don't know what to build anymore."
That last one. That's where everyone gets stuck.
Tuesday's Tools, Thursday's Obsolescence
The pace is insane. And I mean that literally - it makes people feel crazy.
GPT-5 just arrived and with every drop, everyone's asking if they need to rebuild everything. Next week, something new will come out and create a fun, shiny distraction.
This begs pretty hard questions to answer quickly: What happens when we do? What else becomes possible? What breaks? Who gets uncomfortable? What assumptions about our business are we actually encoding into an automation? What are we choosing not to build while we build this?
But who has time for those questions???
You're running a business. Your team has deliverables. Your board wants updates. Your customers need support. You can't afford to explore every possibility. You can't afford the luxury of uncertainty.
During those AI ambassador sessions, I watched brilliant people struggle with this exact pressure. They could see lots of possibilities. They could build almost anything. And that paralyzed them.
We used to know what tools to use. Now we don’t even know what problems to solve.
The Explorer's Mandate
This is where the Builder in Residence thing starts to make sense. The role is a containment strategy for infinite possibility.
Think about it. Every other leverage point in business has had this:
Capital lets you invest in new projects and scale ideas
Talent lets you bring incredible people together to solve problems
Code lets you build something once and scale it infinitely
And now AI is this fourth leverage point and lets you build a new way to create value.
AI needs its explorers. People who can hold the uncertainty while everyone else holds the business together.
When I ran that AI ambassador program, I was essentially a Builder in Residence without the title. My value wasn't in the tools I built (though I built plenty). My value was in the exploration itself:
The failed experiments that saved other teams from wasting time.
The unexpected connections between disparate tools.
The ability to say "we tried that, here's why it doesn't work" or "this looks complex but it's actually straightforward if you approach it this way."
The ambassadors would come to our weekly sessions with questions:
"Can AI help with our pricing models?"
"What about customer churn prediction?"
"Could we automate account research within Salesforce?"
My job was to have already explored enough of the possibility space to guide the conversation toward what mattered. To help them understand the difference between what's possible and what's valuable.
The Anxiety Economy
There's an emotion I keep encountering in every company I work with now and in conversations I have with solopreneurs. It's specific. Unique to this moment.
It's the anxiety of knowing you should be doing something with AI but not knowing what. The fear that by the time you figure it out, you'll be too far behind. The overwhelming sense that everyone else has it figured out while you're still trying to understand what "it" even is.
This anxiety is profitable for a lot of people. Tool vendors promise to solve it with their platform. Course creators promise to solve it with their playbooks.
The anxiety is about infinite possibilities more than anything.
When you can build anything, how do you choose what to build? When everything is changing, how do you commit to a direction? When tools make everyone a builder, who decides what's worth building?
The Designated Wanderer
Last month, a client called me his "Chief of Agents."
He'd hired me to build a go-to-market function from scratch. It’s a fun challenge: early-stage company, great product, no systematic way to sell it at higher ticket value.
But instead of immediately hiring salespeople or buying tools, we explored a different question: How could AI help us stand up a GTM function before bringing in human talent?
The exploration started narrow. Testing AI for lead qualification. Building agents for initial outreach. Experimenting with different conversation flows.
Each week, I'd build something, break it, rebuild it better. No formal process. No workshops. Just me wandering through the possibility space and reporting back what I found.
Then something interesting happened.
My exploration in go-to-market was opening up possibilities they hadn't considered elsewhere. Not because I was smarter or more creative, but because I had the luxury of exploration. While they were shipping features and fixing bugs, I was discovering what AI could actually do in practice for the product itself and even onboarding journeys as well.
I became the organization's AI scout in a way. Testing the terrain before they committed resources. Building prototypes that might go nowhere. Learning what worked by discovering what didn't.
The key was that I wasn't creating burden for anyone else. No mandatory meetings. No required reading. Just: "Here's what I learned this week. Here's what it might mean for you. Take what's useful, ignore the rest."
The Builder in Residence is hired to be what everyone else could be but can't afford to become. They explore so others can execute. They fail in ways the core team can't.
What This Actually Looks Like
Here's what I've learned about making this work:
The exploration has to be grounded in real problems. Not "what can AI do?" but "what does this specific team need?" During those ambassador sessions, we'd start with actual workflows, actual frustrations, actual wishes. Then we'd explore from there.
The builder needs enough context to be dangerous but enough distance to be objective. As Chief of Staff, I had both. I understood how the organization actually worked, but I wasn't embedded in any single team's daily operations. I could see patterns others couldn't because I wasn't drowning in the details.
The insights have to be translated, not just transmitted. When I discovered something useful, my job wasn't to say "here's a cool tool." My job was to say "here's how this changes what's possible for your specific situation, and here's what we'd need to believe for this to be worth pursuing."
Most importantly: the exploration has to be continuous. This isn't a sprint or a project. The landscape changes too fast. The Builder in Residence is a permanent function, like having a scout who's always three miles ahead of wagon train.
The Coming Wave
We're going to see a lot more Builders in Residence. Or whatever we end up calling them.
Every company that's serious about AI but realistic about their constraints will need someone in this role. Someone whose job is to carry the burden of infinite possibility so everyone else can focus on specific, chosen realities.
They won't be prompt engineers who optimize your ChatGPT usage. They'll be explorers who venture into the space between what your company does today and what it could do tomorrow, then come back with actual intelligence about which paths are worth taking.
I've ended up in this role for my clients almost by accident. They hire me thinking they need AI strategy or implementation help. What they actually need is someone to carry the weight of not knowing. To sit with the uncertainty. To explore the maze while they run the race.
There's something almost religious about it. The designated wanderer. The one who goes into the wilderness and comes back with maps of territories that didn't exist last month.
Maybe that sounds too mystical. But I don't know how else to describe what's happening. When you can build anything, someone needs to figure out what's worth building. And that someone can't be everyone.
The burden of infinite possibility is real. The question isn't whether you need someone to carry it. The question is who, and how soon.