The Future of Work
Meetings are Out, Claugging is In
WORD OF THE DAY: CLAUGGING
Claugging (verb) is when a group of people get in a room (or on a call), fire up an AI assistant loaded with everything about their business, and get work done. In real time. Out loud.
It is not the same as vibe coding. Vibe coding is a technique. One person tells AI what to build in plain English, and the AI writes the code. That is how you build.
Claugging is a work style. It is multiplayer. It is a room full of people throwing ideas around while AI listens, builds, adjusts, and ships right there in the session. Nobody goes back to their desk afterward to “do the work.” The work happens while you are talking.
Think of it like this: vibe coding is playing a video game solo. Claugging is playing online with your whole squad and accomplishing the mission…together.
Why business owners should care: Most teams still work like this: meet, take notes, go away, do work alone, come back, review, repeat. Context gets lost. Things get misunderstood. It takes forever.
Claugging skips all of that. Everyone is in the room. The AI has the context. You talk, it builds. By the time the session is over, the work is done. Not planned. Done.
THE STORY
I watched something recently that stuck with me.
A group of guys were in a room together. Not in a meeting. Not on a Zoom. They were building. One of them had set up an AI assistant loaded with full context about their businesses, their strategy, their current projects, everything (this is called an AIOS, more on this soon).
And instead of talking about what they were going to build, they were just... building it. In real time. Together.
One guy would explain a feature he needed. The AI would start building it. Another guy would jump in with a suggestion. The AI would adjust. Someone else would ask, “Can it also do this?” And within minutes, it could.
One of them said something that hit me: “This is like having a genius AI assistant, developer, consultant, and designer who knows everything about the business, can search the web, take actions, create diagrams... a super-smart business partner.”
Another one called it “multiplayer work.”
That phrase keeps bouncing around in my head. Multiplayer work.
Because here is the thing. Most of us are still playing single-player. We sit in meetings. We go back to our desks. We work alone. We send Slack messages. We wait for replies. We schedule another meeting. It is an endless loop of talking about doing the thing instead of doing the thing.
These guys skipped all of that. They loaded context into the AI, sat in the same room, and just claugged. When someone had an idea for a new feature, the AI did not write a proposal. It started building it. When they needed to track progress, the AI did not suggest a spreadsheet. It made a dashboard.
By the end of the session, they had accomplished more than most teams do in a week.
WHY THIS MATTERS FOR YOUR BUSINESS
Here is the stat that should stop you cold.
71% of senior managers say their meetings are unproductive. Employees spend an average of 11.3 hours per week in meetings. That is roughly 28% of a 40-hour work week just sitting in rooms (or on Zoom) talking about work instead of doing it.
The U.S. loses an estimated $37 billion every year to unproductive meetings. One large company can bleed up to $300 million annually from meeting waste alone.
And 68% of employees say they do not have enough uninterrupted focus time because of constant meetings.
Read that again. More than two-thirds of your team cannot focus because they are always in meetings about the work.
Now compare that to what claugging looks like:
Old way: Meeting (1 hour) > Solo work (3 hours) > Review meeting (30 min) > Revisions (2 hours) > Final review meeting (30 min). Total: 7 hours across 3 days.
New way: Co-piloted session (2 hours). AI builds while you direct. You review as it creates. Adjustments happen instantly. Total: 2 hours. Same day.
That is not a small improvement. That is a completely different way of operating.
THE NEW WORKFLOW: 7 STEPS FROM IDEA TO SHIPPED
Here is the future of work in one sentence:
Heavily co-piloted, multiplayer, real-time building sessions rather than meetings followed by solo work.
And here is exactly how it flows. Seven steps. Three are human. Four are AI. Zero are “let us circle back on this next week.”
1. TALK (Human)
This is where it starts. You talk. Out loud. To your team, to yourself, to the AI. You describe what you need, what the problem is, what the goal looks like. No typing a brief. No writing a project plan. No filling out a form. Just talk.
“We need a dashboard that shows all our client projects, their status, and who is behind on deliverables.”
That is all it takes.
2. RECORD (Mic)
While you talk, a microphone is capturing everything. Tools like WhisperFlow are running in the background, dropping the live translation into the AI. Every idea, every clarification, every “oh wait, it should also do this” gets captured. Nothing falls through the cracks.
This is the bridge between your brain and the machine. You do not have to remember what you said. You do not have to take notes. You just talk, and the recording holds it all.
3. TRANSLATE (AI)
The AI takes that raw audio and turns it into structured instructions. It pulls out the key requirements. It identifies what you actually asked for versus the tangents. It organizes your stream-of-consciousness into something buildable.
This is the step most people skip when they work the old way. They go from a messy meeting straight into building, and then wonder why the result does not match what was discussed. The AI does the translation work that humans are bad at.
4. BUILD (AI)
Now the AI executes. And “build” does not just mean code. It means any work.
Draft and send emails to your top 20 clients about the new pricing strategy. Create a follow-up sequence that goes out three times over the next two weeks. Book meetings on your calendar with every prospect who replies. Pull last quarter’s numbers and turn them into a presentation for the team. Write the blog post. Update the CRM. Build the landing page.
The AI does not just plan these things. It does them. While you are still in the room. What used to take a week of back-and-forth between you, your assistant, and your marketing person now happens in minutes.
5. TEST (AI)
The AI checks its own work. It reviews the emails for tone. It double-checks that the calendar invites went to the right people. It makes sure the presentation pulls the correct numbers. It scans the follow-up sequence for gaps. Before you ever see the output, the AI has already done a first round of quality control.
This is like having an assistant who triple-checks everything before it hits your desk.
6. FINAL TEST (Human)
This is where you come back in. You read through the client emails. Does this sound like me? You check the presentation. Are these the right numbers for this audience? You review the follow-up sequence. Is the timing right? Is the tone right?
The human eye catches what the machine misses. Tone. Brand voice. Relationship nuance. “That email is technically fine but way too formal for this client.” This step is where your judgment matters most.
7. SHIP (Human)
You push the button. You send the emails. You confirm the calendar invites. You publish the blog post. You share the presentation with the team. You deliver the proposal to the client.
The human decides when it is ready and the human sends it into the world. AI did the work. You approved it. You shipped it.
That is the whole workflow. Talk, Record, Translate, Build, Test, Final Test, Ship. Three human steps. Four AI steps. The humans do the creative direction at the start and the quality control at the end. The AI does the heavy lifting in the middle.
THE HONEST TRUTH
Is this system perfect yet? No, but it’s better than the current system of death by meetings.
The AI will build things that are 80% right. You will still need to review, adjust, and sometimes redo sections. The “Final Test” step exists for a reason.
And the tools are still early. Setting up a workspace with full business context takes effort. Getting voice transcription to feed cleanly into an AI session requires some tinkering. Not every AI tool talks to every other AI tool yet.
But the direction is clear. The gap between “I had an idea” and “it is live” is shrinking every single week. And the businesses that figure out how to work this way first are going to move so fast that their competitors will not understand what happened.
The old way is: think, plan, meet, assign, wait, review, revise, meet again, ship.
The new way is: talk, record, translate, build, test, final test, ship.
Same outcome. A fraction of the time. And you never lost context along the way.
TASK OF THE DAY
Grab one other person. A business partner, a teammate, even a friend who is curious about AI. Get in the same room or hop on a call together.
Open Claude (or whatever AI tool you use). Before you start, give it context: paste in a project brief, a client problem, a business goal you have been stuck on. Something real.
Click on “Voice Mode” and then just talk. Out loud. Both of you. Throw ideas at it. “What if we tried this?” “Can you build that?” “Now change this part.” Let the AI build while you both direct it.
Do not assign homework. Do not schedule a follow-up meeting. The goal is to walk away from that session with something done. A draft. A plan. A working prototype. Something real.
That is claugging. And once you try it, meetings will never feel the same.
SmartOwner is published (almost) daily by the team at DigitalTreehouse. Want AI consulting or automations for your business? Reply to this email.