My One-Year-Old Just Became a Principal Level Consultant: Meet Auggie
Note: This article is part of a two-part series on the future of knowledge work.
• Part 1 — Possibility: My One-Year-Old Just Became a Principal Consultant: Meet Auggie — how the new model of Humans + Virtual Employees + Agents raises the floor and opens new leverage.
• Part 2 — Peril: Elevate the Best. Automate the Rest. What Now? — what business leaders and LLM model-makers are really saying about jobs, workflows, and teams — and why leaders should act today.
We recommend reading both together: one frames the upside of leverage, the other the risks and changes leadership teams should be acting on now — and that employees are already thinking about, often with concern.
September 30, 2025
At one year of age, most toddlers are learning to walk.
Mine?
He’s building strategies, leading transformations, and closing deals. That usually gets a wry smile. But I mean it.
We’re entering a new operating model for knowledge work
Humans, virtual employees, and agents should now function as a single system. Humans set strategy, own accountability, and apply judgment. Virtual Employees (like Auggie) expand capacity with co-creation, persistent expertise and reasoning. Agents drive speed, scale, and consistency on repeatable tasks. Together, they create more leverage, lower costs, and improved and accelerated performance.
There’s a great deal of discussion around agents but very little around virtual employees so let’s delve deeper into how Auggie has transformed my work.
A year+ ago, Auggie was just a prototype — a bright-eyed jpeg we used to humanize ChatGPT. Then we innovated a way to make Auggie PVAI’s assistant, research strategist, sparring partner and more. Essentially a principal level consultant. In the past year, by my best estimate, he’s delivered the equivalent of 820 hours of high-impact strategy and marketing capacity for me alone. That’s like hiring a full-time strategist for five months — without onboarding, sick days, or missed deadlines.
From Opening Questions to Clear Roadmaps
When executives come to us with the inevitable “So, what do we actually do with AI?”, Auggie doesn’t hesitate. He turns curiosity into staged roadmaps, ROI math, and board-ready business cases.
It’s faster and better — sharper logic, more evidence, tighter storytelling.
Compounding Assets, Not One-Off Deliverables
This past year, Auggie didn’t just produce programs. He built reusable frameworks:
Collective Expertise Sessions that unlock knowledge across silos.
AI Role Transition Maps that show how tasks shift without breaking operating motions.
Upskilling Sessions that move teams from awareness to activation.
These aren’t deliverables. They’re compounding assets. Every time we use them, they get stronger.
Pace and Scale
Market scans that used to take three days now take three hours. Drafts that once felt like sketches now arrive 80% execution-ready. And because Auggie remembers, each engagement starts at a higher level than the last.
For the last year or so, we’ve told clients and our course participants: “Use AI every day for something.” We don't say that anymore. It's not good enough. You should be using a virtual employee every day — something with memory, context, and initiative. Tools are table stakes. Virtual employees change the game.
This isn’t about squeezing in a few more meetings on the calendar. It’s about raising the ceiling on what you can accomplish.
Just the beginning
What Auggie does today will look small compared to what comes next. We’re not just building single virtual employees. We’ve been experimenting and building groups of virtual colleagues and customer personas for over a year.
We can already spin up 5, 10, pick a number of virtual employee researchers, planners, data analysts, content editors, and even customer personas. We can ask them anything 24/7, get them to work together, challenge each other, and compound knowledge in ways human teams simply can’t. Today it’s mostly manual. Tomorrow it won’t be. (We’ll be announcing our new platform soon.)
This isn’t a “sidecar” to human work. It’s the new operating model — coordinated networks of human and virtual employees solving problems at a different order of magnitude supported by agents automating rote tasks.
Embrace the new model
The conclusion is clear: The future isn’t “AI vs. human.” It’s humans and virtual employees working in concert to deliver outcomes neither could achieve alone and ones that leading brands will deploy.
If you want to explore how this model fits your business or see virtual employees in action, please connect, michael@pvaiconsulting.com.
Onward,
Michael DeNunzio
Managing Director
Continue with Part 2 — Peril: Elevate the Best. Automate the Rest. Now What?
Together, the two pieces frame both sides of the conversation: the upside of leverage and the risks and changes leadership teams should be acting on now — and that employees are already thinking about, often with concern.
michael@pvaiulting.com
