Foundational Beginnings
When I first started my career, it was building the websites for my father’s software company, Palo Alto Software. PaloAlto.com was for the software side of the company, and Bplans.com was where you could get free business plans to help start a business, such as opening up a coffee or florist shop.
That was my first experience with going viral because it was like, “Oh my God, the internet can be useful.” And at the time, there were these roundups that CNBC, Yahoo, and CNET would do. For example, USA Today would have a little section titled, “The internet is useful. Here are five sites that are free to check out.” Palo Alto and Bplans would make all of those roundups, and that led me to my first formal job.
In the beginning, I was just building static websites that were the equivalent of a brochure. Then, back in my day, CGI and Perl emerged, and suddenly you could give your website a brain. I was talking to everyone about it. “It’s amazing. It can think things. It can do things.”
The first job I had was at KnowWhere Consulting, which I thought was kind of a clever, bad name: Knowledge and software, and we know where. I liked the metaphor because I do believe that when writing software, there’s a bit of discovery that happens. It’s like an adventure, or traveling. You’re a sherpa who knows how to chart the course.
I was young at the time, and one of the things that we did at KnowWhere was build intranet sites. That was both exciting and boring at the same time, since there was no chance for anything to go viral. There was just a chance that the site could be really useful, but it would only be useful for a small group of people.
But that small group of people were usually expensive employees, and making them efficient and helping them do their job right was really worth it. I was this kid finding myself in offices with senior executives who were the same age that I am today. They had worked their whole life to get into that corner office, to be smart and charming and personable, and I loved working with and learning from them.
Today’s Tech Without Yesterday’s Learnings
Lately, I’ve been thinking about those days a lot because of the evolution of AI and how websites now have the power of a brain more than ever before. And I think one thing that’s a particularly missed opportunity at this point in time is returning to the internet with a brain.
In seeing how companies are currently dealing with this, there’s a rush to get the brain in front of the customer, and that execution isn’t quite complete. Most websites today still have a silly UX from the good ol’ days, when we would point and click through menus to find content through navigation.
This accelerated modernization of the web means you need to have a really good brain in front of your prospects and customers. That brain needs to talk instantly while simultaneously knowing everything that your internal teams know.
Metaphorically, it’s probably not long until we see United Airlines switch out of their entire UX to look more like ChatGPT. That’s a user experience that’s transformative.
We’re helping companies make that transformation, and you can see it on our own front page at RebelMouse. But what I see as missing, in a dangerous way, is the intranet.
Companies are currently giving the AI brain access to their data, and they have data that’s sensitive. Intranet data is meant to be private to a team. You have contracts with companies to be able to see that data, and it’s very important to customers that you follow those contracts — for clients, for partners, for everyone.
Right now, there’s a big risk that people are taking by exposing their private data to a brain that isn’t just their brain, i.e., giving it to Claude or Codex or ChatGPT. As you tell those AI systems all of these private things, you’re doing it in a way that has no clear contract that contains and protects your data.
And as you continue to talk to this external brain, it’s constantly learning more about you. But there are ways to work with Anthropic and OpenAI that technically and contractually keep that data where it belongs, and we’re doing that now at RebelMouse.
It’s tremendous what can be done today if you give your employees conversational access to your core data so that they can simply ask for things. “Build me a report for the leadership meeting based on the client churn and growth spreadsheet.” Make your team more efficient, but don’t expose private data to this larger AI brain where leakage is inevitable.
And just like I liked that company name I mentioned earlier, KnowWhere, if you want advice on how to navigate these new waters, we offer strategic sessions to understand what you’re currently doing and help you with where you want to go.
It's an astonishingly fun time in the phase of technology that we’re in, where a brainstorm has never been so helpful. In the past, we used to have brainstorms that led to 10 ideas you could never do. Now, you can realize those ideas in no time at all.
So figuring out what’s that idea for your intranet, or for your extranet — which we also built at KnowWhere — really makes sense. What do your clients get? Not just the general public or your team. It’s different. Your clients can have access to things they can even change or update themselves. It’s a tremendous time of opportunity, where websites have never had a better brain. I’m really excited.
And while a lot of SEO value is unfortunately translating into AI summaries and affecting website traffic across the board, there’s still this larger opportunity for the web to get smarter and more useful, and to help with these transactions, these changes, the building of ideas, and the building of relationships.
The RebelMouse Take
The first link below further explains how the private intranet has evolved, and the second link talks about the agentic operating system that we’ve pioneered at RebelMouse. The agentic operating system is our vision for taking data and building specific agents that do specific things that your employees have been doing manually, or that you wish they could be doing. It gives your people the chance to do so much more in incredibly intelligent ways.
- Private Data Vault: https://www.rebelmouse.com/agentic-operating-system/private-data-vault
- Agentic Operating System: https://www.rebelmouse.com/agentic-operating-system
