AI Was Created to Connect People, Not Turn Into a Wall

Sam Altman once told a group of technology executives that they were betting on when the first one-person company valued at $1 billion would appear, something he called impossible without AI. Since then, the one-person company has become a global dream, including in Vietnam.

A 2025 study led by Fabrizio Dell’Acqua of Harvard Business School and Wharton tested nearly 800 Procter & Gamble professionals on real product-development problems. It found that one person working with AI produced results comparable to a two-person team working without it. From findings like this, some people have jumped to a worrying conclusion: if AI is available, collaboration is no longer necessary.

But does a one-person company mean that people no longer need anyone else? The article argues that this is one of the most serious misunderstandings of the moment. Isolation is the enemy of innovation.

“

Isolation is the enemy of innovation.

During a visit to the Cambridge Innovation Center in Kendall Square, next to MIT, the author heard senior adviser Suman Lal contrast today’s collaborative challenges with Nikola Tesla’s isolated laboratory in Colorado in 1899. A cancer problem today, Lal said, requires doctors, chemists, mathematicians and engineers to develop solutions together.

CIC began in 1999 in a 250-square-meter coworking space. More than 10,000 companies have started there, including Android and HubSpot in their early days. Its Venture Café network, founded in 2009, operates on the principle that “Isolation is the enemy of innovation.” The network holds free Thursday gatherings open to anyone, now in 17 cities and attracting more than 100,000 visits a year. In Cambridge alone, more than 450 people attend each week, including entrepreneurs, students, investors and customers with unmet needs.

Alex Cheung, director of Venture Café Cambridge, describes the work as “engineering serendipity”: creating enough chances for people to meet and potentially change one another’s lives. Even the venue’s high tables are designed to encourage strangers to start conversations. The author’s conclusion is direct: lasting value usually emerges when two or more real people meet, not inside an isolated individual, however successful that person may be.

“

engineering serendipity