Dolly Parton wrote I Will Always Love You in 1973. Whitney Houston made it enormous nineteen years later.
One wrote it. One made it huge. The two jobs I most needed doing, so the names took about a second.
It came off my office wall. A painting I bought at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition a few years ago, by Leigh Banks: the greats, round one table like the Last Supper. I looked up, and there were my names. Every time I say one, I feel warm. I love it.
They’ve got colleagues.
Meet the crew
Dolly reads the news for me every day. She works 9 to 5, and if something breaks that I ought to react to, she tells me the same day.
Whitney is my editor. I talk into Wispr Flow and she turns the voice notes into drafts. Then she asks How Will I Know, and hands it to Freddy.
Freddy checks everything before it goes out. Dates, names, numbers, the sentence that sounds like me but isn’t. He works best Under Pressure. Don’t Stop Me Now is the one request he refuses.
Bowie reviews the week. He takes Dolly’s daily finds and everything I’ve made, and tells me what’s changing. He also reminds me who my Heroes are: the wins worth backing next week.
George Michael joins soon, as chief of staff. He doesn’t work yet. When he does, his first job is Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, with the day already planned. I have Faith.
The humans are still very much here. My team and I make the calls. The agents do the reading, the editing and the checking.
Nothing technical in any of that, just a choice about how working with AI should feel.
A tab called Untitled
A name makes you brief an agent like a colleague, not a search bar.
Most AI setups don’t have names. They have a tab.
The tab says Assistant, or Untitled chat 47. You open it, you type a question, it answers, you close it. Next time, it’s a stranger again, and you type your whole life story back in. Who you are. What you sell. The words you’d never be caught using. It’s 11pm and you’re doing it for the fourth time this month.
I did that for longer than I’d like to admit.
The thing that changed wasn’t the tool. Same Claude, same folder of notes about my business, same me. What changed was that I gave the jobs names, and the names made me behave differently.
A name makes you brief an agent like a colleague, not a search bar.
When I brief Whitney, I brief her the way I’d brief an editor on her first morning. Who this is for. What good looks like, with examples. The three things I never say. The bit where I want to be argued with. When I typed into a search bar, I typed six words and hoped. The output was exactly as good as the briefing, and I’d been blaming the tool.
Freddy is the clearest case. Nobody briefs a tab called Untitled to be merciless. You do brief Freddy that way, because Freddy has a reputation to live up to, and he does.
This week he stopped a LinkedIn post calling Dolly and Whitney a duet. They never sang together, and the people who’d notice are exactly the people who read me. It goes out as a pairing.
Dolly has the opposite job, and the same rule applies. Told to “read the news”, a tab reads the news. Dolly’s told who I am and what I’d want first, so she comes back with the three things and leaves the forty.
Last week it was Jacob Coxon, 27, resigning after about three years across OpenAI and Anthropic, saying neither was acting responsibly. Anthropic’s alignment lead Evan Hubinger then said he personally puts the odds of AI going catastrophically wrong above 10% within the decade. Dolly flagged it. What to say was mine, and it went in this Monday’s Weekly Spark.
Why these names?
Still every job. Still us.
Why these names, though? Why not Assistant One to Four?
Because they’re my musical heroes. It brings me warmth, and it’s a joy, because every one of them is named after someone who makes me genuinely smile. That’s part of the mindset shift that has to happen.
Most of us are still doing every job ourselves. Writer, researcher, inbox, chaser of invoices. AI arrives and we give it a tab, and the tab makes us feel like we’ve got a slightly faster version of ourselves. Still every job. Still us.
The shift is from doing every job to running a small crew. It sounds grand. In practice it’s one folder on my computer that knows my business, four names, and a habit of briefing them like people.
The names do something else, too. They mark where each job stops.
Dolly reads. She doesn’t decide what I say about it. Whitney edits. She doesn’t press send. Freddy checks. He doesn’t get to overrule me, only to stop me long enough to look. Bowie reviews. The review is a mirror, and what I do about it is mine.
Trust doesn’t come from the tool being clever. It comes from knowing exactly where the line is.
The ends stay with the humans. What the job is for, and whether it’s good enough to go out with my name on it. AI is so good at the middle of a job that, quietly, you start letting it do the ends too. A named crew, with named jobs, is how I stop that happening. Trust doesn’t come from the tool being clever. It comes from knowing exactly where the line is.
Try it with one job
If you want to try it, you don’t need anything you haven’t already got.
Pick the job you re-explain most. The Monday client email. The follow-up. The post you rewrite four times. Give that one job a name you’d queue for, and brief it the way you’d brief a person: who it’s for, what good looks like, what to never do, where to stop and check with you. Then run it on something real this week.
That’s one agent. It’s also the whole method, and it’s the part I’ll be sharing at the next
Switched ON Session (02)
Wednesday 23 September in King’s Cross.
6:30pm for 7pm - close by 10pm
I’ll show you how my crew works, then we start building yours together.
The details are at luma.com/SwitchedOn-2 if you fancy it.
I’m aware that naming an AI after Dolly Parton sounds like the sort of thing a person does when she’s spent too long alone with a laptop. It probably is. It’s also the best decision I’ve made about working with AI all year.
Whose name would you give the job you keep putting off?
Nish x
P.S. I wispr’d this, I didn’t type it. My own Careless Whisper, minus the sax. Fancy a go? wisprflow.ai/nishma. Three months free, on me.
I’m Nishma, and I help people get Switched ON to AI. Less overwhelm, more time and freedom, and a brand that stays unmistakably yours. If you’re midlife, brilliant, and tired of being told you’ve missed it, you’re exactly who I do this for. Come and find out more at nishma.co.