Aristotle drew a distinction between what something is capable of and what it is actually doing. Most AI tools today exist in the first category. Tremendous potential. Impressive benchmarks. And yet the user is still doing the work, just slightly faster. I have watched the AI productivity space fill up with a particular kind of claim. The language is always confident. The promises are always significant. Inbox zero. Automated workflows. Hours reclaimed. And yet, when you press on the specifics, the answers tend to dissolve into the abstract. Vague gestures at efficiency. Numbers that weren't measured so much as imagined. Akash Sharma does something different. He pitches Vellum not by telling you what it does. But by telling you what he has stopped doing. Superhuman: canceled on Day 1. HubSpot: pending. The interface layer every SaaS company assumed was permanent is becoming optional. Not as a thesis. As a lived experience. His actual words: "I am inherently lazy. I just want AI to do my job for me." The most honest AI product pitch I have heard this year. Not because laziness is a virtue. But because it is accurate in a way most pitches refuse to be. The goal was never productivity for its own sake. It was to remove yourself from the parts of work that compound without generating value. Vellum addresses all of that. Runs locally on your machine. Persistent memory that builds over time. Journals its own interactions so the next conversation starts from context, not from zero. Monitors live sales calls. It called Akash mid-negotiation, got discount approval in real time, and the deal closed. That is not a tool you prompt. That is an entity that operates. $24.5M raised. Backed by Dharmesh Shah and Arash Ferdowsi. I will be watching this closely. The question is not whether the product works. The demos are specific enough to be credible. The question is whether most people are ready to accept what it implies. The future of personal AI is not a smarter chatbot. It is an entity that has been working while you were doing something else. Are you ready for that?
Sam Sharma
4d
Would love to see how this performs across messy real-world workflows, not curated demos.
Nilson Ivano
3d
The "entity that operates" distinction hits differently. Stopped outsourcing thinking, started outsourcing execution.
Tom Head
3d
There’s a quiet but important difference between productivity tools and systems that start acting on context instead of instructions.
The strongest part of this post is that it doesn’t oversell. It just shows behavior.
Khushboo B.
4d
This should change how we evaluate AI productivity tools going forward.
The difference between a tool you prompt and an entity that operates is well articulated here.
Ahmed Rashed
4d
I’m more interested in the memory architecture than the sales call feature tbh.
I hope this kind of transparency becomes the norm in how AI products are presented to users.
Vipin Yadav
4d
The fact that it called him during a live negotiation and got discount approval is genuinely impressive if true.
What feels different about this generation of AI products is that the value is gradually shifting from assistance to delegated agency. Most earlier tools accelerated tasks humans still actively managed, whereas systems with memory, context retention and autonomous action start changing the relationship between people and operational work itself.