The Case for Human-First Digital Spaces

AI is everywhere now. It writes our emails, summarizes our meetings, generates our content, and increasingly mediates our digital interactions. And honestly? A lot of this is genuinely useful.

But here’s what concerns me: as AI gets better at handling routine interactions, we’re at risk of designing all our digital spaces around what AI can do well, rather than what humans need.

AI is Amazing at the Wrong Things

AI excels at:

• Summarizing information
• Finding patterns in data
• Generating content from templates
• Optimizing for specific metrics
• Handling routine queries

These are valuable capabilities. But they’re not where human collaboration happens. The breakthroughs, the creative leaps, the deep understanding that comes from truly working together - these emerge from messy, non-linear, profoundly human processes that AI can’t replicate.

What Humans Need (and AI Can’t Provide)

Spatial thinking: We understand complex ideas by arranging them spatially. We literally move things around to see relationships and patterns. This isn’t just a visual preference - it’s fundamental to how our brains process information.

Fluid collaboration: Real collaboration is full of false starts, sudden insights, parallel explorations, and synthesis. It’s not linear. It’s not always efficient. And it’s definitely not something you can prompt an AI to do for you.

Shared context: When teams work together over time, they build shared understanding that goes beyond what’s explicitly said or documented. Inside jokes, shorthand references, intuitive understanding of each other’s thinking styles - this is the invisible infrastructure of great teams.

Presence without performance: Sometimes the most valuable thing is just being together in a shared space. Not actively collaborating, not “engaging,” just… present. Aware of what others are working on. Available if needed. Working in parallel.

The Risk of AI-First Design

As AI capabilities expand, there’s pressure to make everything AI-compatible. Structured data over freeform exploration. Neat taxonomies over messy ideation. Quantifiable outputs over hard-to-measure understanding.

This is a mistake.

The future shouldn’t be about replacing human collaboration with AI assistance. It should be about AI handling the busywork so humans have more space for the kind of collaboration that only humans can do.

What Human-First Looks Like

At Glint, we’re building with a clear philosophy: AI should fade into the background, not stand at the center.

This means:

Unstructured space for structured thinking: No forced templates or workflows. Give teams an infinite canvas and let them organize it however makes sense for their process.

Persistent context: Everything stays where you put it. Conversations, documents, sketches, references - they all live together in the same space, building context over time.

Fluid interaction: Move between solo focus, pair work, and group collaboration without switching tools or contexts. The space adapts to how you’re working, not the other way around.

Real-time presence: See what your teammates are working on. Drop in on interesting conversations. Collaborate spontaneously when it makes sense.

AI as Infrastructure, Not Interface

This doesn’t mean no AI. It means AI in its proper place.

AI should:

• Summarize what happened while you were away (if you want)
• Suggest relevant documents or past conversations
• Handle tedious formatting and organization
• Transcribe discussions for later reference

AI shouldn’t:

• Mediate how you collaborate
• Force you into AI-friendly workflows
• Generate “engagement” for metrics
• Replace the human work of understanding and creating together

The Canvas Advantage

Here’s why we’re excited about canvas-based collaboration: it’s inherently human-first.

You can’t train an AI to have a brainstorming session on a canvas. You can’t prompt your way to the kind of organic idea development that happens when a team spreads out materials and starts connecting concepts.

The canvas is messy, spatial, visual, and non-linear - which makes it perfect for how humans actually think and work together.

Why This Matters Now

We’re at an inflection point. AI capabilities are expanding rapidly, and there’s enormous pressure to integrate AI into every aspect of digital work. Some of this will be valuable. Much of it will be noise.

The risk is that we optimize everything for AI compatibility and lose the spaces where genuine human collaboration can happen. Where teams can think together in ways that are messy and exploratory and fundamentally human.

We need to build spaces that resist this pressure. That prioritize human needs over algorithmic optimization. That create room for the kind of collaboration that only humans can do.

That’s what human-first means. And it’s what the future of collaboration needs to be.

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What does human-first design mean to you? Where do you see AI helping (or getting in the way) of real collaboration? Let’s talk at hello@glint.so