There is a moment in most role-playing games where you realize the hero cannot do it alone.
Maybe you wandered too far off the main path and got annihilated by something you had no business fighting yet. Maybe you stood in front of a locked door with no way through. Maybe you walked into a cave with no poison resistance and paid for it immediately. Whatever the moment was, the lesson was the same: you need a party. Different abilities, different strengths, different roles. No single character can carry everything.
Jason and Melanie Winter have been thinking about the AI landscape the same way. And in Season 2, Episode 6 of Wired Together, they make the case that the way most people are approaching AI, bouncing from one tool to the next looking for the perfect replacement, is exactly backwards. The real power is not in finding the one tool that does it all. It is in assembling the right party.
How We Got Here
It was not that long ago that most people had one AI tool. ChatGPT arrived and it felt like magic. You could brainstorm, write, explain, explore. It seemed like it could do everything, and for a while, that felt like enough.
But the landscape did not stay that way. New tools arrived. Google Gemini. Microsoft Copilot. Grok. Perplexity. Claude. Each one with its own strengths, its own personality, its own way of handling a task. And suddenly people started doing what people always do when something new and shiny shows up. They started switching. Ditching one for the other. Starting over.
Jason and Melanie think that is the wrong move. Not because loyalty matters, but because switching misses the point. These tools are not competitors for the same job. They are different characters with different abilities. And if you have spent any time with role-playing games, you already understand exactly how this works.
You Are the Hero. Do Not Forget That.
Before getting into the party, Jason and Melanie want to make one thing clear. The human is always the hero.
Not the mage. Not the barbarian. Not the rogue. You.
The AI tools in your workflow are companions on a quest. They have abilities you do not. They can move faster, hold more, dig deeper. But they do not know where you are going. They do not know what the goal is. They cannot correct course when the direction is wrong. That is your job. Always.
This matters because one of the quiet risks of leaning heavily on AI is the gradual belief that the tool is running the show. It is not. A party without a hero is just a group of characters standing around a tavern. You are the one with the quest. The companions just help you survive it.
The Mage: Your Thinking Companion
The first companion in the party is the mage, or in some games, the cleric. This is the strategic one. The one you sit down with before the battle, not during it.
In AI terms, this is where tools like ChatGPT and Claude live. These are your collaborative thinking partners. You bring them a problem, a half-formed idea, a document that needs to make sense, and they help you work through it. They ask good questions. They push back in useful ways. They help you see angles you missed.
Jason describes it as casting spells before you enter the cave. The mage does not swing a sword. The mage prepares you so that when you do go in, you are ready. Fire resistance before the fire-breathing dragon. Poison resistance before the cave full of whatever it is that always lives in caves.
Claude in particular has been getting attention for the quality of its writing, its ability to analyze large documents, and the depth of its reasoning. ChatGPT remains a strong, versatile collaborator. Both earn the mage title because they are not just answering questions. They are helping you think.
That distinction matters. A search engine gives you information. A mage helps you figure out what to do with it.
The Barbarian: Your Execution Companion
If the mage is who you talk to before the battle, the barbarian is who you send in when the battle starts.
The barbarian does not strategize. The barbarian does not write poetry or help you work through a complex idea. The barbarian goes in and gets it done. High hit points, high damage, no complaints. You point toward the problem and the barbarian clears a path.
In the AI ecosystem, this role belongs to tools like Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, specifically in the way they integrate into the platforms where actual work happens. Copilot lives inside Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams. Gemini lives inside Google Docs, Gmail, and Drive. These tools are not there to brainstorm with you. They are there to summarize two hundred emails, build a spreadsheet formula, draft a meeting recap, and get through the pile.
Melanie makes the point well. The barbarian does not tend to have a lot of memory or broad conversational range. It has its thing, it does it extremely well, and it does not need to do anything else. That is not a limitation. That is the design. You do not bring the barbarian to the planning session. You bring the barbarian when the planning is done and the work needs to happen.
The mistake people make is expecting their execution tool to also be their thinking tool. That is like asking the barbarian to cast poison resistance. It is not what they are built for, and you will be disappointed every time.
The Rogue: Your Discovery Companion
This is Jason's favorite, and honestly, it is easy to see why.
The rogue is not one specific tool. The rogue is a category, an energy, a moment. It is the AI experience that stops you in your tracks and makes you say, I did not know it could do that.
Jason's first rogue moment was Midjourney in the spring of 2023. He typed out a description of a dragon emerging from a cave, breathing fire at a silver-armored soldier with a shield, and waited through what he describes as the two longest minutes of his life. What came back was, by his own account, mind-boggling. Not because image generation is magic now, but because at that moment, it was. That was the rogue showing off.
Grok earns rogue status for its speed and creative unpredictability. You throw something at it and it takes its own course, comes back through a door you did not know existed, and delivers something you did not expect. Perplexity earns it for real-time research, surfacing sources and citations like a scout darting ahead of the party to map the territory before you arrive.
The rogue moments are also the ones that emerge through social media. Someone posts a video of an AI doing something that seems impossible and suddenly everyone is talking about it. Those moments matter because they change how you work. You find a legendary item in a chest you almost walked past, and you never go back to the way things were before.
The rogue is also a reminder that the ecosystem is not finished. Tomorrow there will be tools that do not exist today. The rogue is always arriving.
The Problem Nobody Talks About: Switching Costs
Here is where it gets genuinely complicated.
You have been working with a particular AI tool for a while. It knows your voice. It knows your business. It knows how you like things structured, what you are working on, what you have already tried. That is not nothing. That is a relationship built over dozens or hundreds of conversations. It is the spell books, the equipment, the backstory.
Now a new tool shows up. It is better at something. Maybe a lot of things. And you want to bring it in. But the thought of starting over, of losing everything you have built, is a real barrier.
Jason raises the question of what it would look like to transfer that knowledge. Claude, interestingly, offers a way to export a structured prompt that captures your context and preferences, something you can carry into another tool to bring it up to speed faster. He describes it as a brain transplant. Sitting around a campfire and telling the new companion everything they need to know before the quest continues.
Melanie calls it a personality blockchain, and that phrase opens a door neither of them fully walks through, though the implications are genuinely fascinating and a little unsettling. What if all of that context, all of that learned understanding of who you are and how you work, lived somewhere portable? Something every tool could draw from? It would be extraordinary. It would also raise privacy questions that do not have easy answers yet.
For now, the practical reality is that switching tools means rebuilding context. Which is exactly why assembling a party, rather than chasing the perfect single tool, makes more sense. You do not have to replace the mage when you hire a barbarian.
The Party Is a Business Strategy
Step back from the RPG metaphor for a moment and what you have is a genuinely useful framework for how to think about AI in a small business context.
You need a thinking partner for the hard problems. That is your mage. You need an execution tool for the volume work. That is your barbarian. And you need to stay curious and open to the rogue moments, the tools and features that surprise you and change your workflow in ways you did not anticipate.
What you do not need is one tool that tries to do all three and does none of them particularly well. The AI landscape is too specialized for that now, and it is only going to get more so.
Jason and Melanie have been building this party for a couple of years, and the difference between how they used these tools at the beginning and how they use them now is not just a matter of comfort. The tools themselves have grown. The relationship has deepened. What started as occasional wow moments has become a genuine working dynamic, one where the tools know enough about the humans to be genuinely useful, and the humans know enough about the tools to ask the right things of the right companions.
That is the goal. Not the perfect tool. The right party.
And you are still the hero.