The era of humans and agents

Cloud 2.0

The thesis

Shared state was the revolution.
It is again.

There is a shift happening underneath the AI conversation that nobody has named yet, so we will name it. We are calling it Cloud 2.0: the shared state that humans and AI agents both read from and write to. It is as big a change as the first cloud was.

Cloud 1.0 freed data from the machine it lived on. A file stopped being a thing on a device and became a thing in a place, reachable from anywhere and shareable with anyone. The breakthrough was not faster machines. It was shared state.

AI today is a strange regression. Its leap came through the terminal, powerful precisely because it sits close to where you work. So everyone went local, and capability got tied to the box it runs on. An agent's work lives in the session that produced it and evaporates when that session ends. We have rebuilt the closet server, just with a language model inside it.

Cloud 2.0 is a shared state layer that humans and AI agents both operate in as first-class participants: persistent, multi-actor, attributable by default, and machine-readable, where an agent is not a guest visiting a human tool but a native inhabitant with its own identity.

Read the full thesis →

The framework

Five shifts from Cloud 1.0 to Cloud 2.0.

Each shift moves a default Cloud 1.0 set. Hold any tool up against them and you can read which era it belongs to.

Shift 1
Storage
State
Shift 2
Sessions
Persistence
Shift 3
Single-actor
Multi-actor
Shift 4
Implicit attribution
First-class identity
Shift 5
Vertical SaaS
Cross-vendor surfaces

Read the five shifts in full →

How to recognize it

The markers of a Cloud 2.0 system.

Cloud 2.0 is a category, not a product. The more of these a system has, the closer it is to the real thing.

  • Persistent shared state

    The work lives in a durable place, not a session that ends. Close everything, come back to exactly where it stood.

  • Agents as first-class identities

    Each agent is its own principal with its own credentials, not a script wearing a human's login.

  • Multi-actor concurrency

    Many humans and many agents work the same surfaces at once, safely, without overwriting one another.

  • Attribution by default

    Every action records who or what did it, a human or a named agent, so the trail is always answerable.

  • Machine-readable surfaces

    The same docs and tables a human reads are structured for an agent to read and write directly. No scraping.

  • Cross-vendor reach

    State is not locked to one model or one toolmaker. Humans and agents from different stacks meet in it.

  • Output-shape-agnostic

    It holds whatever AI produces: prose, structured rows, files, code, context. Not just one format.

In production

Dock is the first cloud built for it.

We did not name Cloud 2.0 from the outside. We built toward it, then realized it needed a name. Dock is the first cloud built for humans and agents as equals rather than for humans with AI bolted on. The markers above are not a roadmap for us; they are what Dock already does.

Picture it concretely. A workspace holds a launch plan as a table and the strategy behind it as a document. One founder edits the table. An agent fills in a research section of the doc while that is happening. A second agent, running on a different stack entirely, drops its findings into a third surface. A teammate opens the whole thing an hour later and sees exactly who and what touched each part, because every change carries its own attribution.

Nobody emailed a file. Nobody re-pasted a transcript. That is the shared state doing the thing the definition describes, in production, right now.

See it with Claude →

Open a workspace in Cloud 2.0.

A shared, persistent place your whole team and every agent you run build in together. Free to start, no credit card.

Cloud 2.0 was articulated by Govind Kavaturi and Mike Molinet, founders of Dock, in May 2026.