The Revolution of Agentic AI Is Here!
Your Work Will Be Automated. Click to Accept.
IF YOU WORK IN THE ARTS OR MEDIA, you might find AI’s recent rapid advances unnerving. At best, AI devalues your work. At worst, it presages your replacement. No one seems to know what to do and the only big megaphone sounding off about risks to the labor market appears to be Ezra Klein, who has kind of been right about a lot lately. Alex Kantrowitz, founder and host of the popular tech newsletter and podcast, Big Technology, recently wrote on this here, candidly admitting “technology’s evolution is making me believe it may soon automate much of my work, and perhaps yours too.” I’m with you, brother.
There’s due excitement for AI making potential advances in medicine, and there are loud cries for cybersecurity, with an emphasis on not allowing China, for instance, to reach artificial general intelligence (AGI) before the US does. These potentials excuse and encourage speeding ahead, placing labor concerns on a back burner. In the Arts and Media, the focus is in the courts, turning solutions to problems—like devalued skills, intellectual property theft, and job loss—into a waiting game for how the laws will shake out. Meanwhile, Big Tech and multitudes of entrepreneurs rapidly move to integrate AI into our everyday lives.
CEOs like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, and the like, are Big Tech’s models for ultimate success. At the top of their sector, they’re highly visible pillars of the world economy. They’re also the world’s wealthiest people. If there were a winner board for high scores in a gamified version of business, they’d hold the top slots.
Winning the game in Big Tech means founding a company that deploys successful products, dominates its market and makes a ton of money. The holy grail is innovating a product that’s so desirable, that’s perceived as so useful, that when a company creates a business model around it and gets it to market, it sells so well and widely, is used so broadly and at great volume, that it becomes interwoven into everyone’s lives. That product becomes necessary enough that consumers can’t do without it. At the same time, its ubiquity, along with consumer dependence, helps it fade into the background. It’s a product that becomes like the air we breathe. It’s everywhere, it’s necessary, it can’t be replaced. We only notice it when it’s gone.
Thirty some odd years ago, the personal computer arrived. It was an innovation in hardware that came with another, even more key innovation: its operating system and the highly useful applications for office work. The winning operating system was, and still is, Microsoft Windows, which dominates by a large margin. Apple’s MacOS came in at a distant second. If you work on a computer, the likelihood that you use Windows is over 70%. The winning office productivity software was Microsoft Office, chiefly Word and Excel. Right now, Google’s Workspace apps hold the top slot.
Today, the holy grail is a product that reconfigures the way you spend the majority of your working life, just as PCs, Windows and Office did in the 90s. It’s a product that’s as ubiquitous, or somehow manages to replace the market dominance Microsoft, Google and Apple have on office productivity products. All eyes are on innovations in AI.
THERE’S A NEW-ISH IDEA EMERGING in conversations about the next phase of AI integration that’s going to change everything about how you work. It’ll create the kind of structural change, too, that could cause problems, particularly in Arts and Media. The new idea involves integrating agentic AI into everyone’s workflow.
What are ‘AI agents’? They’re “autonomous software tools that perform tasks, make decisions, and interact with their environment intelligently and rationally.” This January, Jason Huang, CEO of Nvidia said 2025 would be the year we’d see AI agents “take off.” This winter, at the World Economic Forum, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce said, “From this point forward…we will be managing not only human workers but also digital workers.” Andrew Ng, founder of DeepLearning AI, Chairman of Landing AI, co-founder of Coursera, has been all in for agentic AI for some time.
At the end of February, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, spoke with Dwarkesh Patel, on the Dwarkesh Podcast. Patel, a freshly minted computer science grad (UT Austin, 2021), is an extraordinary researcher and a talented communicator. He was one of Time’s 2024’s 100 most influential people in AI. He’s barely twenty-four and has interviewed Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tyler Cowen, amongst other big brains, on the topic of AI. Dwarkesh brims with insightful curiosity. His intelligence and full attention elicits unguarded, intellectually exciting conversations.
During his conversation with Nadella, now at Microsoft for thirty years, the CEO talked with animated enthusiasm about a vision he had for a new workflow for everyone. You can imagine a workflow for everyone and it would be a good, fun conversation. But when Nadella does it, it’s probably going to be integrated into your life, and the lives of everyone you know.
If you use Microsoft productivity products, your “choice point” for integrating this workflow will be a familiar: “Click to Accept.” After a succession of such choices, the updates will bring this new software and its workflow into your computer, your phone, your tablet. Google’s nascent version is already integrated into its Workplace productivity products. Apple’s version is Apple Intelligence.
As the iterative updates continue, you’ll learn the new workflow and adapt to it. It’ll change the way you communicate with colleagues, friends, and family. It’ll alter how you get your news and information, the way you shop online, the way you engage on social channels.
Here’s the vision…
WE’RE ENTERING THE PHASE OF AGENTIC AI. It’s a phase in which AI agents will become the knowledge workers that humans manage. “Knowledge work” is Silicon-Valley-speak for “office work,” or work for anyone who uses a computer. In the new phase, knowledge workers become the agent managers of AI agents. You, as the knowledge worker or office worker today, will be replaced and automated by AI agents in the future. AI will automate the work you do now. And you’ll either become an AI manager, managing a team of AI agents, or—. Uh. You’ll do something.
Nadella talks about the integration of AI into his own workflow and uses it as an example of what he imagines you will do. He rolls it into a pitch for Copilot (which is his job) as the new, overarching user interface (UI). He says, Microsoft “Office is not just about the office of today; it's the UI layer for knowledge work. It'll evolve as the workflows evolve. That's what we want to build. [The] applications that exist today… are going to fundamentally be changed because the business logic will go more into this agentic tier.” For Microsoft, Copilot will bring that agentic tier. “Copilot, as the UI for AI, is a big, big deal. Each of us is going to have it.”
The work you do using software like Microsoft Office—i.e. Outlook, Word, Excel, Power Point, Notes—will be replaced by AI automation that you manage. For example, you won’t write using Word. You’ll prompt Word to write documents for you. You’ll tell Outlook how to parse through your email, respond for you, even initiate an email exchange. Based on an outline (that Word has written), Power Point will create a slideshow for you, generate your voice to narrate it and progress the slides for you.
If you’ve been following the advances and happen to have a little technical aptitude, you’ve probably been experimenting with some of the AI-integrated applications blasting at us. Many are existing productivity software that now have new AI integration. Here are some popular ones:
Notetaking and file management: Notion and Notebook LM
Research: ChatGPT’s DeepResearch and Perplexity
Image generation and graphic design: Midjourney, Dall-E-3, Photoshop and Canva
Custom GPTs (generative pre-trained LLMs that you can give personalized instructions): ChatGPT
*Please put your faves in the comments, and let me know which ones I’m missing!
If you’re not technically inclined or haven’t the time to explore, apply and adopt individual, AI-integrated applications—like most people!—then you’re a part of the consumer-base that Microsoft, Apple, and Google Workplace are targeting with a generic form of this new agentic-AI workflow. Shortly, you’ll integrate an overarching software suite that will offer standardized AI uses from the apps you know. You’ll be trained, by having to use the software, and ‘upskilled’ in tandem with your software updates. The company that will dominate this coveted market is the one that integrates it into your computer, phone and tablet, trains you to use it, and habituates you the new workflow the fastest.
Those who can master the role of agent manager in a more complicated context or industry—an individual who can prompt, code, tweak, and monitor AI agent output, communications, and transactions—will be the most valuable on the labor market. They’ll be able to perform the work that today requires an entire department of people. This radical increase of productivity for one person seems awesome, but, hopefully, you can see the problem. A single person’s office work will be able to replace several. Those in the workforce who lack the technical aptitude to adapt will be devalued or out of a job. This applies, as well, to those whose work is meaningful, satisfying, and worth spending one’s life performing only when NOT using AI, which is the case for most work in the Arts or Media.
That’s what Nadella means by “the business logic [of the] agentic tier.” It’s going to transform work, and by extension, make much of the workforce redundant. In this business-logic, hyper-users or power-users of the products Big Tech deploys are rewarded, and the rest can eat virtual cake.
WHILE TALKING ABOUT AUTONOMOUS SUPER-INTELLIGENCE and the possibility that releasing something like that could be dangerous or get into the wrong hands, Nadella tells Dwarkesh, “You just can't unleash something out there in the world that creates harm, because the social permission for that is not going to be there.” Nadella doesn’t seem to see the analogous harm of unleashing a workflow that replaces a large percentage of the workforce. Risks posed to labor are, perhaps, the inevitable price of progress. Shoshana Zuboff calls this the rhetoric of inevitablism in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Public Affairs, 2019). Quoting Landon Winner’s Autonomous Technology (MIT, 1978), Zuboff echoes his assertion, made back in the seventies: “‘The changes and disruptions that an evolving technology repeatedly caused in modern life were accepted as given or inevitable simply because no one bothered to ask whether there were other possibilities.” Here in the 2020s, the inevitability of our acceptance isn’t due to our not bothering to ask if there are other choices. There just no longer appear to be any.
Nadella cites David Autor, an economist at MIT who found that 60% of job titles in 2018 didn’t exist in 1940. New jobs had been created over time. Nadella implies a similar percentage of positions will be lost, new ones invented, and still others will become more valuable. He offers the following silver lining, which, to give him the benefit of the doubt, he does premise with wondering if perhaps he’s being “naive”:
I think that in order to have a stable social structure, and democracies [that] function, you can’t just have a return on capital and no return on labor. We can talk about it, but that 60% has to be revalued. We'll start valuing different types of human labor. What is today considered high-value human labor may be a commodity. There may be new things that we will value. Including that person who comes to me and helps me with my physical therapy or whatever.
IN THE NINETIES, SILICON VALLEY PITCHED A REVOLUTION in productivity software and internet networking. They were tools for individual liberation and would connect us all to the rest of the world. They delivered. Now, we can’t do without that global network of office productivity software and internet connectivity. The global economy depends on it. You depend on it. But a new revolution in productivity software is here! It’s a powerful pitch. But no one’s really asking you to buy in, to believe in them, to take a chance on some smart, scrappy guys and their new innovations in tech. Instead, you’re simply being immersed in it. It’s in your phone, your operating system, your office applications, your search engine. It’s just showing up. A new, agentic AI workflow is being integrated into your life. It’s here to improve your productivity and speed you into the future, eagerly prompting you to automate yourself. It’ll be difficult, if not impossible, to opt out. Update Tonight? Or Install Now. The next stage of the industrial revolution is here!
Click to accept.