Future historians will see that the seeds of a profound transformation were planted in 2025. By 2050, most people will command workforces larger than the biggest multinational corporations of today. But our “employees” won’t be people sitting in cubicles or standing on factory floors. They will be fleets of AI agents—digital workers which can perform tasks like design products, write code, negotiate supply chains, run complex experiments, and devise marketing campaigns while we sleep. The speed at which agentic AI has spread throughout the workforce accelerated over the past year. A survey of business executives by PwC indicates that 79% of companies are leveraging agentic AI. And though many have understandably criticized companies which have invested in AI without immediate bottom-line benefits—a phenomenon I call the “productivity J-curve”—agentic AI promises to drive true productivity gains, fueling further adoption. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The most pressing question for the era ahead: What will happen to human workers? To understand the significance of the agentic AI shift for humans, we must deconstruct the nature of work itself. Almost every valuable task can be broken down into three distinct phases: Asking the right question: Defining the problem and the goal. Execution: Carrying out the steps to reach that goal. Evaluation: Verifying the results and refining the objective. For most of human history, human workers have had to do all three. But the defining characteristic of this era is that AI is getting astonishingly good at Part 2: Execution. In my research with Tom Mitchell, we…
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