1. Substitution of Goals in Roles and Teams by Goal Seeking Autonomous AI Agents, leading to minimal Goals & Tasks (which may also have tech augmentation) assigned to roles in an organization leading to minimal power and mobility for roles.
2. When we think from a perspective of outsourcing, these autonomous AI Agents are like Employees in the Outsourcing company and these outsourcing companies are liable for the quality of work delivered by these autonomous AI agents, similar to how they are liable to the quality of work done by their employees now.
This is a great framework to think about upcoming change and disruption from agents, autonomous or otherwise. I appreciate that you gave examples of organizational shuffling due to other past technologies.
One example I point to is data analytics moving from dedicated teams to self-service tools like Looker, etc (even spreadsheets).
I’ve thought about (in a much less rigorous and structured way) the impact of AI agents on consumers. If the “organization” in your framework is analogous to an individual or household and all the supporting companies are the roles and teams, there could be a similar shifting of allocating time and resources (ie. money) there.
Analogies here would be from past self-service capabilities like travel planning and booking accommodations (as in your example), banking, retail e-commerce, or streaming cinema.
My interest is less about replacing or reducing the scope of organizations but rather increasing the accessibility of “goal accomplishment” to many more people.
In fact I’m in the process of building a startup to do just this - deliver AI based experts to help individuals plan and achieve their goals across multiple domains (finance, career, travel, health and wellness, event planning, etc).
What are your thoughts on how agents may impact the consumer space, given this framework?
Yes, I agree, I'm more excited about democratising goal-accomplishment. If anything, it helps much smaller companies and solopreneurs gain much higher returns on their efforts.
Today, a lot of that is achieved through marketplaces like Fiverr etc.
I believe that there will be a further capital-labor divide. The Fiverrs and McKinsey will gain outzsized benefits from AI. The workers within both will suffer.
When most work can be done by AI agents, the control point will no longer be the ability to do work but the ability to guarantee authentiicity/veracity and to own liability, both of which are insurance to hallucinations. This is what every service provider will eventually sell.
Great points and thoughts in the article Sangeet. While we have seen tech displace jobs/roles in industries like advanced manufacturing, having AI-based Agents displace roles in traditional functions that exist in modern enterprises is a big paradigm shift. It makes me wonder how companies that sell software that augments users' capabilities will react when there aren't as many humans to 'augment.' Will the software be re-cast as an 'Agent'? At present, many software providers are adding AI capabilities to their products to remain relevant, but thinking a couple of steps ahead - it sure seems like some augmentation tools and software won't be as widely needed if workflows are re-designed to be AI-driven versus human-driven. Big change management implications all around! I am advocating for Agent-based architectural thinking myself. I wrote a blog about this recently. https://revenuegrowthassociates.com/the-rise-of-ai-agents-building-your-agent-007/
I feel the vision of organization this reflecting is rooted into is redundancy of parts. Would be great have a reflection on AI agents impact on an architecture based on Redundancy of Functions (you can find some description here
1. Substitution of Goals in Roles and Teams by Goal Seeking Autonomous AI Agents, leading to minimal Goals & Tasks (which may also have tech augmentation) assigned to roles in an organization leading to minimal power and mobility for roles.
2. When we think from a perspective of outsourcing, These autonomous AI Agents are like Employees in the Outsourcing company and these outsourcing companies are liable for the quality of work delivered by these autonomous AI agents, similar to how they are liable to the quality of work done by their employees now.
Please let me know if I've missed out or didn't understand correctly.
To summarize in 2 points,
1. Substitution of Goals in Roles and Teams by Goal Seeking Autonomous AI Agents, leading to minimal Goals & Tasks (which may also have tech augmentation) assigned to roles in an organization leading to minimal power and mobility for roles.
2. When we think from a perspective of outsourcing, these autonomous AI Agents are like Employees in the Outsourcing company and these outsourcing companies are liable for the quality of work delivered by these autonomous AI agents, similar to how they are liable to the quality of work done by their employees now.
Those two are on point. There are other implications too discussed here but these two are on point.
Great post. Thanks for the Flint shout out :)
Very interesting, if only because it feels very reminiscent of the post-WW2 introduction of management-as-technology.
Always interesting to unpeeled with first principles.
This is a great framework to think about upcoming change and disruption from agents, autonomous or otherwise. I appreciate that you gave examples of organizational shuffling due to other past technologies.
One example I point to is data analytics moving from dedicated teams to self-service tools like Looker, etc (even spreadsheets).
I’ve thought about (in a much less rigorous and structured way) the impact of AI agents on consumers. If the “organization” in your framework is analogous to an individual or household and all the supporting companies are the roles and teams, there could be a similar shifting of allocating time and resources (ie. money) there.
Analogies here would be from past self-service capabilities like travel planning and booking accommodations (as in your example), banking, retail e-commerce, or streaming cinema.
My interest is less about replacing or reducing the scope of organizations but rather increasing the accessibility of “goal accomplishment” to many more people.
In fact I’m in the process of building a startup to do just this - deliver AI based experts to help individuals plan and achieve their goals across multiple domains (finance, career, travel, health and wellness, event planning, etc).
What are your thoughts on how agents may impact the consumer space, given this framework?
Yes, I agree, I'm more excited about democratising goal-accomplishment. If anything, it helps much smaller companies and solopreneurs gain much higher returns on their efforts.
Today, a lot of that is achieved through marketplaces like Fiverr etc.
I believe that there will be a further capital-labor divide. The Fiverrs and McKinsey will gain outzsized benefits from AI. The workers within both will suffer.
When most work can be done by AI agents, the control point will no longer be the ability to do work but the ability to guarantee authentiicity/veracity and to own liability, both of which are insurance to hallucinations. This is what every service provider will eventually sell.
Great points and thoughts in the article Sangeet. While we have seen tech displace jobs/roles in industries like advanced manufacturing, having AI-based Agents displace roles in traditional functions that exist in modern enterprises is a big paradigm shift. It makes me wonder how companies that sell software that augments users' capabilities will react when there aren't as many humans to 'augment.' Will the software be re-cast as an 'Agent'? At present, many software providers are adding AI capabilities to their products to remain relevant, but thinking a couple of steps ahead - it sure seems like some augmentation tools and software won't be as widely needed if workflows are re-designed to be AI-driven versus human-driven. Big change management implications all around! I am advocating for Agent-based architectural thinking myself. I wrote a blog about this recently. https://revenuegrowthassociates.com/the-rise-of-ai-agents-building-your-agent-007/
I feel the vision of organization this reflecting is rooted into is redundancy of parts. Would be great have a reflection on AI agents impact on an architecture based on Redundancy of Functions (you can find some description here
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/india-sets-stage-digital-transformation-just-nicer). Abundant intelligence should probably trigger a though or two on purpose. Gunter Anders said once that the "apocalypse is in the hands of the incompetent."
I feel we're walking on a thin line
To summarize in 2 points,
1. Substitution of Goals in Roles and Teams by Goal Seeking Autonomous AI Agents, leading to minimal Goals & Tasks (which may also have tech augmentation) assigned to roles in an organization leading to minimal power and mobility for roles.
2. When we think from a perspective of outsourcing, These autonomous AI Agents are like Employees in the Outsourcing company and these outsourcing companies are liable for the quality of work delivered by these autonomous AI agents, similar to how they are liable to the quality of work done by their employees now.
Please let me know if I've missed out or didn't understand correctly.