AI-powered workers are coming and work may never be the same again

Recently, an Alphabet board member speaking off the record, didn’t mince his words about automation: “If you’re still copying and pasting information from one place to another, you’re doing something wrong. AI should have taken that off your plate.”

I suspect, like most of us, I still am.

Picture the scene. Someone emails you to arrange a meeting or ask for some random piece of information, an email address maybe or who paid for the office cat in 2005.

Rather than checking through the calendar and going back and forth on dates or scrolling through your inbox for the particular nugget they are after, you point your “AI bot” at their “AI bot” and your virtual assistants sort it out between them.

Or perhaps there is an email inquiry from a customer. Your “bot” finds out the answer, drafts a response and sends it out without anyone else intervening.

This is the vision of a future populated by AI-powered “autonomous agents”, that, once instructed, can carry out tasks by themselves.

They are a big step up from AI chatbots, or much of the current workplace AI software offering.

Microsoft unveiled its version in London this week, one player fighting to corner this space. At its Cloud Summit, Google called autonomous agents the “next phase of AI evolution”, and is making major strides.

In September, ServiceNow boasted of its plans to “unlock 24/7 productivity at massive scale” with its “agentic AI”.

Anthropic is putting out “computer use” that can understand what is on someone’s screen and then take actions on their behalf.

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