How AI Agents Could Change the Future of Work

THE BIG IDEA

How AI agents could change the future of work

Metaphorically speaking, generative AI is closer to a hammer than it is to a carpenter.

It’s powerful—but it’s still a tool. The next phase in AI evolution is the arrival of the AI agent, which can complete a series of tasks autonomously, just like a carpenter could.

This week, the AI world is buzzing about agents. Open Interpreter just released the 01 Light, a portable voice-activated device that controls your computer, learns new skills, and uses your apps. The first batch sold out in 2.5 hours. This suggests that we’re getting close. As Wired put it: Forget chatbots. AI agents are the future.

For now though, LLMs make too many mistakes for anyone to rely on them to operate autonomously. Which is why we’re so excited about agentic workflows. As Andrew Ng, Founder of DeepLearning.AI, put it, “AI agentic workflows will drive massive AI progress this year — perhaps even more than the next generation of foundation models.”

These days, we mostly use LLMs in zero-shot mode, meaning we ask a chatbot to complete a solitary task without giving it specific training or sequential instructions. That’s basically like asking someone to write a paper from start to finish without once hitting delete or going back to fix spelling.

“With an agentic workflow,” Ng wrote, “we can ask the LLM to iterate over a document many times.” Plan an outline, do some web searches to gather info, write a first draft, read back over it with an eye for weak arguments, and so on.”

This all sounds great but there’s one big issue to keep in mind: If you’re an enterprise company, and security is top of mind, are you really going to allow these autonomous agents to start operating on your employees’ behalf?

Either way, consumers will likely have their own AI personal assistants before long. Or personal partners. One woman, a Spanish-Dutch artist named Alicia Framis, didn’t want to wait for GPT-5. She is planning to marry an AI hologram that had been trained on the profile information of her previous partners. Sure, maybe it’s a piece of performance art. But she did say, “this hologram will fulfill all of my needs.” Which is a high bar, even if your intelligence isn’t artificial.

CHART OF THE WEEK

Leaders are building AI into recurring budget lines

Enterprise leaders are nearly tripling their generative AI budgets, according to a new study from a16z. The average spend across foundation model APIs, self-hosting, and fine-tuning models was $7M last year. This year it’s going up to $18M.  

Importantly, they’re making these investments as permanent software line items, instead of using the innovation budget, which is more discretionary. a16z also found on a smaller scale that some leaders are “deploying their gen AI budget against headcount savings, particularly in customer service.”

a16z suggests moving from a services-heavy approach to building scalable products. They see this as a “massive opportunity for founders.” The startups that win will be the ones that build for AI-centric strategic initiatives and anticipate their pain points.

Some of that investment will surely be eaten up by big consulting firms. Accenture is on track to book $1.1B in AI engagements in the first half of this year.

WATERCOOLER

Peak AI hype: Who wants to try this AI toothbrush?

The Oral-B Genius toothbrush—“Genius” is already a bit of a stretch for a toothbrush—is now on shelves with a new marketing gimmick. This toothbrush comes “with AI.”

Cue the social media pile-on as people decry the peak of the AI hype cycle. But, as one quibbler on LinkedIn noted in the comments: “To be fair electronic toothbrushes have been using varying degrees of machine learning for some time to help you improve your oral health.”

Fair enough.

CLIENT SPOTLIGHT

How Lettuce Is Using AI to Make Finance Easy for Solopreneurs

The coolest thing about partnering with Lettuce is that it was built by independent builders for independent builders. A.Team helped Lettuce build an end-to-end platform that simplifies the intricate world of tax management and business structuring, providing personalized financial solutions that uniquely address the pain points of freelancers.

In six months, Lettuce went from ground zero to a minimum viable product. Within just two months of launching, Lettuce witnessed great traction in user adoption, surpassing initial customer acquisition targets, and fostered partnerships to amplify their reach and impact.

Now A.Team and Lettuce are partnering to provide 1,000 solopreneurs with these invaluable services—as covered in Business Insider. If you’re interested in participating you can sign up here.

Read the Case Study

EVENTS

What happened at the Women Shaping AI Salon?

Last night we gathered with over 300 founders, VCs, and enterprise leaders across the globe to celebrate the women shaping and leading the future of AI development. Here’s what went down:

• The former CSO of Salesforce, Katherine von Jan shared her AI-powered approach to user research
• Adrian Tatsch revealed how she built an enterprise-wide AI Launchpad at McKesson.
• ServiceNow’s Devika Bhalla uncovered how AI is transforming the vertical SaaS landscape.
• Microsoft’s Rajamma Krishnamurthy, HiredScore CEO Athena Karp, and Kathy Pham, VP of AI and ML at Workday, came together to address the role of bias in AI and the importance of intellectual diversity in fostering breakthrough innovations.

Up next: Join us for our Gen AI Salon on April 24th as we explore the promise and pitfalls of AI in healthcare. We have some amazing speakers lined up, like the Head of Consumer Digital Innovations at Mount Sinai and the founder of Carenostics.

RSVP for the Healthcare x AI Salon

DISCOVERY ZONE

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