We have a new ‘species’ of our own making: Artificial intelligence agents

Agents or ‘Agentic AI’ first caught my attention through a prescient Bill Gates blog (bit.ly/3tSMNkB) in which he declared, “In the next five years… you won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do. 

And depending on how much information you choose to share with it, the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. This type of software—something that responds to natural language and can accomplish many different tasks based on its knowledge of the user—is called an agent." 

Also read: These new AI bots will do just about anything for you

He later went on to claim: “Agents are not only going to change how everyone interacts with computers. They’re also going to upend the software industry." Agents, he declared, are the new platform.

So how are agents different from apps and why are they creating an AI gold rush? As Bain Capital’s Sarah Hinkfuss elegantly describes (bit.ly/3Ye4reU) it: “We are used to ‘pulling’ information from computers; we need AI to ‘push’ finished work to us instead." 

Instead of tapping apps multiple times or asking ChatGPT a series of questions to work out a complex and frustrating travel itinerary, what if, say, a travel-site agent would select a hotel and airline that we usually like, design a daily schedule based on our interests, and go ahead with the requisite bookings, since we have given it the permission and agency to do so. 

This AI-based system makes decisions and takes actions on its own to achieve our goals on the basis of the travel scenario and what it knows about our holiday history and preferences.

Agents have started proliferating, as thousands of startups amp up their agents built on top of Large Language Models (LLMs). Genie by Gather helps parents manage their time, Minday scours the internet and mines your preferences to find the best restaurant or shop around you. 

Relevance AI automates prospect meetings for harried sales reps, and Greenlite creates digital compliance ‘workers’ for heavily regulated financial institutions. 

Also read: ChatGPT has ‘a little crush’ on its user; AI bot initiates conversation without prompt, ‘Did you settle in well?’

Klarna, a European fintech firm, made waves when its CEO said that customer service agents built on OpenAI platforms have ‘replaced’ 700 human agents, that they resolve queries in a fifth of the time it took humans, and it would translate to a thousand less human agents plus a $40 million positive bottom-line impact!

BigTech is betting big on agents and the last three weeks have been abuzz with Agentic AI announcements. At Salesforce’s summit Dreamforce, Marc Beinhoff launched Agentforce, its agentic AI suite. Oracle CloudWorld announced 50+ AI agents created with its cloud applications. 

AI major Microsoft released Copilot Agents in Wave 2 of its 365 copilot suite. Pioneer OpenAI announced a partnership wit T-mobile to create AI agents for its customer service platform. 

In fact, OpenAI’s started the whole wave with its Custom GPT store, where about 4 million of them jostled for space. These Custom GPTs were proto-agents.

AI agents will impact work, business, society and even humanity. I have written earlier about how the end of the app store is nigh as agent platforms replace them. 

The mighty smartphone will not be spared either, and the next evolution of it will be agent- and LLM-driven, rather than app- and OS-driven (like the Rabbit R1). AI will be the new user interface, so we can ‘talk’ to agents on our devices to get work done, instead of tapping or clicking. 

Also read: AI bot evolution: Agents will be the next big thing in artificial intelligence

In the enterprise software space, a new service-as-software, will replace the traditional SaaS, with agents bundling services and workflows. Diversity and inclusion plans may have to include non-humans!

The ethical impact of this is immense, and I will cover this in more detail in a subsequent article. However much we intend to have humans as pilots and AI agents as co-pilots, giving them agency would mean putting them in autopilot mode. We would need to take guardrails and regulations to a new level as AI agents proliferate among humans.

Well known AI author Max Tegmark is not wrong when he says that 2024 will be remembered as the year of AI agents and “they will be more of a new species than a new technology." How we work and live with this powerful agentic ‘species’ we have created for ourselves could define the course of humanity in the near future.