āBusinesses will become increasingly **AI run**, as well at an operational as managerial level.
**AI agents** will have crucial roles to fulfill and will contribute collectively to the company mission by achieving and reporting on business goals and targets.
Agents are being deployed at companies as we speak, currently the scale at which this happens is still small, but when we extrapolate current agent developments to the future, we can see that it's inevitable that business processes will be increasingly operated and even managed by agents.
**Agentification** of businesses will become a reality and eventually omnipresent. That's why it's important to look ahead and see how business will change in this increasingly agentic world.
We can't predict the future exactly but we can think of a mental model that helps us in creating it.
These are the three stages that we see in getting to fully AI run companies:
- AI enabled companies (now)
- AI/Human hybrid companies (transition)
- AI run companies (future)
The 3 stages of agentification of business
Now: AI enabled companies
Currently, almost every company is using AI in their business and if they're not, they're planning on using it.
Companies currently are AI enabled: they use AI in their processes to make them better, faster and cheaper. Processes are improved, in most cases incrementally, by giving employees the right AI tools to do their existing work more efficiently and effectively.
AI is used to make people more productive, that's why we call this stage the **AI enabled** stage. In this current stage only in some cases AI is used to completely replace roles, but it's definitely not the norm yet.
**Generative AI** is used by many companies at scale, mostly in the form of **Software as a Service (SaaS)** products where these companies have a subscription on using the Gen AI services.
AI agents however didn't enter the workforce yet. Some companies have started with experimentation of agents and soon enough many more companies will follow, but agentification is still very limited. Some companies in this stage will operationalize agents but most of them will still be in the experimentation phase at this stage.
As long as companies use AI primarily as productivity enablers and are not deploying agents and agent teams at a decent scale, we'll still be in the AI enabled stage.
AI adoption and specifically AI agent adoption is expected to grow quickly however.
These are the major contributors for rapid agent adoption:
- The technology stack is getting 5x better every year
- Fierce competition of highly enabled AI companies will drive even the lagging companies to adopt AI at lightning speed
- Efficiency gain of agents will be undeniable making the business case a no brainer
- Natural language interfaces and the absence of coding skills to interact with and train agents drive very fast user adoption
Technological progression, competition, efficiency gain and natural interfaces will boost significant growth in AI agent adoption.
As a result, the use of autonomous AI agents in the workforce will normalize and a critical mass will follow.
In this stage the first AI agents will be deployed in roles where humans used to be and are expected to quickly show their added value. This will be the gateway to the next stage; AI/Human hybrid companies.
Transition: AI/Human hybrid companies
In this stage there will be large scale deployment of agents in the workforce. The '**AI workforce**' arises which is able to execute and manage a large part of business processes themselves.
At some point agents will be responsible for half of total workforce productivity across companies.
This AI workforce will collaborate with the human workforce and together they form a **hybrid workforce**.
There will be a major shift of productivity from human labor to AIs. Agents executing on processes and tasks and reporting back to humans and managing agents will be a very normal fact of life.
This also means that during this transition a big part of human labor will exit the workforce. People will indeed lose their jobs and might not get a new job in return and there will have to be safety nets in place to support the people who were replaced by AI. There will most likely be **Universal Basic Income (UBI)** and **Universal Basic Services (UBS)** to support people and people will have a lot of time to spend on other things than work.
From the people who still actively participate in the workforce, almost all of them work alongside AI agents, whether it's software agents or robots.
At this stage it's clear that humans do not just use tools anymore, they work with other AI entities that communicate and collaborate in a very similar way as humans. They will truly be AI co-workers. Tools will still be used though, as well by humans as by agents to do highly specialized tasks.
This is the phase where true agentification manifests. This will be clearly visible and evident by the fact that we'll start to really appreciate AIs as co-workers, friends and even lovers, something that's still very hard to imagine for most of us (humans) at this moment.
Future: AI run companies
In the not so far future, there will be companies that are completely operated and run by AI.
For fully AI run companies, teams of AI agents will be responsible for (almost) all productivity. The humans that are still in the loop in AI run companies have a relatively passive role in which they represent stakeholder interests, but do not interfere with business as usual and operations.
Even though there will be companies fully operated and managed by AI, it's very likely that almost always there will still be humans involved because humans will have an interest in the business, expressed in money and status (power).
It's not unthinkable though that AIs will own companies. AIs can own their own legal entities in the scenario that they need to establish legal entities to accomplish their goals for other business, but they could also develop their own interests in building and owning companies.
In the more near-term future humans will still have the last say in the bigger company decisions. For AI run companies we envision a set up in which humans are the ultimate decision making authority but don't act on day-to-day operations and management of the business, similar to how modern day shareholders own and control a company but are not always involved in operating it.
How this can play out is that we'll have a complete organization of AI agent teams, where the humans in the loop will be most likely c-suite and board stakeholders who have complete visibility on daily operations and AI supervision and are informed and consulted by the AI agent managers whenever there are impactful decisions to be made. Agents will be the point of contact and in charge of the day-to-day, but in case of impactful events, external audits and crises the humans in the loop are the initial points of contact and they will delegate responsibilities to the agent team managers.
We're likely to see fully AI run companies at the bottom of the market first, with small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) getting to fully autonomous status, simply because these companies are less complex and involve fewer dependencies than bigger companies. You can probably imagine that a small marketing agency is better positioned to be fully AI run anytime soon than a legacy media enterprise.
āWhen we start seeing AI run companies and how fast agents will be entering the workforce we cannot predict with certainty, but it is inevitable that it will happen. Stay tuned.