Linked – AI Agents Come For White Collar Jobs
One story in the newsletter is linked below, but it’s interesting. As I watched Mircosoft’s Copilot Wave 2 announcement earlier this week, I thought that the description of Copilot agents does not match the positioning of previous Microsoft messages about AI.
How often have we watched a C-level person from Microsoft remind us that AI will not take our jobs but help us do our jobs better? It was there to assist us, not work for us.
“It’s even in the name, Copilot.”
When I heard them talk about agents being our team members and eventually managing other agents and their tasks, I immediately thought this was no longer a copilot. If it’s a team member, that means fewer human team members to do the work.
To grab a quote from the article:
AI agents will increasingly take on significant portions of white-collar work. This would transform industries like law, medicine, and software development, leaving humans to focus more on high-level strategy and oversight.
There are two points I want to make about this, and neither of them is positive.
- The author goes on to describe how these agents will interact and perform mundane tasks like tech support, answering customer questions, etc. But no one wants them. Customers do not want to interact with bots and AI agents. They’ll be given no choice because businesses will find them cheaper and easier to deal with than employees, but we’ll all hate them a little more.
- This promise that humans can focus on high-level strategy and oversight is misleading. Consider your run-of-the-mill corporation. How many people work there? What percentage of them have input to the company’s high-level strategy? It’s pretty tiny. If you work in response to requests, that’s not focusing on strategy. If an AI agent can respond to those exact requests, what is your role in the future?
The quote above is used in the article, but it’s originally from an Andreesen Horowitz article. It highlights three prominent industries we previously believed were irreplaceable. You can’t replace lawyers, doctors, and programmers with AI; it’s not intelligent enough to do the work.
In some ways, that’s true. In many other ways, it isn’t. Could an AI agent take information from a user and draw up a will, a contract, a divorce, or other legal work? Absolutely. There are products out there doing those kinds of things. How soon will clients use AI to answer most legal questions without a per-hour fee or get medical information without a doctor’s visit?
How soon before AI writes most code?
I’d argue that those things are a given. That work is going away, and businesses will not hesitate to employ fewer humans as AI matures into a space where it takes on more tasks and coordinates complex workflows with little human involvement.
Read more about what the folks at The Tech Buzz had to say about it, too:
https://www.thetech.buzz/p/ai-agents-for-white-collar-jobs
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