The Big Picture
AI is breaking out of its limited scope of assistance to engage more and more of the world through action. Over the next decade, we will see the rise of entire agent ecosystems—large networks of interconnected AI that will push enterprises to think about their intelligence and automation strategy in a fundamentally different way.
Today, most AI strategies are narrowly focused on assisting in task and function. To the extent that AI acts, it is as solitary actors, rather than an ecosystem of interdependent parts. But as AI evolves into agents, automated systems will make decisions and take actions on their own. Agents won’t just advise humans, they will act on humans’ behalf. AI will keep generating text, images, and insights, but agents will decide for themselves what to do with it.
As agents are promoted to become our colleagues and our proxies, we will need to reimagine the future of tech and talent together.
While this agent evolution is just getting underway, companies already need to start thinking about what’s next. Because if agents are starting to act, it won’t be long until they start interacting with each other. Tomorrow’s AI strategy will require the orchestration of an entire concert of actors: narrowly-trained AI, generalized agents, agents tuned for human collaboration, and agents designed for machine optimization.
But there’s a lot of work to do before AI agents can truly act on our behalf, or as our proxy. And still more before they can act in concert with each other. The fact is, agents are still getting stuck, misusing tools, and generating inaccurate responses—and these are errors that can compound quickly.
Humans and machines have been paired at the task-level, but leaders have never prepared for AI to operate our businesses—until today. As agents are promoted to become our colleagues and our proxies, we will need to reimagine the future of tech and talent together. It’s not just about new skills, it’s about ensuring that agents share our values and goals. Agents will help build our future world, and it’s our job to make sure it’s one we want to live in.
96% of executives agree leveraging AI agent ecosystems will be a significant opportunity for their organizations in the next 3 years.
The technology: From assistance to actions to ecosystems
As AI assistants mature into proxies that can act on behalf of humans, the resulting business opportunities will depend on three core capabilities: access to real time data and services; reasoning through complex chains of thought; and the creation of tools—not for human use, but for the use of the agents themselves.
Starting with access to real time data and services: When ChatGPT first launched, a common mistake people made was thinking the application was actively looking up information on the web. In reality, GPT-3.5 (the LLM upon which ChatGPT was initially launched) was trained on an extremely wide corpus of knowledge and drew on the relationships between that data to provide answers.
But new plugins to enable ChatGPT to access the internet were soon announced that could transform foundation models from powerful engines working in isolation to agents with the ability to navigate the current digital world. While plugins have powerful innovative potential on their own, they’ll also play a critical role in the emergence of agent ecosystems.
The second step in the agent evolution is the ability to reason and think logically—because even the simplest everyday actions for people require a series of complex instructions for machines. AI research is starting to break down barriers to machine reasoning. Chain-of-thought prompting is an approach developed to help LLMs better understand steps in a complex task.
Between chain-of-thought reasoning and plugins, AI has the potential to take on complex tasks by using both tighter logic and the abundance of digital tools available on the web. But what happens if the required solution isn’t yet available?
When humans face this challenge, we acquire or build the tools we need. AI used to rely on humans exclusively to grow its capabilities. But the third dimension of agency we are seeing emerge is the ability for AI to develop tools for itself.
The agent ecosystem may seem overwhelming. After all, beyond the three core capabilities of autonomous agents, we’re also talking about an incredibly complex orchestration challenge, and a massive reinvention of your human workforce to make it all possible. It’s enough to leave leaders wondering where to start. The good news is existing digital transformation efforts will go a long way to giving enterprises a leg up.
The implications: Aligning tech and talent in the workforce
What happens when the agent ecosystem gets to work? Whether as our assistants or as our proxies, the result will be explosive productivity, innovation and the revamping of the human workforce. As assistants or copilots, agents could dramatically multiply the output of individual employees. In other scenarios, we will increasingly trust agents to act on our behalf. As our proxies, they could tackle jobs currently performed by humans, but with a giant advantage—a single agent could wield all of your company’s knowledge and information.
Businesses will need to think about the human and technological approaches they need to support these agents. From a technology side, a major consideration will be how these entities identify themselves. And the impacts on human workers—their new responsibilities, roles, and functions—demand even deeper attention. To be clear, humans aren’t going anywhere. Humans will make and enforce the rules for agents.
Rethinking human talent
In the era of agent ecosystems, your most valuable employees will be those best equipped to set the guidelines for agents. A company’s level of trust in their autonomous agents will determine the value those agents can create, and your human talent is responsible for building that trust.
But agents also need to understand their limits. When does an agent have enough information to act alone, and when should it seek support before taking action? Humans will decide how much independence to afford their autonomous systems.
What companies can do now
What can you do now to set your human and agent workforce up for success? Give agents a chance to learn about your company, and give your company a chance to learn about agents.
Companies can start by weaving the connective fabric between agents’ predecessors, LLMs, and their support systems. By fine-tuning LLMs on your company’s information, you are giving foundation models a head-start at developing expertise.
It's also time to introduce humans to their future digital co-workers. Companies can lay the foundation for trust with future agents by teaching their workforce to reason with existing intelligent technologies. Challenge your employees to discover and transcend the limits of existing autonomous systems.
Finally, let there be no ambiguity about your company’s North Star. Every action your agents take will need to be traced back to your core values and a mission, so it is never too early to operationalize your values from the top to the bottom of your organization.
Security implications
From a security standpoint, agent ecosystems will need to provide transparency into their processes and decisions. Consider the growing recognition of the need for a software bill of materials – a clear list of all the code components and dependencies that make up a software application – so as to let companies and agencies under the hood. Similarly, an agent bill of materials could help explain and track agent decision-making.
What logic did the agent follow to make a decision? Which agent made the call? What code was written? What data was used and with whom was that data shared? The better we can trace and understand agent decision-making processes, the more we can trust agents to act on our behalf.
Conclusion
Agent ecosystems have the potential to multiply enterprise productivity and innovation to a level that humans can hardly comprehend. But they will only be as valuable as the humans that guide them; human knowledge and reasoning will give one network of agents the edge over another. Today, artificial intelligence is a tool. In the future, AI agents will operate our companies. It is our job to make sure they don’t run amok. Given the pace of AI evolution, the time to start onboarding your agents is now.
