How Every Employee Becomes an "Agent Boss"

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, the rise of the agent boss and the birth of the frontier firm. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes.

0:18Hey, hello, friends. Quick note, today's main episode ended up running very long. It's a really interesting exploration of the fast coming future, as you'll see. And so I decided to just let it rip as of the entire episode. Tomorrow, we will be back with our normal headlines as well. But for now, enjoy this report about the Frontier Firm. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Well, friends, you know that we love nothing more here at the AI Daily Brief than a big prognosticating report. And boy, does this year's Work Trend Index deliver. Now, for a little bit of context, you guys have probably heard me talk about the previous iteration of this report numerous times, right?

0:54Back at the beginning of 2024, Microsoft and LinkedIn put out their annual Work Trend Index, which came out of a survey of something like 30 ,000 or 31 ,000 knowledge workers and had some really interesting insights. The two big things that stood out from 2024 were that one, people were using AI. At the time, they found that 75 % of global knowledge workers were using generative AI and that number had doubled in the last six months. And the second thing was this sort of secret cyborgs insight where 78 % of those using AI were bringing their own tools to work and effectively doing it secretly. This year's report, if nothing else, shows how dramatically things have changed in just a year.

1:33This year's report really shows how there's been a move away from sort of bottoms-up, employee-led AI adoption into thinking about how AI is going to change the firm from a top-down structural level, which isn't to say, as we'll see, that bottom-up adoption doesn't matter. But what bottom-up adoption looks like is very, very different than what we thought it was going to be last year, where at this point, employees were mostly just looking to not be punished for using ChatGPT at work. Now, this was all part of a larger announcement. In fact, yesterday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tweeted, big day for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

2:08Copilot has truly become the UI for AI, and for me, it's the scaffolding for my workday. He then pointed to four new features that he's been using. The first, unsurprisingly, is agents. Satya writes, our new researcher and analyst agents have become my go-to 24-7 experts. I use them all the time. With Researcher, the multi-step reasoning aggregates and synthesizes information from the web and all enterprise data and creates super insightful reports on any topic or project. And Analysts can turn raw data across multiple sources into deep insights, forecasts, or a great visualization. Satya also points out that they're launching a new agent store.

2:42So sorry, Microsoft, I like you. I apologize that we're going to have to out-compete you with our marketplace, but at least the competition will be fun. And he also talks about Copilot Studio, where you can build your own agents. Now, there's a bunch of other features that Satya talks about as well. Continuing the really interesting theme of companies consolidating around similar naming, Microsoft now has its own version of notebooks. Satya writes, with notebooks, I can organize all my heterogeneous data for a project, whether it's pages, docs, websites, team meetings, and Copilot will ground itself from that content.

3:10And I can turn it all into a new modality like an audio overview. Now, I'm being serious when I say that I actually like that companies are naming similar products, similar things. Deep research is now a category. Notebooks is apparently now a category. And what makes this powerful is that it allows people to think in terms of new AI primitives and product categories rather than being forced to learn some new branding. I wouldn't have expected the branding of these products to evolve in this way, but I actually think that it's quite consumer-friendly. In the short term, it might be confusing because you don't know if you're talking about Google's Notebooks LM or Microsoft's Notebooks, but I think that you're already seeing, especially with deep research.

3:49What's important about it is that it's now a category of behavior. And yes, of course, you're going to have your preferred tool. But ultimately, what matters is that you know that that's a category of behavior, a category of actions you can take that is roughly consistent from platform to platform. There's also a couple other cool things. They've expanded their enterprise search, which is a huge area of development for companies. And they have a new tool to turn one type of content into another. For example, turning a PowerPoint into an explainer video. So these were all new features that were released around the report this year, which I think makes a lot of sense to combine not only a big report, but tools that make the trends come to life.

4:24And especially as we compare this to 2024's work trend index, it's clear that we're coming up on or have actually reached an inflection point when it comes to enterprise AI. Aparna Chennepragada, the chief product officer of Experiences and Devices at Microsoft, did an interview with VentureBeat about this and said, we're around the corner from a big moment in the AI world. It started out with all of the model advances, and everyone's been really excited about it, and the intelligence abundance. Now it's about making sure the intelligence is available to all of the folks, especially at work. She also talked about these two new AI agents, the researcher and the analyst agent, saying, think of them as a really smart researcher and a data scientist in your pocket.

5:03And I think as you'll see, this is really important because effectively, this is not just thinking about an agent as a tool, but thinking about agents truly as a colleague or a co-worker. And that gets us to the actual WorkTrend Index, which they call the year the frontier firm is born. And right there, even in the title, you can tell that this is about firm-wide structural change, not just individual employee productivity. Which is not to say that productivity doesn't matter. One of the big trends that Microsoft saw with their survey this year was this capacity gap between 53 % of leaders saying that productivity needs to increase, but 80 % of the global workforce, including both employees and leaders, saying that they lacked enough time or energy to do their work.

5:44Anyone who's dealt with enterprises, particularly around AI transformation, has had this experience where the constraint on adoption is the simple reality that people just don't have time to sit down and figure out the tools. And these are hands-on tools that you have to figure out by using them. Now, interestingly, Microsoft also points out that 82 % of leaders expect to use agents to meet the demand for more workforce capacity. Again, not to beat a dead drum, but in a single year, actually less than a year, because the last survey came out in May, we've gone from 75 % of knowledge workers using AI and 80 % of them doing it secretly to 82 % of leaders expecting to use agents to expand their team's capacity.

6:24If that doesn't put a fine point on just how fast things are changing, I don't know what does. And indeed, really the big new force throughout this report is the emergence of agents and what agents represent as an actual augmentation of the workforce, a new set of digital workers. Microsoft sees the evolution to a quote-unquote frontier firm happening in three phases. Phase one, they call human with assistant. Every employee has an AI assistant that helps them work better and faster. Now, interestingly, if we go back to KPMG's recent Pulse survey, at this point, this seems like total table stakes.

6:58Remember, between Q4 of last year and Q1 of this year, KPMG found that weekly knowledge assistant usage was up from 48 to 61 percent, and daily usage of AI productivity tools had gone from 22 percent to 58 percent. Just an absolutely huge acceleration. Today's episode is brought to you by Vanta. Vanta is a trust management platform that helps businesses automate security and compliance, enabling them to demonstrate strong security practices and scale. In today's business landscape, businesses can't just claim security, they have to prove it. Achieving compliance with a framework like SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, and more is how businesses can demonstrate strong security practices.

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8:56prompts and workflow IP. Make your life easier, your clients happier, and your business thrive with Plum. Sign up today at useplum.com. That's Plum with a B forward slash NLW. Today's episode is brought to you by Superintelligent, and I am very excited today to tell you about our consultant partner program. The new Superintelligent is a platform that helps enterprises figure out which agents to adopt, and then with our marketplace, go and find the partners that can help them actually build, buy, customize, and deploy those agents. At the key of that experience is what we call our agent readiness audits.

9:29We deploy a set of voice agents which can interview people across your team to uncover where agents are going to be most effective in driving real business value. From there, we make a set of recommendations which can turn into RFPs on the marketplace or other sort of change management activities that help get you ready for the new agent-powered economy. We are finding a ton of success right now with consultants bringing the agent readiness audits to their client is a way to help them move down the funnel towards agent deployments, with the consultant playing the role of helping their client hone in on the right opportunities based on what we've recommended and helping manage the partner selection process.

10:04Basically, the audits are dramatically reducing the time to discovery for our consulting partners, and that's something we're really excited to see. If you run a firm and have clients who might be a good fit for the agent readiness audit, reach out to agent at bsuper.ai with consultant in the title, and we'll get right back to you with more on the Consultant Partner Program. Again, that's agent at bsuper.ai, and put the word consultant in the subject line. So back to the frontier firm. Phase one is human with assistant. Phase two is human agent teams. Agents join teams as digital colleagues taking on specific tasks at human direction.

10:39This is where a lot of the discourse is right now. Jason Clinton, the chief information security officer at Anthropic, recently did an interview with Axios where he said that the company thinks that fully AI employees are just about a year away at this point. Phase three of the frontier firm, Microsoft sees as human-led agent-operated. Humans set direction and agents execute business processes and workflows checking in as needed. This is highly resonant from where I sit with all of our conversations at Superintelligent and where it seems to me that things are going. I mentioned before that right now, even the advanced firms still tend to view agents as one-to-one replacements for or augmenters of specific tasks or roles or functions.

11:20And that makes sense if we're in this sort of phase two of human agent teams. I've also shared my view that in the future, we're not going to hire one agent for something. We're going to deploy a thousand agents. We're going to have agent swarms. We're going to have battle games type scenarios. And that looks a lot like this idea of a phase three of a human-led agent operated firm. But aside from just prognostications, what are the interesting numbers that Microsoft actually found around all of this? First of all, they certainly found a lot of reasons for and justifications of why employee productivity is hampered.

11:51They found that on average, employees are interrupted every two minutes by meetings, emails, or other types of notifications. The net total for the average employee was 275 interruptions in a day. 60 % of meetings were ad hoc rather than scheduled. Chats outside of the workday are up 15 % year over year. Meetings after 8pm are also up 16 % year over year. Around 50 % of both leaders and employees say their work feels chaotic and fragmented. But how are firms actually thinking about change? Well, again, another big change between these two years is that if the 2024 Work Trend Index showed the story of bottom-up adoption, this year shows a story of much more top-down approaches.

12:31The Microsoft study found 81 % of business decision makers reporting that they want to rethink core strategy and operations with AI that's very different than just thinking about employee productivity. Microsoft's Chena Pregata said, that's a shift between even last year where it was much more bottom-up and employee-led. What that tells us is that there needs to be much more of a top-down AI strategy, but also AI products that you roll out in the enterprise with security, compliance, all of the guardrails. So what are the priorities for these firms and how are they thinking about change internally?

13:01One of the questions was about ranking most likely strategies. The percentages reflect the share of respondents who ranked the answer as a top three most likely strategy. Down at the bottom, the least popular answer was no change to workforce strategy. The most popular answer was prioritizing AI-specific skilling of existing workforce. And in some ways, that reflects continuity with last year. However, one, the percentage that prioritize AI-specific skilling of existing workforce as a top three likely strategy was only 47%, even though that was the top answer. 47 % is, I think, quite a bit lower than the type of reporting we would have seen last year.

13:37Meanwhile, the number that are willing to admit that they're thinking about using AI to reduce headcount being a third, 33%, is up fairly meaningfully from where we might have been last year. I tend to think that that has more to do with macroeconomic instability and big questions around the global work environment than it does around just AI capabilities, but whatever the case, I do think we're in the midst of a shift of prioritization. Now, positively, there is clearly a lot of interest in using digital labor as supplemental. Just behind prioritizing AI-specific skilling of existing workforce was maintaining headcount but using AI as digital labor.

14:1545 % of respondents had that as a top three most likely strategy. 32 % had increasing headcount to support business needs. And 40 % said that a top strategy was prioritizing retention with long-term incentives and bonuses. And so yes, I do think inevitably more companies are thinking about AI as a possible headcount reducer, but that's far from the only trend. And in fact, I think net-net, there's really positive indications that these leaders who want to become frontier firms are thinking about AI more as an opportunity technology than as an efficiency technology exclusively to use a parlance that I've adopted before.

14:49Now, one other totally unsurprising statistic is that companies are definitely hiring for AI-specific roles. 78 % of leaders overall are considering hiring for these types of roles, and that number hits 95 % when you ask frontier firms. The roles include things like AI trainers, data specialists, security specialists, AI agent specialists, ROI analysts, as well as AI strategists in specific functional areas like marketing, finance, customer support, and consulting. The next big section of the report is called Human Agent Teams Will Upend the Org Chart, And this gets into that phase two of human agent teams, where agents join teams as digital colleagues taking on specific tasks at human direction.

15:25A couple interesting observations from this. One theme that I think you'll hear a lot more about, because it's a very crisp way of explaining this change, Microsoft argues that the traditional org chart may increasingly be replaced by a work chart, what they call a dynamic outcome-driven model where teams form around goals, not functions, powered by agents that expand employee scope and enable faster, more impactful ways of working. They compare this to movie production, where it's not like you have a single org chart. You have dynamic teams that are assembled for the specific roles in a temporary sort of fashion to get the specific jobs done.

15:58We also started to get some numbers from Microsoft here around agents. 46 % said that their companies are using agents to fully automate workflows or processes. And we also got some information around which different areas are seeing the most adoption. Not surprisingly, it's areas like marketing, customer success, internal communications, and data science where agentic systems are most breaking out. The survey also explored the specific reasons that agents in AI are being turned to. And while none of this is particularly surprising, it's still really interesting to see displayed in this way. The most frequent response for why an employee or a team member might turn to AI is 24-7 availability.

16:35After that are things like speed, limitless capacity, and the endless stream of ideas on demand. And yet for all that's interesting about this sort of phase two of human-agent relationships, it all does kind of feel like it's prelude to part three. Phase three is where, as Microsoft puts it, every employee becomes an agent boss. They define an agent boss as someone who builds, delegates to, and manages agents to amplify their impact. Working smarter, scaling faster, and taking control of their career. And although it's early, there are already indications that this is the place we're trending to.

17:0828 % of managers are considering hiring AI workforce managers to lead hybrid teams of people and agents. 32 % plan to hire AI agent specialists to design, develop, and optimize them within the next 12 to 18 months. In the next five years, 41 % of leaders said that their teams will be training agents. 38 % said they'll be redesigning business processes. 42 % said they'll be building multi-agent systems to automate complex tasks. Now, along with this shift to agentic thinking, leaders versus employees have started to race ahead. The survey introduced seven indicators to identify who has a quote, agent boss mindset.

17:42Things like familiarity with agents, regular AI usage, trusting AI for high stakes work, expectations to manage agents, using AI as a thought partner, and more. And leaders were ahead on all of those different areas. Microsoft summed up, last year employees led the AI wave, this year it's flipped. What explains the gap? We expect it's because leaders are the first to feel the pressure to have an AI strategy, and the first to be held accountable for making it work. They see what's coming and know they can't afford to wait. This part, though, is also really important. Microsoft continues, Managing agents also plays to their strengths.

18:14Delegating, guiding, and stepping in when needed. And this is really important. In a world of agents, everyone is going to be more like a manager than they are today. When you have hundreds or thousands of agents available on demand for you for any type of function you want, you're going to have to get good at coordinating them, orchestrating their actions, figuring out how to plan around their capabilities. This is in many ways the biggest shift that we're likely to see. And I will also say this, this is the biggest reason that the current crop of upskilling platforms is woefully out of touch with the actual needs of modern employees.

18:49I say this as someone who started a couple years ago a platform specifically to upskill employees with AI. The reason that we have been so aggressive about pivoting and changing what that company does and responding to the actual changes in the marketplace is that this is where things are headed. AI success will not be. It isn't even now. Is your team good at using individual co-pilot or assistant tools? Long-term success with AI, real transformation, is going to be about fundamentally reimagining the structure of organizations and empowering individuals and teams to manage armies of agents to do things that are literally not possible right now.

19:28That is a very, very different challenge than making sure that people are good at prompting chat GPT. And I think too much of our upskilling conversation is stuck in that old way of thinking from, you know, the ancient days of 12 months ago. In any case, as you can probably tell, I think that even more than last year, this work trend index is hugely instructive for where the enterprise is trending and what AI and agent adoption is going to look like inside companies. I would highly encourage you to spend some time with the report, check it out, think about the implications for your company. I'll insert a standard shill here for super intelligent and our agent readiness audits, which can help you better understand the specific implications for your specific company.

20:07But whatever you're doing to get prepared, the takeaway is that you have to be doing something because the future is increasingly here and coming at us a lot faster than even it seemed like just a year ago. For now, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always. And until next time, peace.

20:27Thank you.