Ep 830: Faster AI Agents, Fewer Human Coworkers: The Overly Productive Future of Managing Agents?

This is the Everyday AI Show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business and everyday life. I am the only full-time employee at Everyday AI. Sure, I have a few contractors helping out but I'm the only full-time human responsible for creating this daily podcast that reaches millions of people a year. Others are kind of always shocked to hear that as most of the other top 25 tech podcasts have large teams to produce the same amount that we produce. But do you know what I do all day? I just manage agents. I mean literally right now I have Codex running with at least 50 sub agents active. I have Codex controlling Cloud Code and I have scheduled agents running in Google Gemini, CloudCode, Co-Pilot and others. Maybe I'm a little overly productive from a single human to output perspective but it's about to get worse or maybe better depending on your perspective. That's because as soon as today or Friday at the latest we'll have a new OpenAI model powered by SyrieBrus that runs up to 20 times faster than their current models at the same capabilities. And that coming thinking what the heck is the future of working to be like? I mean I'm already agent pill then producing more content and hopefully value than much larger teams with many more humans. So what happens when all of my agents are 20 times faster? I'm not sure yet but I wanted to kind of opine about that out loud on today's show and explore this weird conversions that we're in now because not only are agents producing economically valuable work end to end at a higher quality bar than expert humans but now we are entering a new phase where those AI agents might be working 20 times faster. And I don't know if anyone truly understands what this convergence means for the future of work but let's unpack it and see what we might come up with anyways on today's episode of Everyday AI. So here is the big picture. What the heck is going to happen when millions of professionals like me and you business leaders that are on the cutting edge of AI what's going to happen when we just become managers of faster agents and they become more powerful. Right now AI is fast and parallel enough that one person can direct dozens of agents a day. That's pretty much all I do all day but opening AI as well we are seeing maybe by the time you're listening to this it will already be released but at least as of now you know the rumors are saying that we're going to be getting a new opening AI model powered by cerebral. That's essentially this really fast chip and essentially let's say you put you know a very you know smart agent out there and it thinks and you know normally it takes five minutes and you get a great output. Well what happens when that five minutes becomes 30 seconds and normally you go I don't know manage other agents or do other tasks during that time that you're waiting what happens when things are just instantly done and the upside here is is real right with workers reporting more autonomy and more outputs but the risk is maybe a workday spent managing machines while human trust and mentorship quietly just thins out. So on today's show here's what you're going to learn you're going to know why employees are increasingly asking agents before managers specialist or awkward conversations. You're going to understand how faster inference turns solo work into supervising parallel machine teams. You're going to know how winning companies can empower human judgment while still automating most of the manual knowledge work and you're going to leave the show with the three human handoffs to protect before your workflow quietly deletes them. All right welcome to every day AI if you're new here my name's Jordan Wilson we do this every day it's for you it's your daily unedited unscripted live stream podcasts and free daily newsletter helping business leaders like you and me keep up with drinking from the fire hose of new AI updates I turn that fire hose down I serve you nice glass of water and say here this is what matters today go take this information and share it with your team and become really smart AI so that's what we do here hopefully the podcast is helpful if you didn't know we recap it all in our daily newsletter so make sure that you go check out our newsletter for that and all of the other AI news all right so when did this start happening I'm not sure as someone that follows this every single day this kind of convergence now that is maybe going to start today for people on the edge of the edge but I think the rest of the enterprise will start to feel this in maybe six to nine months but we are now going to be at this convergence very quickly where we've had these extremely capable agents now for the most part running on desktop so whether you're using codex chat you can see work clawed desktop something else right but I'd say those and maybe cursor are the big players and at least when it comes to people number of people using them I don't think Google is there just yet with you know anti-gravity or their Gemini desktop Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella did mention again yesterday they're super app coming out so I do know that most of our many of our listeners out there are using Microsoft Windows and in co-pilot so you'll be living in this world soon too if you haven't already maybe with you know co-pilot co-work but we're at this place now where we have these agents that if you know what you're doing they will literally on demand output the same level the same asset the same deliverable as expert humans right we see this in important benchmarks like GDP Val that you know a human and a large language model get the same inputs and then they create outputs they're judged blindly by subject matter experts and you know we're at the point now where AI models win or tie about 90% of the time so AI models or AI agents can actually do the same work that humans do and create these assets or artifacts or deliverables which is cool and all right but you know I'd say the downside no it's not even technically a downside right I always tell people be a little patient but you have to number one know what you're doing number two you have to understand kind of agent guardrails and context engineering which those are kind of basics tables table states now but number three is a little bit of time right and that little bit of time is now what could be changing today whereas before you know I have agents that work for many hours but I'd say my average agent task maybe lasts about five minutes so for the most part all day I'm just flipping between agents right and one of the big things I like doing is doing that on a chat Gbt voice mode but what happens then when that five minutes the becomes 30 seconds right I think of so much of what I actually accomplish day-to-day it's when I'm waiting for agents I go check in on other agents so then at least you know by the time the day is done right in theory I've had time to check in and look at those artifacts and look at those outputs and you know manually approve that so what happens when things go faster well one thing is I think where we're gonna start is workers are just gonna start asking agents now right because not only is this convergence of these two things happening faster and smarter agents but also that takes away I think ultimately human connection and I think where you know people for the last 20 years right maybe I've been guilty of this managing people in the past and maybe you said this or it's happened to you but you know saying hey did you Google that right now one of the things is gonna be like hey did you ask our agents on that which isn't necessarily a bad thing in theory right but it's gonna take away human connection right even for me right I started the show by saying I'm the only employee at every day the only full-time employee at every day I'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing but I'm not talking to a lot of humans all day right for the most part I'm talking with agents again pros and cons good and bad I'm able to produce a lot more but maybe I'm getting fewer outside perspectives that are tied to my own custom instructions and I name data that I'm feeding these models but right now studies show so Adobe just came out with an interesting study this month that showed that 68% of people ask agents obvious questions and only 4% of those people would ask their managers so people are like more than 15 times 16 times more likely to ask an agent something then ask their manager again not saying that's a bad thing but what does that do to human connection and workers chose the agent because it answers instantly and never makes them feel unprepared or dumb and then once that agent answers first workers kind of stopped routing the work to specialists too because then they build more trust and they're like okay well I was gonna ask my manager on this but the agent did great and I was gonna take this over to the product team but I asked our agent and it that did great too right so you know you start to be able to build faster in silos, uh, versus is maybe building more intentionally at a slower pace, but in a collaborative fashion. So. Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on Gen AI. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And so the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for chat GPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you can partner with us too, just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everydayai.com/partner to get in contact with our team or you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on Gen AI. That's the other thing is now all of a sudden we're getting a lot more skills that we didn't have before. And we're able to attempt work that we couldn't previously because we have a new set of skills. Kind of the best way for me to look at this, way back in the day, you know, I used to have a marketing and advertising agency. Right? Kind of a big part of my background is, you know, I was a writer, I was a journalist before. And you know, as a marketer, sometimes you have to wear many hats. But at a bigger company, a lot of times you have people who are specialists. Right? You have people who just maybe write Google ads. And that's all they've done for, you know, 20 years. You know, now it's getting to the point where one marketer, maybe they can't do it at an A rating, but they could maybe do 20 jobs that have B rating. Whereas before, maybe they only had one specialty. Right? So now, as we get collectively better in the enterprise, that sharing our skill sets, recording and distributing kind of our nuance, understanding and kind of internal IP, so to speak, and give that to others via shared agents or shared skills. Right? All of a sudden, individual humans don't always need, while their manager's approval or even a specialist to help complete the work. And every handoff, right, those handoffs, the human, human handoff that we're starting to decrease, it deletes a human conversation. It deletes mentorship. Right? Handoff is kind of once something is carried through explanation, correction, introduction, in a moment of shared context. So it was purplies. I believe that's how it's pronounced purplies. May 20, 20, 6th study that found that 63% of people used AI to avoid a difficult workplace conversation. Right? And that's, you know, that one skipped conversation multiplies. And I think you also start to get internal project drift there, but I think so much of even, I'm thinking of where I am today. Right? Probably the reason, maybe, why I've been able to have whatever level of success that I have with this weird little podcast thing is, you know, I had a lot of great mentors throughout the years. I learned from very smart people and sometimes that comes from conversations when things go awry, you know, or when things go great and having that be a teachable moment. So I'm just thinking, you know, yes, there's, you know, working with agents, you can get all those things and build them in, but, you know, agents by default are sometimes overly sick of phantastic, you know, and then I think you can almost develop a certain AI psychosis, you know, in the good way or bad way versus well, when you had a team of humans and collaborating more with humans, I don't think that that was as big of a problem. Right? Working in these silos that yes, maybe you are, you know, two, three, four, five times more productive in terms of the business value that you're able to create, but at what cost. So the translation here as well, we have more collective skills that we didn't have before, and we also have fewer productivity roadblocks, right? The two things that I just covered. And well, that gives us all the reason to be more productive and well, things are getting faster now too. That's because, you know, today, maybe tomorrow, but opening, I said in July that they're going to release the new GBD56 soul on the cerebrus chip, which is up to 750 tokens per second. So if you don't speak tokens, that's about it. 20 times faster than the current models, right? So if you go into, you know, codex like I do and, you know, you turn on, you know, GBD56 soul, and you put it on, you know, extra high or high or ultra or something like that, even if you're throwing a hard task, you know, you might only have to wait five, six, seven minutes. Now, I've said, and that's going to be a matter of seconds. So the value there is, it's the throughput. It's with the research, the drafting analysis and review, all running simultaneously. So a slow agent is a tool that you wait on. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing because what I have always done when I'm waiting on agents, I'm usually reading the chain of thought, right? If in that five minutes, I'm literally looking at the chain of thought, I'm making sure that it's calming the right tools. I'm making sure it's pulling in all the correct dynamic data because it's like, what else am I going to do? Well, yeah, probably multi task with some, some different agents and go in and check on my blue lights that require my input, but ultimately I'm spending more time doing it being the expert driven loop, right? So I think that this is actually could be a big problem, right? When AI is almost too fast, even the people that are maybe trying to be responsible, right? All of a sudden, everyone knows. I mean, you know, in a year or so, everyone's going to know, oh, the AI is going to be way more powerful and it's going to be even faster. Whereas right now, if you're using AI in the right way, in theory, right, you're getting more done, but it's you, it's almost like you're going slower, but way faster. You know, it's like, you're waiting, but you're accomplishing more, right? So instead of working on how we would traditionally do it, you know, in pre-AI days, you know, me, one human, I would work on one project across these 20 little steps. Now, conversely, I'm working on 20 little projects and my only one step is just checking in on what the agents are doing, right? But, you know, usually I stagger it in a way where I can understand kind of, you know, prioritize, explainability and, you know, making sure the guard rails that accept are being followed, making sure my agents are crashing all of these things. But what happens when it's just done? Am I still going to go and do that? I hope so, but when things are done faster and when the models are smarter, won't my human nature just be to be like, well, I should go grow the business in a new way. I should go get more and more things done, right? A fast, just team just now needs more management. So directing agents is just middle management without the manager title, right? I do see the future where most, you know, most knowledge, you know, subject matter experts, most people, if you're a knowledge worker, you sit in front of a computer and you create value for your business, which is what many of us do. I think people, for the most part, you're going to be like a middle manager, right? Just agents. I like, I actually think that in theory, the middle management layer is going to get bigger and thicker. I think there's going to be fewer people at the entry level. I think there's going to be fewer people in the, you know, the VPC, C suite director level. I think for the most part, you know, your average knowledge worker, that middle, middle management tier, right? When we think it's not really needed, well, I think true, you know, if we look at the middle management today in an AI native world, it's not needed. But I think just everyone else is going to become kind of that middle layer, right? People are going to be managing more agents, not people. And yes, there's still going to be, you know, humans reporting up the food chain. But I think for the most part, the overwhelming majority of work is actually going to get done in that middle management layer, or traditionally, that's not where the work gets done, right? They're just managing people. So it's, I think that's ultimately what's going to happen. But I think it's normal in AI native companies for decision makers to just publish an agent to help to speed up productivity, right? We've seen these stories where literally, you know, a CEO or a VP or, you know, some of that manages a big department at a huge company is just literally unloading their entire brain and decision making process and all their documents and all of these things into an agent, right? Let's say it's, you know, marketing Jane at a Fortune 500 company, you know, Jane just, you know, dumps her brain, her decision making process, everything into an agent and the, you know, 500 people in marketing, well, they can just get answers straight from the Jane agent. They don't necessarily have to wait. So the work, it just becomes faster, but it becomes four verbs, I think you decide what matters. You delegate, you inspect the exceptions and then you integrate the results, right? So, but those things can happen now like agents can in parallel and you have to push that pattern to its limit and that one person just directs more hours than exist. Right, that's where I find myself and I find myself, you know, since kind of clawed code work, um, in clawed code kind of kicked off this phase in late 2025, early 2026. And I think codex, um, has really taken over the narrative ever since, but, you know, essentially I'm directing more, um, hours that exist in a day, right? I'm literally getting done what used to take me even two years ago, right? And in the early Chatchee BT days, I'm getting, uh, about 30 hours of 2024, me work done every single day. So it's just you're directing more hours, more traffic than can fit on a traditional runway. Um, and, you know, in, uh, opening, I report came out with this. They showed how their team was using codex. And what I found interesting was opening the eye staff of the 99th percentile generated over 60 hours of agent turns every single day. So yet that's kind of the anomaly, right? That's not the average because they're building this technology. But I think eventually that is going to become the default. And that is going to force people, I think, to question how do you work, right? What is the value of my actual time? And how can we responsibly, you know, use these agents as they get even smarter and even faster? I actually think we're in a nice little groove where we are today, right? There's been all this, you know, talk in the last, you know, 36 hours or so of this concept of AI pacing, you know, essentially a lot of researchers, um, particularly at open AI and traffic, but also Google meta and other labs, you know, kind of sign this letter saying, hey, we support, you know, essentially calling it like pacing, right? But it's kind of just means like, hey, it's okay. If we slow down, will that happen? Probably not. Right? Is it the responsible thing for, you know, some sort of AI pacing to happen? Probably because the issue is the capability gap is growing. The model overhang is growing and it's not going to get any slower, right? Especially as, you know, over the past couple of months, we've gotten, you know, real results from the big labs talking about RSI recursive self improvement where the models are improving themselves, right? Yesterday, open AI literally just announced like an 18% improvement via RSI. They essentially said, hey, we got, you know, we used GP 5.6 to make itself better and it's like 18% better. It's going to see, you know, 18% cost savings now. So this is where it's at. These models are going to get better and better, faster and faster, but way at a much faster accelerated rate than humans can keep up with. So yeah, there's this whole pacing thing that maybe we'll tackle at a different time. But the brutal reality is if you want your team to be able to keep up and get ahead, that's something that you have to tackle right now head on. Some other good stats that recently came out, a Workday Foundation study in May found that 86% of users felt more productive. But those same workers described the conversations that rarely moved past transactional work needs, right? And that's kind of where I feel right now. It's like, yeah, I'm getting way more done. The content I hope is good. The quality is good, right? What I produce is much different than what most people produce. But it's just kind of transactional, right? I've talked many times on the show about, I'm not even because my, you know, the throughput the output is so insanely high for what I'm doing on a daily basis as an individual full-time human. I don't retain information like I used to because I think so much information now is transactional. And maybe that's something that we, you know, the future workforce needs to understand because I think, you know, have you ever thought about how you can learn a concept better if you write it down my hand or if you teach it to someone, right? I'm a big believer in you haven't really learned something until you teach, right? That's one of the reasons why I started a daily podcast. I'm like, I really want to learn this AI thing. I need to learn it well enough and I can teach at least one person, right? Luckily, hopefully it's helped more than one person. But I think the same is true because AI, it does all that hard work for you, right? You no longer have to go onto 20 web pages and read it all and be like, ah, this doesn't make sense. This does make sense. I'm not sure about this. Let me look at a little more. Now you just put something into whatever AI system you're using. You get a personalized customized output. And well, most people don't even take the time to truly read it and understand it. So there is this disconnection between the productivity and disconnection that's shared in one work day. And this study shows that that is the mechanism. And I've actually touched on some of these other concepts. So if you do want to dive in a little bit deeper on some of these downsides of using AI the right way, I actually had an episode, episode 757 that was part of the start here series. It's called the seven silent sins of doing AI right? How to spot and overcome the invisible AI work traps. And three that I wanted to share that are kind of relevant to what we're talking about today is number one accidental de-skilling, which is kind of one of the things I just referenced there. That's where AI does the work. So you lose the skill. I talked about the agent bun sandwich. And that's when agents start to hollow out your core expertise and then the compression tax where the AI speed overloads your brain. And that's where I think we might be getting into with this, you know, this cerebrus, right? Which might sound like a dorky niche thing. And you're like, okay, why do you keep talking about it? Because again, think if you are an AI power user now, and I said, Hey, tomorrow, you or your company, your team can accomplish 20X what you accomplished today. If you are an agent, piled team, and I'm like, you can accomplish 20 times more today, that's some compression tax happening right there. All right. So yeah, make sure go check out episode 757. So let's be fair to AI though. Some of this stuff, we don't need it, right? How many times have you gone through a three hour meeting and you're like, that could have been a single bullet point. That could have been a single slack message, right? Or waiting two days for a basic answer is not, you know, culture or mentorship. It's just maybe the signs of an antiquated business hierarchy that shouldn't have existed in the first place. Right. So, you know, companies didn't quickly redesign how they worked for an AI native workplace. So, you know, you get to then decide which collaboration is intentional. You know, human to human, you get to choose kind of pick your spots where that happens if you are AI native. Okay. So as we wrap up here, I want to try to answer this question. How do you strike the balance then of, you know, the reality of we're going to be managing more agents, which might lead to less human connection and probably an increased expectation of productivity. How do all of those three things build together? And I know this isn't for 100% of organizations, right? I understand that. But I do think that more organizations, more teams will be shifting toward this than the opposite. So how do you meet that head on? Well, I think that winning companies are going to intentionally automate the manual work, but keep and prioritize human judgment. So I think generic human, the loop will always fail. So you have to name one expert owner. I always talk about expert driven loops and expert driven loops actually require instead of one passive human generalist. It requires active expert human collaboration and communication. So I think that's one thing right there. But also, I think winning teams know which friction to remove and which human handoffs to protect and maybe elevate. So then how do we start the balance then? Well, I think, yeah, as my slides are losing, losing my place here, sorry, yeah, all screwed up. There you go. My slides got all out of order. So here's the three human handoffs that I think you need to protect. So number one, you need to protect the judgments by naming the human who owns consequences when the answer is wrong. Okay. Number two, you need to protect learning by making people explain decisions instead of blindly approving aging output. So that's kind of the difference between, like I said, passive, lazy, human and the loop, which will always fail. And the correct way to do it, which is expert driven loops, which is experts communicating with each other, but also expecting, inspecting agent outputs. And then last, you need to protect your belonging, right? I think so much of this so much of what we do in our work, it's about having this sense of belonging. It's about, you know, some people for better or worse, wrap their, you know, self in their own meaning is who they are in their job. Right. But I think you can still protect your belonging by giving coaching, recognition in unstructured conversation, a scheduled place to happen. All right. So what's my big takeaway here as we get faster agents that are smarter and maybe we're just managing dozens or hundreds of agents and talking to our human co-workers less, but producing more. Well, I think three big takeaways for me. Number one, everyone needs to increase their ambition, right? Not just saying more prompts, more outputs, but being more intentional with what you can accomplish, right? Maybe not just doing 20 acts of what you were doing yesterday because you can do 20 acts today. Maybe instead it's thinking higher, it's thinking harder. It's just being more ambitious. Number two, you always have to unmarry your domain expertise. That is the, you know, the building blocks of what I've been talking about now for three and a half years. unlearning, you have to un-mary your domain expertise because it doesn't really matter necessarily anymore. Your domain expertise is really just about that, you know, the human agent bun sandwich, right? It's making sure that you give it the right context and check it in the right way, but you're not going to be doing the 90% percent in the middle anymore. So you have to un-mary your domain expertise as agents get faster and smarter. And then last but not least, you have to be prepared to rebuild monthly instead of yearly. I think in the pre-agentic phase of 2024 or early 2025, you know, I was still recommending that people revisit their AI strategy roadmaps quarterly, but I would say even if you did it yearly, you know, in 2024, you weren't going to be left behind, now you will. You have to be prepared to literally unlearn and rebuild how your company operates every single month, which sounds like an absolutely ass-9 concept because before you only had to do it every five years, right? You know, or maybe every 10 years. And then, you know, as the internet and, you know, Web2 and social media and all these other things started to gain in popularity and how people make decisions and all that, you know, advertising, marketing, communications, you know, those things changes. And so, you know, with digital transformation, I think that shortened that lifespan of, you know, how your company works kind of your company's IP, not just your SOPs, but literally how your company works and runs and thinks and makes decisions. You can't do it anymore. As crazy as it sounds. I think probably a majority of the time for successful companies moving forward are going to spend as much time unlearning and rebuilding processes as they are actually doing work the old-fashioned way. All right. So, I hope this episode was helpful. Just more of a kind of a zoomed-out look of saying, I don't necessarily know what the heck is going on or what the heck is happening next. But if you look at the writing on the wall, you have to see and you have to understand agents are getting smarter, agents are getting faster. And we as people who are AI leaders in our respective organizations, well, we're going to be working with way more agents and probably fewer humans in many cases. If so, let me know. Please subscribe to the podcast if you want to hear more or less of shows like this. Do let me know by signing up for the newsletter at youreverydayai.com. So, thank you for tuning in. Hope to see you back tomorrow and every day for more everyday AI. Thanks y'all. And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going. 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