Who Does Your AI Agent Work For?
Agents are helping us do more, while deepening our dependence. Who operates them, how do they earn, and who owns the customer relationship?
So now everyone has agents doing things for them.
The great promise of AI is to save us time. In my experience, something slightly different is happening so far: I work roughly the same hours, but I cram far more into them. Videos that sat waiting months for an edit suddenly go up on YouTube. Things I'd have put off until I found someone to help simply happen. Wonderful, right? Except my competitors are getting the same superpowers. All this productivity may not buy us more free time at all; it may simply become the new bar we're expected to clear.
I'm still asking AI for too little. I asked it to edit a video, then to write a description and tags for YouTube. Then I raised the stakes: do it inside YouTube. And again: do it for all my previous videos. We're so used to being the computer's hands that it takes a while to accept it could become ours. The gap between "I want this to happen" and "it happened" is starting to close.
But the moments when the agent genuinely surprised me came without my asking for anything. The speaking invitation I hadn't answered, the graphics change I'd requested that never happened, the clash between my daughter's after-school activities. Things I didn't even know I was missing.
Having felt the benefit, I find it hard to imagine switching it off. That's probably how dependence on technology takes hold.
Who is this agent actually working for? If I'm paying it to look after my affairs, I understand the deal. When an advertising company offers to run my life, I want to know how it makes money from that. Access to my email and calendar, let alone to devices that see and hear the world around me, gives it far deeper reach than it ever had through the feed. For me, the question of who runs the agent, and on what business model, matters at least as much as how clever it is.
Who do I belong to? If my agent decides where to order flowers, which hotel to book and which software to use - who owns the relationship with me as a customer? I caught myself working on an idea for a service, agonising over the copy for the website, and suddenly stopping: who is actually going to read it? The most important visitor to the site may well be an agent that needs to understand what I'm offering, what it costs and why it suits its user. Businesses will have to learn to explain their value to readers who aren't impressed by a pretty homepage.
More on agents in the latest episode of "While You Were Working" (in Hebrew), which I recorded with Danny Peled.
