Two weeks ago, Joe Reis and I talked on “What’s the BUZZ?” about whether we would soon train our avatars and agents and send them to work on our behalf—and maybe even send them to work for multiple companies.
This week, gig work platform Fiverr introduced “Fiverr Go,” an option for freelancers to train an AI model on their previous work. I think Fiverr is on to something about how work will be organized in the (near) future—and they’re not the only ones who think so. But more on that in a minute…
You have likely seen the stats in 2023: McKinsey & Company estimated that Generative AI will add between $2.6-4.4 trillion to the global economy. Although it seemed in recent months that Large Language Models alone won't realize that opportunity, AI agents can help get us there.
AI Agents’ Impact on Jobs
Agents have the potential to radically change how work is done—and by whom. The first companies are experimenting with agents to solve narrow tasks with a higher degree of complexity and variance; think of automatically answering customer service inquiries for common categories, for example.
The next evolution is having two or more agents collaborate with each other. That is already possible today as well; think of multiple specialized agents in customer service answering various questions by collaborating and checking the answer before it’s sent to the customer.
Yet, even expanding this concept to agents working across multiple departments is no longer science fiction either; think of customer service and finance agents collaborating on checking a credit note.
Evolution of Agntic AI Adoption in Business
So, eventually, more and more manual knowledge work can and will be automated. In fact: if an agent produces the same or better results, involving the same or lower risks and costsand higher quality, companies will be compelled to delegate that task to an agent—for economic purposes alone.But where will that ultimately lead us?
There’s a pretty good chance that a majority of full-time roles might become part-time roles, while agents handle the rest. That doesn’t mean that there will be two 4-hour blocks (you work in the morning and agents in the afternoon), but I expect it’ll rather be the evolution of how we collaborate with AI: you will complete your work in half the time. Consequently, though, you might also be paid for just half the workload. To some extent, it’s similar to fractional roles and freelancing, which have been established working models for years.
But wait! Agents start sounding very disruptive to the status quo all of a sudden. After all, you still need to pay your mortgage, car loan, and other living expenses. But aside from Fiverr Go helping creatives scale revenue independent of their time, you can see this future is already starting to take shape.
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A few weeks ago, I shared my experience producing the audiobook edition of the AI Leadership Handbook by creating a voice clone for the narration. Voice actors can already scale their voice through early beta programs that Amazon/ Audible and others offer: More business in less time—and independent of your own time.
Wizly, a startup out of Singapore that focuses on brokering GTM expertise, has been offering GTM experts to create their own avatars and train them on their existing content and previous work for a while now. It’s the evolution of making knowledge available globally, independent of the expert’s time and time zone.
A few weeks ago, I came across another company, Personal.ai. The premise of its offering is to create agents for you based on current knowledge (e.g., your company’s documents) and pull in new data from the web as needed; think of a research assistant. One agent might excel at doing research, while another might excel at putting it into the context of a business function like Finance. As a user, you can add one or both agents to your Teams chat and ask them questions. The next evolution of concepts like these would be to add your own content and knowledge and send in your avatar to do the work.
So, in many ways, the foundational technology is already in place.
Making the Leap from Agentic AI Niche to Mainstream
If there will be less work to be done per role, the idea of us having multiple ‘fractional’ roles doesn’t seem so far-fetched—it’s a revival of the gig economy of sorts, but this time, for knowledge workers: What if you sent your agents to work for 3-4 employers on your behalf to make up one full-time workload? What if your agents found new work on a job board for agentic labor? (It’s almost like the job market where you’ve last applied for a job yourself.) And what if, once your agents have secured a job, they only ask for your input when they’re about to hit a roadblock?
However, despite the slightly dystopian angle of job loss and change, there's a silver lining:
We will need to redefine what it means to work (not just a 9-5 job!).
We will likely work for more than one company at a time.
We will eventually make our old income, but it will be the sum of several ‘fractional’ roles or income streams, which (together) will be a full-time equivalent—or higher.
The leap from niche to mainstream will primarily be driven by two factors: vendors’ ability to deliver robust and reliable platforms and companies’ ability to identify (and scale!) meaningful agentic scenarios that support measurable business goals.
Summary
New business models are emerging through which AI agents can do work on your behalf while you monetize it. As Agentic AI gains further traction in business and implementations continue, the way work is done and what it means to work on an individual basis will shift. It is likely that we will have multiple ‘fractional’ roles that comprise a full-time equivalent.
Yet, Agentic AI business models can see us using agents as proxies to do work on our behalf. The same or similarly capable agents could work for multiple companies on your behalf, each for a fraction of the time and price of a full-time resource. Breaking out of the gig economy niche into the mainstream will require a shift in how we define work, income, and status.
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