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Agentic AI is moving fast, but are we ready for it?
"We're all going to be CEOs of a small army of AI agents," predicted Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the digital economy lab at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and founder of Workhelix, recently quoted in The New York Times. "We have to think, OK: What is it we really want to accomplish? What are the goals here? And we have to think a little bit more deeply about that than we have in the past."
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Brynjolfsson is the ultimate techno-optimist, so his caution toward marshalling armies of AI agents should be heeded. This view was also shared recently by Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, who has openly sounded the alarm about the risks of AI. He, too, sees the advent of human-led agentic workforces, particularly within technology shops.
The first adoption and success stories for AI agents are starting with coding tasks -- but end up rapidly expanding to other roles within businesses as well, Amodei said, speaking with Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi at the recent Databricks conference. Currently, the emphasis for AI agents means multiple agents working together, relying on extended networks of agents that can communicate with and activate each other to meet the needs of the moment.
However, they will not be operating autonomously -- even AI's most visible and vocal proponents say there will always need to be humans to steer AI actions. Within an agentic AI architecture, Amodei predicted, "you dispatch a number of agents to do things for you, where you act as essentially the managers for the agents." These could be called "agent fleets," which will evolve to "agent swarms."
Anthropic's foundational model, Claude, is employed widely across organizations for a variety of purposes, from coding to business functions.
Also: Anthropic mapped Claude's morality. Here's what the chatbot values (and doesn't)
"Coding is moving the fastest -- it's where we're seeing things first," said Amodei. "It's a foreshadow of what's going to happen across all applications. We started with coding, and at first, people just write code, then there's the autocomplete era, now we're moving into what's being called vibe coding -- where you kind of ask the model to do something, and it's very interactive."
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