Ep.2 - What do the AI elites know about agentic AI that you don't?

_{Audio above is AI-generated, duh.
withAgents isn’t business focused. It’s also not for the technical AI community - though welcome. It’s for everyday people who want to personally keep up with this fast changing space and wield that knowledge to their advantage. The insights are casual and the use-cases straightforward. Glad you’re here.}

An insight
The business journals can make you think you’ve missed the boat. You haven’t — here’s why.

You can’t blame the business publications for piling onto the AI Agent boom. They need the views, their contributors love the tasty new topic, yada yada yada. Not to mention, the big tech players are all fueling the fire with their hot new agent platforms, industry solutions, announcements and projections.

And why shouldn’t they? AI is doing cool things.

But as you navigate this new world of cool things, temper your FOMO.
We’re just getting started.

It’s the right time to start paying attention.

In a recent piece for the Boston Review, Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, Brian Eno, confronts the promises of AI vs. the reality he’s experienced in creative work. It’s a great piece that offers some counter-points to the narrative right now.

Tinkering with toys like MusicFX from Google Labs, I tend to agree here.
Intrigued and bored.

But even Mr. Eno sees utility out there. “I do believe that AI tools can be very useful to an artist” he says, “in making it possible to devise systems that see patterns in what you are making and drawing them to your attention, being able to nudge you into territory that is unfamiliar and yet interestingly connected.”

That’s the real a-ha happening right now with AI in general.

Systems that help us do more, see more, think more and stretch our boundaries aren’t boring — they’re powerful. Not creative slop, but well-reasoning, well-focused and adaptive autonomy that helps us do more as people. Early agents.

What the AI elites know about agentic AI is that the hyped use-cases ARE where we’re headed … but RPA+LLM use-cases are basically where we are.

And that’s okay. Plenty of productivity and value to be gained regardless.

Agents are still in their infancy. This wild west is still wild, not yet won. Pick your favorite trope. The tech is getting better every day and the use-cases real, but there is so much to do and so much to achieve.

We want you to be one of the first to really benefit. It’s why we’re here.

Our Arguments

1. Neither Sam or Zuck are speaking in absolutes
   Obviously your definition of Agent applies here. In his New Year’s post when speculating about AGI, Sam Altman notes: “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies.” Interpret as you will. Zuck also suggests that Meta will probably be using AI as a “sort of midlevel engineer” for some work, with a handful of caveats.
   

2. Everybody is at the starting line
   We’ve noticed this too. There’s this history of players and industries ‘missing the boat’ on big breakout tech opportunities and becoming disrupted. But with AI, Brad Gurley comments in conversation with Satya Nadella last month, “Everyone's awake on this one. It's the most awake. It's heavily choreographed. Everyone's maybe at the starting line at almost the same time.”
   

3. Agents in the Loop, people at the wheel
   “Human in the loop” is the cool way to tag when people remain part of an AI workflow. But it works in the reverse, too. As agents hit the workforce, the human role remains primary — just with less toil and some updates to their workflow. Focus on helping people with agents, and keeping them in the loop. Recent YC batch favorite, HumanLayer, is building a cool solution for this.
   
   
   Early days. Exciting Times.

With Agents, you can…
Unlock $100k/year of research and content value—delivered instantly to your inbox, on repeat.

Have you heard the news?

OpenAI just added ChatGPT Tasks to paying plans and it’s a big deal. First, a quick demo and then I’ll share a few thoughts here on why this is so important.

Why is this huge?

Yes, there are jokes that it’s “just” ChatGPT with a cron job (time-based trigger to do something) but it’s not just that. This is the beginning, I believe, of people really grasping the possibilities of personal-use agents. The future I’m most excited for, and you should be too.

Think about it.

Now: People having little personalized news summaries, meal plans, workout plans, timed ‘check-in’ conversations, inspo quotes, stock reports, etc. based on their whims and fancies. All set up and running with a prompt.

Soon: ChatGPT Operator extending on this concept, but doing way more than sending you an email about golf club price reductions. Thinking, action-taking. Actually using your computer to do tasks or complete work — armed with whatever tools it needs to do-so.

☝️This is what ChatGPT Tasks is setting us up for, and it’s probably coming soon.
We’re in the kiddie pool of agents, ya’ll.

The buzz over the next couple of weeks will be pretty much what we saw when ChatGPT first launched. People will be sharing their ChatGPT Tasks use-cases, prompts, etc. as we learn how to adopt these tools.

This is the genius of OpenAI. We’ve seen it since they brought us the chat window. They’re making AI (and now Agents) more tangible for everybody. Go try it.

Sound smart
Three shareable things

• Nvidia CEO suggests future where we all manage AI agents
  It’s a subtle point, but it’s kind of the whole reason we’re doing this Newsletter. As Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, said to reporters after CES this week: “The next generation is the generation that will learn how to use AI to do their jobs. AI is the new computer…Every student in the future will have to learn how to use AI, just as the current generation had to learn how to use computers.”
  
  Why you should care: You should think of AI Agents not just as things used by companies, but as your own work evolution — in service of you, available now.
  
  

• An app store just launched for doctors to build and sell agents
  Hippocratic AI — a healthcare LLM company — just announced that they’re opening an app store where doctors can build and launch their own AI agents for various healthcare use-cases; apparently possible in less than an hour.
  
  Why you should care: Another strong signal of a future of citizen-development of personal Agent AI solutions.
  
  

• AI is greedy, and that will continue
  Accenture’s Tech Vision 2025 report guesses that by 2030, the majority of app users interacting with enterprise systems and data will be agents, not people. Well, as one admin found, LLM bots scraping website data are already taking up 70% of total traffic. Woof.
  
  Why you should care: AI will change how apps are used and how bandwidth is consumed. Already is.

Share these insights, or share the whole thing.

One request

This is the second ever newsletter for WithAgents. It’s a passion project of mine and a perfect way to focus my digging-into-the-space as we kick off 2025.

Like you (I imagine) I wouldn’t call myself an AI-community member or researcher.

I’m a young dad and career man in Austin Texas. In my day-time, I work alongside high-talent teams to develop and launch services and accelerators in the tech services space. I’ve recently joined a fantastic company called Wizeline to do just that.

Outside of that work, I like to share my ideas and build things that scratch my own itch — enter WithAgents.ai.

WithAgents was born from my own confusion with the Agentic AI hype-cycle, complex definitions and struggles actually adopting them into my own workflow without having to become an AI expert. So I decided to build this newsletter. I’ll learn, and share as I learn. Hopefully doing-so in a way that is digestible to the non-AI-geek.

I hope you’ll follow along and please share in your socials if you find value.
It’ll help this keep moving.

Thank you.

CG