VCs have informally coined “agentic” as the buzzword of 2025, for good reason. Agentic AI will soon change all our lives in ways few have yet started to appreciate. I believe AI agents will be profoundly useful, and frankly I can’t wait to start using them. Let’s double-click on what our agentic future is going to look like.
AI chat tools like Chat GPT have changed our lives. It’s stunning that they only came on the scene in late 2022. In just 3 years they have changed how many of us think about retrieving information or learning new things.
But they’re about to get even more useful.
For example, today you could ask Chat GPT to plan your vacation. You give it a location, it comes back with a terrific itinerary for your vacation. But then it stops there.
Soon Chat GPT will be able to go book that vacation for you. It will contact the airline and buy your plane ticket. Reach out to the hotel and book your rooms. What might take you hours of tedious phone calls, your AI agent will get done in a few minutes all on its own.
There’s lots more possibility. Companies might use agents to answer their phones. Business people might have agents to manage their calendars. Banks might use agents to review loan applications. Coders will use agents to write code.
These agents are going to save us an enormous amount of time. I personally can’t wait to let my AI agent do all the work to get me to the beach with a Mai Tai.
That leads to a stunning implication for the productivity of our country. Bots stand poised to free humans of oceans of tedious drudge work. This will lead to an incredible gain in productivity across the entire nation. There are even some who have theorized that the increase in growth of productivity over the next few decades will be enough to neutralize our stunning national debt. That would be an amazing result.
Another coming good is the improvement in living standards.
We have a great example in Industrial Revolution. Before it, about 80% of people worked in agriculture, living subsistence lifestyles defined by hard labor and total dependence on the weather. But with the advancement of technology, the average person today enjoys a vastly better quality of life. Consider this: nearly everyone today has access to better dental care than a king did 100 years ago.
The coming world of AI agents will bring a Second Industrial Revolution: the AI Revolution. My hope is this will lead accelerates the leap in standard of living that the first IR sparked over the last 200 years.
Easy answer: Fraud. I don’t think our industry is doing enough to defend in advance against bad agents.
We’ve actually seen this movie before. Email was invented during the earliest days of computing, when idealism ruled the programmer mindset. As a result, the email protocols assume that all senders will be good senders. Today we know today how naïve this was. As a result, 50 years later, we are still dealing with the issue of spam. Phishing emails remain one of the most common and effective methods of account takeover. The news is littered with stories of hundreds of millions of dollars in losses (and also a stunning Twitter takeover of the accounts of Musk, Obama and others) via a highly convincing fake emails.
Once we start trusting agents with our payment methods, or bank records, access to all of life’s essential services … this is going to be an incredibly appealing target for hackers.
We can’t make this same mistake with agents. As agents start to do work for us, we will need tooling to tell the good from the bad. And by the way, this determination can change overnight. Because a highly trusted agent could get compromised by hackers, and all of a sudden become a bad agent.
This one’s easy: bots that don’t get it. Imagine you call in for help with a product and you get a Customer Service bot that doesn’t understand your question, and then no matter how much you scream “connect me to a human”, it never happens
When we let the agents take charge, we better make sure there are escape hatches!
Personally I can’t wait to experience this new future. It will be energizing to build it together.
Originally published on Cyber Protection Magazine. For more details, visit the source.