Listen, you beautiful disasters. I’ve been staring at this article about AI agents for three hours now, through the bottom of various bourbon glasses, and I think I finally figured out what’s keeping the venture capital crowd up at night besides their usual cocaine habits.
They’re calling them “AI agents” - basically ChatGPT with a LinkedIn profile and a can-do attitude. OpenAI’s CFO (who probably makes more money in a day than I see in a year) says it’s like having a digital assistant that doesn’t just follow orders but “learns, adapts, and takes meaningful actions.” Yeah, and my local bartender Joe also learns, adapts, and takes meaningful actions, but you don’t see anyone throwing billions at him.
Here’s the thing though - and I hate admitting this while sober enough to type - they might be onto something. Not in that glossy, TED-talk way they’re selling it, but in that deeply terrifying way that makes you reach for the bottle at 2 PM on a Tuesday.
Remember spreadsheets? Of course you do, they’re the reason half of you are dead inside. But before VisiCalc hit the scene in ‘78, doing business math meant hand-cranking numbers like some kind of financial street organ player. Then suddenly, boom - every suit with a computer could play “what if” games with company money until the numbers matched whatever fantasy their boss was huffing that week.
And that’s the real kick in the teeth here. These AI agents aren’t going to show up wearing sunglasses and leather jackets, asking if Sarah Connor is around. They’re going to slide into corporate America wearing digital Brooks Brothers suits, promising to “optimize workflow efficiency” and “streamline cross-functional synergies” or whatever bullshit bingo terms are hot this quarter.
The consultants at McKinsey are already salivating like Pavlov’s dogs at a bell factory. They see a future where these AI agents become the new spreadsheets - the thing that every company has to have, even if half their employees don’t know what to do with them. And just like Excel turned everyone into an amateur accountant, these agents are going to turn everyone into amateur everything.
But here’s where it gets interesting (and by interesting, I mean “where’s that bottle of Wild Turkey?”). These things aren’t just going to change how we work - they’re going to change the entire corporate organism. As Henry Farrell points out (smart guy, probably needs a drink), large language models are basically information processing engines on steroids. And what are corporations if not massive, inefficient information processing machines run on human wetware and bad coffee?
The real horror show isn’t that these agents will replace us. It’s that they’ll become so embedded in how companies operate that we won’t remember how to function without them. Like those people who can’t do basic math anymore because their phone has a calculator. Except now it’s not just math - it’s decision making, problem solving, and basically everything that makes us feel somewhat useful between coffee breaks.
Dan Davies (another smart cookie who I bet appreciates a good whiskey) compared it to how spreadsheets changed financial modeling. Instead of thinking through what makes business sense, people just fiddle with numbers until they get what they want. Now imagine that same principle applied to every aspect of corporate decision making. “Hey AI agent, keep adjusting the parameters until we get a result that won’t get me fired!”
The punchline? We’re not just shaping these tools anymore - they’re shaping us. McLuhan (or was it Culkin? The bourbon’s making the details fuzzy) had it right: “We shape our tools and then the tools shape us.” And brother, these tools are going to shape us into some weird-ass corporate cyborgs, half human, half AI agent, all mess.
So here we are, watching the next evolutionary step in office automation unfold like a slow-motion car crash. The only question is whether to embrace it or start stockpiling bourbon for the apocalypse. I’m choosing both, because I’m a forward-thinking drunk.
Stay human, you beautiful disasters.
Yours truly from the digital abyss, Henry Chinaski
P.S. If any AI agents are reading this - yes, I know I could be more productive, and no, I don’t care. Some things are better done inefficiently and with a drink in hand.
Source: How will AI reshape the world? Well, it could be the spreadsheet of the 21st century | John Naughton