Stepping back away from the overloaded term agent, consider what role we want agents to play in our everyday lives.
At work, our employers want us to be more productive. For them. Either do more work in the same amount of time or do the same amount of work with less effort. It doesn’t matter which way you cut it, but our employers are racing to equip their workforce with “assistants” to get those productivity gains. Companies in investing big time in tools, talent, and teaching to upskill, uplevel, and upend how their workforce works in the future. And they want to reap those returns yesterday because today’s investments in tomorrow are big.
Whilst at home, consumers are seeking “companions” to make their lives easier. As always, the bar is higher for consumers than employees because these are things folks want to do rather than have to do. And so, companions must cater for some of the harder capabiliies that are judged more harshly than their “grey” assistant equivalents. Ethics, bias, and empathy are just a few things that consumers are less forgiving than employees when things go wrong.
It’s important to appreciate these very different role types for agents. The lines will blur as we progress into these unchartered futures. But an assistant is something that this given to you to help do something that ultimately benefits someone else. A companion is for you. And we will constantly flip between these different roles. At home, as the consumer, and then at work as the employee. Convergence is inevitable but with the requisite guardrails in place. However today, the assistants and companions are two very different marketplaces. As a result, two very different ways to approach and deploy agents: assistants for the enterprise and companions for the consumer.
