Work intelligence combines Automation and AI to deliver better business outcomes within a future-ready digital workforce. Work Intelligence is coming. Let me explain.
In the late nineties, as a newly minted computer science postgraduate, I built an application to help undergraduates design better software systems. It took three years to build. Today, I could deliver a better version with agent assistance in three weeks.
As a fintech architect in the early 2000s, I developed straight-through processing systems for the major investment banks, managing the life cycle of trades through the front, middle, and back office systems. We worked in high-performing teams across multiple disciplines. Today, I could achieve a similar throughput with a single squad supported by agents and get more done.
I joined Cognifide as their CTO in 2006. We built digital experience platforms for Fortune 500 companies to enable multiple brands, with multiple products, in multiple markets, to better engage with their consumers globally, at speed and at scale. Five hundred platform deployments later, I could do the same job with a fraction of the engineering horsepower. So if Cognifide started today, I would not have had the pleasure of meeting the hundreds of people who became proud Cogs. Instead, agents would build over 50% of the code base that powers these global brands today.
A couple of years ago, the amount of code generated by machines surpassed that crafted by humans. And now companies are using AI to write more and more of their code. We are seeing the software engineering landscape being disrupted daily, and the other sectors – health, marketing, automotive, travel, and CPG – will be fast followers. So it’s about the work, and work intelligence is coming for us all.
Work Intelligence
Agents are redefining work across all industries. Work includes coding, research, diagnosis, scheduling, production, analyzing medical scans, editing copy, and reflowing video. Work comes in many different shapes and sizes. As a result, there are many other combinations of ‘work modes’ with a keen emphasis on who directs (leads) versus who does (follows).
These work modes range from manual to fully automated, with hybrid models in between. Today, we are embracing augmentation where humans lead. This is a big space, ranging from using it for yourself to effectively delegating to virtual workers as part of larger global teams. Orchestration looks at horizontal workflows led by agents for end-to-end services with a mixture of agent and human workers—a bigger space than the augmented.
Many questions still require answers. What kinds of discrete work tasks can/should we entrust with agents? In what scenarios should agents delegate work items to humans? How much human oversight is required for fully orchestrated agent workflows? Can agents replace entire roles? What new human roles are needed? How does an agent mentor operate in tomorrow’s digital workforce?
So, I’ve updated my previous Venn diagram to include Work that keeps intelligence at the centre of everything. Work Intelligence is coming.
