AI Agents Are Here

AI agents have arrived, and they can do far more than just answer questions – they can act on your behalf. That opens up incredible opportunities, but also brings new risks for yourself, your team and your organisation. Even if you already have AI policies and guidelines in place, you need to update them now for agentic AI.

https://swiy.co/go-ai-agents-are-here

Are you ready for AI agents? This is the next level of AI, and it creates both opportunities and risks.

We all know generative AI now, where you type in a prompt or question, and AI spits out a response. AI agents take it to the next level, where they can act on your behalf. That creates great opportunities, but also creates new potential risks. As a leader, it’s your responsibility to understand both.

For example, I recently used an AI agent to plan a trip to the Gold Coast, where I was speaking at a conference a few weeks ago. The “standard” way to fly from Perth to the Gold Coast is via Sydney or Melbourne, but that’s a long flight, especially because I have to allow extra time in transit so I don’t miss my connection. What I prefer instead is to fly to Brisbane and then organise a car to take me to the Gold Coast. That’s faster, simpler, and more reliable.

For my recent journey, I decided to experiment by asking ChatGPT’s new AI agent option to plan this trip. I simply gave it dates and venues, without any guidance about choosing options. I was hoping it would be clever enough to consider the flight-and-drive option.

Sure enough, it did!

That alone isn’t the “agent” part. You could have asked older versions of ChatGPT or Copilot to do that research to get the same result. So that’s nothing new.

But after showing me the options, the AI agent asked me:

“Would you now like me to book this trip for you?”

If I had given it my personal details, frequent flyer number, and credit card information, it would have made those bookings for me!

This is the power of AI agents: They don’t just give you a response; they can act on your behalf.

AI agents have huge potential for boosting productivity and efficiency, freeing you up for more high-level work, and even doing work that wouldn’t otherwise be feasible or practical.

But because you give them the power to DO things, you’re also opening up new potential risks.

This applies to everybody in your team - including yourself. Unless you all have the appropriate education, AI policy, guardrails, and governance in place, it’s easy for an AI agent to make decisions that could damage your organisation.

Because AI agents are more powerful than just generative AI, you might need to upgrade your policies, guardrails, and education to keep up.

AI agents are just one of the new features in AI over the last year, and that means you should also adapt now-outdated policies and education.

For more, join my coming online presentation “Rethinking AI”, where I will share how AI has advanced in the last year - and what it means to you. It’s free, public, and open to all, so register here and invite others in your team and network as well.

Register for the virtual masterclass:

https://swiy.co/go-ai-agents-are-here

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