Efficiency Gains Are Just the Beginning

Here’s what the headlines miss: agentic efficiency gains are a quick win for some corporate executives focused on short-term results. Automate routine tasks, reduce headcount, and capture the cost savings. These are tangible improvements. But what happens after you’ve optimized existing processes? You hit a ceiling. You’ve made workflows faster with fewer people without reimagining what’s possible when people and AI agents work in entirely new ways.

AI agents can optimize some processes better than one or more people can. AI can handle high-volume, end-to-end activities with speed and consistency that humans simply can’t match. It can analyze massive datasets, automate workflows, surface insights in real-time, and execute repeatable tasks without fatigue and without being constantly prompted. If you’re not using AI agents to optimize processes in 2025, you will fall behind.

That’s not a threat – it’s just reality. But here’s where the layoff headlines end and business wisdom begins. Growing a company requires passion, creativity, good ideas, talent, taking risks, collaboration, communication, teamwork, and customer empathy – things that people will always be able to do better than AI. That’s why the future of business growth is reimagining what people and AI agents can and should be doing.

People and AI Do Different Jobs and Work Together

While there’s plenty of room in a growing business for people and agents to do different jobs, there are also plenty of opportunities to define how people and AI work together. One excellent example is the emergence of specialized AI agents in industry verticals. 

In the AI economy, the most valuable AI agents aren’t only trained on vast amounts of general knowledge. They’re trained on the unique institutional knowledge a business has accumulated. Think about financial services versus manufacturing versus public sector; the domain knowledge is fundamentally different. And the work that people and AI do is different too.

Human workers and AI agents need to be trained specifically on an industry and a company’s unique ways of working, governing, selling, marketing, servicing, and so on. Otherwise, people with industry domain expertise and experience can’t use AI agents effectively and they just become expensive tools for doing commodity work better than people can.

These aren’t only efficiency plays. They’re new types of workflows where people and AI agents operate with their own unique domain expertise. There are efficiency gains, yes, and also gains from exponential growth and new ways of doing business.

The AI Economy Is Moving at Unprecedented Speed

According to a study by Morgan Stanley, for example, it took 12 years for 50% of households to adopt the Internet, and AI is on track to hit that adoption rate four times faster. Based on a recent study with 564 global executives, 86% of business leaders believe AI agents will play a critical role in their transformation over the next two years and a lot of them are already heavily investing into agentic capabilities.

Here’s how I think about the speed at which executives need to move to adopt autonomous agents: the window for AI adoption and your company’s investment in the AI economy isn’t closing, and that’s because it was never a window to begin with. It’s more like a fire escape. If you don’t escape your current business model and reimagine your work as soon as possible, you’ll be stuck in a business that’s burning through growth opportunities. Your headcounts go down while your competitors’ earnings go up because they saw the potential for industry-specific AI agents to work with them and for them. 

The AI economy isn’t just about deploying a technology, it’s about fundamentally rethinking how work gets done, who does it, and where value gets created. The headlines about job losses are real, but they’re marking the beginning of a major transformation, not the end of a story. And the companies that get this right will define what competitive advantage looks like for the next decade.