The biggest AI Agent opportunities are going to be in categories of work where there could be a 10X or 100X increase in demand if the cost of executing certain tasks went down dramatically. The key is to find categories of work where there’s a significant amount of non-consumption simply because doing the work before was too expensive or time consuming. It turns out that these spaces are basically in every single market. The easiest way to figure out these markets is to find out which verticals have things that customers have always wanted to do but never get around to. If you talk to lawyers, they’ll complain about how time consuming reviewing every contract is, and how many contracts are sitting around that they don’t know anything about. If you talk to engineers, everyone knows how endless the backlog of mindnumbing work there is to get done that isn’t core feature development. If you talk to marketers, they always would love to launch more targeted campaigns to more markets. In every one of these areas, AI Agents will bring down the cost of doing this work dramatically, which means the work can finally get done. And importantly, all of these tasks are tied to broader workflows, which is desirable given the need for ultimate human review of most output. There are endless opportunities like these to go after right now.

There’s such a clear opportunity for IT, engineering, or operations people to help companies go AI-first right now if they both understand the workflows of the organization and what’s possible with AI Agents. AI is going to continue to advance at a rate that far exceeds most organizations’ ability to adopt all of the latest technology when it comes out. This will only continue to increase as breakthrouhs keep coming from AI labs at a faster pace. Like it or not, the long pole in the tent on transforming workflows with AI will be the pace that change management can happen. Asking questions and getting answers back in an AI chat doesn’t require much change management. But adjusting an entire workflow to deploy AI Agents in the background to help do real extensive work fundamentally requires quite a bit more education, hand holding, and technical integration. And doing change management amidst a rapidly evolving space is even more complicated - one day a user will try to automate a workflow with AI and it won’t work, but 6 months later all of a sudden it’s possible. The people in the trenches that can help align what’s possible with AI and the individual workflows in an organization are going to have a huge advantage right now and going forward. The companies that do this early will learn faster and develop much more muscle in the process.