Managing expectations in AI, Agents & Humans in the era of 'I don't know anymore what's AI and what's not'

Businesses are in need of a hybrid workforce management platform

We’re entering an era where we really need to start thinking about the marriage of AI, agents and humans. All are ment to solve for the same tasks, figure out the same processes to make them more efficient and reason about the same problem areas we humans tend to bend ourselves towards.

But when it comes to monitoring this, even benchmark them (yes i dare to say it), it seems like everybody turns a blind eye. We’re not talking about it that much. Everything becomes anecdotal very fast where we humans quickly point to instances an AI messed up badly (eg. How is it possible that it can’t count an amount of the same letters in a word?!).

Skill gap and performance analysis on a hybrid workforce

Nonetheless, the change is already under way, on a daily basis. We are not calling everything an agent (this feels to distant, mechanical and un-real) but we are using them already en masses: sometimes through LLM’s, sometimes through FAQ’s, sometimes on a phone call, … . Sometimes for small tasks, small asks, lookups, confirmations, bookings, etc.. . Also more and more for more elaborate processes, multiple steps long, really freeing up time or taking over parts of your work. But what always gets the headline is the miscellaneous word ‘autonomous’. Agents to often market themselves as autonomous. Reporters love this: Agents taking over. Reducing demand for human labor. And not surprisingly, that is also where marketing managers of ‘agent-startups’ are going for. Here's a quick overview of a listing of some of the taglines of these agents I’ve mentioned in a different article:

You’ll get to know them as Your AI Chief of Staff, Max: your autonomous AI recruiting partner, The first autonomous ML Engineer, Julius The AI Data Analyst, Cora is the $150,000 chief of staff that only costs $15 per month, Donna: The only proactive AI assistant for field sales, Lindy: your first AI employee, Delty: Your AI staff engineer,… while some will propose working alongside with you excelling in specific tasks you maybe would not want to do at all: AI Voice Agents‍ for Patient Access and RCM, Freckle sits on top of your CRM, auto-enriching every record coming in from any source, … or they give you the option to Hire ready-made digital workers or create a custom digital workforce tailored to your business, Build and deploy AI agent workflows, Hire and set up enterprise-grade AI Employees within minutes, not months, …and so on. Some are even harsh about it and suggest us to even directly Fire our GTM Engineer!

We tend to overlook the gains it fosters and focus a lot on how it is not on parity with humans. Why not approach it head on and say bluntly that every business should figure out how to create a hybrid workforce, comprised of human & agents, on different levels of autonomy, both with their advantages and disadvantages. And when we do, make sure we monitor correctly on what, why and how we blend these two workforces.

Check out this prototype that gives a hint on how we could start setting things in place so we know who is doing what work in your business

Hybrid workforce management