How do workers react when an AI agent joins the group chat? Cautiously, according to Yoav Levy, co-founder and chief executive of cyber security company Upstream Security.
After he added an agent to his marketing team’s Slack channel, there were “24 hours when no one wrote anything”, he says. “People were afraid. Then we had the first brave person writing “‘Hey!’ — and the bot starts having a chat.”
Caution is an understandable human reaction. While large language models (LLMs) answer questions and perform tasks on command, agents have, well, agency. “Agentic AI is AI that can plan and execute complex workflows and can plan into the future,” explains Nicholas Wright, a neuroscientist who researches the brain, technology and security at University College London and Georgetown University.