You've just been promoted. By AI.
There wasn't an interview, there's no pay rise, and nobody asked if you wanted the job. But over the last five months Google, Meta, Apple, xAI, Microsoft and OpenAI have all come to the same conclusion about you. You're now a manager, and you need a team of helpers all wrapped together in the form of a personal AI agent.
A personal AI agent is an assistant you give access to your email, calendar, files and messages, and then it goes off and does jobs for you. The big difference from the chatbots we've all been using is that it keeps working when you're not there. You can shut your laptop, go to bed, and it keeps going autonomously and even proactively.
In this week's essay I run through what's launched, from Google's Gemini Spark through to Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots. I want to be balanced and describe the massive upsides, as well as the equally sized risks and concerns.
If you're in a senior leadership team, you'll need to decide pretty quickly (ie, now!) where personal agents can act in your business, when the human has to sign off on their decisions, and who'll be responsible when they go wrong. If you don't decide that on purpose, it'll get decided for you through accidents.
And then there's which of these companies you actually trust with access to everything in your life??