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At this point, we’ve largely been talking about hiring people and adding agents to our organizations as two separate decisions. We recruit someone, and then we build or buy an agent.
But what happens when the person comes with their own agents?
Suppose you hire me. I bring my experience, my relationships, but also a few agents I’ve already worked with. Those agents may have access to knowledge I’ve collected, understand something about how I work, and help me get things done.
What, exactly, have you hired? And when I leave, what leaves with me?
The more time I spend with personal agents, the more I think about this. Working with them feels increasingly natural. And that makes the boundary between my tools and the organization’s tools harder to draw.
In Winston Brought Friends, I described trying GrokBot, Instinct, and Muse. (I’ve since added Dot and Cue to the list, and I will add AutoPilot as soon as I get access.) When a trip landed in my calendar, all three offered to help with the logistics.
Ben Thompson writes about agents becoming our interface to services in Apps, Agents, and Aggregation, and I largely agree, of course, since I’ve been using these agents heavily the last few weeks.
Where does my agent stop and yours begin?
So what have I done with the agents? Let’s take a concrete example.
Over the last three days, I’ve spent 6+ hours in my car. Driving to different events, driving to work in Gothenburg. I dictate this article now while driving, but that’s not the only thing I’ve done while driving; I’ve also answered all my emails.
Or me or me, my Dot has.
It’s easy, quick, and, for me, time well spent in my car. Now, I work for myself, so this is rather easy for me, but imagine if I were employed somewhere and did this. These bots crave context; it's what fuels them. But useful context might sit in my personal account as well as my work account. Should I be allowed to connect the two? It would benefit my work, but it would also mean my personal and professional life blend in ways that have all kinds of implications.
Why not keep two separate swimlanes? Of course that’s an option, but these agents benefit from context (work) and personality (you). If all there is is context, why bother hiring a person at all? You (hopefully) are the one being creative, answering emails, and bringing your thoughts to benefit the organization; the agent is a helper to get you there. So where will we draw the line? And will it even be possible to draw a line?
Because even if I decided to keep all my personal agents out of my professional life, I think it would be very hard to keep them totally separate. Information will, whether I like it or not, bleed into my agents. When it understands I’m traveling, it will ask where and why. When I ask for restaurant tips for a client meeting, it will piece things together. When I’m stressed and asking for last-minute advice on the meeting with my boss, it will get work context, in some shape or form.
So what happens then? And the above assumes that we, the organization, provide people with alternatives to our personal agents at work. If we don’t, well, a different kind of story. It’s a bit like when the smartphone entered people’s pockets. Suddenly, a ban on surfing Facebook on your work computer meant nothing; you just used your phone instead.
If we don’t make employees' lives easier at work by using agents like the ones mentioned above, we can be pretty sure some people will just use their own, with or without our permission.
So do we need to consider this now? Is this something that will happen “somewhere in a distant future”?
Muse is the most downloaded app in the US.
Dot has over a million users, just a couple of weeks after the launch.
These tools are convenient, and convenience usually wins.
So the time to start informing yourself and pondering (and maybe even creating processes) about what’s allowed, what the benefits are, and what the problems are is now.
A ban didn't stop Facebook at work once phones arrived, and your smartphone comparison suggests it won't stop personal agents either. A short list of what never goes into a personal agent might hold up better, like pay data, client contracts and health records. People can remember a list that short and follow it without a policy manual.