The Rise of AI Workers Future of Work Insights from AI Summit London

Let's go ahead and just jump right in. AI is shifting more into the primetime era. Which of those two companies do you think is going to win? The one who banked the savings or the one who reinvested? What was that core message that you were trying to get across for everyone in that audience? You cannot stick your head in the sand. You are going to lose. It seems like we're trying to keep the truth away from people to not scare them too much. Bullshit. That's absolute bullshit. Hi, everyone. My name is Austin Bram and I am the AI evangelist here at EverWorker. Today, I have the actual pleasure to speak with our CEO, Peter Grigenti, right after we're coming back from London from the AI Summit London. So, Peter, thank you very much for joining today. Let's go ahead and just jump right in. So I have my first question for you today. After coming back and having a few days to actually recoup and think about all that happened at the summit last week, it was clear that agentic AI was one of the major themes that everyone was trying to pretty much learn about and see more from. So from your perspective, how has the conversation around agentic AI kind of evolved, especially over the last year? Because this was something that everyone was more or less asking me about. And what kind of signals did you pick up from the show that show that businesses are actively now ready to start thinking about agentic AI and start implementing agentic AI? Yeah, it's a great question, Austin. I think the sort of macro trend that I'm seeing in all of this is AI is shifting more into the primetime era. Like people are really looking at this and saying, OK, we're ready to start actually embracing this. And I think some of that is also an evolution of our understanding of AI as business people. Right. I think early on, you know, I mean, AI has been around for a while, right? And it took ChachiBT to actually go and help people really start to understand what was possible with LLMs. You know, the capability of LLMs predated ChachiBT, but a lot of people hadn't yet fully embraced what they could do. And so I feel like ChachiBT kicked off this sort of assistant era. Right. And everyone started really looking and saying, you know, how do I now engage AI as a accelerator for the tasks that I do, the capabilities and things that I'm looking for as an individual? And you see it in the tooling that came out. Right. You know, we've had code assistants that came out that worked with you while you typed. We had, you know, a plethora of ChachiBT copycats with Gemini and Copilot and all those other things that emerged inside of the office suite. And I've seen a lot of personal productivity tools emerge. But agentic AI, take the term agentic out for a minute and start thinking about it as the application of AI. Right. So if assistance really exists as, you know, a thought partner and tool for you to prompt and interact with, agentic AI is about now taking the power of the LLM and slowly and steadily starting to take on more and more complicated tasks autonomously. Right. And that's really the heart of it. And I think the promise of that, you know, is something obviously we've seen AI agents now for at least a couple of years being used for everything from basic to more complex tasks. But I think now businesses are starting to wrap their head around the art of the possible. I think it's literally that simple. And, you know, when we were at the show, what I was hearing more and more of was, is this possible? Can I do this? Can I do that? I've got this challenge in what I'm doing. And I think there's an opportunity to apply AI for this use case. And I think what was both a lack of understanding of what was possible when you took an LLM and you gave it data in context and you gave it good prompting and you worked it into workflows or inside of other structure, you know, we now are starting to really understand as business people what's possible with that is also being met at a time where if we're really honest, companies are expected to do more and less. Right. I think after the hype of free capital, you know, post-COVID, you know, to the crash that occurred two years later, I think we're now sort of in the doldrums as businesses. Right. It's super hard to raise capital. You know, if you're not an AI company, it's super hard to raise capital. You know, the street is demanding more and more profitability. And I think companies have had their back against the wall for a couple of years now with this. And they're looking and saying, look, I need to I need to find ways to reduce my costs. I need to find ways to reduce some of the rudimentary and low value efforts so I can reinvest so I can go and put money back into growth. I can go and put money back into being competitive. And so that was the heart of all of my conversations. It wasn't, you know, embracing technology for technology's sake. There were business people coming up to me in almost every role and function saying I'm constrained on my capacity today or I'm constrained on my capability today. I'm trying to do these things in my business and I think I can help. What do you think? And I think that's the answer to a lot of the stuff is very clearly agentic. And I think people are starting to get that. Absolutely. I feel the same way after all my conversations as well as most people, especially. And this was a large part of much of what we're talking about was talking about agentic AI, but then, you know, baseline starting. Hey, so what is your AI strategy in the first place? And oftentimes we were hearing there really wasn't one at all. And so that kind of led to a great start of the conversation, which kind of leads to your talks. So for everyone that was not there, Peter actually gave a keynote address titled The Rise of AI Workers, which kind of went over all that you just more or less mentioned from this that we just talked about. What was that core message that you were trying to get across for everyone in the audience for those that were not there? Yeah, the heart of my talk was actually intended to be a bit of inspiration for the business people in the room to start wrapping their heads around what was possible by sharing stories of what others were already doing. I liken what we're living with right now to what we experienced with the birth of the Internet in the late 90s. Right. AI today feels like the web in 97. Right. In 97, you already had innovators. Right. You had Amazon already starting to to dominate commerce. You had, you know, early media properties really trying to introduce their own content. You know what eventually became independent streamers, independent publishers. You know, you even have, you know, Google was being founded only a year later. Right. And so, you know, I think there's this there's this gap that exists between the people who really understand the technology, were early adopters and have started doing early experimentation with the sort of average company. And so, you know, when I do these talks, I try to I try to be a good servant to the audience. Right. And so in my in my thinking, it was I want to share what's happening. I want to share the early results from what's happening. And I want to inspire people to start wrapping their head around what you could do. So, you know, I shared quite a bit about, you know, our thesis that, you know, to to be very direct, which was a little bit controversial in the room. But, you know, A.I. workers are highly likely going to replace human workers in a lot of the sort of basic knowledge worker tasks. You know, that is scary, but it actually does. It is potentially a good thing because human workers move up in that context. You know, we move into more creative and strategic decision making. It does increase our capacity. It unlocks capabilities we didn't have before. You know, I shared a concept that A.I. what's really interesting is A.I. augments humans in a very interesting way. If you're incredibly strong, you know, creatively, but you're not good technically, you know, you can use code assistance to go and automatically generate applications. Right. You know, people could never write code before. I know I know artists and scientists who are doing that stuff or flip side. You know, if you're you know, I work with the CTO of a software company who hated having to go and ask for help to create graphics for his public talks. And now he uses A.I. image generators to go and do that. So, you know, sharing these concepts of, you know, you now have these sort of force multipliers with A.I. workers. And I shared I shared the story of people I know who are executives who have five, 10 A.I. workers that they've created for themselves personally, that expand their capacity, expand their capability. And then I talked a little bit about, you know, if you're a business owner, if you're a line of business leader, if you're an executive, how do you start wrapping your head around what you should be doing? So I shared a path into the first handful of use cases where, you know, you as a business can get started and start learning and start seeing value immediately. Yeah. And I think that that's something that you and I were even talking about at the event that after both your talks, that radical kind of honesty was actually refreshing for a lot of people, because oftentimes it it seems like we're trying to keep the truth away from people to not scare them too much, which, you know, has its validity in some in some ways. But at the same time, just like how you were saying, you're really trying to act as a service to the people that are at the talks to prepare them. So one one aspect of that that even I was hearing more or less people in the audience talk to you and ask you or and come up to us after the fact was you spoke about the idea of the hybrid workforce, you know, with the humans and A.I. working together almost collaboratively. What were some of those most common questions or concerns that came up from the attendees of, you know, both your talks, but then also after the fact at our booth that you're also even talking to other business owners out outside of the conference? Yeah, look, I think I was a little shocked when my my honesty and sort of radical candor was was considered so controversial. I mean, I I I got flooded after my talks that I was the only one at the show who was openly acknowledging what was actually happening with A.I. Right. And what was coming? It sounded like, you know, the feedback I had received from a lot of the attendees. And obviously I have my own my own individual talk. And then I did a panel with with a number of other thought leaders from some other companies. And I just spoke what I'm seeing. Right. I wasn't talking hypothesis. I wasn't talking, you know, what, you know, the art of what may be possible at some point in the future. And I wasn't I wasn't pulling a Sam Altman and like, you know, pontificating about A.G.I. and also the nonsense. I just went practical and tactical. And I talked about what am I seeing? What am I seeing with our financial services customers? What am I seeing with our software customers? What am I seeing with our, you know, manufacturing and logistics customers? And and we we tend to you obviously know this often, but our audience doesn't like we tend to serve very strongly in the market, right, where people can't hire engineers, but they have massive human labor forces that they're not even able to hire for. Right. They're struggling right now. And so, you know, so I was sharing what was going on there. And what was interesting was the conversation very quickly went past the technology and went into the change management side, which I think is very reasonable. And, you know, I think the change management side that we all have to face in this is if you fast forward five years from today and the LLMs do not develop any longer, any further, right, the LLMs just as they exist today. We're learning more and more and more how to use them effectively to start taking on more complex knowledge work. So if you fast forward three to five years from today, we will have hybrid workforces. You know, you will have companies where you have leadership orchestrating A.I. workers to complete their vision and to complete the tasks they want to do. That is that I think is an inevitability. You're already seeing it with the early A.I. first companies. And the value to them is pretty dramatic. Like, you know, Klarna, the CEO of Klarna, went in front of the investors, you know, only a few weeks ago saying that they pivoted a year ago to in order to make their financial something that actually could work as an IPO. They pivoted to be an A.I. first company. They did do some layoffs, but then they doubled their revenue per head, even with only making modest layoffs in the business. And I think that's now it's becoming a bit of an apocryphal story because you look at that and say, OK, if they can do that, right, because they were finding savings, but they weren't banking those savings, right? They doubled their revenue per head. It wasn't just about margin enhancement. It wasn't just about improving EBITDA, right? They were finding those savings and investing it back in the business and really growing the company. So the conversations inevitably got to this change of interest. They go, OK, well, not only how do I and where do I think about applying A.I. What am I doing? But then what does that mean for my workforce? What do I do with that additional time? Where do I redirect people? And so there was a lot of conversations about. First and foremost, really think about retasking your people towards higher value work so you can be competitive, so you can grow your business. And then there was a lot of conversations about what are the implications of this long term for bringing up junior staff? Right. You know, how do we go and develop young people in the face of where we're not just delegating sort of the menial and rudimentary tasks to new hires and then, you know, using that so they can then get leadership view by osmosis? Right. Which I don't think ever really worked. Right. It never really was a good a good a good way to actually develop talent. I am very American of me on stage. I likened it to Hunger Games. I'm like, you know, we act like we hire, you know, a thousand young people and we're like breeding leaders. We don't just some of them survive, right? Some of them rise up on their of their own accord. And so we have to be more thoughtful in an A.I. workforce era to find good emerging talent and actually maybe create more of an apprenticeship model, you know, to actually go and help them build leadership skills so they can orchestrate A.I. workers, too, and and ultimately contribute higher value to the businesses. Individuals that that that all, of course, spoke, spoke to people, you know, more or less heartstrings because they they see this happening, but they see people not telling the truth about it. But yet they know they need to learn about it. So there's just a whole lot of confusion that that goes on. Like even just today, you know, all our team, you know, talking amongst ourselves about The New York Times just came out with a new article saying, you know, I might take your job, but here are 22 new ones that that I could give you because we know that how that's how it works with every technological revolution. Can I can I can I can I interrogate that actually really quickly? Of course. Of course. I mean, to interrupt you, but I think, you know, I did use that example, right? Because if we if we look at every time we've had radical new technologies. You know, we assume that it's going to be the end of all things, right? We assume that that's what's going to happen. And I use the example of bookkeepers, right? So when we invented the spreadsheet, so even pre-Internet, you know, just desktop software and all this stuff. When we invented the spreadsheet, you know, you can find news articles were like, that's it. Accounting jobs are gone. We're never going to have accountants again. You're not going to need bookkeepers. You're never going to need these things again. Well, guess what? That's not what happened. As soon as we had spreadsheets, all of a sudden we could actually analyze and understand our data better, like in a whole new way. And so we could visualize data in a way that we never actually could do before. Accounting jobs, they skyrocketed after the creation of the spreadsheet. Right. And actually, we saw a rise of a whole new class of workers in FP&A, you know, forward planning and strategy inside of finance organizations. And so, you know, from my perspective, I mean, as humans, we're just terrible at change. We should just acknowledge that, right? As humans, we really, really are terrible at change. And that's OK. We shouldn't admit it. But, you know, inevitably, the example I use was imagine two companies, right? They both embrace AI really aggressively. They both seek to become AI first companies. And AI first, from my perspective, is they look at every role and say, can this be done by AI before they attempt to hire a human, right? So let's say you have two companies to do this and they both achieve 20, 30 percent increase in their actual EBITDA, right, which is possible given some of the early indicator numbers we've seen. You can see that kind of a dramatic increase in margin. So both of them find that savings. One of them banks it and pays their executives fat bonuses for banking that savings. The other company does. They reinvest that money in being more competitive, building better products, creating better customer experiences, being more competitive in their markets, you know, doing better sales and marketing. Which of those two companies do you think is going to win? The one who banked the savings or the one who reinvested? I mean, that's the truth of what happens every single time we have these technologies, right? That money doesn't just go away. I mean, yes, it has happened. There are plenty of large organizations who just enrich their managers, right? But the better long standing high growth companies that have taken categories have always been the ones that actually reinvest. They've always been the one. So, you know, I think, yes, there will absolutely be some creative destruction in the roles that we know of today, and it will probably be really disruptive. Right. We as leaders have to acknowledge it can be disruptive. And ask ourselves how we mitigate that for our stakeholders. But at the same time, long term, it will create more value. It absolutely will. Kind of diving, especially deeper into this topic. I know. I mean, obviously, like we were just talking about, like, you know, the New York Times, I mean, the article about this, that's what everyone's talking about. And in just helping as many people as we can, especially a lot of people at the summit. I mean, I know a number came up to you to talk to you. They were students that were just finishing college or their or their MBA or something, and they wanted they wanted advice. What advice would you give to someone to actually help future proof them for this upcoming, you know, agentic revolution? Look, I think we should first acknowledge where the disruption is likely to occur first and then, you know, where the extra value is. There's sort of a a really pat and simple answer, which is, well, find AI jobs. Right. But I think that that doesn't that that's not enough. Right. I mean, I think that happened in software land. Right. I mean, if you look at startup land, what happened was, you know, everyone who was thinking about building a SAS business three years ago is now building an AI company. Right. Same idea, different underlying tech. Right. But that that that's not that's not going to really address the average knowledge worker, the average information worker, right. The average white collar worker. Like, let's be honest. Instead, you know, what what I what I shared on the panel was my view of this is two things have to happen if I'm a student. I would really start focusing on those parts of my education that teach me critical thinking, that teach me the more advanced creative skills, strategic skills, because you have to assume you're not coming into a business at a junior level anymore. You have to come in as a leader. But you have to come in with that mindset. Right. So not saying everybody should pursue MBAs. That's not what I'm saying. But I think, you know, what we see when people orchestrate AI is actually these are creative and strategic thinkers. That's what they really are. They're thinking systemically, right. They're thinking like leaders do, which is whereas we're trying to solve a specific thing or accomplish a specific thing or serve a customer in a specific way. How do I deliver that? How do I deliver my vision in that way? Because if AI really does dramatically increase our capacity and unlock new capabilities for us, as you know, with AI workers over human workers, many times you couldn't afford to do those things. Now it's about your vision. All right. Now it's about your ideas, vision and ideas win over capital in some ways. You know, vision and ideas win over, you know, technical prowess, which is what's been true for the last 20 years. So, you know, I'd encourage young people to really think about like forget the computer science classes. You know, what are you doing around critical thinking and strategic thinking and creativity? What are you doing to unlock that part of your brain? And, you know, there's a hot debate around what are LLMs and how do they really work? And, you know, what are they capable of? What are they not capable of? I personally land squarely in the camp that LLMs are not creative. That LLMs are pattern matchers. They kind of feign creativity, but they're not going to do they're not going to really generate something completely unique. They're not. And part of that is because in my experience, really radical creativity breaks patterns. It runs orthogonal patterns. Right. And so that's where innovation really comes from. And so, you know, my belief is then think about if the AI worker has a certain, you know, very strong capability, what are the things that are not going to be capable of that humans are going to have to do? And I think direction, strategy and creativity are things that are never. That's some great life lessons right there that I think are very actionable and and people are looking for that. So that's that's great. Thank you for that. So kind of just my my last general question for you here, kind of like I said, going back to the general after all the whole event, all the conversations and even conversations after the fact with all the attendees that we even met with, what would be kind of the what's the major message that you saw that really resonated with the audience? And what feedback did you receive from basically the audience? So what was what was radical about my messaging on the panel was and the feedback was given to me, you know, doing this panel in in England, right in the United Kingdom, was that almost everyone else at the event was sort of downplaying the impact of AI in the near term. In fact, there was somebody on stage saying that, you know, they have they've seen no measurable benefit from using AI at scale. And, you know, just pardon my French, but that's bullshit. That's absolute bullshit. I mean, I see these numbers every day, right? I see what's happening already. You know, there's the early assessments of AI first companies are that, you know, they're finding order of magnitude improvements in their business, you know, doubling, tripling, quadrupling their revenue per head. You know, seeing their cap ratios get cut in half. Right. You know, and being able to actually go and save dramatically in sales and marketing, seeing their their customer support teams actually not just reducing their mean time to resolution and tickets, but seeing their CSAT go up at the same time. Like, you know, I think there is there is a really, really radical impact that these things are already having. So what I said on stage and what I was saying to customers, and I'll say here is, look. This is happening really fast. And just because some of it scares you and just because some of it, you know, is is disconcerting. It's a new thing for us to learn. You can't stick your head in the sand, right? You cannot stick your head in the sand and hope it's going to go away because what's going to happen is if you're a business leader and you are slow on the uptake on this, but then one of your competitors is fast on the uptake. You are going to lose like you are going to lose the market because think about once again, that 20, 30 percent EBITDA example. Again, you keep running the business the way you've been running it all along. Maybe there's parity in your competition set because you all are operating with the same margins and you're all operating with the same investments. All of a sudden, one of your competitors becomes an outlier and they can spend 20, 50 percent more on growth than you, or they can provide better customer experiences than you, or they can radically improve their product in a way you can't. Right. Because they have unlocked AI. What do you think is going to happen? Right. I mean, I lived through the rise of Amazon and at the time hearing Barnes and Noble saying, no, no, no. We've got to protect our brick and mortar business. We have to protect retail. Internet sales are never going to ever really be that big. Yeah. Where are they? Where are they? Right. And so, you know, I think what happened with digital transformation is happening again, but it's probably happening now at two times the rate. Right. I think that's the truth. Right. We're seeing adoption at two to three times the rate. So we're not going to have a lot of time to muck about and hope and hope we figure it out. We have to just act now. And so the coaching I was giving to people is that doesn't mean you have to jump in with both feet and all of a sudden be AI experts. Like it could be as simple as looking at every function in your business and saying, where can I start adopting AI where we can at least start learning and start thinking about how to improve this? Because I don't think the AI first companies jumped in and were like, we're just going to go and fire half of our people and build AI agents to do it. That's not what happened. Right. Instead, what actually happened was, you know, marketing started using some off the shelf AI tools in order to accelerate components of what they were doing. They built some custom stuff for themselves for some specific use cases. Think about like lead enrichment and lead scoring and these sort of things that we were using manpower to do that's actually hard to do with manpower. You know, they're going into finance and saying, let's do some AP and AR use cases. Let's just to try to try to simplify some of the things that are coming in that aren't adding any value. And that crawl, walk, run evolution. If you think about it, you know, you don't have to be, you know, 400 to 500 times better in one day, but you can get there if you're one percent better every day. Right. And so that's a lot of the coaching I was giving to my peers and other executives that I work with of like, jump in. Don't be afraid of it, but start small. Just start small. Start by buying some tactical agents off the shelf, building some of your earliest first agents and start having a vision for where this might go and experiment, right? Experiment, but experiment in production, not allowed. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Peter, for all that. And then once again, like on on behalf of our team, but then also everyone in the audience, thank you for the radical transparency there, too, because in this time, that's what people need. And at the same time, that's what people want. In a day of, you know, avatars or whatever, seeing seeing, you know, you actually saying these things out loud and real person, especially that's that's radical in and of itself. So thank you very much. And thank you to everyone that that joined us and met with us while we were at the summit last week. We really appreciate all of you. And we can we look forward to continuing our conversation with you as well. And then for everyone that's watching right now, we appreciate you spending your time with us. And if you have any questions, please reach out to us on LinkedIn, both to Peter or myself. And you can also request the demo at everworker.ai. So, Peter, thank you very much for joining today. And I'll see you next time.