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The Future

Age of Autonomous Business

Kai Feller •
Listen 00:00 00:00

We are living in an age where software and hardware will no longer just assist people in running businesses, but begin to actually run the businesses themselves. For the first time, technology can autonomously observe, decide, and act across every layer of operations. Calls, messages, customers, quotes, payments, scheduling, marketing - all can be coordinated by a network of specialised intelligence working together.

Until now, we've built tools. CRMs, booking systems, invoicing software, marketing platforms - each solving a single problem, but all reliant on armies of humans to tie them together. People have been the system integrators. That era is ending.

AI has transformed what's possible. It can talk to customers, understand intent, and act on context. It's now possible to have technology that doesn't just store and organise information - it executes and operates. The result isn't a new app, it's a new kind of system - a network of intelligent agents, memory systems, and orchestrators that together behave like a single, unified super intelligence for the company.

This new kind of system acts as one cohesive brain. It's what allows an intelligent receptionist to pass a lead to a sales agent, who generates a quote, books a job, updates the CRM, and follows up - or for an invoice arriving by email to be reviewed, reconciled, and entered into accounts automatically. It's what turns disconnected static software and information into a single, self-running organism.

Autonomy won't just live in software. The physical world will be the next frontier. Purpose built hardware will bring this intelligence closer to where work actually happens. New devices built for AI will replace legacy devices built for humans. They will be connected devices that see, hear, and act. The same system that answers your phone will one day see the problem, quote it, schedule the fix and then actually fix it.

But autonomy doesn't mean losing control. Businesses will always define the boundaries. They will decide what the AI can do, what requires approval, and what stays human. The system will be the ultimate expert on their business - powered by deep domain knowledge, acting on their behalf but never outside their direction.

This is going to replace pain, not people.

Future

Kai Feller •
Listen 00:00 00:00

We are at the start of a new technological revolution. AI is a new invention, just the same as electricity or the internet was. It has unlocked the door to a new wave of disruptive innovation and everything will be affected. You will be able to do much more, with much less. This will make the economy far more efficient, increasing overall consumption (Jevons Paradox) and driving up global GDP. This is not going to happen overnight, and will not be smooth sailing. There is still significant infrastructure to build and huge challenges to overcome e.g. energy supply and skills gap. But we have just entered the Intelligence Age that will transform the way everyone and everything works. There is so much that could be done even with the technology that is available now, and this is only going to get dramatically more powerful and an order of magnitude cheaper over time (Moore's Law).

The way people get work done is going to be disrupted the most. You will look back at how we used to do work and it will be unrecognisable. Just like if you were to look back only 20 years at how we used to work and live - the internet just started taking off and most people were relying on dial-up internet. It will be unrecognisable how we used to find information by googling it, inefficiently trawling through a list of search results to try and find the answers to our questions. It will be unrecognisable how we used to click through software, dragging files, nudging buttons, and filling forms, with every interface looking like an old school design for a manual human process. And it's already unrecognisable how we used to code, manually writing each line and spending hours scanning StackOverflow and documentation whenever we came across a problem.

Most people are going to work like a manager; but instead of being a manager of humans, they will be a manager of AI employees. You'll set objectives, have brainstorming sessions, review drafts, approve or reject deliverables, and give feedback. There will be some things that require your approval and some things that don't, just as you would with a human employee. Human checkpoints will persist and may shrink over time, but that last 5-10% of judgement will be very hard to replace and probably shouldn't be replaced. There will be new UX patterns that are designed around this way of working which will give the ability for anyone to become superhuman.

This is why we are building an AI Workforce - to transform the way people work and make them significantly more productive.

There is still a huge market focus on AI infrastructure and developer tools, which is required as building a complete AI Workforce probably isn't feasible right now. Dev tools around things like Memory, RAG, Context/Prompt engineering, Evals, Tool use, Agent Auth are all in their infancy with new and improved architectures to come. We also need the data centre infrastructure to be built out to support the level of compute and usage that will be required in the future.

But instead of waiting until that's more mature, we are going to start with the parts of the AI Workforce that are feasible now. We'll build up expertise, understanding, and position ourselves at the forefront of the revolution as this transformative wave accelerates. The AI Workforce will get better as the models get better. The AI Workforce will be able to do more as more frameworks and dev tools become available. And the AI Workforce will become much more cost-effective as technology becomes cheaper.

And soon, a one-human unicorn will be created that is powered by our AI Workforce.