AI at Work: Workforce Shifts, Rogue Agents and Enigma

And, um, There's a conversation going on out there.

And John was at a Workday conference this week.

But the conversation is, well, just what is the future of work going to look like? Because I think we're moving past this notion that suddenly, you know, everybody's going to be replaced by AI.

But, you know, that doesn't appear to be happening anytime in the immediate future.

But, you know, there's still folks talking about that, I'm sure.

But what was interesting to me, John, is with the Workday stuff is They were embedding a lot of automation into a platform that's normally used by HR folks.

One of the things that caught my eye was there's now over, I think it was 145 or I can't remember the exact number of skills or AI skills that they have put into this platform.

These AI skills are essentially job functions or job roles that people perform.

And these are the things you invoke to accomplish a task.

So I feel like we're trying to capture some of the knowledge of the average worker.

And maybe this is tribal knowledge that companies had and lost when somebody left the company and it was always a pain in the ass.

But how far does this go and what were they talking about?

Well, this is, so as you mentioned, Workday had a conference called Rising and they introduced a ton, dozens and dozens of AI agentic features.

They also announced this partnership with Anthropic to automate corporate tasks.

And one of the things that was interesting, so I talked to a couple of the executives and they were preaching to me two things.

They were talking about this idea, this place and time for specialized AI agents, especially in hiring and talent acquisition.

And one of the weird takeaways I got, and I'm not sure if it was intentional on the part of the executive, but I asked him how effective the AI agents were in terms of hiring and retaining people, and basically in terms of hiring the right person for the job.

And he said it was significantly better, which made me come to the realization that the people that do the hiring at a lot of these places, and including some of the customers that they mentioned, like 7-Eleven,

are going to probably go down that path

where eventually that person will lose their job as somebody in hiring or in talent acquisition and retaining people.

So, They in talking about the specifics of what they're doing, they in a sense kind of led me to believe that they are going to eliminate these jobs.

Now, they also I can't I'm not going to betray this guy, but he accidentally told me another major customer of theirs that is in the fast food industry.

So you can you can probably guess who it is that was really ramping this up.

because this company believes more in the idea of hiring in kind of the background HR stuff than they are in terms of replacing people at the counter.

Um, now that said, we also had a story that we did about a Danish supermarket that's, that's trying human aid robots to handle repetitive tasks like restocking shelves.