02.21.2025

ForwardThinking

FastForward #10: Let’s stop personifying AI agents

Let’s start this week’s commentary with a story 📖: Back in the 1990s when I was a technical writer writing documentation, online help and training materials, there was a lot of repetitive content. To get around this, I would create macros by recording a series of tasks and the software – a word I use deliberately as you shall see – completed the tasks for me with the press of a key command. It was pretty brittle, but it worked.

Shifting to present day, we have AI agents, which give you the ability to define a series of tasks, much more smoothly than its 1990s predecessor, or even the more recent robotic process automation (RPA). In an ideal world, if an agent gets stuck, it can try different approaches until it learns the correct way to complete one or more tasks. My 1990s macro certainly couldn’t do that.

It’s a pretty cool idea, but let’s be clear, it’s still software. I say this because earlier this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was delivering the keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and had this to say about the agentic AI workplace of the future: “In a lot of ways, the IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future.”

Little girl in Kuromon Market in Osaka, Japan making friends with a robot.

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash

People latched onto that HR idea because the metaphor is kind of tidy. Human workers are hired to take care of a set of tasks and AI agents perform a set of tasks, so they must be akin to each other, right?

As I wrote in my 12/20/2024 ForwardThinking commentary looking at some of the questions around agentic AI, Salesforce certainly thinks so. “At Salesforce’s earnings call [in December], CEO Marc Benioff was trumpeting his company’s position in the coming agentic world. “Salesforce has become, right out of the gate here, the largest supplier of digital labor, and this is just the beginning.”

While it’s useful for marketers like Benioff to frame agentic AI in a personified package for the typical enterprise buyer, I think it’s a mistake to refer to these tools in this way. Returning to Huang’s metaphor, if you think about agents as software as I do, then that’s something IT has always managed, so nothing really changes. It’s no more related to HR managing human workers than when IT managed your Box or Workday licenses.

People latched onto that HR idea because the metaphor is kind of tidy. Human workers are hired to take care of a set of tasks and AI agents perform a set of tasks, so they must be akin to each other, right?

The nature of the software may change, but IT continues to do its job, managing the software, making sure it works, that it’s secure and complies with the rules of the organization and whatever regulatory requirements the company has. IT will continue to do this with agents.

While agents should help humans do their jobs, much more effectively than my 1990s macro recorders, in the end they are still software. We certainly shouldn't be attempting to personify them or make them anything more than that, an approach that could ultimately backfire by creating unreasonable expectations about their capabilities for the companies using them.

What's new on the blog 📰

Amalgamated Bank CTO focuses on bank’s social mission as he sets tech policy

Amalgamated Bank CTO Adrian Glace has to take into account the bank's social mission as the country's largest union-owned bank as he sets tech policy, and that's especially true when it comes to using AI.

“The whole objective is not to replace people. It's not to eliminate jobs. The idea is to, as you grow, to reduce the rate at which you need to incur expenses,” he said.

Read the full article >>

Databricks gains enterprise street cred with SAP partnership

I spoke to Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi and SAP Global Head of AI Walter Sun about the SAP Databricks partnership announced last week. I also spoke to a couple of industry experts to get their point of view. The consensus was that everybody wins, especially customers, and you don't see that very often.

Read the full article >>

Photo courtesy of SAP

News of the week

Salesforce apparently made a major cloud deal with someone 🔥

The Information reported this week that Salesforce was in talks with Google, Microsoft and Oracle around a big deal involving $1 billion in cloud spending over several years. That's still a lot of dough, even by today's inflated infrastructure spending numbers.

But Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff immediately took to X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) to refute the report. Benioff wrote that while the company explored some alternative cloud vendor options at the end of last year, the winner in this particular vendor battle is Google Cloud. Benioff said the company chose to expand its deal with Google, although he didn't say how much the deal was worth.

Marc Benioff X post refuting Information report that it was looking at spending a $1 billion on cloud infrastructure.

While Benioff surely does love himself a bit of high drama, his public pronouncement was good news for Google, which sits in third place in infrastructure market share with 12%, well behind Amazon with 30% and Microsoft at 21% according to the most recent numbers from Synergy Research. The cloud infrastructure market reached $330 billion in 2024.

Microsoft made a major quantum breakthrough this week -- or did it? 🤷🏻‍♂️

Quantum hit kind of a rough patch recently when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (who has had a lot to say lately) suggested that we were a couple of decades away from practical quantum use, causing a bunch of quantum computing company stocks to temporarily tank.

This week Microsoft suggested that maybe Huang was wrong when it announced what it called a major breakthrough in quantum, "the world’s first quantum chip powered by a new Topological Core architecture that it expects will realize quantum computers capable of solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades," the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new chip.

Photo courtesy of Microsoft

Sounds important and revolutionary, right? Well, not so fast. Tom Krazit writing on Runtime News says it's actually more science fiction than actual breakthrough, at least for now. Quoting Scott Aaronson, a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, who is a recognized expert in Quantum, he suggests that this still very much an open question.

"Topological qubits can win if, and only if, they turn out to be so much more reliable that they leapfrog the earlier approaches—sort of like the transistor did to the vacuum tube and electromechanical relay. Whether that will happen is still an open question, to put it extremely mildly," Krazit quoted Aaronson.

So the big news isn't such big news? As with all things related to quantum computing, it's hard to know, but maybe some day we'll understand.

Amazon chime we hardly knew ye 💀

We've all heard of Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, but you'll be excused if you hadn't heard of Amazon's online meeting offering called Chime. If you're a journalist like me, you would have had Amazon meetings on Chime, but few people outside of Amazon actually used it.

Business Insider's Eugene Kim reported this week that Amazon finally gave up the ghost when it came to Chime. The company will be shutting down the tool, which believe it or not, has been around since 2017.

But Chime's demise is good news for Zoom, which becomes the 'standard' online meeting tool inside of Amazon, according to BI.

Former openAi CTO Mira Murati resurfaces at new startup 🎇

When Mira Murati left her job at OpenAI last fall, it was fair to wonder where she would land. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she has launched a new startup called Thinking Machines.

The Verge's Kylie Robison reports the details are light when it comes to the new company's mission, but Murati told her that the new startup hopes "to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable."

There are also a lot of words on the company's home page explaining their goals and desires without saying much at all about what they intend to do, beyond becoming an artificial intelligence research and product company. Not exactly crystal clear, but apparently that's the way Murati wants to keep it for now as her company remains mostly in stealth. In other words, we'll know more when she's ready to reveal more.

What we're reading

Person reading book, but all you can see is their hands holding the book. They are sitting on a hardwood floor steeped in shadow, creating an interesting look.

LivPhoto by Blaz Photo on Unsplash

VentureBeat

AI can fix bugs—but can’t find them: OpenAI’s study highlights limits of LLMs in software engineering

Emilia David

Benedict Evans

The Deep Research problem

Benedict Evans

CIO

Is VMware really becoming the new mainframe?

Grant Gross

WSJ

What Is Quantum Computing, and Why Does It Matter?

Asa Fitch

Look who's talking

“Open source AI is accelerating. The ability of the community to quickly match any new development is clear validation of the velocity and power of open source AI, driven by the brains of a massive and growing community of talent all over the world.”

- Jim Zemlin, executive director, Linux Foundation

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