Latest news with #AIemployees
Forbes
30-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Digital Employees: The Invisible Workforce Of The Future
Anton Alikov, CEO and Founder, Arctic Ventures. In our rapidly evolving digital world, AI employees (also known as AI agents) are already becoming a transformative force in traditional workplaces. It is possible that in the next two or three years, digital employees will cease to be a futuristic concept and become integral members of high-performance teams in various spheres of human activity. I believe this evolution of the workforce will also create opportunities for human workers to develop new skills and take on more meaningful responsibilities that require creativity, intuition, critical thinking, off-the-shelf skills and emotional intelligence. The Microsoft 2025 "Work Trend Index Annual Report" indicates the emergence of "frontier firms" that fully integrate AI agents into their business processes, leveraging "intelligence on tap" and hybrid human-agent teams where every human employee becomes a colleague or supervisor of a digital agent. It is not yet easy to assess the market for such technologies, but the Boston Consulting Group forecasts that the AI agent market will grow by an average of 45% and reach $52.1 billion by 2030. In my own experience, the combination of digital employees and human teams can increase efficiency without seriously reducing jobs for people, and a number of both established players and startups are at work developing the technology even further. What exactly is a digital employee? A digital employee is a complex AI-based software structure designed to autonomously perform tasks that are traditionally performed by trained people. Unlike traditional rule-based bots that follow simple instructions, well-designed AI employees are able to learn and adapt to a complex environment and make decisions similar to humans. In addition to AI technologies, digital employees also use machine learning, LLMs, deep learning, robotic process automation and cognitive computing technologies to "think" and propose solutions to complex problems. This powerful combination makes it possible for them to solve a wide range of tasks that previously required the intervention of qualified people. Digital employees can analyze large amounts of data, offer solutions to problems and even make complex decisions with high speed and accuracy, avoiding human errors and providing consistent task execution. They can work 24/7 and hyperautomate entire business processes end-to-end. In my opinion, one of the most impressive aspects of digital employees is their versatility in various roles and divisions of companies. They can perform various tasks in the field of customer service, personnel and financial management, etc. This feature can make them a valuable asset in any organization, as they can be configured to support teams from different departments simultaneously. Last but not least, thanks to natural language processing (NLP), AI employees can be designed to effectively communicate with customers and company staff, including detecting context. This allows them to provide accurate and relevant answers, helping to make their interactions more natural and productive. How does a digital workforce function? As AI grows in relevance, a number of developers are striving to seamlessly integrate AI employees with their existing systems in order to increase the efficiency of their entire organization. Many modern AI platforms use low-code/no-code software and offer plug-and-play deployment options, enabling enterprises to achieve immediate benefits without as many technical obstacles. AI employees are designed to work with people, with the latter providing training, control and feedback to fine-tune processes. In my experience, this collaborative approach can significantly increase team productivity by allowing employees to focus on strategic priorities while the AI program performs routine tasks. Humans can have constant access to huge amounts of information, process it quickly and receive recommendations. This can help transform them from narrow specialists into diverse professionals with both broad and in-depth knowledge, potentially increasing their productivity. Who will be the main customer for AI employees? Based on the above analysis, a wide variety of organizations can benefit greatly from the introduction of digital workers. For example, I've observed that they are already in high demand by small businesses right now, as AI can help these companies address a variety of common problems, such as: • Difficulty finding and retaining qualified people, which can lead to a hesitancy toward training human employees • Inability to serve customers 24/7 • Challenges with scaling a business without loss of quality Many of these problems are already being solved by the introduction of digital employees, helping to turn more SMEs into strong candidates to become frontier firms. What challenges can leaders expect? Although AI employees have great potential, their implementation may still be burdened with certain difficulties, including: • Risks of security breaches and data theft • Lack of emotional intelligence in AI programs • The formation of excessive trust in digital employees, which could lead to a lack of human oversight necessary to catch incorrect AI outputs • Technical problems of integrating AI employees into legacy systems I believe overcoming these challenges will be a top priority for developers and business leaders alike in the coming years. Will digital workers be able to completely replace people? This question scares many people, but I believe the answer is no: Despite their impressive capabilities, AI employees are not able to completely replace people. Most likely, we will never see fully automated and peopleless organizations. On the contrary, I see a future in which both digital and human employees will work in tandem, using their unique strengths to achieve various synergies. As history has shown many times, new technologies can destroy jobs, but they also usually go on to create many more new jobs. Conclusion In sum, AI employees are rapidly becoming important components of many organizations. By automating routine tasks and empowering staff, digital workers are revolutionizing the way businesses operate. I encourage business leaders to look at digital employees not as AI replacements for humans but rather as a way to create powerful partnerships that can help ensure high levels of productivity, innovation and job satisfaction. Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
TechCrunch
02-06-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
For the love of God, stop calling your AI a co-worker
Generative AI comes in many forms. Increasingly, though, it's marketed the same way: with human names and personas that make it feel less like code and more like a co-worker. A growing number of startups are anthropomorphizing AI to build trust fast — and soften its threat to human jobs. It's dehumanizing, and it's accelerating. I get why this framing took off. In today's upside-down economy, where every hire feels like a risk, enterprise startups — many emerging from the famed accelerator Y Combinator — are pitching AI not as software but as staff. They're selling replacements. AI assistants. AI coders. AI employees. The language is deliberately designed to appeal to overwhelmed hiring managers. Some don't even bother with subtlety. Atlog, for instance, recently introduced an 'AI employee for furniture stores' that handles everything from payments to marketing. One good manager, it gloats, can now run 20 stores at once. The implication: you don't need to hire more people — just let the system scale for you. (What happens to the 19 managers it replaces is left unsaid.) Consumer-facing startups are leaning into similar tactics. Anthropic named its platform 'Claude' because it's a warm, trustworthy-sounding companion for a faceless, disembodied neural net. It's a tactic straight out of the fintech playbook where apps like Dave, Albert, and Charlie masked their transactional motives with approachable names. When handling money, it feels better to trust a 'friend.' The same logic has crept into AI. Would you rather share sensitive data with a machine learning model or your bestie Claude, who remembers you, greets you warmly, and almost never threatens you? (To OpenAI's credit, it still tells you you're chatting with a 'generative pre-trained transformer.') But we're reaching a tipping point. I'm genuinely excited about generative AI. Still, every new 'AI employee' has begun to feel more dehumanizing. Every new 'Devin' makes me wonder when the actual Devins of the world will push back on being abstracted into job-displacing bots. Generative AI is no longer just a curiosity. Its reach is expanding, even if the impacts remain unclear. In mid-May, 1.9 million unemployed Americans were receiving continued jobless benefits — the highest since 2021. Many of those were laid-off tech workers. The signals are piling up. Techcrunch event Save now through June 4 for TechCrunch Sessions: AI Save $300 on your ticket to TC Sessions: AI—and get 50% off a second. Hear from leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Khosla Ventures, and more during a full day of expert insights, hands-on workshops, and high-impact networking. These low-rate deals disappear when the doors open on June 5. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | REGISTER NOW Some of us still remember 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL, the onboard computer, begins as a calm, helpful assistant before turning completely homicidal and cutting off the crew's life support. It's science fiction, but it hit a nerve for a reason. Last week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years, pushing unemployment as high as 20%. 'Most [of these workers are] unaware that this is about to happen,' he told Axios. 'It sounds crazy, and people just don't believe it.' You could argue that's not comparable to cutting off someone's oxygen, but the metaphor isn't that far off. Automating more people out of paychecks will have consequences, and when the layoffs increase, the branding of AI as a 'colleague' is going to look less clever and more callous. The shift toward generative AI is happening regardless of how it's packaged. But companies have a choice in how they describe these tools. IBM never called its mainframes 'digital co-workers.' PCs weren't 'software assistants'; they were workstations and productivity tools. Language still matters. Tools should empower. But more and more companies are marketing something else entirely, and that feels like a mistake. We don't need more AI 'employees.' We need software that extends the potential of actual humans, making them more productive, creative, and competitive. So please stop talking about fake workers. Just show us the tools that help great managers run complex businesses. That's all anyone is really asking for.
