Imagine the dream employee: They don’t take breaks, go on vacation or request meetings.
DailyMail.com spoke to Ed Broussard, CEO of Tomoro.AI
For some industries, this type of worker could soon be hired.
In recent months several companies have announced they are building AI agents, or ‘synthetic employees.’
These digital workers could upend the workplace as we know it – answering emails, organizing invoices, responding to customer service inquiries and managing a calendar – possibly doing away with admin employees or pricey third-party technology.
DailyMail.com spoke to Ed Broussard, CEO of the artificial intelligence company Tomoro.AI, who said the productivity boost offered by these synthetic employees will be so great it will lead to a three-day workweek.
Mr Broussard, whose company works with Sam Altman’s OpenAI, told DailyMail.com the next two years will see leaps and bounds of progress with these types of workers.
Recently, Nvidia, an AI tech company, and Hippocratic AI, a medical AI company announced they would be collaborating on ‘AI healthcare agents.’
In recent months several companies have announced they are building AI agents, or ‘synthetic employees’
The companies hope their new AI nurses can address the healthcare shortage worldwide.
Hippocratic researchers said the ‘nurses’ will be trained ‘on a massive collection of proprietary data, including clinical care plans, healthcare regulatory documents, medical manuals, drug databases and other high-quality medical reasoning documents.’
So far, the AI healthcare workers have been tested by more than 1,000 nurses and 100 doctors in the US.
Earlier this month, Cognition, an AI software company, was the first to make an autonomous artificial intelligence software engineer, which it named Devin.
Devin can create websites and code apps on its own within 20 minutes and is capable of using the internet to teach itself skills.
The ‘engineer’ was tasked with going on Reddit to take website building requests – and decided – on its own – to start charging money, according to a Twitter thread posted by Wharton professor Ethan Mollick.
Devin is available for hire, though there is a long waitlist.
In addition to AI workers, companies are already using AI-augmented applications, with 40 percent of human resources functions at companies across the world using the automated technology, BBVA OpenMind reported.
The AI workforce is just getting started.
Mr Broussard told DailyMail.com he believes the progress that will be made in just the next two years will be more significant than all advances seen in the industry in the previous 75 – adding that by the end of the decade, every office job will be ‘transformed’ by AI agents.
And the tech CEO isn’t the only expert who has spoken out about the major changes AI could bring.
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, believes AI agents will replace internet search and shopping sites such as Amazon
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, predicted the use of AI in his book, ‘The Road Ahead,’ nearly three decades ago.
He now believes the synthetic workers are going to have a huge impact in education and healthcare, claiming they will be ‘the biggest revolution in computing since we went from typing commands to tapping on icons.’
Mr Gates believes AI agents will replace internet search and shopping sites such as Amazon.
And Mr Broussard believes the productivity boost offered by the digital employees will be so great it will lead to a three-day workweek, adding that in the near future, the technology will take over admin and research duties in several industries including law, investment and marketing.
He told this website: ‘One of the agents we use the most is a Fact Extraction Agent. It is specialized in reading large numbers of documents and extracting all of the facts and useful information into a form other AI Agents can read from easily.
‘That can then be used for lots of different business applications: Legal document reviews, investment analysis, customer research, right through to things like providing the right information to call center staff or price negotiating for large contracts.’
Mr Broussard believes large organizations who fail to start using ‘synthetic employees’ will be destroyed in the next decade.
Broussard told DailyMail.com: ‘Organizations who adopt quickly, start to experiment and work on human and AI interaction will see massive gains in terms of productivity, effectiveness and wellbeing.
‘Laggards will essentially fall away. Big organizations have a huge advantage as they have lots of customers, private data and access to computing power, but the value of all three of those will erode and the big companies that don’t use their advantage soon will start to decline and ultimately disappear, being replaced with new AI native firms.’
He also predicted AI agents will do away with admin altogether – people won’t have to search for information or fill in forms or book hotels, and will instead ask a digital assistant.
The CEO added: ‘We’ll see very different ways of working, new roles emerge and organizations shifting work that typically limits human creative output towards AI agents – it can liberate people.
‘As the impact a human can make starts to decouple from the amount of hours they spend working we may need to reimagine how we think or work.
‘It’s entirely feasible we move to a three-day working week or less, and the top performers aren’t the smartest and hardest working, but the people who are the best at instructing AI agents.’
Mr Broussard maintains AI agents aren’t quite ready to replace entire roles, however.
He said: ‘We’re still a long way from an AI Agent replacing a nurse or a software developer in entirety. We have seen agents do parts of those roles and do them well, for example AI is often better at identifying cancer cells from scans than humans are – but that’s not the entire job of a radiographer.
‘Much more likely agents will be built as capabilities, which can be packaged together for different purposes.’
