Aaron Levie: The New Role of Knowledge Workers Is Managing Agent Teams
Box CEO Aaron Levie believes that the work model is shifting from "agents helping us do our work better and faster" to "we help agents do the work," and that practitioners will change from individual contributors into managers of a team of agents. The most affected will be information-intensive positions such as programming, cybersecurity, law, biotech, and engineering; individual leverage will no longer be tied to hours invested, because agents can execute tasks in parallel. The earlier individuals and organizations adjust their operations around this, the more their workflow returns will compound.
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View original postGreat line from the CTO of Proton. I’m paraphrasing and stealing it : Your job is not to use agents to help you write code. Your job is to lead the agents to help them write code.
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Great line from the CTO of Proton. I’m paraphrasing and stealing it : Your job is not to use agents to help you write code. Your job is to lead the agents to help them write code.
Body
Increasingly this will be the new job description for a lot of roles, not just coding. We’re clearly moving from a world where agents help us do our work incrementally better or faster, to us helping agents do their work.
This turns everyone in one of these positions to that of a manager of a team of agents, instead of an individual contributor with just some added leverage from AI. The biggest areas of impact will be information-heavy jobs, like coding, cybersecurity, legal work, biotech, engineering, and many other fields.
And as a result, in these jobs your leverage will begin to be decoupled from the normal ratio of hours spent working to output generated. For essentially the history of knowledge work the main variable you had to play with was hours of work done (assuming fixed level talent/coordination/strategy).
Now we’ve separated these variables because agents can parallelize work for us, to in theory execute as much as we need to pull off whatever goal we’re trying to accomplish. The people and organizations that discover this sooner, and orient their operations around it, will see compounding gains in their workflows.