This should be so obvious that it shouldn’t need to be said, but with multiple companies still promising to (soon) deliver “AI Employees”, it apparently needs to be said.

First of all, why it should be obvious:

1. There is no Artificial Intelligence. The tools are as dumb as a doorknob. The best you can get is Augmented Intelligence, which, by the way, is what you really need because it can provide almost instantaneous insights that would take a traditional analyst with traditional tools days to weeks (or months) to discover.
2. An employee is a person. A PERSON! Not a piece of software.
   (As we don’t have AI, we don’t have autonomous robots, so we can’t even have the theoretical argument about whether or not a robot should be recognized as a person for legal means.)

Secondly, we’ve already seen how autonomous software agents don’t work (because they are not intelligent or people). Klarna, one of the first companies to fire the majority of its customer support team with the false claim AI can do that, quickly found it it really can’t and now has to hire back hundreds of support agents because what AI was really doing was the work of 700 really bad agents! And their customers didn’t want to talk to these bots (essentially because of how dumb and useless they were).

Thirdly, there have been no, and nor will there be with existing algorithms, stacks, and technologies, any magical emergence that will suddenly allow these “AI agents” to become intelligent and be able to perform their tasks autonomously. Because

1. if Neural Networks were the right models, today’s models (constrained to commercial compute capacity) would put them on par with a pond snail, maybe a sea slug;
2. compute power doesn’t double year over year anymore; Moore’s law is quickly becoming a historical footnote due to quantum limits; and
3. there’s no more data to train them on — the big AI tech plays have already illegally stolen all of the copyrighted data on the internet, and that’s still not enough (and AI generated data just worsens performance because it’s not real, or good, data).

Moreover, we don’t need AI Employees. What we need are more productive employees! Employees that don’t waste up to 80% (or more) of their time doing more-or-less nothing but data wrangling trying to turn data into knowledge and knowledge into the insights needed to make a decision. Tasks that are purely tactical calculations and conversions that are precisely what computers were built for. Computers can do trillions of calculations a second error free, while we can only do a few, and not necessarily error free.

Which means what we really need are Augmented Intelligent Agent Assistants that do the computational tasks we need done and either

1. automate processing that we would do almost thoughtlessly if we determined that the appropriate conditions were met or
2. present us with the data, knowledge, and insights we need to make a decision and take action, including suggestions for that action if there are standard response patterns

Because, when the 80% time wasting tactical data processing is taken off of our plates, we will be at least 5 times as effective with these Automated Intelligent Agent Assistants, and that is what will propel organizations forward. Not dumb tech, and definitely not false promises of fake AI Employees that do not, and fundamentally cannot, exist.