Eoghan McCabe: prediction

Transcript context

…The first thing I'll say is that CX is deceptively large given it's hidden behind just two words, two letters. Customer experience really is service success, sales and marketing, in my opinion. It's all engagement with all customers. It's the biggest part by headcount of any business. Any consumer business and any B2B business the biggest organizations are sales, service, success. So, I'll talk about things other than CX in a moment, but I want to emphasize that CX is the majority of business operations. Of course, it'll go beyond CX. Any function that requires a lot repetitive operational mechanical work will be automated, whether it's chasing or collecting or issuing invoices, it could be onboarding or offboarding employees. There are so many repetitive jobs in an organization that it'll start to replace. One of the interesting questions is how much will be generic operations bots, how much will be expert agents? There are expert agents for law and contract review. There will probably be expert agents for accounting, but you'll need the glue in between all of these agents too. But future organizations will be agents everywhere. I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about what does it all look like in the future, and I imagine it as a medley of humans and agents, and I don't think it's obviously going to be humans on the top and the agents all in the IC roles. I think that'll be more of a complex mix where you're going to have people that are like managers and leaders, but they'll be in IC roles, working with agents to configure them for success and monitor and manage their progress, kind of add that oversight and cover for edge cases. And so I think we're going to be surprised in which the way that these organizations go, they'll definitely be smaller, they'll be flatter because of that. I won't be surprised if there are agents at the highest level too. I mean, I've been thinking about how, and we do have a great human chief of staff here, but imagine a future human chief of staff that understands your priorities and actually talks to you and does a check in each day and reaches out to different people and ask for updates and helps organize your priorities and helps you remember who you need to keep accountable. Clearly there's an opportunity for that. And so you can imagine agents in specific roles like customer service in operational roles being glue and in being kind of like co-pilot or assistant roles like that, which I mentioned. But what I think that all brings is just epic levels of efficiency. It's going to be super deflationary. There'll be a lot more competition. AI itself is insanely competitive right now. It's so intense in a way that was never before that's going to come to all industries when so much of their inner workings becomes automated. And ultimately I think it's going to be great for the consumer. so intense in a way that was never before that's going to come to all industries when so much of their inner workings becomes automated. And ultimately I think it's going to be great for the consumer. They'll have more options, cheaper options, and I can't but see that be great for the economy, a lot of economic lubricant as it were, and a lot of new movement and activity. And if we were to really go off the reservation, but I'll stop here, that means that we need more humans too. We need population growth to show up for this big growth economically. And yeah, I just see the future as just a beautiful collaboration between humans and agents in every direction. I love the optimism. Someone described this once as a society ... What is it? Agentic society where it's us and agents living together.…

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