Last month, Salesforce doubled down on its new Agentforce offering, rolling out an Agentforce 2.0 event a scant three months after the debut of its autonomous AI agent-building platform. What made us sit up and take notice was how CEO Marc Benioff talked about the generative AI-powered agents that his company's platform could help customers create: he called it a “digital labor platform” that would address the very real concerns of a global labor shortage.
The reason we paid attention to this particular phrasing is because it marked a shift from talking about generative AI-driven agents as technological tools to technological workers. This "digital labor platform" could talk about the labor that exists in the realm of the digital -- information query, retrieval and analysis, for example -- but it could also mean labor in the sense of a workforce comprised of individuals.
Then earlier this week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a blog entry in which he forecasted:
We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies.
This is the second high-profile tech executive to deploy a rhetorical phrase that equates digital agents with human workers. Once is happenstance. Twice is a coincidence. We'll see if we tip into the trend-making three or more mentions.
What's worth noticing now is how this sort of language signals a change in how workforce managers will define "work" and "workers," because that will signal a change in what our human job duties are.
The length of human history is replete with examples of technologies changing or replacing what used to be specific jobs done by human beings; it's also replete with examples of jobs that were created by one technological demand and then superseded by the next. The Industrial Revolution created the need for knocker-uppers -- people who were employed to wake up shift workers in industrial towns -- as both standardized labor schedules and shift work grew increasingly more common. And then alarm clocks erased that need within decades. We no longer have a booming market for switchboard operators in the telephony sector. There will doubtless be jobs created in response to the AI agent boom that won't be needed in another ten years.
However, that's cold comfort to the workforce members being told they're interchangeable with digital agents. It does raise some interesting existential questions about how to optimize the employee experience if some of these "employees" aren't actually humans. And it throws a fun wrinkle in the still-raging Return to Office debate: if some of the workforce doesn't have to come to the office because they don't actually exist in three dimensions, why are the people required to be there?
As we start 2025, the U.S .Department of Labor is still counting job rates based on people. It'll be interesting to see when, if and why that changes.
