For more than a year, Elias Bustos’ co-worker has been a bot.
“Since ChatGPT came out in late 2023, I signed up for it,” Bustos, 39, a publicist based in Buenos Aires, said in an interview, explaining his chummy relationship with a digital co-worker. “I was known as the guy with the ‘AI friend’ at the time. My colleagues then at a U.S. company were really threatened by it and thought they would lose their jobs. But in a way, I thought it was a way to be more productive in ways that were unfathomable.”
And fruitful. Bustos estimates he’s 50% more productive since writing and creating PR strategies with the assistance of an AI agent to gain “impactful” media and investor coverage. He used it with particular success on a campaign to draw attention to a non-governmental organization (NGO) that fights for the falsely accused in Argentina.
Executive recruiter Lou Adler was on the verge of retiring when he discovered Anthropic’ Claude, which has rejuvenated his career.
“My background made this [Claude] a piece of cake for me,” said Adler, 78, a onetime engineer-turned-recruiter based in Laguna Beach, Calif., who has written books on performance-based hiring. “This is a huge game changer in terms of HR.”
AI has helped Adler find the “right precisely-defined candidates for jobs” for clients ranging from a large bottling company in Eastern Europe to a mid-sized Silicon Valley winery. “AI extended my career several years,” he said in an interview.
Then there’s Sawyer Middeleer, 30, chief of staff at Aomni, a tech company based in San Francisco.
Using the company’s AI assistant, Middeleer has all but eliminated tedious tasks while tripling his efficiency in sorting email and researching sales leads.
“Work used to be insanely tedious,” he said. “Now, I’m expanding AI use as needs arise. I do things that I would never of had time to do before, or could do. For instance, I have a vastly organized work email (only 81 vs. 50,578 in his personal inbox) through triage.
“I feel super organized, which is awesome. And I do some coding for internal automations,” Middeleer said.
Welcome to the efficient new world of working with AI-powered bots, which are gaining traction at enterprises large and small. As executives pour more resources into bots and plan to deploy AI agents, some employees are getting a jump on their peers — many of whom are still spooked by the idea of an amorphous assistant that could take their job one day.
For now, the AI success stories of Bustos, Adler and Middeleer are outliers in the corporate world. But that is expected to change dramatically in 2025 as more companies adopt a wave of agentic AI offerings from the likes of Microsoft Corp., Salesforce Inc., ServiceNow Inc., Adobe Inc., LinkedIn, Cisco Systems Inc. and others.
“Welcome to a new era: Digital labor is here, transforming productivity without growing the workforce. Economics is being rewritten, and businesses are reaching horizons once thought impossible. The age of AI agents is now,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a recent column in Time magazine. To drive home his point, Benioff and NVIDIA Corp. CEO Jensen Huang chatted up the prospect of billions of AI agents eventually performing low-level tasks that free up humans to do more creative work.
Indeed, more than two-thirds of consumers (68%) believe that within two years they will have their own personal AI assistant that can interact with companies for them, according to Zendesk’s 2025 CX Trends forecast.
What is more, AI will become an indispensable “apprentice” in the developer’s toolkit next year, automating bug fixes, testing and code optimization. According to O’Reilly, 51% of companies were already using AI-assisted development tools in 2023. AI in development will bridge skill gaps and reduce error rates by 20% or more, helping developers keep pace with the faster release cycles of DevOps.
“As overall automation advances and bot-to-bot interactions grow, human involvement will remain critical, especially when it comes to brand loyalty,” Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeier said in an email. “Complex issues requiring empathy, creativity or nuanced problem-solving will still depend on human expertise.”
2025 is the Year of Agents — and Growing Angst
Longtime Silicon Valley analyst Greg Sterling has gone so far as to call 2025 the year of “agents” and “agentic AI.” Consumer and B2B agents will be introduced, he said, that automate a range of tasks previously done entirely by humans and largely manually.
This is likely to lead to a mix of good, bad and ugly news for workers, he cautioned.
“We start to see AI’s macro-impact on jobs more clearly,” Sterling said in an email. “It’s mostly negative with less hiring, more layoffs — often not officially attributed to AI — and higher productivity expectations of remaining employees. Job satisfaction levels decline in many industries, especially among ‘knowledge workers.’ There’s also downward pressure on salaries, as a partial result of AI adoption.”
Worker fears that AI will take their jobs are beginning to bear out: Demand for automation-prone jobs plunged 21% in the eight months following the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, according to an analysis of 1.39 million job posts worldwide from July 2021 to July 2023 by Harvard Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research and Imperial College London Business School.
Security remains a concern for chief information officers like Siroui Mushegian of Barracuda Networks Inc. “I have skepticism about genAI, but it is barreling at me, and I have to accept it.”
The threat of AI has also prompted strikes and threats of work stoppages by unions, especially in the entertainment industry and among union members affected by automation. But labor experts say this is to be expected; advances in technology such as movie sound, call centers, and robots at warehouses prompted similar reaction before displaced workers landed new jobs.
Now, robots are seemingly everywhere, performing menial dental work in Colombia, washing windows at a high-rise building in New York, delivering food in Santa Monica, Calif., performing manicures at airports, sorting materials in vast warehouses.
“AI doesn’t have to be a job stealer; it’s a tool to enhance human potential, enabling more strategic, creative, and impactful work. Tim Houlne, CEO and author of “The Intelligent Workforce,” said in an email.
Just ask Bustos, Adler and Middeleer. Each swears by their bots.
“AI adjusts to cognitive capacity of the use – by age, for example,” Bustos said. “I have become more intuitive in my use, as I discover its capabilities. You do not lose thinking capacity.”
