Enterprise and Consumer : Agentic AI

This past week I have had time to pause and reflect on where we are with AI in the consumer landscape and the pathway from enterprise that is about to emerge. Currently if you are using AI for your tasks at work or school you are probably using Enterprise AI such as Microsoft copilot with Enterprise Data Protection. This is good at tasks like summarization, note taking, email support, document writing, creating rubrics and so on. This is Agent based AI (Agentic AI) that acts like an intern.

Agentic AI is when an AI system has some autonomy and can act to achieve specific goals such as action planning, and make simple decisions based on its human creators' requirements. For example, summarize the meeting I missed and create me an action list based on anything I was assigned.

However, in the consumer landscape we are now moving into a more holistic Agentic AI. Currently the AI we use at home is awful. As a long time, user of Alexa and also Google Home this technology currently sucks as observed by many "Siri is the dumbest friend and Alexa is not too good either" - Kara Swisher - from the On With Kara Swisher podcast.

However, it is getting better and a whole new swathe of home agents are about to land. I have been using the new copilot app (on mobile) for a few weeks now and I started off being really frustrated with it. However, I have just figured it out why. This new copilot is my personal assistant, and it is built for consumers e.g. everyone. It wants to know who I am, to chat with me and learn about me as I go. It will be my guide, by support and my digital twin through my life. This experience is very different to my enterprise use of copilot and that's why I struggled with it at first. Copilots' modality of choice is voice and it wants to talk to me. When you first start interacting it feels like an annoying American therapist more at home with the Kardashians than a Welsh born, Sydneysider but I'm getting used to it. "Hey Dan, that's interesting, tell me more about why you feel this way?" ..... "No stop counselling me"

Are people ready for this form of AI? I wasn't but I will be, so I am sure others will start to get more invested in it especially if the OpenAI/Apple Intelligence starts working properly. I will use Copilot Agentic AI on my Android Phone rather than Gemini for now as I trust the Consumer Microsoft service more than my Google ones for now.

This tech will improve over the next year. Hallucinations will get less and less and go below thresholds that mean AI will become more practical and useful. Being a consumer service it will start to gain memory from mobile to desktop and it will remember things, retrieve information accurately and will be good to develop new memories rather than dig through your device for older information. It will integrate with other apps and become an all-encompassing agent.

The future will then come together where the AI will read the webpage page and enter data that I need into forms. Finally, copilots with vision will see what you see digitally as well as via the real world via earbuds, glasses and other spatially aware hardware devices.

Agentic AI, the future? Yes.