This past weekend, I got started on a website I told a friend I’d help him build. I’ve been building websites for over 30 years now, but for this one, I decided to use a platform that
was new to me. Knowing there would be a significant learning curve, my plan was to use the weekend to learn the basics of the platform.
As is now true everywhere, I had just logged into the
dashboard when a window popped up asking if I wanted to use the company’s new AI co-pilot to help me plan and build the website.
“What the hell?” I thought.
“Let’s take it for a spin!” The promise I got was intriguing: the AI copilot would ask me a few questions and then give me back the basic bones of a fully functional website. Or at
least that’s what I thought.
I jumped on the chatbot and started typing. With each question, my expectations rose. It started with the basics: What were we selling, what were our product
categories, where was our market? Soon, though, it started asking me what tone of voice we wanted, what search functionality was required, were there any competitors’ sites we liked or
disliked, and if so, what specifically did we like or dislike? As I plugged in my answers, I wondered what exactly I would get back.
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The answer, as it turned out, was not much. As I was
reassured that I had provided a strong enough brief for an excellent plan, I clicked the “finalize” button and waited. And waited. And waited. The ellipse below my last input just kept
fading in and out.
Finally, I asked, “Are you finished yet?” I was encouraged to wait just a few more minutes as it prepared a plan guaranteed to amaze.
Finally -- ta da!
-- I got the “detailed web plan.” As far as I can tell, it had simply sucked in my input and belched it out again, formatted as a bullet list. I was profoundly underwhelmed.
Previously, I’d had little experience with AI. I’ve used it sparingly for tasks with a clear scope, and was generally more impressed than disappointed, but I haven’t really tested
it thoroughly.
Every week, when I sit down to write this post, Microsoft Co-Pilot urges me to let it demonstrate what it can do. I’ve resisted because when I do ask AI to write
something, it sounds like a machine did it. It’s grammatically correct and usually accurate, but there's no human touch in the process.
I believe I have the ability to connect the dots,
bringing together seemingly unrelated ideas or examples to create a unique perspective. For me, AI is a workhorse that can gather information efficiently, but somewhere along the way, a human is
needed to add that spark of intuition or inspiration. For now, anyway.
Meet Agentic AI
With my recent AI debacle still fresh in my mind, I happened across a blog post from Bill Gates. It seems I thought I was talking to an AI agent when, in fact, I was chatting with a bot. It’s agentic AI that will
probably deliver the usefulness I’ve been looking for for the last decade and a half.
As it turns
out, Gates was at least a decade and a half ahead of me in that search. He first talked about intelligent agents in his 1995 book “The Road Ahead.” But it’s only now that
they’ve become possible, thanks to advances in AI.
In his post, Gates describes the difference between bots and agents: “Agents are smarter. They’re proactive—capable
of making suggestions before you ask for them.... They improve over time because they remember your activities and recognize intent and patterns in your behavior. Based on this information, they offer
to provide what they think you need, although you will always make the final decisions.”
This is exactly the “app-ssistant” I first described in 2010 and have returned to a few times since, even down to using the same
example Bill Gates did: planning a trip. This is what I was expecting when I took the web-design co-pilot for a test flight. I was hoping that, even if it couldn’t take me all the way from A to
Z , it could at least get me to M. As it turned out, it couldn’t even get past A. I ended up exactly where I started.
But the day will come. And, when it does, I have to wonder if
there will still be room on the flight for us human passengers?