Kimberly Tan is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). She discusses how AI agents operating web and desktop software will disrupt traditional outsourced human operations.
“One thing that we're quite excited about on the horizon is this emerging browser use technology, whether it's, you know, some people call it computer use, some people call it operator, where AI agents will soon actually be able to work across a heterogeneous set of systems, whether it is, you know, traditional software systems, whether it is the web, whether it is some In-house bespoke piece of software a large enterprise has, and actually be able to navigate that set of situations to be able to not only get the information it needs, but also take appropriate actions. That is still an emerging field of research that we see getting better very quickly, and we think once that is at a state of production, there's going to be a whole new set of use cases where data analysts or invoice processor, et cetera, that had to be human before, now AI could handle.”
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More from Kimberly Tan
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Kimberly TanApr 3, 2025▶ 4:26Unbundling the BPO: How AI Is Disrupting Outsourced Work
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Tan: Voice AI agents are now nearly indistinguishable from human operators
“Voice AI has been an incredible, I think, enabling innovation in the last few years where you can now actually talk to an AI agent on the other line. You may not even know that it's not a human because their conversational abilities and their intonation sounds…”
Kimberly TanApr 3, 2025▶ 5:32Unbundling the BPO: How AI Is Disrupting Outsourced Work
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Tan: High call-volume industries like logistics face the most AI disruption today
“I think where we're seeing the most disruption today Is industries that have very high call volume. We're seeing it a lot in logistics in particular, because if you think about how many different nodes are in a supply chain, there's so many people who have to …”
Kimberly TanApr 3, 2025▶ 7:14Unbundling the BPO: How AI Is Disrupting Outsourced Work
Insight
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“I think you have to be a really AI native technical founder to be able to understand how to leverage that, and that's actually just not a widely distributed skill set yet.”
Kimberly TanApr 3, 2025▶ 9:24Unbundling the BPO: How AI Is Disrupting Outsourced Work
Insight
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“So we think that the best types of opportunities for people in that domain is Just really thinking about situations in which the ROI is so incredibly clear, which often means in types of work or types of functions where they have clear KPIs that you can assess…”
Kimberly TanApr 3, 2025▶ 9:32Unbundling the BPO: How AI Is Disrupting Outsourced Work
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