The Ledger, every show

“And if you want a contrarian take on this, I think it will help with the disinformation problem a bit. People don't assume everything coming out of these agents is a hundred percent accurate and they like verify it. And my hope is the combination of these AI t…”

“And so then you look at AI agents, and I believe most businesses, it will be their primary digital interface, and it's because it works over WhatsApp, and it works over the phone.”

“Will these companies be less valuable 10 years from now than now? I think the answer is probably yes. Will that be true for every individual company? I don't think that's true.”

“And then the other thing is I think most companies in Silicon Valley won't write code by hand.”

“The future of software is agents. So, rather than having a web browser with forms and fields that we click on, we will delegate tasks to agents that will operate against a database somewhat autonomously.”

“I think the importance of dashboards will go down. A point of a dashboard is so a human can stare at it and derive some insights. I think that probably AI can serve a very meaningful role in deriving insights from your data”

“I would argue that actually, I think agents will go the way of outcomes based pricing where, you know, for example, at CIRA, we charge per resolved case for our customer service agents. I think if you made an agent to Audit your financials. You should pay per …”

“I think ChatGPT is already the front door for the internet for many people, and I would say, if you look at, like, ChatGPT, Gemini, and the like, I think your personal AI agent will be your front door to the internet.”

“And consumers over the next three or four years will have their own agents.”

“In those moments where you're delegating basically decision making to your agent, it really changes a lot of the mechanics and economics of the internet. SEO, SEM, all these things that have been awesome, optimized towards persuasion of humans, all of a sudden…”

“Your AI agent is going to be your digital front door, and most of your customer interactions will happen via your AI agent, not by, from your mobile app or your website, even if they exist in those platforms,”

“In my lifetime, hopefully, 25 years from now, there will be things that today I wouldn't understand, and jobs I don't understand technologies that were hopefully discovered by AI”

“Where you had a dynamic where a company was outsourcing software development to save costs, the cost of the AI agent might be less than the cost of the outsourced I'll say resource even, so it's somewhat a dehumanizing term, but Often the term used in the indu…”

“I think there'll be a period of consolidation. Well, that was always my joke. Your perspective on the dot-com bubble is very different if you went all in on buy.com versus amazon.com. And so you're gonna have some companies go out of business. I think more lik…”

“The actual craft of software engineering that we're doing right now I think it's literally a fact that it'll be completely different two years from now.”

“I think it was a time when like Twitter had the fail whale and it was down half the time and people couldn't even use it. And, you know, we, our product, we were innovating faster. We had more features. People liked it. We could. And we were up a hundred perce…”

“I do think the act of creating software is going to transform from typing into a terminal or typing into Visual Studio code to operating a code generating machine. I think that is the future of creating software, but I think operating a code generating machine…”

“I think just like what I was good at will no longer be useful in the future or certainly not like valuable in the future and that's okay.”

“And I think computer science especially at least sort of the foundations of it will continue to be the foundations of how we build software and understanding that when you're interacting, particularly with something that's smarter than you producing code, you …”

“I think today, you know, getting an orchestration, orchestrating an agentic process on top of the models is like, sounds really fancy and it's really hard and all that stuff. You know, I'm pretty sure that's gonna be easy in three or four years. It's just like…”

“I think we're going to go through a similar transition. Like the whole market is going to go towards agents. I think the whole market is going to go towards outcomes based pricing. Not because it's the only way, but it's going to be like the market is going to…”

“And if I look at the actual craft of software engineering that we're doing right now I think it's literally a fact that it'll be completely different two years from now.”

“I think we have probably have too many people building models right now. There's already been some consolidation actually of companies being folded into Amazon and Microsoft and others. But I do think it will play out a bit like the cloud infrastructure busine…”

“Is I do think that, It will be the delivery mechanism for AGI when it's produced, and not just because of the many researchers at OpenAI, but because of the amazing, like, utility it's become from individuals.”

“I have a completely personal theory that it will benefit deep generalists in a lot of ways, too, because your ability to understand a fair amount in a lot of domains, and leveraging AI knowing where to prompt the AI to go explore and bringing together those do…”

“At some point, we will be we will no longer be supply constrained in software, but we're not anywhere close to it right now, and you're taking something that has always been the scarce resource, which is software engineers, and you're making it not scarce, and…”

“AI, I think, will change the landscape of software to be tools of productivity that, to agents that actually accomplish tasks, and I think it will Help some companies who, for whom that's a amplifies their existing value proposition and it will really hurt oth…”

“I think it might be a really hard product to build because when you think about all the different services and people you interact with every day, it's kind of everything. So it's not, it has to generalize a lot to be useful to you. And because of the Personal…”

“Nowadays the tools are changing so rapidly that I'm like not totally skeptical of tool makers, but I just think that open source will broadly win.”

“In 2025, existing digitally will probably mean having a branded AI agent that your customers can interact with to do everything that they can do on your website.”

“We will look back and laugh at some of the excess, but I'm confident we will have, you know, a brand defining and likely trillion dollar consumer company come out of this. 10 plus enterprise software companies that are enduring, you know, public companies comi…”

“I actually think the AI market commercially will play out like the cloud market did over the past 20 years.”

“I think there's probably some short term professional services spend that reflects the lack of the maturity of the AI applications market right now. You know, and I think that when there are solutions like Sierra and others for specific domains available, you …”

“In any one of those, you could probably make a very rational intellectual case that we're gonna hit a wall, but then you have the two others. And I don't think you can make the case for all three that they're all coming up on a wall. And I think like any big s…”

“I'm incredibly optimistic that just the cost of running AI will could probably track something like Moore's law.”

“I think we'll see consolidation of companies pre-training their own models you know, and I think that the cost structure of the tools and applications companies are different and perhaps more sustainable.”

“And as a consequence, you know, I think that, you know, if you fast forward four or five years, when you're interacting with any of the consumer brands, you work with your insurance company, your phone company a car rental company, you will probably be having …”

“We like to say like in 1995, the way you existed digitally as a business to have a website in 20, 25, the way you will exist digitally is to have an AI agent.”

“And my thesis is just like touch screens have come to dominate Our experience with computers because of convenience, you can have a conversation in so many different places. You don't need an instruction manual. I think it will be the main way we work with com…”

“So in the short term, my intuition is that the combination of a smartphone with Ray-Ban glasses or AirPods or the like probably, you know, meaning you might need to look at your screen less than you do today. But my intuition is because of the prevalence of sm…”

“The focus on hardware and models and not enough focus on the applications of AI. I think many of the defining companies in AI will be delivering consumer and business solutions that happen to be powered by AI, not just the models themselves.”

“My take is the domain of personal agents is probably of the very large consumer companies like Apple and Google and OpenAI and others that have big consumer brands.”

“In 2025, existing digitally will probably mean having a branded AI agent that your customers can interact with.”

“I think that will probably play out with the frontier models. We'll end up with a relatively small number of companies doing pre-training you know, which is the really capital intensive part of model building not because, you know, there's not, they're the onl…”

“Every company will want their own agent, and they'll spend as much care and attention on their AI agent as they do building their website, as they do building their mobile app. This is going to be one of the main digital artifacts as a business that you make.”

“I think it will make the better people even better by giving them more leverage. It will probably increase the gap in the distribution between the best people and the worst people, because the best people will now have an Ironman suit, you know, of AI capabili…”

“So, we have payers with AI agents that pick up the phone. And we have providers that have AI agents that pick up the phone and make phone calls. We have revenue cycle management companies that work to make outbound calls to do it. We've already had- ... We've …”

“Well, they're automating 90% of their cases.”