Tomorrow: The Human Agent Presentation
PSFK founder Piers Fawkes presents new thinking around employee enhancement, the future of work and corporate innovation.
On 2 upcoming dates, I’ll be providing an online talk that explores an emerging shift: employees becoming Human Agents, AI agents built from real people that hold their expertise and can act on it.
Companies have always struggled to retain and leverage the knowledge inside their own people. Every wiki and knowledge base ever built died the same way, because it needed someone to remember to feed or find it. Expertise stays trapped in heads, in Slack, and in decks on a server nobody remembers to check. And the loss is expensive: unplanned downtime costs manufacturers an estimated $1 trillion a year, and the industry now says that’s turning into a knowledge problem as veterans retire.
What’s changed is a collision of AI interviews, agentic access and knowledge graphs, which together make it possible to capture how a person actually reasons, and then let the rest of the organization interogate this.
But the interesting part isn’t retention, it’s what happens next. A Human Agent doesn’t sit in an archive waiting to be searched. A Human Agent works for its employer and the employee. Ask it a question and it reasons like the person it came from, but it can reach further than they ever could, across the company’s own research, live market data and outside expertise none of them own. Your best strategist, with a body of knowledge they never had time to read.
And then it stops answering and starts doing. It builds the marketing plan. It develops the retail strategy. It consults the Human Agent two desks over when the question crosses into their lane. Give it a year and it will be spotting the opportunity nobody in the building had time to look for.
I’ll walk through how Human Agents actually get built, the problems that come with them. We’ll talk “onclauding”, LLM probing, and expert interviews run by AI assistants - and of course how this is is changing the way I think about Fodda.
And we’ll finish on the hard questions: employer ethics, employee compensation, and who owns the knowledge. Times and links below.
Piers
PSFK/Fodda
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Wednesday July 15, 12pm ET, 6pm CET
AI Marketers Guild Virtual Event (Free to attend with RSVP via Luma)
Tuesday July 28, 2pm ET, 8pm CET
Partners Collective (Free to attend with RSVP via LinkedIn)