The Future Belongs to PEOPLE with Agency, not AI Agents
Our future isn’t about grand architectural statements or gravity-defying vehicles, but something far more fundamental: who gets to decide what happens next.
My thesis is the future will be decided by people with the most agency.
Now, that might sound a bit like saying water is wet, or that politicians are occasionally economical with the truth. But bear with me, because the implications are rather more startling than you might imagine.
For the better part of a century, if you wanted to do anything of consequence in this world (build a widget, sell a service, get your idea to market) you needed to be rather large.
Enormous, in fact.
You needed a corporation so vast it likely had its own postcode, its own internal bureaucracy that could rival a small nation-state, and enough layers of management to make a trifle look positively minimalist.
To be a player, you needed scale. Massive, jaw-dropping scale. You needed capital, an awful lot of it. You needed infrastructure, meaning factories that stretched for miles, distribution networks that snaked across continents, and enough filing cabinets to house the entire history of human endeavor. And, of course, you needed a workforce, a teeming multitude of souls, all diligently employed in managing the overwhelming complexity that arose from, well, being overwhelmingly complex. An individual, or even a plucky team of bright sparks with a penchant for innovation and a serious caffeine habit, simply couldn’t compete. They didn’t have the resources.
They were a single guy in a kayak trying to race an ocean liner.
Admirable, perhaps, but ultimately futile.
That, my friends, was the old world. A world of giants. A world where the primary organizing principle of the economy was the vertically integrated corporation, a monolithic beast that kept everything from raw materials to customer service under its vast, sprawling roof.
Then, as often happens in the grand, meandering narrative of human progress, something rather inconvenient occurred. Technology. It arrived not with a bang, but with a series of increasingly loud whispers, each one eroding a foundational pillar of that corporate edifice.
First came the internet. A glorious, chaotic, slightly disreputable beast that proceeded to obliterate the distribution advantage. Suddenly, you didn’t need a fleet of trucks or a network of retail outlets stretching to the horizon. You just needed a website. Or an email address. Or, eventually, a social media profile. The global marketplace was no longer a matter of physical presence; it was a matter of digital access. A local artisan could, with a bit of savvy, reach customers on the other side of the planet. Which, for the old guard, must have felt a bit like finding out your carefully constructed castle walls could be bypassed by a chap with a decent Wi-Fi connection.
Then, cloud computing arrived, wafting in like a benevolent, yet slightly bewildering, genie. It rented out the infrastructure advantage for pennies on the dollar. No longer did you need to build your own server farms, those humming, air-conditioned behemoths costing millions. You could simply rent computing power, storage, and databases from someone else. It was like suddenly being able to hire a fully equipped factory for the price of a particularly fancy latte. The barriers to entry, which had once been mountainous, were now more akin to a modest speed bump.
And then, as if to really twist the knife, open-source software and SaaS products sauntered in, arms laden with tools. They commoditized the very instruments of production. Want a powerful database? There’s an open-source one that’s free. Need sophisticated project management software? There are dozens, all available for a subscription fee that wouldn’t even cover the annual office party budget of a medium-sized firm. Suddenly, a tiny team of motivated, slightly obsessive people could build and deploy products and services that could not only compete with, but often utterly demolish, the lumbering, bureaucratic giants of the old guard. They were agile. They were lean. They were, to borrow a phrase, rather fed up with the status quo.
We are, in essence, witnessing the great fragmentation of the firm.
The core functions that once had to be housed under one massive corporate roof are being externalized, automated, and outsourced. What’s left, if you’re smart, is a small, agile core focused on the highest value-added activities: strategy, creativity, and client relationships. The stuff that still requires a beating heart and a spark of genuine human ingenuity. The rest? Well, the rest is increasingly handled by software and freelancers.
And now, just when you thought things couldn’t get any more interesting, Artificial Intelligence is pouring gasoline on this already roaring fire.
AI is the great capability leveler. It is democratizing expertise at a rate that is difficult to comprehend, let alone comfortably integrate into your existing worldview. A single person, armed with the right AI tools, can now perform the work that once required an entire department, a whole squadron of specialists, each with their own particular jargon and their own preferred brand of ergonomic office chair.
Need to conduct complex market research? Don’t bother commissioning a team of expensive consultants who will spend weeks generating PowerPoint slides you’ll skim once. An AI can synthesize thousands of data points, identify trends that would make a human analyst’s head spin, and generate a comprehensive, meticulously footnoted report in minutes. Probably without complaining about the office coffee, either.
Need to create a sophisticated marketing campaign? An AI can not only write the compelling, conversion-optimized copy, but it can also design the visuals, target the audience with unnerving precision, and manage the deployment across multiple platforms. All while you’re enjoying your second cup of coffee.
Need to draft a complex legal document, something that once required a lawyer so specialized they probably had their own section in the library? An AI can analyze your specific needs, compare them against a colossal database of precedents, and produce a near-perfect contract, tailored to your specific jurisdiction, with better grammar than most senior associates.
Need to build a piece of software? This is where it gets truly unsettling, in the most magnificent way. An AI can write the code. It can debug it. It can deploy it. And then, as if that weren’t enough, it can take customer success inbound emails from clients, even answer the phone with a perfectly modulated voice, and update the CRM afterward. All without needing a single coffee break or an annual review.
All of these tasks (market research, marketing, legal drafting, software development, customer service) were once the exclusive domain of highly paid specialists housed within large organizations, each guarding their particular silo of expertise like a dragon guarding its gold. Now, they are tools available to anyone with a laptop and an internet connection. The barriers to entry for creating serious economic value have never been lower. It’s like turning up to a medieval battle with a laser gun.
This, my friends, is where being a four-dimensional professional comes in. I wrote about this on our sister site,
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This is why Drive becomes the master trait for professionals in the AI era.
In a world where AI can perform most routine knowledge-work tasks with superhuman efficiency, and let’s be honest, often with more grace and fewer passive-aggressive emails… what is the uniquely human value proposition?
What makes us indispensable?
It’s certainly not just competence. The AI is, or soon will be, demonstrably more competent at many discrete tasks. It can calculate faster, recall more data, and synthesize information with a breadth that would leave even the most prodigious human intellect in the dust.
It’s not just reliability. The AI is perfectly reliable. It doesn’t get sick, it doesn’t have a bad day, and it certainly doesn’t spend half its morning looking at cat videos. It just… computes. Relentlessly.
It’s not enjoyability, though that always matters, of course. A particularly charming human interaction will always trump a perfectly efficient but sterile one. But that’s a secondary consideration, a pleasant bonus rather than the core value.
No. The core value, the irreplaceable spark, is agency. It’s the bias toward action.
Think of it this way: the AI is an unbelievably powerful engine. A supercharged, infinitely adaptable, perfectly obedient engine. But it doesn’t have a destination. It does not have intent. It doesn’t wake up in the morning and decide, “Today, I shall revolutionize the concept of sustainable urban farming,” or “I shall invent a new form of digital art.” It waits.
It waits for a prompt. It waits for a human to provide the direction, the strategy, the creative spark. It is, for all its dazzling capabilities, a magnificent tool, a truly astounding lever…. but someone still has to decide where to place the fulcrum and which way to push.
The winners in this new economy will be the people who are masters of the prompt. And let’s be clear, I don’t mean just typing a clever query into a chatbot, though that’s a useful skill, certainly. I mean prompting reality. They will be the ones who can identify a problem that desperately needs solving, envision a solution with clarity and conviction, and then orchestrate a symphony of human talent and AI tools to bring that solution to life. They will be the instigators, the initiators, the ones who kick things off.
They are also going to be massive money makers.. but we’ll get to that.
Agency, this fundamental drive to make things happen, coupled with a relentless bias toward action, will be the most scarce and, consequently, the most valuable resources in our rising age of AI and automation.
The future belongs to the small, agile, and proactive. It belongs to the solo consultant who uses AI to deliver the insights of an entire McKinsey team at a fraction of the cost, with twice the speed, and probably with fewer impenetrable graphs. It belongs to the seven-person software company that uses AI to build a product that serves millions of professional services firms, something that once would have required hundreds of developers and a truly frightening burn rate. It belongs to the creator who uses AI to produce a media empire from their bedroom, churning out content that would have once required an entire production studio and a small army of assistants.
It belongs, in its most distilled form, to the Company of One. A single individual, or a very small, tightly knit team, leveraging the power of AI to achieve disproportionate impact. My favorite goal is revenue per FTE (full-time employee). These companies will achieve $1B revenue per employee. They will leap into new verticals and sectors rapidly, offer mutations to their products and services with ease. These are the new titans. Not of industry, but of initiative. They won’t own the factories or the sprawling office parks. They’ll own the ideas, the direction, the spark of intent and lots of leverage. And that, it turns out, is the most powerful thing of all.
So, while the old corporate giants might still lumber on for a while, like dinosaurs blissfully unaware of the meteor heading their way, the smart money is on the nimble, driven individuals who aren’t waiting for permission to build the future.
They’re too busy context engineering it into existence.
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I started Life in the Singularity in May 2023 to track all the accelerating changes in AI/ML, robotics, quantum computing and the rest of the technologies accelerating humanity forward into the future. I’m an investor in over a dozen technology companies and I needed a canvas to unfold and examine all the acceleration and breakthroughs across science and technology.
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