I have been there for a long time to see each major change in the technology of the workplace arouse the same reaction: panic.
I saw it when we moved to work to the cloud. When we started using AI in research and discovery of knowledge. When we replaced the spreadsheets with shared documents. And now, with the rise of AI agents, I see it again.
The question always comes quickly: Will this technology take my work?
Here is my answer for today’s version of this existential question: AI agents will not replace you. But someone who uses them could.
It is not a threat – it’s an alarm clock. Because this generation of AI does not concern automation. These are amplification and impact.
Meet the new MVP of work: The ai glue guy
To explain what I mean, let me take an analogy from sports. I have long admired athletes like the former swingman of the NBA Andre Iguodala – those who do not lead the League in Statistics but are absolutely essential to their teams. They bounce. They defend. They communicate. They improve the players around them. This is why Iggy was appointed MVP of the NBA final in 2015 – he did the grainy and neglected work that maintained the Warriors together.
In basketball, they call this kind of player the “glue guy”.
This is what AI agents are at work. They are the guys from the glue of the modern team – not the stars, but the manufacturers of silent difference. They fill the gaps. They keep everything connected. They help people do their work faster, more precisely and better.
Take one of the companies with which my Growthloop team has recently joined – Allegro, widely considered as “the Amazon of Eastern Europe”. He uses one of our tools which is supplied by the AI agent and is above his data cloud. Instead of jumping between disconnected tools, its marketing specialists are now working alongside a team of specialized AI agents: we understand data, another builds optimized trips, others on the surface of information, suggest an audience and reflect on campaign ideas.
All this occurs from a single interface, such as a command center for modern marketing. Agents do not replace humans – they empower them. The result? An elevator 2x in return for advertising expenses. A jump of 60% of the value of raw goods. A drop of almost 70% of the cost per click.
This is not the replacement of the work. It is the transformation of employment.
And the best part? It’s just to start.
We have already seen this dynamic playing. In my previous company, we presented Glean – a tool that I helped to launch that transformed the way the teams discover knowledge in their businesses – and it was the same story. People feared overload. But what they found was a faster path to the right information, and more time for a real problem solving. This is the story of each major breakthrough of technology: first, fear. Then productivity. Then progress.
What means that AI agents feel different, it is how speed they evolve. These models no longer authorize the tasks of the left brain such as mathematics and planning. They now manage the tasks of the right brain – creativity, language, strategy. But the real breakthrough is their ability to reason in real time and personalize the results. These agents are not only tools – they are strategic partners. They process the data faster than all the human and punctual models that we would eat and suggest options that we could never consider.
We have already seen this change between industries. Developers use AI to generate code and spot bugs faster. Customer support teams provide personalized responses in a few seconds, as agents gather the interactions spent in the background. The creative teams test and itere on the countryside without waiting for weeks for the results.
None of this scares or removes the need for humans. It eliminates the chore.
Look inside any large company and you will find a mountain of purely busy work. Reports, status updates and manual coordination consume massive times – what anatomy of the Asana work index calls “work on work”, which eats until 60% of a person’s day. All these hours are added to huge amounts of lost time. These are modern “TPS reports” ( Office space) in rehearsal. But AI agents change this. Imagine if, for each project, a summary of three net bubbles has been generated automatically and shared each week – no prosecution, no compilation. Now your product manager can spend time with customers, not decks. Your marketing manager can focus on creative and not paved data with five tools. These agents do not steal jobs; They release people to do the work that really matters.
Will some jobs change? Absolutely. But show me an era when they did not do it. The best jobs today did not even exist 20 years ago. Fast engineer. Data strategist. AI agent supervisor. There is a whole new category of work emerging on the way we guide, governs and collaborate with these systems.
It is easy to feel overwhelmed, especially with the speed at which things move. But speed should not mean chaos. In fact, AI agents can help to tame chaos, in particular for companies buried under decades of partitioned data, inherited tools and fragmented workflows. They are the connective tissue, the missing link. Glue.
And here is the thing with Grue Guys: they don’t ask for the spotlight. They improve the team.
The future of work is a team sport
If you are a leader who reads this, I encourage you to start familiarizing yourself with new technologies where humans and agents collaborate, about the same way as human teams today. Ask yourself what are the low value and repetitive tasks that no one likes to do.
The workforce is more adaptable than we grant. History shows that when people receive new tools, they find new ways to work. The same thing will happen here. We will invent jobs that we have not yet thought of. We will solve the problems we have considered insoluble. We will constitute teams where everyone, human or agent, plays their strengths.
If I had 10 seconds in front of each employee in a Fortune 500 company, here is what I would say: you are not going to lose your job with AI agents. You will lose him with someone who knows how to collaborate with him very well. So kiss him. Learn it. Use it to improve your work and more human. There are no limits to human ingenuity. Agents will help reduce the distance from an idea to an impact.
Because in this new era of work, the most powerful movement you can do is play like a team. And your team will only benefit from glue guys.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com comments are only the views of their authors and does not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of fortune.
Find out more:
- When AI built AI: the next great inventors may not be human
- I have spent years helping founder women access capital. Now that they have AI, they might not need
- Prices, AI and a broken pipeline: the person’s work crisis is not ready for
- The collapse of IA costs changes which is possible – with massive implications for technological startups
This story was initially presented on Fortune.com
