The agency in agentic AI feels a lot more like giving the users - the humans - agency they didn’t have. That’s what’s making it useful for me, from sorting out dumb-shit home-networking incompatibilities, figuring out taxes, and otherwise sorting my shit out. When you unleash something like Claude code on all the messy and neglected rooms in your life, you start to clean-up and pay attention more.
There’s a very bottoms-up thing here. Individuals with these tools can get a lot done. Using the tools where they are not is like assembling and continually using a Rube Goldberg device. It’d be impossible to scale to a large organization, let alone sort out all the data access and security concerns.
So far, it’s the individuals who get the productivity benefits of agentic AI. For “home use,” this stuff is killer.
I can image CEOs coming back from a week’s vacation where they downloaded Claude code or started using Claude Cowork, disappeared into all that agency, coming back to work, and telling everyone to cancel their meetings to figure out how to give everyone in the organization that kind of agency.
That happened with iPhone around 2010 or so. They were strictly a consumer device, then executives used them, and suddenly, there we were with them as the primary business device.
I don’t like the cliche line that “technology is easy, culture is hard,” but I can see where there’s something of that with enterprise AI ROI.
First, there’s a mindset and way of working that depends on a lot of human work and review.
Second, there’s probably a lot of people who still would balk at reading AI output (in docs or slides).
Third, there’s a lot of “collaboration” (meetings, reviewing slides, “email me your deck”‘ing) going on that is more about getting people informed and “synced up” than getting work done.
A person with a full-blown agentic rig doesn’t care about any of that. They have a task, they ask the agentic rig to get it done, guides it along, and then the thing is done.
We’ve built a computer out of meat-sacks called “the enterprise.” Executives use these “knowledge workers” as meat-mouses and meat-keyboards. Each of those people can be a mini-CEO now.
Or, put another way, all that prep-work and bubbling up can be done in minutes. The big meeting can be able understanding the problems, ideas, testing assumptions and fixes, and actually doing work beyond building slides, pulling CSVs from the creek CRM, visiting with customers more…doing work that doesn’t require the Office toolchain.
Sure, there’s “training” that needs to happen. You have to train people to think iteratively like a programmer, big picture like a management consultant, project management and keep the agent focused like a good manager/executive.
There’s of course securing and controlling this technology (like any other technology). I think the need to clean and prep data is likely way over blown: it just works with what you have, especially if it’s in well understood, plain old just work things like SQL, CSV files, or whatever. In fact, I’d wager the older the data format/service, the better it works.
I think a lot of the failure to find ROI in AI is because very few enterprises have actually started. Just putting a chat app in place isn’t much at all. And all those studies are probably based on things that happened in 2025, at best.
The only thing enterprises can do now is just start to try and experiment. Until they figure out how to fit AI into how their organizations works - into their “culture” - they’ll just get low-level benefits. As my pal John Willis put it, they need to define what agentic AI means for them.
That seems like a swirling mass of chaos and naive enthusiasm, sure. But, it also sounds like a better option than us all sitting in meetings, building decks, and being a meat-mouse for executives.
Here’s your assignment, which I took from Brandon Whichard. Install Claude code on your machine. The next time you need to do anything, ask it to do it for you. It won’t cook eggs for you, but most anything a “knowledge worker” would do, it’ll do. Do that for a week. I think you’ll find more human agency than you thought was possible.