Kate Kuehn - AI

THE NEXT WAVE OF AI IS HERE: AUTONOMOUS AI AGENTS ARE AMAZING—AND SCARY

The relentless hype around AI makes it difficult to separate the signal from the noise. So it’s understandable if you’ve tuned out recent talk about autonomous AI agents. A word of advice: Don’t. The significance of agentic AI may actually exceed the hype.  An Autonomous AI agent can interact with the environment, make decisions, take action, and learn from the process. This represents a seismic shift in the use of AI and, accordingly, presents corresponding opportunities—and risks.  To date, generative AI tools, largely subject to human supervision, have been designed to function by being pretrained (the P in GPT) on vast amounts of data such as large language models (LLMs) or other defined data sources and then to provide responses to inputs or prompts (a question or instruction) provided by users. This has proven to be an impressive way to come up with humanlike responses to queries or prompts—like a baby imitating sounds or words without really knowing what it is saying. Kind of adorable, but unlikely to conjure Newton’s Principia or a Beethoven symphony. So, are these generative tools really functioning as creative, independent beings? Doubtful. But that may be changing dramatically.  A new approach allows AI to interact directly and more autonomously with data and react in a dynamic way—a lot more like what humans do. This technology relies on autonomous AI agents, which Bill Gates believes are going to upend the software industry, bringing about the biggest revolution in computing since we went from typing commands to tapping on icons. And that may be an understatement. Cybersecurity Analyst for World Wide Technology// expert in Information Security Risk // Vice President of Global Cyber Advocacy at World Wide Technology // has 25 years of experience in cybersecurity, holding positions such as Chief Information Security Officer and CEO KATE KUEHN