Transcript: 

Hello Humans! And welcome to the weekly podcast that aims to summarise in around five minutes an important development in AI relevant to the world of HR.

This week I’m questioning the promise that AI will make the typical workplace dramatically more efficient, ushering in a 9-to-5 pace that finally feels manageable. History suggests otherwise.

When the ghastly fax machine finally started wheezing towards retirement, I'll admit I got rather excited. Email was about to change everything. No more re-typing documents and with re-typing went the inevitable content errors that crept in along the way. No more standing beside a machine that screeched like a wounded seagull while a single page inched out, smudged and curling. Email transmission was practically instant. On paper, it was a triumph.

And yet, looking back, I genuinely wonder whether it made my working life any easier. In some ways, I think it made it harder.

Because the real impact of email wasn't speed. It was the brutal collapse of expectation. Before the internet, final documents went out by Royal Mail, and that gave you the most beautiful thing a professional can have, leeway. A 24-hour buffer, minimum. When the other side rang up asking where their papers were, you could blame the Royal Mail. After email, that grace vanished. The other side would keep you on the phone, breathing down the line, while the attachment crawled in. I'm telling you this because I think we're about to live through it again — only bigger.

The promise of AI agents is the same promise email made. Faster. Easier. More capable. But here's the thing: agents don't just save you time, they reveal how much more work was always possible. Nathanielle Whittemore calls this the infinite backlog. Every project you parked, every idea you shelved, every "we'll get to it eventually" — agents drag the lot back onto your desk and ask which one you'd like to start first.

Agentic work makes ordinary jobs feel like founding a startup. Endless options. Limited judgement. Constant prioritisation. No obvious finish line. And the risks that come with that life come with it too — burnout, scattered effort, chasing every shiny thing, and the most dangerous trap of all: mistaking activity for progress.

Organisations will feel this hardest. You can't just unleash a swarm of agents and hope magic happens. New roles, new workflows, new operating models — the companies that figure this out won't be the ones with the most agents. They'll be the ones who learn to manage them.

So here's where I land. Email didn't fail us. It just rewrote the rules while we were still playing the old game. Agents are about to do the same thing; faster, harder, and across every desk at once. The question isn't whether you can keep up. The question is whether you can resist doing everything just because, for the first time in history, everything is finally on the table. Speed is cheap now. Judgement is the new scarce resource. Spend it well.

Until next time. Bye for now.