2025: Enter The "Ai 1st" Era
Ai = The 5th Era of Silicon Valley in the last 30 years; Web>Mobile>Cloud>SaaS>Ai
Short on time? Highlights only. Want the full dive? Spend the 5 minutes to read!
Highlights:
Ai 1st Era: Just like "Web First," "Mobile First," and "Cloud First," it's now time to adopt an "Ai First" mindset to stay competitive.
Agentic Ai Revolution: Moving beyond Generative Ai, Agentic Ai will act as your personal assistant, streamlining tasks we currently do with apps and browsers.
Human Team-Like Ai Systems: Ai agents will work together like human teams, evolving into "Services-As-Software."
No Dystopia Here: Instead of displacing jobs, Ai will address labor shortages and uplevel the workforce, just as past revolutions have done.
Key Insights from Leaders: Learnings from Jeremiah Owyang and Foundation Capital on how Agentic Ai will shape the future.
How To Get Started: Time to take action now with clear steps.
In The News: More reading on our Agentic Ai future.
The last 30 years of technology have been an amazing evolution of capabilities and operating systems that have evolved from “The Web” to “Mobile” to “Cloud” and “SaaS”. We are now entering a new “Ai 1st” Era for scaling companies. Just as in the last four evolutionary technology eras, adopting and reorganizing your company and your teams to be Ai 1st is critical.
In 1995, “WWW” - The World Wide Web’s operating system - burst onto the scene. By 1999, if you weren’t operating with a “Web First” mentality, you were clearly on the path to being disrupted.
Ai for many of us who lived through the dot com period feels very similar to this period of the late 90’s. While we certainly had the irrational exuberance Dot Bomb crash of 2000-2001, the web hype was not wrong. It was simply too much, too fast. Some of today’s largest and most influential companies were born shortly before and after this web era, most notably Amazon, Google, Netflix, Facebook. The recent massive investments in all things Ai in Silicon Valley will end up producing a few new technology leaders while many other Ai companies will get absorbed into the winning companies.
Let’s continue the quick history lesson of our technology evolution.
2000-2010 brought us “Web 2.0” with new user generated web publishing, social music, and social media into our lives (Facebook and Twitter). In 2007, the first iPhone was launched and by 2010, the mantra rifling around Silicon Valley was the requirement to install a “Mobile First” operating mantra inside our companies. Desktop software (the “old guard”) was all of a sudden now threatened by this new technology guard of all things Mobile.
From 2010-2020, most everything became an “App” or operated in the “Cloud” with Apple and Google taking leadership positions in new ways of delivering software and services to people worldwide.
What began as a “Web 1st” call to action in 2000 quickly became “Mobile 1st” by 2010. By 2015, “Cloud 1st” became the requirement. If you weren’t “Cloud 1st” by 2015, your company was certainly threatened to be disrupted. SaaS (Software As A Service) was born. Mobile combined with Cloud and services literally started coming to you at the touch of an app (Uber, DoorDash, Instacart).
Web 2.0 Social Media + the Cloud + Mobile all combined to completely change the way we interacted with news and entertainment (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Netflix, YouTubeTV) and dominated the 2015-2020 period of our technology world.
These operating system transitions over the last three decades - Web > Mobile > Cloud > SaaS > Social Media - also required companies to not just “think differently” but to “operate differently”. Entirely new technology platforms and code bases had to be re-written with the help of new technology development tools. Huge investments were also required in “Dev Ops” (Development Operations) and Security along with new product design and development talent for new end user/customer interfaces.
It’s time to be “Ai 1st”
We are waking up in the first half of our current 2020’s decade and hearing a new rallying cry of “Ai 1st” inside our companies.
Generative Ai (Gen Ai) burst onto the scene in November 2022, a short 2 years ago. GenAi was yet another evolutionary technology woven together from nearly 2 decades of ML (Machine Learning), NLP (Natural Language Programming) combined with the ability to store and index “Big Data” in massive data center storage. The computing power enabled by Nvidia’s chips combined with Google’s Deep Mind inference research was the spark that lit the fire now known as “GenAi”.
As we enter 2025, the talk is now turning to not just another evolution of technology but rather a new revolutionary technology. The words “New Digital Species” and the equivalent of building our own personal “Cognitive GPS” are brain breaking thought models guiding our new era of Agent Based Ai (“Agentic Ai”). In this new world, we are evolving beyond Generative Ai (generating or predicting text and images; GenAi) and into a world where Ai will now begin acting on our behalf as our personal assistants and our agents.
Apps themselves, born just 15 years ago, are now the old guard and are being threatened by disruptions in a new Agent based Ai world of technology. Soon, we won’t need to open dozens of apps and tabs on our laptops, phones, and tablets to book your vacation travel. We will be able to eliminate hundreds of keyboard keystrokes and touchscreen touches by simply talking to the computer differently.
Ai technology has now arrived to simply “Ask the Computer” to do these same tasks for you either via text based “Prompts” (a sentence describing what you want) or by simply “Talking” to your device finally building off years of “Hey Siri”, Alexa, and “Hey Google”. We will soon be having actual conversations with new Ai Agents who will perform the same tasks we’ve been performing on Apps and Browsers historically.
Apple is promoting “Apple Intelligence” in it’s new iPhone while Google, and Microsoft are providing their own version of Ai as your personal assistants on their own Web and Cloud based operating systems.
Talking to your new “Ai Agent” will quickly become a new learned behavior just as we all had to learn how to browse the web, search the web, use a touchscreen, and download and interact with apps on a phone or tablet.
We often forget that we humans are very quick adopters of new technologies. Think about how we rarely use actual cash anymore, we interact almost exclusively with our financial institutions in the cloud, we are driving cars with touchscreens, and we stream nearly all of our entertainment vs. actually going to the movie theaters. We get nearly all our information digitally these days.
Talking to an Ai Agent will be a similar and fairly easy behavior change for all of us. Sure it will be clunky at first as we learn new ways to “talk to the computer” or “type to the computer”. Eventually, we will all have our own personal “aha moments” where it all just “clicks” within the synapsis of our brains and we realize this is just an easier and more efficient way of getting stuff done.
The Ai 1st Era has arrived
Your new Ai agent will most certainly be assisting you in booking your new vacation. We will greatly reduce our multiple searches and multiple app interactions with the various travel providers (airlines, hotels/Airbnb’s, rental cars/Ubers), and our complete travel itinerary will be provided to us as a set of options delivered to us by an Ai Agent. Hundreds of underlying keystrokes or fingerprints on screens will disappear into a simple conversation with your new friendly computer assistant who never gets frustrated or angry with you.
I’ve promised with these newsletter posts to curate and bring you the “Best Ofs” I’ve found with respect to Scaling Operational Leadership. Below I’m highlighting and summarizing two of the best presentations I’ve seen so far (as of Oct/Nov 2024).
1st Up - Jeremiah Owyang has a great public presentation highlighting the new Agent based Ai Revolution:
Foundation Capital’s “System of Agents”
Just a few weeks ago, Foundation Capital’s Joanne Chen and Jaya Gupta published a brilliant and clear summary of where we are with respect to creating a new “System of Agents.”
I love the simplicity of this slide and its caption which summarizes quite well the last few decades (Yesterday) of our technology of System Inputs (Structuring Data) and Predicting Data with clear Systems of Record to produce our Outputs.
Joanne and Jaya do a great job with the slide below of explaining where we are today with our new Agent based orchestration layer, which based on new small and large language models (Ai), we can now deal with unstructured data to create a new system of record.
Where we arrive at “tomorrow”, the future, and our new “System of Agents” with multiple Ai based agents working together to produce the outputs and services we need.
Joanne and Jaya in their article clearly depict how a “System of Agents” will begin mirroring human teams, taking on specialized tasks and continually learning from each other, just as human teams do.
We are entering an era where these Ai based agents will work together as a team in a pursuit of shared goals and the outputs can either be delivered to a human managing their new team of agents. Instead of “Software as a Service”, they argue incredibly insightfully we will enter an era of “Services-As-Software”.
In case you are fearing a dystopian future where jobs are displaced, Joanne and Jaya make a great case of how this new technology will solve several areas of our labor shortages worldwide and uplevel our human workforce to better ways of working just as we have over the last few centuries of amazing progress from farm fields to the industrial revolution to the computing revolution all while still having an overall labor shortage. Jobs haven’t been displaced over this time period but rather they have evolved into a more efficient way of working and work productivity.
Foundation’s full article is here again: https://foundationcapital.com/system-of-agents/
GET STARTED WITH YOUR TEAM
Make “Ai 1st” with Your Team a Mandate: It’s time to lead.
Call your team together (face to face ideally) to educate them on Agent-based Ai. Use the 2 presentations above as your primer.
Give your team “Engagement Homework”. Example: Have them upload a few of their department’s documents to NotebookLM (Google) and create a podcast from it. Don’t worry - this only takes a few minutes with a push of a button after the docs are uploaded. By engaging your team’s brain on “the possible” of Ai, I’m confident their brains will engage and what I call “aha moments” will occur.
If you are the CEO or CFO or Department Head, put your money where your mouth is. Give everyone a small budget to buy and use their Ai tool of choice.
KEY TIP: Before you greenlight the spending, ensure the person presents to you the “use case”, the “what”, and the “why” to “pitch you” on approving the spending. Even if you were already going to greenlight it, this “pitch practice” is worth its weight in future leadership influence practice for your team members.
Set a Team Goal for Ai 1st
Start with small milestones and short term dates. Example: Start recording all team meetings and cross team meetings with a tool like Ambient.us.
Ai Learning Share Back Milestone: Set a date to have every department share back their research on how various Agents can be used inside their teams/departments to all other team leaders.
Rinse/repeat with setting additional milestones of launching a small AI agent inside your team or department.
Create a Roadmap for Scaling Ai Agent Usage Across Your Company
Start with Low-Risk - High Impact Use Cases: Start by “Documenting” (yes, “Write It Down”) the most repetitive, transactional, time consuming tasks that don’t really need a human.
Ask each department to implement one example of an Ai Tool or Agent in the next 90 days.
Create a stretch milestone (6-9 months) of each department having their own Custom GPT. Example, ask your finance team to upload all their policies and procedures and “how to” documentation of working with various systems and create their own Custom Finance GPT for the rest of the organization to “AFA!” (Ask Finance Anything!)
Bottom Line:
It’s now time to embrace Ai 1st as the new operating systems of your business and personal lives. An exciting new era of Agent based Ai has arrived.
As with anything new and mysterious, the key action is to simply get started. Once you and your team discover the new possibilities of Ai and Agent-based Ai, you’ll be off to the races.
If you feel inclined, leave a comment of how you are currently using Ai inside your teams for others to read and learn from:
In the News:
Tue, Nov 19, 2024: “Microsoft Pitches Agents That Perform Tasks On Their Own…”
Fri, Nov 15, 2024: “The 3rd Wave of Ai”
Tue, Oct 22, 2024: Nvidia Blog on Agentic Ai
Sat, Jan 11, 2025: Aaron Levie CEO/founder of Box Xeeted on Jan 11 2025 - reinforcing my Dec 2024 post (this post): his full Xeet is linked above; excerpt below
Now, in the mid 2020s, we are firmly entering a new era of enterprise software, which gives rise to systems of intelligence. Systems of intelligence combine enterprise data, workflows, and AI, to deliver insights and automation to an organization. Importantly, because of the ability for AI to process unlimited unstructured data - like documents, video, or communications - we also get the same benefit from this messy data as we did our structured data. We can query, synthesize, calculate, and automate all the work around thus unstructured data just as easily as we could query a database before.
Unlike systems of engagement that generally broke down the more information that goes into them, we see the reverse now with AI, where software can become more powerful and useful the more data it has access to.
And with AI Agents being a native property of systems of intelligence, these systems aren’t only leveraged by every employee, they dramatically expand the output of the workforce. Systems of record are where people work by largely themselves. Systems of engagement let users work collaboratively with other people. Now systems of intelligence let us work seamlessly with people and AI.
book on SuperAgency released Jan 28, 2025
Check out Aaron Levie’s (CEO/founder of Box) Xeet on Jan 11, 2025 on this subject. https://x.com/levie/status/1880464541815107793?s=61&t=-YygOMqKQ790TaVVKGYKmQ