THE AGENTIC AI ERA

SORRY ABOUT YESTERDAY.  I FINISHED THAT BLOG, BUT NEGLECTED TO POST IT.  You can read it by clicking on THE HAPPIEST STATE IN THE USA.

************************

Yes, much of our Federal government is shut down.  Read this for details.

The Hamas rejected President Donald Trump's 20-Point Gaza Peace Plan.  Watch this video.

Defense Secretary Hegseth and President Trump yesterday summoned all the important generals into a room in Virginia and ....well, here is what Jimmy Kimmel reported.  Quoting Politico:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s speech to top generals was supposed to serve as a rallying cry for military exceptionalism — but it didn’t land that way with many of the people it was targeting.

Numerous defense officials — who watched senior brass scramble to Washington and then sit through a partisan speech from President Donald Trump and a return to old-school military standards by Hegseth — were left wondering why the event had occurred at all.

“Not quite a loyalty test, but … on the spectrum of loyalty to ideology,” said a second defense official. “Total waste of money.”

Want to watch the whole show?  Click on this for the full 2 hour plus gathering.  Around 800 top military brass were summoned.  How many showed up?  Not sure.  That long video does not show the audience.  But here is a partial photo to the left.

So on to my topic of the day, which in many ways is Part 3 of a series that began on September 21 with CAN YOU CHAT WITH AN AI GOD?, and continuing the next day with WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENCE?  

Time magazine in September covered Artificial Intelligence in a Special Report.  One article dealt with The Agentic Age:  a new frontier for AI and humans.

• According to Google AI:

The Agentic Age is an emerging era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) where systems evolve from being passive tools to becoming proactive, autonomous agents capable of perceiving, reasoning, planning, and acting to achieve goals with minimal human oversight. Characterized by intelligence, autonomy, and continuous learning, these agents interact with environments, make independent decisions, and can even communicate with each other, ushering in a new paradigm for business and technological innovation.

Multi-agent system for operations planning:

Okay, that's about as technical as I will get today, for I will turn to Marc Benioff, author of this Time article, for details.  He is Salesforce Chair and CEO, plus Time owner.  How many of you know that Benioff and his wife purchased Time magazine in 2018?  To the left are Lynne and Marc.

Who is Benioff and what is Salesforce?

• I once frequently visited San Francisco.
• In 2018 I was astonished by something called Salesforce Tower, for at 1070 feet, which cost more than $1 billion to build, it towered over the once controversial Transamerica Pyramid.
• What is Salesforce?  
• It is an American cloud-based software company, now heavily into agentic AI.
• Founded by Oracle executive Marc Benioff in 1999, who himself is worth $8.9 billion.
• Of course, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle was an early investor.

• 
  Benioff proudly says that its corporate culture is based on the Hawaiian concept of Ohana.
• Has a market capitalization of $233 billion.
• Has 76,453 employees.
• While headquartered in San Francisco, it has 110 offices all over the world.

• 
  In 2020 replaced ExxonMobil in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
• Hired actor Matthew McConaughey for $10million/year to be creative advisor and TV pitchman.
• 
  Marc Benioff is 61 years old and was born and grew up in the Bay Area.  
• Bought Time in 2018 for $190 million.
• Has co-written four books about business and technology.
• Purchased 600 acres of land near the town of Waimea on the Big Island of Hawaii for $24.5 million, but donated 440 acres to the non-profit Hawaii Island Community Development Corporation, plus another $150 million to Hawaii medical organizations to link to the Hawaii Pacific Health system.

• 
  Benioff begins with:

For the past year, I’ve been running Salesforce with a colleague who never sleeps, never takes vacations, and has read more than I could in 100 lifetimes. On a typical day, sitting with a few executives around the table, I’ll ask it to evaluate a competitor’s moves, refine a keynote draft, or surface strategic blind spots we might have missed.  This colleague is my AI agent, and we work together constantly. Sometimes it surprises me. Sometimes it challenges me. Sometimes, like all of us, it makes a mistake. But always, it expands what I can see and do.

• 
  He further says:

We are at the beginning of the Agentic Era, the most significant transformation of work in history. For the first time, machines can perform not only repetitive tasks, but cognitive work once reserved for humans. These AI agents–which can reason, adapt, and act on their own–are already reshaping thousands of companies and will ultimately touch every job and every person.

• 
  Then:

The potential is so vast that some of my peers look at this trajectory and predict we’re approaching a milestone called artificial general intelligence, where AI begins to match, or even exceed, human intelligence. The implication is that while enabling leaps forward in every aspect of our lives, AI could eventually render human intelligence obsolete.

• 
  But, aha, he disagrees with this statement.  Why?
• AI has no childhood...no heart.
• It does not love or feel loss.
• It is incapable of expressing empathy or understand human connection.
• Only humans have these "superpowers" to invent, inspire art, earn trust and forge lasting bonds.

• 
  He adds that Salesforce has made a decision.
• They are building a new operating system for The Agentic Enterprise designed for humans and AI to work together.
• In this new age, AI will orchestrate in a manner that allows the team to move ahead together.
• This next hybrid world will combine human and digital labor.
• 
  Salesforce has reached a limit for personal relationships with customers.
• 100 million prospects have contacted the company recently, and human teams cannot handle them.
• Their AI agentic representative can call back 10,000 leads a week, turning conversation to revenue.
• Employees can thus focus on higher-value work.

You know you've arrived if you can afford a Super Bowl commercial.

-