Item — HN Reader

I don't think ai agents are good enough to replace every job today, but they're starting to nip at the more junior / menial knowledge jobs

I've seen a lot of success come from AI sales agents, just doing basic SDR style work

We're having some success automating manual workflows for companies at Skyvern, but we've only begun to scratch the surface.

I suspect that this will play out a lot like the iPhone era -- first few years will be a lot of discovery and iteration, then things will kick into superdrive and you'll see major shifts in user behavior

2 comments

> junior / menial knowledge jobs

Not junior, unthinking. It's like outsourcing/offshoring. You're getting the equivalent of someone who doesn't care about what they're doing, not somebody inexperienced. I'm not saying it doesn't have a place, just commenting on the framing.

> I don't think ai agents are good enough to replace every job today

You mean any.

You can fire a human knowledge worker for not doing their job correctly, but what are you gonna do when you only have LLMs and realize they can't do their job correctly?

I think there are some they're good enough at today. Auto generating meeting notes + AI context, auto responding / following up to emails, filling out forms (we do that pretty well at Skyvern with high accuracy)

Fire 8 out of 10 of your knowledge workers and have the other remaining 2 review and fix LLM output.

Basically the same what we have now, except the grunt workers will be replaced by the machine.