Who will manage AI tool data?

CHALLENGE IS TO DESIGN SYSTEMS WHOSE INTELLIGENCE GROWS WITHOUT MEMORY TURNING UNACCOUNTABLE

- SIDDHARTH PAI Technology consultant & venture capitalist By invitation

THE CONVERSATION AROUND artificial intelligence (AI) has shifted in a way that markets immediately understood, even if policymakers and users are still catching up.

For several years, the promise of AI rested on incremental productivity gains: better copilots, faster summaries, and smarter recommendations. That changed abruptly with Anthropic’s announcement of Cowork, an agentic extension of its Claude system designed to operate across workplace tasks with minimal human supervision. The response was not applause but alarm. Software and software-services stocks sold off sharply, both globally and in India, as investors reassessed a long-held assumption that enterprise software and labour-heavy services would remain insulated from automation. When capital reacts this quickly, it is usually responding not to hype, but to a credible shift in underlying power.

At first glance, the market reaction may appear disproportionate. After all, AI systems that assist with drafting documents or reviewing contracts are hardly new. What unsettled investors was not Cowork’s raw capability, but its architectural direction. Anthropic was signalling a move away from tools that merely support human workflows towards systems that can remember context, retain state across tasks, and act autonomously over time. In other words, Al that does not just respond, but persists. That persistence is what threatens both existing software products and the services layered on top of them. A system that can recall prior instructions, learn organisational norms, and execute multi-step processes begins to look less like software and more like a junior employee who never asks for weekends off.