HOW WE LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE AUTONOMOUS FUTURE

What better way to prepare you for the age of agents than... 40-plus pages of print journalism! When things are moving this fast, the only way to keep up is to slow down, read, and think. What follows is a guided tour of the AI vanguard: Fei-Fei Li's quest to blaze a trail beyond LLMs, Saronic's reinvention of naval might, and Uber's route into a robotaxi streetscape. Plus, 20 visionaries at the forefront of agentic innovation, autonomous shopping, tips on the best AI tools, advice from a dozen CEOs, and the surprising reason why the new autonomy is keeping one power user up at night.

- BY AZEEM AZHAR

An agentic AI power user explains how he's using the technology to ramp up his productivity-and the surprising challenges of finding himself completely caught up with his work.

MOST MORNINGS now, I've got a new routine. Before coffee, before social media, I check my phone to see what got done while I slept.

Last Tuesday: a 2,000-word briefing on the risks of helium shortages to Asian semiconductor companies for my consulting clients. The report covered a dozen companies in some detail, touched on secondorder effects, and, most importantly, surprised me. There was the nightly security audit of my software platforms a small bug had been found and fixed. Another message confirmed that my daughter had received her French reading practice. Also completed before dawn: a huge customer segmentation analysis, which simulated 40 people reviewing a proposed new product.

Astute readers noticed the passive voice in the previous paragraph. That was intentional. I didn't complete any of that work. My small staff of AI agents did.

R Mini Arnold (RMA) is an AI agent I set up in February. Why RMA? R is a nod to Isaac Asimov, whose robot names often begin with R, and they serve humans without an agenda. Arnold is the T-800 from Terminator 2: not the killer, but the reprogrammed protector, which is tireless, literal, and utterly loyal. Mini is a tribute to the popular tiny Mac, an elegant desktop box.

RMA coordinates several other agents working in parallel: One is an editor, another a researcher/analyst, a third takes an investor's lens, and a fourth focuses on data. Some evenings up to 10 general coding agents might join them. Together, they handle anything I queue up before I go to bed. RMA determines how best to deploy this squad to accomplish the evening's work-the security sweeps, the software updates, the tedious technical housekeeping.