Jason M. Lemkin discusses how software agents let you do more work but demand intense focus. One speaker shifted an hour of meetings to supervising multiple agents handling support, ticketing, and campaigns. Automation removes emotional friction but replaces it with cognitive load.
So yeah, instead of my hour now being with those people, I spent an hour with all of our agents in the morning. Again, used to be set up. Now I check on all of them, I see if there's any follow ups we need to do. And then I do more things now. Right. Like used to be. Okay, I'm going to set up all the platforms to do their core things. I'm going to set up inbound, outbound support, ticket information, event support, like whatever we need. We have that all set up now with our agents. Then I was like, oh, now I can do email. Like I can de anonymize some of our website traffic. I can send them a follow up campaign. If they didn't actually buy a ticket. Maybe it doesn't matter if they were on the website or not. Like now we have all these different use cases that it started to compound itself because I'm like, now I can just do a lot more in that one hour with like my five core agents than talking to two humans, 30 minutes each.
But it is more like this. As a society, we're going to figure this out. It is because you can do more work. It is a higher cognitive load. You have to think more. Right? You don't, you don't spend time arguing with people. As I say with Amelia, the agents don't cry, okay? They don't cry. And that is exhausting. Right, but it's exhausting in a different way. Right, Exactly. You know, if someone's gonna cry. Meeting with you, Craig, you just have to sit there for an hour. Okay? But you don't have to think. You don't have to use all your brain cells for an hour, do you, with your agents. It's so many brain cells and that's. And so I just think that, you know, even if you think about coding, you know, everyone, I just wrote this up, everyone brags that 50% of our code of qualified's written by cursor or. But that doesn't mean your engineers only work three hours a day, does it? No, not at all. Yeah. And so I haven't seen a lot of engineers complain about, but I do think for the best engineers there's more cognitive load because you can do more. It's not as simple as doing more releases. That's more you have to think, okay? Engineering is very creative and so the more of the road stuff that's done, it's fun, but it's exhausting. You might have to think about how to make that agent work better eight hours a day instead of three hours a day. It's much better. But I don't know that everyone can make the jump, right?
