Knowledge work in the age of agentic AI

In the middle of a technological shift, people tend to get stuck in tunnel vision — heads down, focused on whatever’s directly in front of them. It helps, every so often, to step back and get a broader read on the lay of the land.

In 1969, the management thinker Peter Drucker, in The Age of Discontinuity, argued that the coming wave of technology would break apart the work structures everyone assumed were permanent. Two years later, Intel released the 4004 — the first commercially available microprocessor, a full central processing unit shrunk onto a single programmable chip.