Research: How AI Agents Broaden the Scope of Knowledge Work - Harvard Business Review

Summary.

AI agents don’t just speed up knowledge work; they change its nature. In a field study of Perplexity’s conversational assistant and autonomous agent, researchers found that not onlyYou ask two different AI tools the same question—say, to pull together a comprehensive competitive landscape for a new product line. The first comes back in seconds with a tidy summary and a list of links. You read it, open a dozen tabs, copy numbers into a spreadsheet, build the chart, and write the memo yourself. The second comes back twenty-some minutes later with the spreadsheet built, the chart drawn, and a draft memo attached. One handed you information to act on. The other handed you completed work.