The Action Economy and the rise of the AI Agents

Get ready for tension with your coworkers

What is the Action Economy

Action Economy is a term of art in the game theory & game strategy community that refers to the relative number of “activities” a given player in a scenario can perform compared to other players. For example imagine a two player game where there were ten facedown playing cards, and one card has a prize on it that the players are trying to discover. Each player gets to choose one card per turn, and all things being equal both players have a roughly similar chance of winning. (maybe some slightly better odds for the player picking first.) Now imagine the same game, but one player has 3 guesses per turn, and the other player still only gets one guess per turn. The player with three guesses would have a major advantage in the “action economy” of this game, even though their chances of flipping each card aren’t changed

This is what is going to happen in many office & information worker jobs as AI agents are adopted and shadow tech’d into organizations. Some workers will be able to perform many times the activities of their non-agent coworkers, but of course nothing is free in this world.

Who (or what) are these agents

Agents are the industry term for “hooking up AI to an existing software system in ways that let the AI drive the software system” An example you may have already run into are chat bots that many websites use as cheap customer service agent. (Having problems with your bill, travel plans, cable internet?) Behind the scenes these bots are reading the documentation, the troubleshooting steps guide books, and occasionally hooked into a trouble ticket system if they can’t help you out directly.

However the AI agents that are being launched and will be used in 2025 are MUCH more powerful. These Agents can do things like “visit my amazon books wishlist and get my list of books and then go to my local library website and tell me how many of my wishlist books are available for free at the library.” They can also do things like “Go to my competitors' website and fill out their “get a free sample” form hundreds of times, filling out the delivery information with addresses I find from a web search for “expensive places to ship things.”

Leadership Considerations

Even while most midsized and smaller organizations are struggling mightily with AI governance already, things are about to get a lot more complicated with these agents. The reason is that the Agent’s change where and how quality assurance and risk management happen with these tools. Let me demonstrate with a few diagrams:

Current use of LLMs by most staff & software integrations:

The risk model when using AI Agents instead of “bare” LLMs/AI:

This means that the QA & risk management using AI agents happens through process & governance. Something most orgs are already struggling with. It's likely that some of these agents will have basic “preview” modes of what they'll do, just like content management systems for websites have them, and they’ll work just about as well. (Which is to say, not that great, and many people will skip using them.)

What now?

With any new technology like this there is a sweet spot of freedom of use. The businesses that steer into adopting agents intentionally will manage the risk and reap the rewards. They'll build in risk management, create governance, and encourage their employees to share what they're learning and coordinate what they’re doing. These businesses will will leap ahead of the businesses that don’t.

Meanwhile, just about EVERY business will have ambitious, curious, and puzzle solving staff who will try to use agents in their jobs regardless of what the business does as a policy. The businesses that try to ignore agents, or ban their use, or just keep their heads in the sand are going to suffer some big public relations disasters in the next two years. Staff and employees who learn how to use these agents well will be tremendously more productive than their peers, however each one of these staff will also be the stewards of greater organizational reputation than ever before.