🥇This is Gold! just dropped by Carnegie Mellon University! It’s one of the most honest looks yet at how “autonomous” agents actually perform in the real world.
👇
The study analyzed AI agents across 50+ occupations, from software engineering to marketing, HR, and design, and compared how they completed human workflows end to end.
What they found is both exciting and humbling:
• Agents “code everything.”
Even in creative or administrative tasks, AI agents defaulted to treating work as a coding problem. Instead of drafting slides or writing strategies, they generated and ran code to produce results, automating processes that humans usually approach through reasoning and iteration.
• They’re faster and cheaper, but not better.
Agents completed tasks 4 – 8× faster and at a fraction of the cost, yet their outputs showed lower quality, weak tool use, and frequent factual errors or hallucinations.
• Human–AI teaming consistently outperformed solo AI.🔥
When humans guided or reviewed the agent’s process, acting more like a “manager” or “co-pilot”, the results improved dramatically.
🧠 My take:
The race toward “fully autonomous AI” is missing the real opportunity, co-intelligence.
Right now, the biggest ROI in enterprises isn’t from replacing humans.
It’s from augmenting them.
✅ Use AI to translate intent into action, not replace decision-making.
✅ Build copilots before colleagues, co-workers who understand your workflow, not just your prompt.
✅ Redesign processes for hybrid intelligence, where AI handles execution and humans handle ambiguity.
The future of work isn’t humans or AI. (for the next 5 years IMO)
It’s humans with AI, working in a shared cognitive space where each amplifies the other’s strengths.
Because autonomy without alignment isn’t intelligence, it’s chaos.
Autonomous AI isn’t replacing human work, it’s redistributing it.
Humans shifted from doing to directing, while agents handled repetitive, programmable layers.
Maybe we are just too fast to shift from "uncool" Copilot to sth more exciting called "Fully Autonomous AI", WDYT? | 36 comments on LinkedIn