On a recent call with the Yahoo Finance product chief, I pulled up a slide that looked like two burgers, side by side, to represent eras of work before and after AI. Leimer leaned in. “It’s totally that,” he said.
The slide came from Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton computer scientist who just keynoted the International Conference on Machine Learning in Seoul. In his illustration, the burger on the left, labeled “Traditional,” shows a thick patty — the execute layer of work, the coding and debugging — sitting between modest buns. On the right, labeled “With AI,” the patty has shrunk to a sliver. The buns — “decide” on top and “deliver” on the bottom — have swollen in size.
Work used to be a fat hamburger with skinny buns, as the meat of the work was the actual doing of the task. Now, AI is collapsing the middle of the sandwich, but the top and bottom layers of human work are growing instead of disappearing. Work is increasingly talking about work — there’s a lot of bun to chew over.
“We come in and talk to each other and we make sure that we really have real confirmation and conviction about, like, these are the things we’re going to do. And this is how we’re going to unleash the agents.”
