Harvard Business Review LogoJuly 29, 2026Illustration by Jason FordAI 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.
Research: How AI Agents Broaden the Scope of Knowledge Work
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 only did the agent perform more autonomous work, cut task time, lowered cost, and left users more satisfied, but it also expanded the scope of work people attempted—crossing occupational boundaries, tackling more complex, multi-step projects, and generating tasks that rarely appeared with a standard assistant. As workers shift from operators to supervisors, leaders must redesign roles, workflows, and oversight to harness agents’ potential while governing their expanded autonomy.
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