With Rise of Agents, We Are Entering the World of Identic AI

Deal is not just another payroll platform. It's one your team might actually enjoy. HR, IT, and payroll together finally. Built in house, built for peace of mind. Visit deel.com/hbr. By 2030, finance could harness hindsight, insight, and foresight to elevate your function from necessary cost center to value creator. Explore Deloitte's future of finance publication to shape your team's impact. Visit deloitte.com/us/futureoffinance. I'm Adi Ignatius. I'm Allison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast. Alright. So we are back again this week to the topic of AI. One of the things that I find most interesting about AI is that despite its huge potential, there's no blueprint for how to use it. Right? So we're all essentially pioneers experimenting with this powerful technology to figure out how it can help us. Yeah. I'm constantly hearing from colleagues, guests on the show, other contacts about how they're using AI in really new and creative ways, and I think, gosh, I should really try that. But at this point, I'm using it for writing article summaries that we need to do for the magazine and hhbr.org, and honestly feedback on which colleges my daughter should apply to. But I know that I could use it for so much more if I just put the work in to better understand it and train it. I think the breakthrough AI opportunity is still slightly ahead of us or slightly ahead of most of us. And that is the widespread introduction of AI companions that we'll have at our disposal at work and home, that are trained by us, that know everything we know, and that can take action on our behalf across a range of activities. Okay. So now that's beginning to sound a little bit creepy. I don't know that I'm willing to give an AI companion that much control over my life. Yeah. Look. That's a fair point, and I think a lot of people share that. I do think it's coming, and I think it'll be hard to resist. Our guest today, Don Tapscott, will talk about what he calls, identity AI. Tapscott, who's been spotting future trends in the tech space for decades, is CEO of the Tapscott Group and author of the new book, You to the Power of Two, Redefining Human Potential in the Age of Identic AI. Here's my conversation with Don. Now I wanna make sure we're grounded in this conversation. So most of our listeners are probably comfortable using AI in their work and personal lives. They may or may not be experimenting with AI agents to handle certain tasks. Your book is projecting us forward though to a not mostly not yet available technology that you're calling Identic AI. Talk about what that is. Well, AI has really gone through three phases, modern, generative AI. The first was Gen AI where AI could generate content with amazing capability, text, data, graphics, all kinds of stuff. We used it as a tool. Then AI …