Embrace The AI Agent Decade, But ‘Double Down On Your Own Humanity’ To Differentiate: Former Google Executive

‘That’s how you remain relevant in the workplaces of the future,’ says futurist and author Steve Brown.

Steve Brown’s advice for people looking to stay employable in an era of artificial intelligence software and robots: Focus on their unique human capabilities.

“Put another way, double down on your own humanity,” said Brown, whose resume includes about two years with Google’s DeepMind AI research lab plus more than 25 years with Intel. “That’s how you remain relevant in the workplaces of the future.”

The futurist and author shared advice on succeeding as a worker and as a business owner in what he calls the decade of AI agents during a talk at the 2025 XChange NexGen conference hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company.

AI Agents In The Workplace

Marcial Velez, founder and CEO of New York-based Xperteks—a member of CRN’s 2025 MSP500—told CRN in an interview that he is collaborating with another company, HUB Advanced Networks in Puerto Rico, to launch a program that leverages agentic AI.

The program, called secure bonded internet, allows ISPs and MSPs to connect and collaborate on outages. AI is enabling Velez and his company to take their coding capabilities to the next level to offer this service.

“You can go from idea to application so much faster today because of AI,” he said.

Brown left DeepMind in 2022 as a strategic planner and in-house futurist reporting to the chief business officer, according to his LinkedIn account. He left Intel in 2016 as a senior industry advisor and sales influencer.

At DeepMind, Brown “led a cross-company effort to build vision, ideate strategy, and develop over 100 breakthrough use cases,” according to his LinkedIn account. In his final role at Intel, he “led strategic engagements, built partnerships, ran proof-of-concept pilots, and stitched together digital solutions for Fortune 50 companies in the global retail and hospitality sectors to accelerate the adoption of Intel-based technology, fueling over $80m in business.”

In his talk at XChange NexGen, he said he sees spatial AI, which can perceive objects and 3-D space, and agentic AI—software that can reason, take actions on behalf of the user, break problems down into smaller steps to solve—as technologies that will “shape the way that we do business, the way that we live our lives ... in the next three to four years.”

“AI is as bad today as it’s ever going to be,” he said. “It’s only going to get better and more capable from here.”

Humans will look to agents to offload manual and tedious tasks for completion in parallel to more satisfying work, leaving agents to scour the web, for example, while the human does something else, Brown said. Agents can handle work outside business hours, and they don’t get sick or get paid, he added

Humans will leverage agents to improve their performance and think more creatively, he said. They will also use agents to extend their capabilities, having access to new knowledge or the ability to do something new. Businesses need to look at all of their processes and tasks and decide what tasks are best done by humans and which ones can go to an AI agent software or AI robot, according to Brown.

“Think about them [agents] as Ph.D.-level naive interns that make mistakes and, therefore, need human oversight,” he said. “Integrating AI agents into daily operations will become a leadership skill that separates companies that thrive from those that fall behind. This is something you’re all going to need to learn to do.”

Eventually, agents could be given faces to make them feel more like human colleagues. “Your next co-worker might be a machine, perhaps starting as early as next year,” he said. “Machines stop being tools that we use, and some of them are now going to feel much more like collaborators.”

Most website traffic in the future will be done by agents, with humans no longer searching or shopping, instead relying on agent-assembled information to make decisions, he said.

Business owners need human employees included in the AI design phase to help with employee buy-in and avoid human saboteurs, according to Brown. Employers also need to empower workers with AI, not replace them.

“If you replace them, you’re going down a different path, and you’re heading to one of a lack of differentiation in the marketplace,” he said. “Your humans are your differentiation and your brand promise. So automate if you need to but amplify whenever you can.”